‘Seems to be clear down here,’ Nuttall said into the open mike. ‘Any sign up there?’
‘Nothing,’ came back the reply from Forrester, standing on deck with the umbilical in hand.
Sunday, 7 August
SS + 71 h 47 mins
‘STOP!’ shouted Bolonin as loud as he could. His weakened voice was drowned out by the roaring of the air filling the ballast tanks, but Belozerov reacted as fast as he could with his frozen fingers and weakened grip, eventually managing to twist the half-open valve to a fully closed position. Suddenly everyone on board felt what Bolonin had sensed moments earlier. The submersible was moving. They were rising through the water. But looking at the dial on the depth gauge, they were going too fast.
Bolonin knew he had to dump some air from the ballast tanks to slow them down, but the high pressure bottles outside the hull must be running short of gas. If he dumped the air, there might not be enough to lift them to the surface afterwards. He was frozen, watching the depth gauge with eyes wide. 210 metres. 200. 190.
They were almost 30 metres clear of the array. Had they made it after all? Were they free? With every passing mark on the gauge the tension in Bolonin’s throat eased. They weren’t safe yet – lurking above were the sharp hulls of the assembled rescue fleet, any one of which could end the submersible’s uncontrolled ascent with a disastrous crash.
The submersible hurtled up through the black water towards the surface. As the depth gauge hit 180 metres AS-28 suddenly gave a sickening lurch to starboard as a previously unseen cable caught on the side of the submersible snapped tight.
For an agonising moment it seemed as if it was going to be overturned, when with a shudder the final tentacle from the deep gave way and released the submersible for good.
Sunday, 7 August
SS + 71 h 50 mins
Podkapayev’s white-haired explosion on to the deck had sent an electric shock through the waiting fleet. All eyes were looking to the west over KIL-27’s port side. Riches was trying to calculate in his head how long AS-28 should take to surface. A lot depended on how much ballast water she’d been able to blow, but she should have tried to flush it all in order to break free, and that would have meant a rapid ascent, say 70 metres a minute. From 210 metres, that was three minutes. In the excitement of having seen her disappear from the screen, he hadn’t checked his watch to see the exact time, but already it felt as though far more than three minutes had passed, and there was still no sign.
A shout went up from behind the crowd staring over the port rail. As one they whirled around and there, bobbing amid still-roiling water off the other side of the ship were the bright red and white stripes of AS-28. Everyone ran over to the starboard rail, shouting. There was cheering coming from all of the ships. Podka payev was yelling into his walkie-talkie.
AS-28’s red and white stripes were bright against the sea as she bobbed on the surface, still reeling with the energy of her ascent. Just a few metres beyond her was the massive, sharp bow of the Alagez.
A huge roar of joy went up from all around. Arms were flung high and every face was beaming, but there was an added element to the expressions on the members of the UK team. Although overjoyed to see the submersible on the surface, everyone could see how close they’d come to seeing secondary disaster. For AS-28 to surface on their starboard meant she’d either been caught in strong currents that carried her over 200 metres towards them during her ascent, or their mobile mooring system had drifted that far in the direction of the array. They should have been 100 metres away or more, but at some point they would have been directly over her. If she’d come up directly underneath the Alagez or KIL-27 she could easily have damaged herself badly enough to plummet straight back down to the seabed, this time with freezing cold water flooding in to replace the foul air.
A moment later, Riches found himself enveloped in Podkapayev’s arms as he gave the Royal Naval officer an enormous Russian bear hug and covered his cheeks in wet kisses. Out of the corner of his eye, Riches saw a burst of white water erupt from the side of AS-28. A grin spread across his face. At least one person was still alive and was together enough to remember to blow their tanks again – a standard submariner’s procedure to get as high as possible in the water before opening the hatch.
Inside the control cabin the speaker erupted in distorted yelling as the volume maxed out the circuits. Nuttall instinctively turned it down, before turning to Gold. They allowed each other a half-hug, an extended British pat on the back, before turning back to the screen. They still had to get Scorpio back on board safely, after all. Then the door was flung open and Podkapayev burst in. He yelled a huge cheer and flung his arms around the seated pilot, and Nuttall had to let go of the joystick for fear of sending Scorpio crashing into the antenna. Gold then got the same treatment.
Out on deck all of the team were now clustered around the starboard railing, desperate to catch a glimpse of the men when they emerged. Within a minute of them seeing the submersible surface a 30-foot launch had arrived with seven men on board. Five of them clambered on to the submersible’s exposed hull, but they didn’t rush to open the hatch to allow fresh air inside. Instead, the first thing that they did was attach a line to the bow and start towing it around to the far side of Alagez, out of sight. The American divers, who had eventually managed to talk their way on to a boat, were being kept back on the other side of the Russian command ship. Suddenly Riches’ elation was tinged with fear. Why were they towing it away? Was this routine Russian secrecy still permeating everything, even in such an urgent situation? Or did they know something about the state of the men inside that he didn’t, something that they wished to hide?
Sunday, 7 August
SS + 71 h 56 mins
Tatiana Lepetyukha gripped the railing hard as she watched the launch tow the red-and-white striped hull of her husband’s submarine around the bow of the Alagez. The special support squad of naval doctors were on board the launch, together with the Oxygen Rescue Team. Tatiana watched them wrestling with the valves on top of the submersible’s hatch. They seemed to be having difficulty opening it. One of them took aim with a hammer and started banging it. Tatiana’s heart clenched. Her husband’s men usually opened the hatch themselves, she knew. Why were the surface team now doing it for them? Was it too late, after all that?
Suddenly she heard a metallic clang that didn’t match a strike by the sailor who stood above the hatch. It had come from inside the submersible. Someone was alive inside! She later learned that it was her husband’s crew trying to tell those on the surface that they were turning the handle the wrong way, and to let them open it themselves.
Confusion over a simple matter such as which way to turn a hatch had caused disaster before. In 1961, the Soviet submarine S-80 disappeared without trace in the Barents Sea. She was eventually found after a seven-year search effort, and investigations revealed that the boat had been lost simply because a crewman manning one of the hatches had been trying to close it by turning the wheel in the wrong direction. The threads had been badly damaged by his desperate attempts, his conviction caused by the fact that he had recently transferred from another submarine whose hatches closed by turning the wheel in the opposite direction.