‘Jon,’ Avdoshin said with no preamble. ‘Thank you for the British offer of help. I need to clarify one thing. What thickness of cable can Scorpio cut through?’
Holloway leafed through the specifications that he held in the folder he was carrying. ‘Do semyi-desyati,’ he said.
‘Damn,’ said Avdoshin. ‘We need to be able to cut through cables of eighteen millimetres, Jon.’
Holloway frowned. The Vice-Admiral sounded as though he was writing off the British offer of help after all. Then he realised. ‘Seventy’ in Russian sounded much like ‘seventeen’. Holloway clarified what he meant and the Vice-Admiral’s voice relaxed momentarily. Then he dropped his bombshell.
‘Is there anything you can do to accelerate the timescales?’ Even in Avdoshin’s thick Russian, the tone was clear. It was as close as the man would ever get to pleading.
Despite the placatory information being given to the hungry press corps in Kamchatka about the amount of oxygen left on AS-28, the estimated Time To First Rescue of 36 hours given by the Scorpio team was clearly not fast enough.
Friday, 5 August
SS + 31 h
Stuart Gold had just about found himself a core team when Martin Bully called back. Things were progressing higher up the chain, Bully said. It was time for Gold to start a second round of calls, this time telling everyone to assemble at Prestwick airport as soon as possible. Scorpio herself was just about to be despatched.
First up Gold called Charlie Sillet, the team’s long-time mechanical wizard. On his last call Gold had caught him at home in Edinburgh and told him not to go anywhere. Gold hadn’t wanted Sillet getting any further from Edinburgh because he needed someone to go round to his house and pick up his passport. Now Gold told him to go ahead and make his way to Prestwick, stopping at Gold’s house on the way. His kids were home, enjoying their summer holidays, and would let him in.
Next he called back the ROV pilot Pete Nuttall at his home in Barrow. When Nuttall put the phone down he scowled. He hadn’t been expecting things to escalate. How was he going to break this one to his wife? Sue was at work, and he was supposed to be picking up his youngest daughter from tennis school. Even if Sue was free, an illness prevented her from driving long distances. Then there was the weekend. He was supposed to be an usher at his cousin’s wedding, and he wouldn’t be popular for missing that.
After 17 years together she was used to his sudden departures, even if she didn’t like them. Whenever his RNLI pager went off, Nuttall would be out of the door in seconds. All he needed were his shoes to get him to the lifeboat shed – everything required to do his job as a crewman on the boats was there. Things were slightly different with a Submarine Rescue alert. Apart from the exercises, which would mean someone calling him out of the blue and asking where he was and if he was available, real alerts had only come through two or three times in the years he’d been on the team. They meant a bit more thought, planning what to take. After all, you didn’t need a passport to rescue a yacht in trouble up the coast.
Within half an hour Nuttall had managed to talk his sister into picking up his daughter, had packed a bag and was on his way to Broughton where he picked up two other members of the team, Nigel Pyne and Will Forrester. They both had a bit of packing up and organising to do, but before midday they were heading north on the M6, all crammed into his little diesel Rover 200.
Will Forrester had been Gold’s winchman for 15 years, but when not wearing his Scorpio cape he owned a travel agency in Barrow-in-Furness. While a lot of his business came from getting guys out to their offshore jobs in foreign lands, he got to sea himself only occasionally. Like most of the guys in Gold’s team, he was a contractor, brought in by the day when he was needed and available for exercises.
Gold jumped into Sillet’s car when he got to Renfrew and together they headed to Prestwick. In Gold’s mind the whole thing was still an exercise; he knew that there were still a lot of hurdles to clear. The fact that the Foreign Office had approved the UK’s offer of help didn’t mean that his team would be able to get there in time. Who knew which of the reports of remaining air on board the submersible was accurate? And who knew if the Russians would even accept the help?
The news reports were quoting a Russian Admiral saying that the waters off Kamchatka were stuffed with military secrets, and that no foreigners should be allowed in. Gold didn’t like the sound of that.
He remembered all too clearly this time five years ago when he’d spent three days helplessly watching news reports on the BBC, glued to the events on the Kursk along with the rest of the world. Eventually they’d got permission to mobilise and steamed up to the Barents Sea with LR5, Scorpio, the whole kit, hoping against hope that the Russians would let them in to help. For another whole day they’d listened to the reports of knocking sounds against the hull – that was pretty chilling, even though the sounds ended up being diagnosed as only the clanging of fenders on the side of rescue ships.
Back then the Russians had been paralysed by fears of revealing their military secrets, which they seemed to value far more than the lives of the 118 sailors on board. This time there were only the lives of seven men to weigh against those secrets, not a hundred.
If the Russians did relent this time, there was plenty of help on its way. The Swedes had just offered, the Americans were mobilising, the Japanese were on their way, and he’d just heard that the Australians had diverted an oil exploration vessel that was on charter off nearby Sakhalin Island for Shell. With two powerful ROVs on board, they looked like a good option, but their ETA was still unknown.
Friday, 5 August/Saturday, 6 August
SS + 31 h 30 mins
Squadron leader Keith Hewitt bounced along the path between the barrack buildings at Brize Norton airbase, making his way towards the Operations Room. Strictly speaking he was still on leave for another few hours, but he thought he’d come in to check what the evening had in store for him. The weather for the last few days had been glorious, and he’d been making the most of it. Yesterday, along with two old friends from his earliest days in the force 35 years earlier, he’d been to watch England’s cricketers beat Australia during the second Test match at Edgbaston. That had been a welcome reprieve from the long flights he’d been pulling, flights whose beginning or end always held a little more tension than coming or going from a normal airfield. Even before checking the roster, he knew that tonight would see him lifting off under the cover of darkness, headed into the maelstrom of either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Ops was busy as usual. Hewitt noted that there was a Special on – a non-standard transport flight that usually meant an aeromedical or coffins bearing servicemen killed in action. He didn’t bother trying to find out more – Specials happened all the time, and he had his own flight preparation to deal with. He checked the lists to see what time slot he was slated to fly, scanned the weather reports and caught up with the news.