But in Zavoyko district, many of the concrete five-storey apartment buildings were now deserted, their sides streaked with rust and their windows broken. The quaysides of the port were lined with vessels that would never put to sea again. The one road that connected it to the rest of Petropavlovsk was frequently washed by the sea or buried beneath snow, cutting the district off from the city. When isolated from the mainland in this way, officers alighting from their vessels in Zavoyko on leave had to simply return to their ships. The town didn’t even have its own bakery. When the people of Petropavlovsk wanted to evoke the poor conditions of life, they would say It’s like in Zavoyko.
Stepping out of their car – one of the few on the streets there – Latypova and her colleagues walked over to a shop with empty windows and began asking about the families of the submersible’s crew.
The journalists had not been sniffing around long when they noticed that a military vehicle was passing from one apartment block to the next, apparently making visits. They walked over in time to see a handful of men in military uniform coming out of the main doors. A man and a woman were standing outside smoking, and Latypova approached them to find out if they knew anything. She struck lucky. It was Slava Milachevsky’s sister and her husband. Not only that, the woman had seen Latypova’s shows and was happy to help.
Friday, 5 August
SS + 23 h 30 mins
The rasping of men’s breath was all that could be heard in the darkness aboard AS-28. Occasional metallic noises clunked and pinged, the sounds distorted by the spherical pressure chambers, but mostly it was silence that hissed in their ears.
There was no insulation on AS-28’s titanium hull. Other military submarines are covered by a layer of rubbery tiles that serves not only to soften the craft’s sonar reflection, making it hard to detect, but also to prevent the metal hull from conducting all the heat away from the living space. Not designed for either stealth or long immersions, AS-28 had nothing but paint on her exterior. Inside, the men were freezing.
Without the warmth of human bodies, the internal temperature in the forward compartment where one watch member manned the underwater telephone had plummeted to a bone-chilling 4°C, only fractionally warmer than the black water pressing against the outside of the pressure hull. Bolonin’s fur-lined jacket was the only consolation, worn by whoever was on that watch.
Not that clothes were helping much. None of them seemed much better off than the one who was without an immersion suit. Condensation was dripping from the curved walls of their prison, the moisture stripping heat away from their bodies even if their clothes were still fairly dry. The heaters and dehumidifiers that normally kept the submersible comfortable lay silent – the machines would suck too much power from the batteries. It was a delicate balancing act for Captain Lepetyukha and Bolonin: if the crew got too cold and started shivering uncontrollably they’d use three or four times as much oxygen as normal. It would be no use if the rescuers found the AS-28 with battery power remaining but the crew all suffocated.
The only way the men could feel any hint of warmth was by huddling up. They’d laid all of the boat’s lifejackets on the floor of the aft compartment and the six of them lay on top of them in a row, sharing their body heat. Like emperor penguins sheltering from the Antarctic winter, they took turns enduring the cold outer edge.
Lying in the huddle, Captain Lepetyukha was trying to think through what was to come. Previously he’d been confident that with this new technology his Navy would have quickly freed them. But now, through some unspecified technical failure, the ROV was gone. The Kozmin’s operator had said it would be back in the water, but hadn’t said when.
Bolonin had assured him that the ROV was designed to be repairable on the deck of a ship, that there were often problems with them, but they were often quickly fixed. But Lepetyukha was more familiar with the operational state of the Navy. Even if there had been someone on board the Kozmin with the skills to do it, he wouldn’t have the necessary tools. Anything moveable had been sneaked off the ship and sold long ago.
During the frantic scramble to rescue the Kursk, the crew of AS-34 had sent a telegram from their mothership, the Mikhail Rudnitsky, requesting equipment to fix their craft. On the list were the most basic of requirements: monkey wrenches, socket sets and manual drills – all things that should be carried as standard but that had been spirited away by the impoverished crew.
Tools weren’t the only thing being stripped off the rescue ships. Before 1992, some of the Priz class of submersibles used large quantities of mercury in their ballast tanks to help them trim their attitude to match the tilt of a sunken submarine’s hatch. Once the mission was complete, the valuable liquid metal was dumped on the seabed to allow the submersible to surface. Only when it turned out that the mercury was seeping into the hull and causing dangerous fumes did the authorities decide to substitute water for the mercury.
In 1994, the Georgy Kozmin steamed to Vladivostok to have her tanks drained of mercury and enlarged so that the job could be done by seawater instead. One of the crew, Officer Steshenko, apparently spotted an opportunity and contacted the coastal mafia to offer them the metal. The previously poor officer began spending lavishly in bars, but something apparently went wrong with the deal and a few days later his headless body was found. The remaining mercury was stored upon the Kozmin in small cast iron tanks, but soon that started disappearing as well. Two years later, an inspection found that more than 60 kilos were missing, leading to the conviction of several sailors who had secreted some of the liquid metal in hidey-holes beneath the deck and some in an apartment block in Petropavlovsk.
With rescue from the Kozmin looking unlikely, Lepetyukha tried to think further afield. The Sayany rescue and salvage ship that carried the Atmospheric Diving Suit was too far away. He knew she was only able to steam at eight knots on a good day, and the Kozmin had confirmed that she would not be with them until 9 August, four days away. He’d already rationed the oxygen canisters as much as he dared. There was no way they would survive that long.
Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine how help was going to arrive now. And he should know, as a captain of one of the Russian Navy’s submarine rescue submersibles. He tried to put these fears out of his mind. Coordinating a rescue was not his job at this stage. His task was to keep his crew – and their hopes – alive for as long as possible.
Friday, 5 August
SS + 24 h 30 mins
Yelena Milachevskaya had spent the day working in the garden of the family dacha. Owned by Slava’s parents, it was usually a welcome refuge from the oppression of Petropavlovsk itself. Today she’d been unable to appreciate it, her mind filled with the echoes of the nightmares she’d been suffering.
She’d come in to give the girls their dinner and was standing at the sink in the kitchen, doing the dishes. She had the television on in the next room, but her mind was roaming between the sound of the local news, the noise of the twins playing outside, the clink of the dishes and the evening light on the slopes of the mountains in the distance. When the word ‘bathyscaphe’ filtered through the doorway from the living room, it somehow wasn’t enough to rouse her from her dishwashing trance. Perhaps, coming from a submariners’ town, the word was bandied around so much that she didn’t feel it applied to her, even given her premonitions. She didn’t pay too much attention to the news anyway, and had a healthy disrespect for the media.