The flow of barnacles beneath Scorpio’s runners slowed, and all eyes in the control van were boring into the grainy blackness of the front camera. Suddenly out of the gloom appeared a white stripe. For a second no one could be sure, and then there she was, solid and real, with ‘28’ painted on her fin.
Looking at the squat, foreign shape of the Russian submersible’s hull, Riches felt another surge of adrenaline tingle through his veins. He was now acutely aware that this was not an exercise, that there were men inside this steel container and that if his team didn’t do their job properly they would not live.
Each of them was staring intently at the screens and control panel. Nuttall was focused completely on keeping Scorpio exactly where he wanted it, his eyes flicking between the camera displays, sonars and instrument sensors, trying to sense the conditions in the water around the robot and gauge any dangers to his mission. With the immediate piloting being dealt with by Nuttall, Gold was trying to plan the best way of reaching the visible lines that were trapping AS-28, mapping the shifting matrix of ships, anchors, umbilical cables and array structures at the same time as taking Scorpio’s temperature from the various dials in front of him. Podkapayev’s face was hard to read, as though buffeted simultaneously by both hope and fear.
‘Take it easy there, Pete,’ said Gold. ‘Let’s take a good look around before getting too close.’
Nuttall didn’t need reminding. At the forefront of his mind for the last 30 hours had been the fear of blundering in too fast and getting Scorpio stuck.
Holding Scorpio still in the water, he began using the front camera’s pan and tilt to take a look what was holding AS-28 tight against the array. It seemed broadly similar to the diagram that the Russian survey had produced. Most of the cables were bunched towards the front of the fin. They had evidently been there for some time, for they had accumulated a crust of marine growth. From the propeller guard protruded what looked like a tuft of fishing net.
‘Okay, let’s go say hello,’ said Gold. Nuttall nodded, and increased the power until the submersible’s vertical stripes filled the camera and the solid cutting arm that protruded like an insect’s proboscis struck the foreign machine’s hull. Riches’ mind was so fully inside the robotic vehicle below that he fully expected a loud ‘bong’ as metal struck metal. But there were no microphones on Scorpio. The silence that filled the room instead seemed chilling.
It was standard practice to tap a distressed submarine on first arrival, and Gold had done so on every exercise he’d joined. Even though the Russians said they had communications with the men inside, he wanted to create a bond between his team and the shivering, half-suffocated men inside. Given his experience of misinformation from the Russian authorities on the Kursk, he had no idea what condition they were really in. Morale might be the only thing that got them through these few final, critical hours.
In most submarine rescue scenarios, raising spirits was one of Scorpio’s main functions. Aside from locating the site and testing the surrounding currents, checking hull integrity, conducting a radiation survey of a disabled nuclear submarine, and clearing any debris from around the escape hatches, Scorpio would carry down canisters of supplies to drop into specially designed hatches on the deck of UK and other NATO submarines. If the rescuers were in contact with the sailors, they could pack whatever was required inside the pods. If not, they would try and anticipate what would be wanted. Among the practical items like water and food were stashed whisky and pornographic magazines – anything to stir their resolve to live to see the surface again.
On the other side of the thick steel walls of AS-28, the effect of Scorpio’s handshake was like having woken from a nightmare, and all the crew stirred, some managing to pass weak smiles.
‘I told you they would be here, did I not,’ heaved Lepetyukha. ‘Now calm down. Conserve your energy. We’re not free yet.’
Sunday, 7 August
SS + 67 h 50 mins
As Nuttall guided Scorpio back away from the hull, he squinted into the small monitor that displayed the rear-facing camera, checking no nets had drifted into his path. AS-28 looked like a coffin, lying inert and lashed to the side of the huge cylinder of the array. Although it had none of the barnacles that coated the huge listening device, the Russian submersible didn’t look exactly pristine, with rust-brown scars evident on many of the welds. He nudged Scorpio towards the stern to inspect her propeller. The tufts of fibre he’d noticed early on resolved into what they’d all feared – fishing net. Somehow, either while going into the trap or trying to reverse out of it, AS-28 had fouled its propeller as well.
Apart from the net in the propeller, there was nothing obviously wrapped around AS-28’s stern, so Nuttall slowly span Scorpio to face towards the bow. Sliding along close to the hull, he could see what AS-28’s crew evidently had not – a spider’s web of lines that now strapped her firmly to the buoyancy tank of the array. There were at least five of them converging on the angle between the Russian bathyscaphe’s fin – or conning tower – and the forward hull.
Before starting to try to cut the lines, they needed to know what they were made of. The first Russian reports had all spoken of steel cables, but the closer the team got with Scorpio’s high-definition lens the more wisps of filament they saw waving in the current. The lines were starting to look more like tightly bunched fishing net than steel. But one of them was different. It was thicker and apparently coated in some kind of rubber.
Keeping a few metres from the port side of the submarine, Scorpio rose above the bunched cables and around the bow. Something didn’t seem quite right. The submersible was held close up against the array and had jammed itself into the nets so tightly that they’d been mistaken them for steel cable, so why had it not recoiled? Was it just friction from the encrustations that was holding it there? Or had other cables snagged it somewhere out of sight? From above they weren’t able to get a good enough angle to peer between the submarine and the steel cylinder. Looking up from below would be their only option, but that’s where Gold drew the line. That was the one place they wouldn’t be checking, he said.
‘If we were positioned on the other side of the array, then maybe,’ he said. ‘But like this we’d have to loop our umbilical over the top of the submarine and put ourselves beneath it. If anything shifted we’d be in trouble, and it’s not worth it.’
With no other rescue service within range in the crew’s estimated survival period, getting Scorpio trapped would be disastrous. What’s more, Scorpio’s thick umbilical cable would have joined the web ensnaring AS-28.
Positioning problems aside, the jury-rigged, Russian-style positioning system did not seem to be affecting Scorpio too badly, despite the building swell. Nuttall and Forrester were working well together, making sure the umbilical was paid out and heaved in to compensate for the long, slow sway of KIL-27 in the gentle waves. Combined with the water clarity, the conditions were better than on any training scenarios they’d been through. After all the dramas of the journey, it seemed as though everything was going to work out OK. All being well, the cutting operation shouldn’t take more than half an hour, an hour at most, and Podkapayev assured them that the sailors inside AS-28 were still conscious.