Frank Pope - 72 Hours - The First-Hand Account of a Royal Navy Mission to Save the Crew of a Trapped Russian Submarine

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.

‘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.

‘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.

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?