They were ready. Gold cleared his throat. ‘Right, let’s get this thing done,’ he said, as Nuttall began repositioning Scorpio alongside the fin, with the vehicle in line with the bunched cables.
Just as Nuttall started moving forward, Podkapayev began talking into his radio to the command ship Alagez, waving his hand signalling Nuttall to stop. The team all looked at him. The interpreter explained that Podkapayev wanted confirmation that they could start cutting. Riches was about to object that now was not the time for time-wasting protocol, when the translator explained that Podkapayev was uncertain as to how buoyant the submarine was.
AS-28 had previously blown their ballast tanks in an effort to get free. If they were still full of air, the submarine would be straining at those cables and when she broke free she might do so at a dangerous angle, only to come crashing back down again. No one seemed to know how long it had been since they were blown, but to Riches’ eyes it seemed it had all seeped out. She didn’t look as though she was tugging upwards, and neither did it look as though she wanted to sink. Every indication was that she was neutrally buoyant.
Gold turned to Riches. ‘We’re wasting time here,’ he said. ‘You can tell that thing’s not going to go anywhere. Look how she’s lying. There’s nothing holding her down at the stern, but she’s not going to sink suddenly or shoot upwards upside down. Maybe she’s slightly positively buoyant, but nothing that’s going to cause a problem.’
Riches nodded, but waited. He was acutely aware of the need not to crash through Russian protocol. Holloway had warned just how fast the curtain could fall on the collaborative operation if they were judged to be out of control. He could feel his jaw clenched tight trying to contain himself while they waited for a reply from the Alagez, who were themselves waiting for a reply from the frozen, half-suffocated sailors. Riches looked at the panel of their own through-water communications system in front of him. Needless to say, NATO and Russia operated on different frequencies, leaving them unable to talk directly to the submersible.
At last Podkapayev’s handheld radio crackled, and he turned to the others and began talking, pointing at the screen.
‘The Priz is not positively buoyant,’ he announced through the interpreter. ‘You must begin by cutting this cable here, and you have permission to begin.’
Gold looked at Riches again, his eyes full of warning. This wasn’t going to last.
The fixed aluminium head of the cutter was slowly nearing the first line, its movements swaying loosely against the backdrop of AS-28’s hull. Nuttall was keeping the thrust joystick pushed forward just an inch, but Scorpio was slowing, twisting sideways.
‘Give me another half a wrap there, Will,’ he said. The instruction was picked up by the open microphone and relayed out to Forrester on the umbilical winch. After just a couple of seconds Nuttall felt the resistance ease, and Scorpio moved forward again. As the cable got closer and Nuttall started trying to move it towards the mouth of the cutter, the lack of anything solid in their set-up started to become obvious. The jaws and their target were loosely swaying close together one second then a foot or more apart the next. Scorpio was suspended in mid-water, its umbilical stretched across 250 metres of open sea with a current running, attached to a rolling ship that was being held in position only by a precarious balance of opposing forces. Given that, it was a miracle that the cutter and the cable were only moving around by such a small amount.
Even so, trying to catch the rope in the cutter’s jaws was not going to be easy. The depth perception from binocular vision is removed when using a television monitor, making it difficult to judge whether an object is too close or too far. Some expensive stereoscopic camera systems had been developed and fitted to ROVs to try to combat this problem, but all had an apparently unavoidable drawback: after a few hours at most, the artificial 3-D display gave operators a splitting headache. For a job that often meant sitting in front of screens for up to 12 hours a day, it was a critical fault. Besides, like other long-time ROV pilots, Nuttall’s brain had begun to rewire itself with the sensors available to it. Scorpio had two forward-facing cameras and, although not linked up to function in unison, after spending so many hours using them he’d unconsciously started to interpret their signals as one, giving him rudimentary three-dimensional vision.
But Nuttall’s sixth sense could not counter the foot or so of loose movement. Every time the cutter’s mouth rose up towards the cable and a snatch looked certain, everyone in the cabin leaned forward at the screen, willing it in like die-hard – but mute – football supporters whose team were close to a goal. But each time something would shift, and the cable would somehow slip to the side of the cutter’s jaws. Nuttall was having to use a lot of power to move, yet he was sure he’d got enough slack on the winch. Maybe it was the low voltage cutting the power available to his thrusters, he thought.
Watching Nuttall struggling to manoeuvre the entire ROV to get the cable into the cutter’s jaws, Gold had an idea. He pushed backwards past Podkapayev and settled himself against the back wall where the manipulator control was mounted. Everyone bunched up towards the door to give him more room.
With his back against the wall, Gold reached up to a robotic arm that protruded from the wall above his shoulder. Taking the hand grip in his left hand, he adjusted and aligned the various joints to match the orientation of the manipulator arm on Scorpio, 200 metres beneath them.
‘OK, Pete, unfreeze me,’ he said.
Nuttall flicked a switch in front of him that would link Gold’s master arm to the slave below. On the screen in front of them, Scorpio’s arm twitched. Trying to control four joints of the manipulator with levers, buttons or even joysticks made for time-consuming, clumsy work. It was more intuitive to use a master arm whose every motion was replicated by that of the ‘slave’ below on the ROV.
With an easy, practised swing, Gold twisted his fingers and smoothly pulled his arm downwards, and the camera showed Scorpio’s manipulator releasing its grip on a rail and faithfully follow Gold’s movement downwards until it was poised dead ahead of the vehicle.
Gold now extended his arm outwards and opened his fingers, and on the screen the manipulator’s metal claw opened and began reaching out to grab the cable. Able to move independently of Scorpio’s bulk, it was quickly able to capture it. Once in the manipulator’s grasp, Gold could easily pull the cable towards the cutting arm that was fixed to Scorpio’s frame. The ROV was now attached to the cable, giving a little bit of stability.
Nuttall was so focused on controlling the ROV that he was oblivious to all the movement and anxious commentary around him. He was trying not to think of the men trapped inside the steel coffin in front of him, instead concentrating on his task. At last the cable slipped in between the guides and into the jaws – only then did his ears open to the tense murmur of encouragement.
‘We’re in. Cutting now,’ he said and flicked a switch to his right. The cutter arm juddered as the hydraulic blade rotated across the gape of the jaws, and specks of sediment rose like slow-motion dust from the rope, then suddenly the two ends could be seen drifting apart. A big cheer filled the cabin. The time was 12.20 local.
Riches stepped outside for a second. The sea was oily calm, and the scene on the hot, rusting deck was strangely dreamlike. Men were clustered around the crew members who had headphones on, staring in different directions as though imagining the events happening in the darkness somewhere below them.