‘We must secure everything absolutely,’ said Bolonin. ‘Only when this is done can we start to blow, and even then we must use great caution.’
Moving with numbed slowness, the men began trying to lash down anything that might move. Before long the buzz of the underwater telephone sounded through from the forward chamber. The watchman answered, and a few moments later his voice came through the hatch. ‘Surface want to know what is happening. They say they have given us a command and yet we do not surface.’
Bolonin could see the Captain reacting, his military training urging him to follow orders, blow the tanks immediately and break for the surface. Bolonin looked Lepetyukha in the eye.
‘We must not rush this,’ he said.
If the submersible was still caught, they could end up like a balloon on a string, held upside down while heavy equipment crashed down on top of them amid a rain of battery acid.
With everything as secure as they could make it, Bolonin positioned himself in the front compartment. He nodded to Belozerov, who started slowly turning a valve. An initial hiss turned into a deafening roar as air blasted from high pressure bottles into the ballast tanks. Magnified by the cylindrical hull, the noise was like an explosion.
Sunday, 7 August
SS + 71 h 47 mins
All eyes were boring into the main screen showing the view from Scorpio’s front camera. Podkapayev, Nuttall, Gold and Riches were leaning forward, peering into the murky image. Scorpio was as far away as possible while still being within visual range of AS-28’s striped hull. The gentle swaying of the submarine and the continual adjustments that Nuttall was making to keep Scorpio steady were hypnotic. Gold felt like they’d been waiting for more than 30 minutes already, even though it had only been two. Riches was staring so hard he could feel his eyes drying up, and he had to force himself to blink.
Something seemed to be shifting on the screen. It was hard to tell if it was the striped hull moving upwards or the camera moving downwards, but suddenly they realised that the faint white stripe had disappeared. Riches erupted at the same time as Podkapayev, shouting and pointing at the screen.
‘She’s gone!’ Riches shouted, but Podkapayev had already bolted, pushing past behind him and on to the deck.
‘Vzblivayet! Vzblivayet!’ he was yelling. ‘It’s coming up!’
Peering into the swirling murk of the screen, the grey-brown bulk of the end of the array was discernible, but there was no longer a submersible attached to it. They burst out after Podka payev and on to the deck. The whole crew surged towards the port side and began scouring the featureless surface of the sea. This was the moment they’d all been waiting for. Holloway pulled out his camera to catch the momentous moment when the stricken craft broke the surface.
The burst of excitement was immediately followed by silence. Not a calm, soft silence, but a tense, sharp expectation that sliced through the background throb of the ship’s engines. The wind had died away, leaving the day supernaturally calm, sunlight slipping from the low, rolling waves in great slabs. The scattered armada of rusting civilian and naval vessels swayed like giant, irregular metro nomes. Around the fleet every person knew the order had been passed and the submersible should be on its way up.
Tatiana Lepetyukha stood on the flying bridge of the Alagez, having been transferred there from KIL-27 during Scorpio’s repair. She was scarcely able to breathe as she squinted out over the placid surface. She clutched at her faith as though it were the only thing keeping her alive. Alongside her, the Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov, also stared out across the blank water, his face a mask. The political nightmare of the Kursk backlash cannot have been far from his mind. And although this was only seven sailors and not 118, Ivanov had no doubt that if he failed here the cost would be high.
Nothing moved on KIL-27. The dogs, sensing the change in the atmosphere, had stopped barking. Russian sailors gathered with British and American rescuers at vantage points on the port deck, wherever equipment allowed a clear view of the sea. Heads slowly rotated as each scanned the surface with increasing incredulity. With every passing minute, the clarity of the day got more oppressive. Where was AS-28?
Sixty miles away in Petropavlosk, Yelena Milachevskaya held her twin daughters close. She knew that the rescue robot had gone back down to the seabed, and the operator had told her that there only remained a single cable to cut. A blanket of silence seemed to cover her house too, muffling the insistent sound of the television news and its coverage of the unfolding events. In the next room, Slava’s father sat bolt upright at the kitchen table, staring at the screen.
Connected to the situation through a shifting network of satellite communications and lightning-fast pulses travelling across ocean floors through fibre-optic cables, Trond Jurvik sat hunched at his laptop in Norfolk, Virginia, monitoring the ISMERLO website for the latest news. Despite Scorpio’s return to the water he was worried. Despite the best efforts of nations around the world, there was now no backup plan, thanks to the American team having been turned back.
Roger Chapman sat in a puddle of light in an otherwise darkened house, a cup of tea getting cold by his side, as he too watched ISMERLO for updates. His wife was asleep in bed upstairs – it was four in the morning, after all. Although there was nothing that Chapman could do from so far away, there was no way he could sleep knowing that those men, frozen and suffocated, were so close to being saved by the techniques and equipment that he’d helped develop and had championed for so long. Every blink of the cursor seemed to take an age. It was unbearable. Messages relaying the top level scrabble to get the US ship turned back around were popping up, but there were no updates from the British team. The last that mentioned them was from a US Navy Executive Officer from the Deep Submergence Unit:
02:36:24 US VOO has returned to port upon Russian direction. Commodore is still requesting to get underway. British ROV is currently in the water, status unknown of cuts.
The team on deck paced the rails nervously, listening for any hint of information over the open mike from the van. It was quiet.
Gold and Nuttall had stayed where they were inside the van. They knew the fact that AS-28 had shifted was not necessarily the end of the story. Nuttall pitched Scorpio’s nose upwards by about 20 degrees to angle the wide, flat beam of the sonar up through the water column. On the orange wedge like display of the sonar the shape of the array’s floatation tube slipped away. Nuttall swept the beam up through the water above. Nothing. He adjusted the frequency, and swept down and up again, careful to keep Scorpio’s nose pointing in a direct vertical line from where AS-28 had last been seen. Still nothing.