In seconds tons of seawater had flooded the forward compartment, seconds that coincided with a surge of power from Thetis’s engines and a full-down setting on the dive planes as the captain tried to get his craft to dive. This time she responded dramatically and Thetis plunged downwards. The crew at the bow couldn’t get the watertight doors of the first compartment shut in time, and the sea had crashed through into the second compartment before they finally managed to contain it. Seconds later, Thetis hit the seabed 48 metres below.
Thetis was designed with two escape chambers and emergency air for 36 hours. But, like AS-28, she had twice the number of crew she was designed for, and the air would only last for 18 hours. What’s more, she’d hit the seabed a mile from where she’d been seen leaving the surface, night had set in, and she could not be found. The only positive was that they had packed enough DSEA kits to go around.
With the forward two compartments irretrievably flooded, the captain blew the ballast water from the aft torpedo tubes and the stern broke free of the mud. It kept on rising, the 275-foot hull pivoting on its nose until the stern rose out of the water like a tombstone. Although there was chaos inside the submarine, the aft escape hatch was now only twenty feet below the water. They were so close to freedom, but escape would most likely mean drowning unless they knew that a rescue ship was on the surface waiting to receive them. It wasn’t until an hour after dawn that the protruding stern was spotted – 18 hours after the accident and at the limit of the boat’s air supply. Soon afterwards, the first two men made their exit using their DSEA sets.
With more than a hundred men to get out of the submarine and all of them starting to suffer from too little oxygen and too much carbon dioxide, they needed to speed things up. It was decided to try putting four men at a time in the rescue chamber rather than the usual two. The first four crammed inside and pulled the hatch up behind them. Pulling leather goggles over their eyes and nose clips over their noses, they opened the valves of their DSEA oxygen bottles and turned the valve that would flood the tiny escape chamber with seawater. Once it had filled, they opened the outer hatch.
Quite what went wrong is unknown, because all four men had drowned by the time they reached the surface. At least one had been together enough to close the outer hatch behind them, allowing those still stuck inside the submarine a chance, however. The chamber was drained of water, and two more men climbed inside, but the men were now too weakened by the foul air to close the hatch behind them properly. When the valve to flood the escape chamber was opened, the sea flooded not only into the escape chamber, but into the submarine below. As the water filled the submarine the air pressure inside built, increasing the effect of the carbon dioxide. One by one the remaining men passed out, then passed away.
Ninety-nine men died with their escape route only six metres from the surface and within sight of land, a disaster made worse by the contrast with the successful rescue of the USS Squalus just one week before. Even Adolf Hitler sent a telegram expressing his condolences, just three months before the outbreak of the Second World War. HMS Thetis had more in store. A Navy salvage diver, Henry Perdue, was helping raise the wreck when he became entangled in something in the murky water. He struggled to break free, but when he finally did so it was unexpected and he was too buoyant. He shot to the surface without any constraint. The gases that had been forced into his muscles by the pressure bubbled into his veins as gas, then became trapped in his joints. He died in agony later that evening, the air bubbles eventually blocking the flow of blood to his brain. Thetis had claimed her 100th victim.
Despite the damning parallels between the outcomes of USS Squalus and HMS Thetis, the Royal Navy stuck to its ethos that when things went wrong beneath the surface, escape was the only route to salvation, not rescue. It was a position that wouldn’t change for another 30 years.
While some tools of Gold’s trade had remained essentially unchanged since those early days, the Scorpio ROV was not one of them. It relied on the latest electronic engineering, a subject in which Gold was entirely comfortable. He was the sole full-time member of the Scorpio team. The other 11 members of the UK’s Submarine Rescue Service all looked after the LR5 submersible.
But while he could maintain the robot on his own, deploying her was another matter. He needed a pilot, a co-pilot, a winch-man and an umbilical-tender at the very least. If the job was going to be round the clock – as most offshore work was – he’d need double that to run two shifts.
Like all offshore engineering companies, Rumic kept a database of trusted ROV operators. Good crewmen were valuable commodities, and Rumic leased theirs to companies all over the world. Piloting the things could be tricky – like flying a plane, it required you to keep a lot of different variables in your head and make a constant stream of decisions. A mistake might not have such disastrous consequences or happen so quickly, but it would definitely be costly. There were plenty of multi-million-pound robots stuck in hard-to-reach places around the world, or cut loose and drifting across remote seabeds.
Engineers often made the most useful pilots because they understood how the machine worked and could repair it when it didn’t. Salt water, electronics and crushing pressures made an uneasy combination, and things often went wrong. When they did, it was up to the team on the water to diagnose the problem quickly and fix it, fast. Offshore operations cost upwards of £20,000 a day, and you didn’t want to be the ones causing the hold-up.
Tommy Calvert was, in Gold’s opinion, the best pilot in the business. He’d been everywhere, done everything, and always came out grinning. Just thinking about Calvert made Gold smile. Gold was halfway through dialling his mobile number when he remembered: Calvert was hundreds of miles away in the Mediterranean. Rumic required a 12-hour mobilisation, and there was no way he was going to make it in time. That’s if Calvert would have come in the first place; he was on what must be the cushiest job in the business, working on Paul Allen’s superyacht the MV Octopus, indulging the Microsoft billionaire’s penchant for underwater exploration.
Gold didn’t need to pull out his list of pilots to know who to call next. He knew Pete Nuttall was in town. Nuttall had been trained up by Calvert and was already a sought-after pilot in his own right; after seven years with Rumic he’d now decided to go it alone and had handed in his notice.
When Gold called, Nuttall was in his back yard in Ramside, Barrow, hosing down his Royal National Lifeboat Institution storm gear.
‘Where are you?’ said Gold.
‘Barrow. What’s up?’ replied Nuttall.
‘Fancy a trip to the far end of Russia?’