With the offload of the C5 at last complete, Kent Van Horn had finally managed to leave the airbase and was heading for the dockyards. He had with him his ship preparation team together with the three divers and the Medical Officer. Van Horn was feeling strangely dislocated, not just as a result of the unfamiliar geography, but also of the strange atmosphere. He found the marked lack of alacrity surreal, as if nothing was really the matter. All the training he’d been through with his team had been about doing everything they could to shave vital minutes off the response time. Yet here he was, sandwiched between two Russian military personnel, bumping through a pitch-black night in drizzling rain, about to do a school bus style drop off at different vessels because the Russians couldn’t spare enough vehicles to give each team a separate ride. Twenty-four hours ago he’d been in bed with his wife, looking forward to the weekend, and now he was somewhere – he wasn’t quite sure where – in the Russian darkness.
The bus passed through the dockyard gates with minimal delay, and lurched up alongside a rusting ship. Van Horn twisted in his seat, readying himself to jump out, but the Russians gestured to him to stay put. Instead they stepped out of the bus, shut the doors and walked over to the ship. There was a short conversation and the Russians walked back, got back inside, and explained that this was the US ship, not the UK one where the divers were to be dropped. Orders were given to the driver who took off again, bumping down the potholed dirt roads of the dockyard, taking a tortuously circuitous route through the rusting machinery. Ten long minutes later, the bus pulled up alongside another rusting ship. Again the Americans were kept inside while the Russians talked with the sailors on the dockside. Once again they returned and got back into the bus. There had been a mistake, they said. The first ship had in fact been the British ship – this was the one that had been assigned to the Americans. Van Horn and the other members of his advance party were not allowed to get out, however. All of them had to go all the way back to the first ship to drop the divers on the British ship before returning to prepare their own.
At 03.40 the minibus finally arrived back at KIL-27, and the four American divers jumped out and hotfooted it up the gangplank with their gear. After being introduced to the Master they were shown to their quarters by one of the Russian crewmen. They returned two minutes later, their noses still wrinkled. Whether it was an intentional message or not, lying in the middle of their allotted cabin was a huge, fresh pile of dogshit. Carefully avoiding the mess, they put down their kit bags, together with a box of ration packs, and made their way back out on to deck.
The ship’s engines had been running since the team had boarded in order to get power to their equipment and to the welder, and their throbbing had blended into the background of the busy thrum of activity on deck. The US divers and doctor had been on board for around ten minutes when Riches felt the deck shift beneath him. He looked up from what he was doing to see the docks sliding past. A dockworker – having evidently just let go of the ship’s lines – was scrambling backwards, fast. With a terrible screeching noise, KIL-27 scraped down the concrete jetty and sheared huge chunks of concrete off the pier.
Normally in a ship this size, if you couldn’t get tugs to pull you from your berth you prised the stern from the jetty by pushing forward against mooring ropes attached to the bow, then reversed away. It didn’t take long. Instead, KIL-27’s captain had decided to steam out ahead under her own power, and lots of it. The rudder was hard over to starboard and the ship was wreaking havoc both with the pier and with her own hull. None of the crew seemed to bat an eyelid. Having more than one welder in an emergency was out of the question, but destroying the harbour on departure was evidently fine.
Worried about power fluctuations caused by the welder, Gold had not yet allowed Scorpio’s control container to be connected to the ship’s power supply. He needed a constant supply of anywhere between 380 and 460 volts, but sudden peaks and troughs could cause havoc. Now, with everything in place and the welder’s torch just reinforcing the spot welds holding down the control container and the umbilical cable winch, Gold asked for a pause in the welding work, took a deep breath and engaged the main circuit breaker, linking Scorpio’s electrical systems to the Russian vessel’s for the first time. Several gauges in the control van sprang into life, but the needles settled on 360 volts. Gold paused, took a breath, then double checked the main connections. Still the three phase power coming to him was short. Although Scorpio was supposed to function at anything from 380 volts, he’d never made do with less than 400 before.
Gold called out to Holloway to alert the ship’s electrician. Ten minutes later, Holloway returned, having asked the Master to shut down all non-essential electrical power to the ship. All electrical capacity available on the ship was now being routed towards Scorpio’s control cabin, he said. Gold flicked the switch again and the voltage needle jumped up and settled. Gold groaned: 375 volts.
‘We’ll just have to wing it,’ he said. He’d passed on the vehicle’s electrical requirements to the Russians via Holloway in the initial flurry of communications, but this was evidently the best they’d get. There would be damage in the long run and the thrusters might be sluggish, but for now all systems should operate just about normally, he reckoned.
Inside the 20-foot-long control room, a converted shipping container, Gold went through his standard system checks. The basics seemed fine. He double-checked Scorpio’s umbilical cable connection to the control cabin’s external port. He knew that Forrester and Nuttall would already have done this, but years of experience with the unforgiving sea had taught him the value of triple-checking. He’d yet to fire it up, but when he did the umbilical cable would carry all the vehicle’s power (stepped up to 11,000 volts to reduce losses in the 1,500 metres of cable), low-voltage connections for running the guidance systems and coaxial cable to carry video from Scorpio’s cameras. A shield of steel fibres twisted around them, while around that a yellow rubbery coating ensured that the whole thing was almost buoyant in the water and so wouldn’t pull the vehicle either up or down.
Gold ran his eye from the connection down the cable, on to the winch and on to the vehicle. It was always possible that it could have got snagged on something sharp or had something dropped on it during loading, and with such high voltages it was vital to spot a possible short-circuit in the cable before putting power through it. But all seemed normal.
So, the moment of truth. Through long experience with ROVs, Gold had been trained to expect things to go wrong with them. The mix of seawater and electronics was never a good one, and a major part of being an ROV pilot was knowing how to fix them when they went wrong. Thankfully, Scorpios were different. They were the most reliable models available, and with Gold as its continuous and faithful guardian, this particular Scorpio had never had more than the usual small niggles here and there. Powering her up ahead of the launch was merely a matter of habit, a final check to make sure he’d be able to deploy as soon as the ship had a stable position above AS-28.
‘Okay for vehicle power?’ shouted Nuttall from the control cabin.
‘Yep, everybody clear,’ Gold replied from the deck.
‘Okay, firing her up!’ came back Nuttall’s voice.
There was silence for a few moments while Gold waited for the telltale flash of Scorpio’s main lights. Nuttall would then flick each of them on for a second – no longer, or the hot bulbs would burn themselves out without the cooling effect of seawater around them. He’d test the electrics – the cameras, lights, sonars – then run through the hydraulics. Each of the thrusters would whirr only briefly, designed to run for longer only with the resistance of water around them. Last of all the manipulators would take a stretch and the cutter would snap shut a couple of times.