Back in a bleak, grey apartment block in Petropavlosk, Yelena Milachevskaya lay in her sister’s bed looking at the phone. She was still unable to eat. At least Artyom was looking after the girls, taking them out for walks and giving them food. What would she have done without him? Following Guzel Latypova’s lead, other journalists had filmed interviews with her, and now her sobbing face had become a staple on the news reports about the ongoing drama.
Marina Belozerov, wife of Warrant Officer Sergei Belozerov, whose café was doing such brisk business on the stricken submersible, could not bear to remain inactive any longer. She had hardly slept at all since first hearing about the accident almost 60 hours ago, and had not let her phone out of her hand in case she missed some news. When she heard that the British rescuers were about to head out on a ship, she gathered up her daughter and made her way to the Naval headquarters. She had to get on board and get closer to her Sergei. If he died, she wanted to be as near as possible. If he escaped, she wanted to be the first to see his smiling face.
They were turned away at headquarters. There was no room on board, they were told, and their presence might hamper the efforts to rescue the men. Reluctantly, Marina led her daughter away and back into the night.
Tatiana Lepetyukha was not so easily deterred, as befits the wife of the captain. The quiet, insistent voice inside her head that had guided her since her father’s death had returned at the church service she’d organised the previous day. It told her that all was not lost, and that a bad ending was not yet a certainty. Deep within herself she had a growing feeling that all was going to end well. The voices – for there were now several of them – didn’t end there. They told her that she had to be on the rescue vessel, as close as possible to her husband.
Leaving her 13-year-old son at home to look after the dog, she made her way to the Naval headquarters. First the guards, then the officers tried to assure her that things would be smoother and easier without her there, but she didn’t listen. She would not take no for an answer. It was an impulsive decision, but was no less firm because of it. A part of her was watching her insistence as if from outside, cringing at the thought she was making so much trouble for Valery’s beloved Navy at a time like this. But the inner voices won, and she persevered.
Eventually, the Master decided to let her come on board. When a woman is in such a state of mind, he thought, it would be very difficult to stop her. KIL-27 was a civilian ship after all, and there was already a woman on board, working in the galley. He weighed up the danger of her breaking down in hysteria or with a panic attack and decided to bring a doctor along from the hospital just in case. She was ushered on board quietly, without informing the British rescuers, and told that under no circumstances must she interfere.
Saturday, 6 August/Sunday, 7 August
SS + 57 h 50 mins
It was almost half past two in the morning before the UK team had a chance to sit down with Dmitriy Podkapayev and get a full briefing on what awaited them beneath the surface. While the rest of the crew continued to shift, unpack and prepare equipment, Stuart Gold, Captain Holloway and Comander Riches followed Podkapayev’s white-blond head down a peeling passageway and into the officers’ mess.
They filed in, finding places to sit on disintegrating chairs. Beneath the harsh lights of the cabin, Podkapayev looked haggard; his shoulders rigid, his eyes dull and tired. Despite Russia’s enormous geography, the members of the Priz fleet of rescue submersibles were relatively few and he’d trained with three of the trapped men from time to time. He didn’t know the younger sailors, but he was worried for them too – they were little older than his own son. More than anyone he was concerned about his good friend Gennady Vasiliyevich Bolonin. He’d spent many long evenings with the civilian engineer, the esteemed co-designer of the Priz class, back in Nizhny Novgorod. And Podkapayev knew that though Bolonin’s mind was bright, his 60-year-old body was not as robust as it once had been. How would he be dealing with the freezing temperatures, his lungs heaving ever harder to feed from the thinning air?
Podkapayev began talking in bursts, waiting with barely restrained impatience for Captain Holloway to translate before continuing.
‘I’m not sure what reports you’ve heard, so I’ll start from the beginning,’ he said. ‘The AS-28 is stuck at 210 metres, trapped in cables. The depth of water is about 230 metres. The accident happened when they were inspecting an underwater antenna. We have seven men on board, and their air is already very limited. They have been down there since Thursday – almost three days. At our most optimistic estimates, they have between twenty and twenty-four hours of life remaining. I have reports from the bathyscaphe’s commander, as well as some photos and video taken with our Tiger ROV.’
In the cramped and salt-sticky cabin Podkapayev pulled out a modern, state-of-the-art laptop from his bag. He fed it a DVD. The grainy pictures showed swirling sediment, and each of the team strained forward to see what was there. A white band moved across the screen. At first they thought it was interference on the camera, but Podkapayev jabbed at it with his finger. Sure enough, in a few moments it resolved into the striped paintwork of the submarine’s hull.
The picture got no better. For 15 minutes the British rescuers peered into the jumping, distorted images. Any clues they could glean from the recording would give them a head start and maybe even prompt them to make adjustments to Scorpio before she went down. But for all their eagerness to make sense of it, they couldn’t see enough to draw any firm conclusions about how the vessel was trapped.
‘Can you explain to us what’s going on? Maybe you got a better idea while watching it live,’ Gold said, and Holloway relayed the question.
Podkapayev nodded. From a file he pulled out a simple line drawing showing two long tubes – the floatation tanks – and up at the far end of the upper one, the submersible with a cluster of lines wrapped around the fin. From the picture it looked as though the craft could just reverse to free itself, so something was obviously missing. Various dimensions were scrawled on the drawing, the numerals jumping out from the Cyrillic characters. The tubes were huge – 102 metres long. They floated 8.5 metres above the bottom on chains anchored to large concrete blocks on the seabed. AS-28 was ensnared towards the top of the array some 25 metres above the seabed. That meant working mid-water, without the ability to stabilise Scorpio by resting her skids on the seabed.
Seeing the diagram, Gold brightened. It was a clear representation of the situation at last, even if it was incomplete. He began asking questions, starting with what the lines were made of. This was of vital importance. Scorpio could cut wire cable up to 20mm with ease, but they had also brought LR5’s cutter, which could be fitted to Scorpio. It was more unwieldy, but it could cut up to 70mm. So far all he’d heard was that none of the lines were larger than 18 mm, but nothing could be taken for granted. All Podkapayev could do was shrug.
‘We’ve tried to estimate from the pictures. I can only show you what I saw,’ he said. He turned back to his laptop and pulled up some colour images. Their quality was better than the video, but despite lots of discussion and theorising no one could say for sure what the lines were made of. If they were rope then that was one thing, if they were wire it was quite another.
‘Okay,’ said Gold. ‘We’ve got a picture of how things look down there now. Now we need to work out how things are going to look up top. Since this ship does not have Dynamic Positioning, what kind of an anchor web are you thinking of?’