This wasn’t how things went during exercises. Even when they weren’t physically participating in an exercise they’d get involved on ISMERLO, calculating and presenting realistic timelines to get their equipment to the scene. They’d never thought of practising without it.
He picked up the phone and called Moscow. Captain Holloway was still trying hard to get official information from the Russian Ministry of Defence, but so far was having to rely on media reports like everybody else.
A string of other calls followed, to diplomats, the Defence Transport and Movements Agency, to James Fisher Rumic. Riches was working down the standard checklist to establish just how fast he could get his equipment into play. Only the faintest prickle of warning on his skin warned that this might be different.
The knowledge that men were trapped underwater had reawakened something inside him. It wasn’t often that, sitting in that bright, airy office, he felt like a submariner any more. As is true for everyone who has served in those steel coffins, the sensation of cruising silently through an alien world, invisible but all-seeing, had lodged itself deep in his soul and now he could feel it stirring.
There’s a kinship between those who travel or fight on the high seas, sharing the risks of tempests, rogue waves and unseen rocks. Most sailors can expect to survive hours or sometimes days clinging to floating wreckage even if no lifeboats are launched when their ship goes down, but submariners have no such comfort. For them, death is always pressing close around the hull.
Even the deepest-diving hunter-killer submarines can go no deeper than around a thousand metres (except for one experimental Russian boat, the Komsomolets). That gives them enough scope for finding hiding places on the seabed or cloaking themselves between water layers of different temperature or salinity while keeping the engineering constraints manageable. But the average depth of the ocean is more than 3,500 metres. In most places in the world, if a submarine gets into trouble and starts to sink, it will be crushed like a discarded Coke can long before it reaches the seabed.
For the Submarine Rescue Service, this enforced a certain morbid economy. LR5, the UK’s rescue submersible, could operate only to a depth of 500 metres. It could be built stronger and therefore penetrate deeper, but the continental shelves – the skirt of relatively shallow water that surrounds the continents – are mostly less than 200 metres deep. At their edge lies a steep drop to the abyssal plains and hadal depths. If a submarine sinks somewhere off the shelf – as did both the USS Thresher in 1963 and USS Scorpion in 1969 – there is no point in sending a rescue craft. Beyond crush depth, there is no hope for those inside.
The standard Royal Navy procedures for a submarine incapacitated on the seabed were still clear in his mind. No amount of desk-bound duty could erase the charged atmosphere of putting a crew through the drills. The first move is a mayday alert – just as in other emergencies at sea or in the air – letting potential rescuers know that you’re in trouble and where you are. Seawater is dense enough to stop bullets and radiation, let alone radio waves, so an emergency indicator buoy is released. The brightly coloured marker shoots to the surface hauling up an antenna from the submarine. A coded signal flashes out to orbiting satellites, giving the submarine’s position and identity to friendly ears. When rescuers arrive, all being well, they have a marker that will help guide them to the vessel on the seabed.
Next a transponder is dropped on the seabed. Just as the buoy above is transmitting a homing signal, the transponder gives a regular sonic ping. If something happens to the emergency indicator buoy on the surface, this pinging will still act as a beacon for rescuers. Finally, an ECB699 – a submarine-to-shore communications buoy – is loaded into one of the submerged signal ejectors and fired up through the water. Once on the surface the battery-powered transmitter begins sending its coded message to passing satellites, giving the submarine’s position and status, and the number of people on board.
Only once all beacons have been deployed will an escape be considered. It wasn’t always so. Until the 1960s, Royal Navy submariners didn’t expect to be rescued from the surface. No technology was thought to be reliable enough; your best chance was to save yourself. Given an alternative of certain death, the Royal Navy felt a gamble was worth it. Riches, however, knew the Russians did not agree.
The Rush Escape was the last resort, only used if the hull had been damaged. If seawater was forcing its way in, even slowly, the pressure of the air inside the submarine would begin to rise, changing the physical properties of the atmosphere and turning perfectly breathable air into a poison gas. The men were trained to line up beside the exits, breathing from masks attached to air pipes that ran along the gangways, then all hatches were opened and the sea was allowed to flood in. It took enormous discipline to stay in line, moving from mask to mask as the freezing water crept higher and higher and eventually over their heads. Submerged, the men would shuffle towards the exit one by one, progressing along the line of masks as though they were stepping stones. Every 10 to 15 seconds a man would shoot for the surface from the hatch, propelled by the air in his survival suit.
There were many risks, especially for those towards the back of the line. If the submarine was deep the water would be close to freezing – it doesn’t matter if you’re in the tropics or at the North Pole, beyond the reach of the sun’s warming the sea’s temperature hovers around 4°C. With the hull no longer keeping out the pressure, every breath of air from the mask forced dissolved gas into the body’s tissues, gas that would soon be forming bubbles as it rapidly depressurised on the way to the surface. An ascent from anywhere below 60 or 70 metres would most likely result in the Bends, an agonising affliction suffered by divers, caused by gas bubbles getting trapped in the joints. Whoever survived this ordeal then faced all the challenges of a mariner whose ship has been lost and who is floating alone on the empty ocean.
The equipment and some of the methods had changed substantially since the Rush Escape was first introduced in 1929, but the Royal Navy’s training for it hadn’t. Until well into the 21st century, every British submariner since had the necessary self control imposed on them at the bottom of a 30-metre-deep training pool housed in a tower in Gosport on the south coast, where Britain’s first submarine base was located. In the early days, escaping sailors were equipped with the Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus. It consisted of an airtight bag containing barium hydroxide that would strip carbon dioxide from exhaled air while fresh oxygen was provided in a cylinder. The concept was identical to that used on German submarines in the First World War and to the re-breather diving systems used by some technical divers today. Escaping sailors using the Davis Apparatus would pinch a clip over their nose, pull a pair of leather goggles over their eyes then launch themselves towards the surface, their ascent slowed to a manageable speed by a canvas drogue that dragged behind them like an upside-down parachute.
By 1980, when Riches had done his escape training in Gosport’s pool, the latest version was an orange survival suit fitted with an oxygen-filled hood. But by then the preferred method of escape – if conditions allowed – was the controlled method. One crewman climbs into the escape chamber, shuts the hatch below and opens a valve to let the sea in. Only once the chamber is full and the pressure in the tower equalises with the sea can he open the top hatch and escape. While in the tower he plugs his escape suit into an air outlet which pushes air into a collar around his neck that will later provide him with buoyancy. At the same time, excess air escapes into the plastic hood over his face, allowing him to breath normally. When the automatic hatch pops open, the sailor begins shooting to the surface, the expanding air in his suit streaming past his face and allowing him to keep breathing as normal. Those left on board then shut the hatch again and vent the water from the chamber to take the next sailor. Although safer, with less risk of exposure or decompression sickness, the controlled escape could take as much as 10 or 15 minutes to evacuate each person, despite a planned allowance of only four minutes per person.