But the seconds stretched out, and nothing was happening. Gold looked back towards the cabin. Silence.
Inside the control cabin, Nuttall could feel a frown spreading across his forehead. Two of the cameras had flickered into life, but the other two were completely dead. So was the sonar. Something was wrong. It wasn’t even worth flicking through the thrusters and lights if this wasn’t working. Without sonar, Scorpio would be completely blind. There was no point in diving at all without it – they’d never get close enough to the submersible to use the cameras, even if they could do the job on the two that were working.
Gold’s face appeared in the door. ‘What’s going on?’ he said. Nuttall shook his head.
In ten years of looking after Scorpio, Gold had never switched it on and got such a strange combination of faults. He closed his eyes for a second, as though gathering his thoughts, but inside he was trying to loosen the sudden grip around his heart. It was like a nightmare. All this way, and now sailing towards the site of a genuine accident, where men’s lives were at stake, and for the first time ever the bloody system doesn’t work. He’d been training for this very situation, existing for this very rescue, for what seemed like most of his life. And now this.
The two men wasted no time chasing the voltages down through the system. Gold quickly ascertained that the problem was within Scorpio itself. There was no power at all getting to the starboard pod. He drained the main termination box of the oil that protected it from both pressure and water, then opened it up and began testing the connections inside. Meanwhile, Nuttall was stripping out all the connectors between the two long watertight containers that held the electronics. The connections between the pods were common areas to find faults, and it was easier to replace them rather than check them.
With all main connections changed and the earth connection to the main termination box tightened, Gold turned on the power once more. Scorpio stirred. Another camera twitched, but nothing more. This was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Was the low volt age causing the problem? He pulled out the manuals and started to check the voltages all the way through the system. It seemed to get more and more confusing; nothing was making sense. Ordinarily, finding a fault was like a detective story, slowly narrowing the options until you’d got the culprit cornered. But now every time he opened up and inspected a new component there seemed to be more faults and things got more complicated, not less. It was as though the system he knew so well was suddenly speaking a different language.
Knee-deep in manuals and circuit diagrams, Gold was starting to sweat. Not only did he need to solve this for his own self-respect, but he could also feel the eyes of the Russian sailors on him. The US Navy divers were pulling out their Iridium phones to tell their people that they’d better get a move on because it looked like the British team had tanked after all.
Gold was trying to reassure himself that he knew Scorpio, that it was just a machine and a reliable one at that. There were always causes, and there were always solutions. He’d get to the bottom of it, no problem. Whether or not it was fixable was another matter, but that’s why it was important to have redundancy. With the Americans close behind them and the Australian oil exploration vessel steaming up from the south, at least the sting would be taken out of a failure by the British team.
Saturday, 6 August/Sunday, 7 August
SS + 60 h 40 mins
Just past five o’clock in the morning, more than an hour after KIL-27 had left the dockside, the trucks carrying the US Super-Scorpios finally arrived at the dockside. Commander Kent Van Horn looked longingly at the crane and wished it would immediately swing into action, but instead was drawn into protracted discussions with the ship’s Master, Captain Novikov.
One of the pack of journalists that had been sniffing outside the gates of the port, Oleg Kashin, had managed to slip inside and got talking to Andrev Yuryevich, the second assistant to Captain Novikov. Yuryevich was dismissive of the US Navy’s efficiency. ‘The Americans were late, they were,’ he said. But when he realised that Kashin was a journalist, he changed his tune. ‘No help can be unnecessary,’ he oiled. ‘It is indeed a military fraternity…’
Meanwhile, the dark shape of a new ship, bristling with antennae, had appeared in the harbour. Fraternity or not, the presence of the Americans was evidently still suspicious enough to warrant a dedicated surveillance vessel.
With two C17s and the enormous C5 on the ground, Van Horn was becoming increasingly suspicious that the Russians were trying to obstruct them. Forty minutes ago – at 04.30 local time – an order had been received from a Russian Admiral to stop offloading the ADS suits. Van Horn wasn’t too worried about the bulky atmospheric diving suits: the helicopters needed to transport them to the ships on station had not materialised, making them useless. In any case, it now seemed that none of the vessels had enough clear deckspace to take a helicopter delivery.
But it did bother him that his Super-Scorpios had been halted at the same time. The trucks had rolled up to the airport gates only to be told that they should go back to their aircraft and wait. The British team were already on their way to the accident site, the official had said, and American assistance would not be required.
Other than continuing to talk and calling their superiors to complain about the obstructions, there was nothing Van Horn or his team could do. Half an hour later, they’d been given permission to continue, only to run into more delays in getting the vehicles to the dockside. In their rescue projections they’d estimated a Time To First Rescue of 07.10, but after an hour’s discussion with Captain Novikov it was close to 06.30 and they hadn’t even started loading the ship yet, let alone found themselves steaming towards the incident site.
Now that he was at the dockside, it was obvious that loading was not going to be straightforward. With the vessel moored with her stern to the jetty and no crane available on the bank, they would be relying on the floating crane that had been provided. While up against the shore the crane’s arm could reach their equipment but was unable to reach the deck where it was to be installed. To get their gear in the right place, they would first have to lift it on to the platform carrying the crane, move the barge that the crane was mounted on further towards the ship’s stern, then lift the gear on board. It would at least double the time it should have taken them to load.
When the sequence of lifts and set-downs had finally been established, the crane started moving – just. Like the crane serving the UK’s ship, the floating crane serving the US ship had two speeds, but in this case they were slow and excruciatingly slow. It would eventually take the team between three and four hours to load their equipment on to the crane’s apron, another hour to move the crane into its new position, and another three to four hours to load it on to the ship. And while some of the port crew seemed to be anxious to move things faster, the majority seemed completely unconcerned by the slow pace of their progress.
Other elements of the large-scale American effort were also falling away. Another C17 containing a Deep Drone ROV system was supposed to land at Elizovo at 06.55 local time, but was stuck on weather-hold at Anchorage, Alaska, instead. With the ILS at Elizovo airport down, they had to wait for the weather to clear enough to ensure a safe landing. The bad weather and low cloud that had threatened to repulse the British rescue effort had finally arrived, closing the airfield to landings. The RAF C17 had squeezed in just in time.