There was already enormous disparity between the two navies – hardly surprising, given that China was able to spend $15bn more on its defence than Russia. It was bad enough that China would surely know that Russia had not been able to add a single Navy ship to the Kamchatka fleet for 15 years, but for them then to have to admit to having got one of their rescue submersibles stuck on their own hydrophone array was not an option. While trying to work out its next move, the Russian Ministry of Defence remained resolutely silent.
Friday, 5 August
SS + 18 h 30 mins
It was 11 o’clock the next morning when STS-Kamchatka’s Radio 3, Petropavlovsk’s most popular station, got a strange telephone call. A woman, in tears, sobbed that she had terrible news that must be heard but that she needed to be anonymous. The producer assured the caller that her number had not shown up on their system, listened for a minute, then put her on to Guzel Latypova, one of the news agency’s chief editors.
Guzel Latypova was a veteran broadcaster, born and bred in Kamchatka. For more than 20 years she had worked her way up through the newspapers and on to radio before breaking into TV with her opinionated and popular talk show. Her soft face, bobbed blonde hair and intense, probing eyes were well-known among the 400,000 residents of Kamchatka, but it was her familiar voice which was now calming her hysterical caller.
After being assured once more that her identity was unknown, the woman drew breath. ‘There’s been an accident in Berezovya Cove. At this moment there are seven men trapped in a bathyscaphe, more than 200 metres underwater,’ she said.
Latypova paused. She wasn’t really sure what a bathyscaphe was, though she guessed it was an underwater craft somewhat smaller than a submarine. She’d taken the call because it was a slow day with no news about, but she was cautious. Petropavlovsk was a strange town, full of people – especially women – driven to the brink by isolation, alcohol or loneliness. The radio seemed to act as a focal point for the crazies, a voice in the void. But there was something focused about this woman’s ranting, and her insistence on remaining anonymous piqued Latypova’s interest. This was not the usual story of a fire or a road accident, and the woman obviously wasn’t calling just to get her voice heard on radio.
Something about the call made Latypova think that the woman had something to do with the military headquarters, or some close link with it. But before she could ask any more questions the woman began asking once again if the call was being recorded, then suddenly hung up.
Latypova had been a reporter when the Kursk had gone down, and had been one of those drafted in to try to fill the insatiable demand for stories on the subject. Petropavlosk was home to Russia’s second-largest submarine fleet, and everyone knew someone who worked on board one. The whole city had been gripped with terrified fascination by what was happening at the other end of the country. Vidyaevo, the northern submarine garrison town where most of the victims had lived, was a sister city, and everyone had thought how easily the same thing could happen here. And now it had. Not with a huge nuclear submarine, but the thought of seven men trapped in a tiny metal coffin was almost more tangible. Their frozen, suffocating incarceration was somehow more claustrophobic and human, and easier to imagine.
Latypova thought for a minute after putting down the phone. Her journalistic antennae were tingling. It had taken 32 hours for news of what had actually happened to the Kursk to reach the Russian public. If this story were true it would be a big scoop. She picked up the phone to the office of the commander-in-chief of the North East Military Forces and asked if there was anything to the story.
‘No comment,’ came the reply, and with those words Latypova knew she was on to something. Within minutes she had the newsflash on air.
‘We have learnt from a well-informed source a bathyscaphe with seven seamen aboard is in distress at a depth of 200 metres in Berezovya Cove,’ the newsreader said. ‘The headquarters of Russian North-East Military Forces neither confirm nor deny this information.’
Latypova quickly typed up a report to send to Interfax, the news-wire agency that she’d once worked for and still fed with breaking news, while her colleague Oksana Guseva sent it to RIA Novosti, the state news agency based in Moscow. Calls soon began to come into the station from various specialists and anonymous members of the military giving other details of what was evidently already a sizeable operation.
Latypova quickly pulled her teams together. She sent a film crew down to the military headquarters and got some reporters to hit the phones and call anyone relevant. Then she began working out how to take the story forward. When she thought back to the Kursk, the image that first came to mind was not the interviews with stone-faced Naval commanders, or footage of rescue vessels or of submarines tied up on the pier side, but of the desperate wives and mothers.
She decided to take another team to the district of Zavoyko, where many military families lived on a peninsula that jutted out from Petropavlovsk just as Kamchatka protruded from the Russian mainland.
Zavoyko was once wreathed in glory, but those who referred to it as the ‘city of heroes’ now were being sarcastic. While the early 1990s had not been kind to mother Russia as a whole, it was in her former military strongholds and northern regions – and especially the remote, isolated Kamchatka, that the decay was worst. This stung Latypova, for she was both patriotic and acutely conscious of how much the people of Kamchatka had given to their country.
Zavoyko was named after Captain 1st Rank Zavoyko, who, a century and a half before, had fought off the combined might of the French and British fleets. In late August 1854, the Crimean war had arrived at the shores of the Russian east coast in the shape of four French warships and four British frigates (including one six-gun paddle-steamer, the latest in military hardware). The fleet was bent on capturing Petropavlovsk, then Russia’s main Naval facility in the Pacific.
Russia’s only substantial warship in this area was the 60-gun Pallada, and for her to face the enemy fleet alone would have been suicide. She turned tail and hid far up the river Amur, leaving Petropavlovk’s forces to fight alone. The garrison was small and there were no reinforcements available, so Captain Zavoyko roused the general population to man the gun batteries and defend the city themselves. Even then they stood little chance, for they had only 68 cannons to bring to bear against the 212 of the assembled allies. But fortune was on their side. Whether by mistake or on purpose, before the fighting even began the Commander of the British Fleet, Rear Admiral David Price, was below decks in his quarters and shot himself in the head with his pistol.
Under new command, the allied French and British forces landed 70 men but were repulsed. A few days later they returned with almost 1,000 men, and again the hard-bitten Russian resistance fought them back. It was the most significant battle in the Pacific theatre of the Crimean war, and the result was clear. During the siege, the Russians lost a hundred men, but killed five times as many. The heroic defence became a symbol of all that was great about the Russian military: resourcefulness, bravery and the snatching of victory from the jaws of almost certain defeat. Warships were named Petropavlovsk in honour of the event, and Captain Zavoyko was lauded with his own city.