About 44 nations in the world operate military submarines, and only four – Iran, Libya, Taiwan and North Korea – were not included in the rescue community. The exercises began in 1986, and 30 nations had turned up to participate or observe during 2005, including Israel, India, Pakistan and, of course, Russia. Even China would attend three years later.
Initially the Russians were going to bring a ship to join those of France, the US and the UK, but in the end had just sent observers. The simple presence of Russian submarine escape and rescue specialists on this exercise was a major advance. Unfortunately, the programme was extremely vulnerable to being used as a political tool. When the same invitation had been extended in 2000, just prior to the Kursk disaster, the Russians had refused to join in at all.
Building such links was Holloway’s main mission as Naval Attaché. The Kursk disaster had shown the Russian people, and elements of the Navy, that there was an international will to assist when things went wrong. Holloway had worked hard at bringing the Russians to the table in Submarine Rescue planning, developing the framework for how the two nations would work together in case a rescue was needed, and making sure that each was familiar with the other’s equipment. On the latter front, Holloway had brought members of the Russian design bureaus (including the Lazurit office in Nizhny Novgorod responsible for the design of AS-28) and Russian search and rescue crews over to the UK a number of times.
Holloway closed his briefing by outlining what his next actions were going to be. They’d treat it like any other submarine emergency, in the way that they had practised on exercise so often. No matter if you thought it was likely you’d be called into action or not, you readied your equipment. Firstly he’d call the Duty Fleet Controller at Northwood, UK, and make sure that the UK Submarine Rescue Service (UKSRS) was on alert. They would start working out an estimate of how quickly they could get into action. Only one measure mattered: the Time to First Rescue. Once given a realistic time at which the first men could be taken off the submersible, the Russian Navy would be in a position to decide whether to accept the offer.
A call to the MOD’s Russia Policy Desk was next: having the equipment and the team to help out was worthless without the political will to send them. He’d also talk to his American counterpart in Moscow, Captain Mike Morgan, to squeeze out more information. All along, he’d be continuing to try to get in touch with the Chief of Staff of the Russian Navy.
The discussion of how the situation might develop occupied the whole half-hour allocated for the meeting. When the time was up, the avuncular Commodore Metcalfe thanked the assembled attachés and made his way to brief the Ambassador himself.
Friday, 5 August
SS + 26 h 45 mins
Stuart Gold tapped out the beat on the steering wheel as his Ford Focus accelerated away from the last set of lights before the main road. The rush-hour traffic was already queuing up on the other side of the carriageway, but he was cruising in the opposite direction, just the way he liked it. He was tuned to BBC Radio 2, and when the strains of Level 42’s ‘Good Man in a Storm’ started to play, Gold twisted the volume up a notch to get the song to its rightful level. He felt good. He’d just put his partner Susan on to a train at Waverley station – she was off to her last day of work, finishing a two-year stint ringing the changes at a shopping centre in Newcastle. That night they’d be celebrating in the best way possible – with a takeaway, a DVD and a bottle of wine. The fancy parties were all done and dusted, thank God, and now they could just go and slouch on the sofa. Perfect.
He’d just passed Hermiston Gate before getting on the motorway when the news had come on with the announcement. A submersible trapped off Russia. That got his attention, alright, but all the newsreader said was that seven Russian sailors were trapped in a mini submarine off Kamchatka. Poor bastards, he thought. He’d no idea where Kamchatka was, though he had a vague memory of it being the one place you had to conquer if you were going to invade the United States, at least as far as the board game Risk was concerned. The Pacific coast of Russia sounded an awfully long way away. He wondered if they’d have any more information by the time he got to work an hour or so later.
Gold knew better than most what being stuck on the seabed would feel like. He’d spent years working in tiny submersibles during the early 1980s, exploring routes for new transatlantic cables and other pipelines in the North Sea and the North Atlantic for a company called British Oceanics. It was exciting work for the young electrical engineer, but after his youngest son was born backwards with both hips dislocated, suddenly the long periods away became difficult. Knowing that his baby son was struggling in a leather-and-metal cage was too much. When a six-week deployment to the South China Sea came up he’d resigned, and taken a job with a local computer company instead.
Ten long years he’d worked there, until he’d got a call from his old boss at British Oceanics. Martin Bully was now working at a small company in the Lake District that had a big mission – running the UK’s Submarine Rescue Service – and wondered if Gold fancied a change.
Although commanded by the Royal Navy, the UK’s Submarine Rescue Service was run by a private contractor, James Fisher Rumic. It was a good way for the Navy to harness the experience of the offshore underwater industry. Navy recruits would have been rotated out every two years, while many of the guys at Rumic had spent their lives working with the type of gear the rescue service operated. Gold had never had a serious accident during his time on submersibles, but he’d spent plenty of time imagining what it would be like to be trapped on the bottom. During long dives he and the pilot would often settle the vessel down on the seabed to take a lunch break. One by one they’d shut down the non-essential systems. First the whine of the thrusters would die away, then the noisy sonar would stop its metallic rasp and they’d be left sitting in darkness on the cold floor of the ocean with only the sound of the carbon dioxide scrubbers whirring. Though he was in the windowless stern looking after the submersible’s electrical systems, his only view of the surrounding sea via a monitor, the silence seemed as pressurised as the water around them. They’d eat their sandwiches without much talking, just exploring the sensation of being in that alien world that so few humans have been able to experience. It was only natural that the mind wandered into the realms of horror, of wondering what it would be like if something went wrong, if that was where they’d remain, slowly freezing, starving, suffocating to death while the indifferent ocean swirled past the portholes.
As the road rolled on beneath him, heading west towards the base at Renfrew, Gold thought about the day ahead and the final preparations for Exercise Northern Sun, a series of submarine rescue scenarios about to be run off Norway. LR5, the rescue submersible, was on the trucks already, and Scorpio – the underwater robot that was his baby – was boxed up in its containers. He just needed to double check things and make sure nothing was missing – after all, he wouldn’t want to go through the embarrassment of having to ask if he could borrow tools off the Norwegians or the Swedes. It should be an easy enough day, and an interesting one, too. Even so, he’d definitely be keeping an ear to the radio to hear how those Russians were doing.
Friday, 5 August
SS + 27 h