Nuttall appeared at the door of the control cab with a question on his face, but a look from Gold sent him back inside.
Five long minutes later, Podkapayev’s radio crackled and he nodded to Riches.
Riches passed the nod to Gold, and added, ‘Good luck.’
Gold motioned to Sillet with a circling motion of his finger, indicating to start lifting Scorpio. Gently the crane took the load, and everybody’s ears braced for the telltale shriek of tearing metal. Nothing. The welds were holding. Gold’s hand rested on one of the vehicle’s yellow floats to stop it from swinging as David Burke and Alan Hislop cleared the deck of the wooden blocks Scorpio had been sat on. Gold gave Scorpio a little pat. Ten years together and now this was their chance to prove themselves.
Sillet began to dip the boom over the water, and a dull bong sounded through the deck as a piece of metal flexed. Riches’ heart was in his throat, but Cave’s voice came up from the deck beneath saying everything was holding.
With Scorpio clear of the deck, Gold gave the thumbs-down.
‘Okay, Charlie, down on the wire,’ Gold said, and Sillet started spooling out. At 11.30, 28 hours after they’d set out from Glasgow’s Prestwick airport, Scorpio’s frame hit the water, and soon seawater was washing over its bright yellow floats.
‘In water, Pete, power on,’ he said. When the current started flowing, each of the lights flashed on and one by one the thrusters whirred into life before spinning to a halt once more. When everything checked out, he lifted the switch mechanism he held in his other hand. ‘Releasing the block,’ he said, and pushed a button. A signal travelled down the crane’s thick armoured flex and on to the coupling that held Scorpio, and with a heavy clunk the vehicle dropped free into the water.
‘Bit of starboard lateral,’ Gold said, as the vehicle swung slightly to port. The yellow umbilical was snaking loosely up on to the deck and into Pine’s hands, and was now the ROV’s only connection to the ship. Connection was not the issue at this stage, however. Scorpio was dangerously close to the ship’s hull. Gold needed to guide it out of danger as soon as possible, and kept feeding instructions to Nuttall until the yellow floats were 50 metres away.
‘Okay, Pete, clear to dive. Go and get it,’ Gold said into his boom mike. Most of their time with Scorpio together had been on simulated mine-recovery exercises for the Navy, and the terminology had stuck.
With a chopping snarl, the sea between Scorpio’s two floats erupted into a distant fountain of white water and the yellow flash of Scorpio faded into the gloom.
‘Diving,’ came back Nuttall’s voice from the control cabin. ‘Fifteen feet now. Sixteen. Seventeen.’ Like the C17 they’d flown in on, Scorpio was of American manufacture, so everything was in imperial units.
‘Okay, out of sight of surface,’ said Gold and he began walking over to the control cab. With Scorpio launched, he would now leave deck operations to Pine and Forrester.
Inside, Nuttall was sitting at the control desk. Mounted in front of him were the four screens and a series of other coloured displays showing sonar readouts and battery levels. On the flat area were his flight controls, all centred around the joystick. Gold came in and stood behind Nuttall, while Podkapayev and Riches stood alongside, flanked by one of the interpreters. Even with only five inside it was already crowded. It was almost midday, and there was not a hint of breeze to dissipate the sun’s heat.
The four cameras showed a blizzard of sediment caught in the lights streaming upwards, against a backdrop of darkening blackness. There was silence in the cab but for Nuttall’s voice reading off the depths. As he went past 100 feet, the screens were showing fewer snowflakes and a pitch-black background. Riches could almost feel the pressures starting to crush in on Scorpio, and the fingers of cold probing around all the recently opened seals.
‘Shifting past 345 degrees, a bit of port lateral on auto,’ muttered Gold. He was keeping an eye on the electronic compass, keeping Scorpio pointed towards where the Russians said AS-28 was stranded.
Nuttall frowned. Scorpio’s nose was dipping. He leaned forward to a microphone on the panel. ‘A little more speed on the winch there, Will.’
‘Roger, more speed on the winch,’ came the confirmation from Forrester. Scorpio settled back to its correct trim, the umbilical no longer lifting the stern.
The team were using an open microphone system, meaning there was no need to press a button to transmit. That allowed all hands to stay on the job at all times, be it piloting the ROV or operating the crane or tending the umbilical. It also meant that they could all listen in on what was going on inside the cab. Every one of them knew that their presence in the cab could be a costly distraction to the two ROV pilots. By listening in they could at least keep track of how the rescue was going.
As Scorpio passed 500 feet, Gold reached forward and started tuning the Ametech sonar mounted in the centre of the control panel. When the volume was turned up, a metallic throbbing sound filled the cab. The sound – like an idling circular saw – was the signature noise of an active sonar. Together with the pulsing signal on the screen it made part of Riches settle back into his submariner’s skin. Like all of those in that room, Riches now felt as though he was on board the robot.
‘Six hundred feet,’ said Gold. ‘Bottom is only about one hundred below –’ Before he could finish his sentence, the pie-slice wedge that showed the sonic image of the water ahead of Scorpio suddenly filled with a hard-edged orange block, and the circular saw now sounded as though it were off-centre, scraping itself with every revolution. ‘Holy moley. What the hell is that?’
‘Antenna,’ said Podkapayev. Even in Russian his meaning was clear. Gold and Nuttall looked at one another. That was a bigger sonar reading than either of them had ever seen before in the open sea. This thing was huge. It looked like a harbour wall, thought Gold.
There was a reason why the hydrophone was so enormous. Long wavelengths travel furthest, either through land or sea, so to listen out for far-away events an early-warning system needs to be able to pick them up. To do that, a microphone needs to be at least as large as that wavelength – in this case over 100 metres long, and 17 metres high. This unit was part of a network of similar arrays stretching a thousand miles up the entire Russian east coast, listening for rumbles from across the entire Pacific Ocean basin. Their exact locations were a closely guarded secret, but in this region they were reputed to be located seaward from the Schipunskiy Cape, from Anglichankai, as well as from Berezovya Bay.
The fact that the array was installed just below 200 metres was no accident. It had been suspended in the upper reaches of what is known as the Deep Sound Channel, a natural conduit that funnels sound far greater distances than at other depths. In the same way that the mirrored inner surfaces of a fibre-optic cable can transmit pulses of light round corners and over thousands of miles by continually reflecting the light, different densities of water above and below the Deep Sound Channel make them reflective. The upper boundary – at around 200 metres – is relatively warm and salty while the lower boundary – deeper than around 1,000 metres – is very dense and cold. Sounds produced in between them will tend to travel great distances, bending around the curvature of the Earth.
Russia was not the only nation to install listening posts in the Deep Sound Channel. The first SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) network installed by the USA and UK became operational in the early 1960s, tracking Russian nuclear submarines as they passed through narrow channels between Greenland, Iceland and the UK. Other than passing through the dangerously shallow North Sea and English Channel, this was the only route that Russian submarines of the Northern Fleet could take when leaving their bases on the Kola Peninsula in the Barents Sea for the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. By picking up their acoustic signatures there Russian submarines could be tracked, either remotely via arrays, or physically with UK or US submarines. After it had proved its worth, the system was then extended to cover other areas in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In August 2000, the NATO arrays had picked up a strange noise – a noise that turned out to be the death-throes of the Kursk.