A Mystery In The Deep

The floor of the Barents Sea at 69'40" north, 37'35" east, is a place of pure, disorienting darkness. Shine a light and mostly what you'd see is decomposing matter--dead plankton, particles from old skins shed by crustaceans, bits of waste from marine life above--what divers call "marine snow." The term is doubly apt because arctic water is very cold here, 35 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The place is mostly quiet. But at odd intervals last week, faint metallic pings could be picked up by electronic listening devices. They came from the great black husk of the Kursk, a crippled Russian submarine stranded on the bottom. Russian authorities say a sailor was banging out messages on the hull, probably with a hammer. His 19,000-ton nuclear-powered vessel had no power, no light. Oxygen was dwindling, replaced by deadly carbon dioxide. Many of the sailor's comrades were certainly dead as a result of a catastrophic accident; others were likely bloodied, bruised, shivering in the frigid dark of their sealed compartment, hoping not to die but powerless to do anything about it. At the surface, some 350 feet above, the seas roiled with huge swells and whitecaps. The wind howled, and salt spray filled the air. Russian sailors tried repeatedly to lower a diving bell, suspended by a giant cable, to their comrades in the Kursk. If all went well, the bell could ferry 12 men at a time to safety. But the effort was hapless and ultimately futile. The Kursk was listing at least 20 degrees, and the ship carrying the bell was bobbing and swaying. As long as the gale-force winds kept up, the exercise was a bit like trying to thread a needle from a great distance while jumping on a trampoline. Russian minisubs joined the effort but had no better luck. By Wednesday, when storms had calmed, the tapping from inside the Kursk had long ceased; only then did Russia finally request outside assistance from Britain and Norway, which arrived three days later.

The tragedy of the Kursk is a parable of modern Russia, a country still grappling with sudden collapse from superpower status, and also with the responsibilities of a more open society. After seven days, Chief of Staff of the Northern Fleet Mikhail Motsak declared, in the grim but careful parlance of dying hope, that "it is highly probable that we must fear the worst." But well before that, the silence from the Kursk was like a vacuum quickly filled by outrage. Many Russians, including some relatives of the crew, were infuriated by the seeming ineptitude and callousness of their political and military leaders. Why, they wondered, was Russian President Vladimir Putin vacationing in the Black Sea resort of Sochi--Russia's equivalent of Miami Beach--while young Russian sailors were slowly suffocating off the coast of Murmansk? And why did Moscow dither for nearly four days--more than enough time for oxygen to run out, according to its own early estimates--before accepting international offers of help?

Wounded pride was the most obvious answer. Although Russia is not the mighty country it once was, its military brass may have thought that all the more reason to prove it could still take care of its own. The fact that Russia proved otherwise--that the rescue effort was marred by lies, confusion and misjudgments--made the disaster all the more tragic.

It also raised deeper concerns about Russia's obsolete nuclear fleets. The sunken vessel was Russia's most modern submarine, an Oscar II-class vessel that entered service in 1995. The double-hulled Oscar II subs were designed to attack U.S. carriers, and to survive a torpedo hit in the process. But more than 100 of Russia's cold-war subs are rusting and abandoned. Old nuclear reactors aboard the vessels are poorly guarded, and decay threatens to release highly radioactive waste. Thieves sometimes scavenge the vessels for valuable metals. Most of the Russian submarines still in service are much older than the Kursk and suffer from desperately low budgets. They are manned by poorly trained sailors whose pay and morale are abysmal. The deadly final voyage of the Kursk, in short, may seem insignificant compared with catastrophes to come.

With hindsight it's easy to see bad omens. Capt. (First Grade) Gennady Lyachin, a decorated 45-year-old with a solid reputation, had commanded the Kursk with its current crew for a year before the disaster. When the captain and his men returned from their first operational patrol together last Oct. 19, a Russian television camera captured the homecoming. Footage shows an elderly admiral, dressed in a huge Navy overcoat and a high-topped officer's cap, greeting the sailors and offering a strange but telling compliment: "There wasn't one emergency alarm on the ship," he cheerfully declares. Captain Lyachin, who appears avuncular and genuinely attuned to the needs of his men, mentions how happy everyone is to be coming home. "Last night and yesterday, no one ate, no one slept," he says. "Everyone simply waited, counting hours and minutes."

The Kursk's final mission began as a part of the largest naval exercise the cash-strapped Northern Fleet had mounted in a decade. In addition to 113 crew members, five senior officers from fleet headquarters were aboard to monitor the maneuvers, which involved some 50 warships and submarines. The Kursk, twice the length of a Boeing 747, was outfitted with up to 24 Granit sea-skimming cruise missiles, as well as torpedoes. It wasn't carrying nuclear weapons. But a Russian newspaper claimed that it also wasn't carrying emergency batteries, because such equipment has become scarce in Russia's threadbare Navy.

As the Kursk cruised within about 60 feet of the surface at 11:28 that Saturday morning with its periscope up, nothing seemed amiss. Some men would have been resting, others at their stations, when something went suddenly, terribly wrong. According to one theory--put forward mainly by Russian officials--the sub rammed a cargo ship, an icebreaker or perhaps another submarine. The initial collision then set off an explosion within the Kursk, perhaps in the torpedo room.

The main trouble with that theory is that no ship has reported an accident, and none was reported in the area at the time. The nearest U.S. submarine, monitoring the Russian exercises, was 70 miles away, naval officials in Washington said. According to other possible scenarios, the Kursk ran into a World War II or cold-war-era mine, or--more likely--the sub ran into the seabed while trying to avoid a real or imagined obstacle, puncturing a highly pressured air tank between its inner and outer hull. (It was a short dive to the continental shelf--roughly 350 feet--for a sub that is 505 feet long.) Poor maintenance might also have led to a spontaneous explosion of gas, or crew members could have made a deadly error handling torpedoes.

What is absolutely clear is that at 11:28:27, the first of two explosions occurred in the area prowled by the Kursk--a short, sharp thud and then, two minutes and 15 seconds later, a convulsive boom. Sonar operators aboard three NATO subs monitoring the exercises from a discreet distance were almost deafened by the sound in their headphones. The Russians heard it, too. At the consoles of the nuclear-missile cruiser Peter the Great, the noise was registered as a "blow."

Shock waves from the second bang were picked up by seismic stations more than 2,000 miles away. Norwegian analysts at the NORSAR seismic-research institute reckoned that the second explosion was the equivalent of one to two tons of TNT. They also believe, based on the pattern of spikes and valleys in the signal, that the second boom was actually several, nearly simultaneous explosions.

It's likely, in the minds of many Russian and foreign experts, that multiple warheads exploded inside the submarine. At least two (and perhaps four) of the Kursk's 10 compartments were immediately flooded, and the sub was immobilized. Fortunately, its nuclear reactors automatically shut down.

Russian officials now believe that most of the sailors died in the initial explosions and their immediate aftermath. The crew didn't have enough time to send a distress signal, or even to press the button releasing an emergency beacon, suggesting that everyone in the control room was probably lost. The nose of the submarine is badly damaged: a torpedo tube on the starboard side is torn open, and a rail on the front has been bent off, according to Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, commander of the Russian Navy. The conning tower is battered, and there are objects from the submarine scattered on the seabed.

The initial response to the blasts on the part of the Northern Fleet commander, Adm. Vyacheslav Popov, is perplexing: for roughly 11 hours he maintained radio silence and did not attempt to contact the Kursk. The generous explanation is that Popov didn't get a distress signal, and couldn't be sure that the explosions were from one of his subs. Popov did put rescue vessels on alert, but he didn't dispatch them to the scene until the Kursk's scheduled check-in at 11 p.m. had passed in silence. It wasn't until Sunday that rescuers located the stricken sub, and not until Monday that the Navy announced a mishap had occurred. Officials then claimed that radio communication had been established with the Kursk, and that cables from the surface were providing electricity and oxygen. That was not true. When the Navy refused to release a crew list, Russian journalists bought the top-secret information from a naval officer for the equivalent of $650.

Washington, London and other foreign capitals quickly offered assistance, only to receive "polite acknowledgment" of their offers. (U.S. officials concede that there probably was little they could have done to rescue the sailors, largely because American technology is not compatible with Russian escape hatches.) Russia did, however, send six admirals to consult with NATO experts as early as Tuesday. It wasn't that Russian officers were sanguine. "The prognosis... for the Kursk and for the lives of the crew appears extremely grave," said Kuroyedov early in the week. As rescue efforts faltered, officials blamed the weather. Finally, four days after the accident, Putin interrupted his vacation to make his first public statement, saying that "all necessary and possible efforts to save the craft and its crew" had been carried out.

Russia's political and military leaders seemed stuck in a cold-war time warp. But as they tried to impose their own truth by fiat, the press was in full muckraking mode. Nobody was more frustrated by the contradictory announcements and speculation--both by the government and the media--than relatives of the crew. "I've been watching and watching, and now I can't watch anymore," said Natalya Rvanina, mother of 24-year-old Senior Lt. Maksim Rvanin. "They all say different things; you just don't know whom you're supposed to believe."

Between sobs, Rvanina told NEWSWEEK on the phone from her home in the port city of Arkhangelsk that she had received no counseling, no support and little information directly from the Navy. "The only things they tell us are the things we get off the TV," she said. Her husband had gone to Murmansk to join other relatives of crew members, but Rvanina said she couldn't bear to go. "You think to yourself : 'What is he doing now?' "

The men inside the Kursk have trained for such emergencies, as all submariners do. Every Russian sub base has mock-up submarine compartments where sailors practice what is known in military jargon as borba za zhivuchest, "the struggle for life capability" of the ship in question. Russian television last week showed harrowing footage from one such exercise: sailors in orange protective suits fight a fire in a tiny compartment as it is rocked by simulated explosions; others try to fight a leak by winching an emergency bulkhead into place against gushing water.

The crew of the Kursk would have hoped to abandon the submarine using a VSK escape pod, which can hold 110 crew members. But the capsule is located at the middle of the damaged conning tower, and the entrance to it may have been flooded. Realizing they had no means of escape, the sailors may have hunkered down with whatever they could find to keep warm, including sweaters, wool stockings and special protective gear. They'd be feeding on emergency rations, including cans of condensed milk or water, Spam-like meat and 50-gram chunks of chocolate. They might be using handheld flashlights.

On Wednesday, at about the time when Moscow announced that the tapping inside the Kursk could no longer be heard--and after a telephone conversation between Putin and President Clinton--Russia finally accepted help from Britain and Norway. It was about this time that early projections that the crew had 72 hours of oxygen were being revised. Admiral Kuroyedov announced without explanation that the sailors could hold out longer. By this time as well, the Russian press was blasting Putin and other officials with scathing headlines--WHOSE HONOR IS SINKING IN THE BARENTS SEA? ran the bold print in one paper over a photo of Putin boarding a Navy ship. Putin eventually explained that he hadn't gone to Murmansk to oversee the rescue because meddling civil servants often cause more harm than good in such situations.

Norway sent 15 deep-sea divers to the area, and Britain quickly dispatched an LR5 minisub, designed specifically for such operations. Although it had never been used in a real rescue, British officials said it could link to the Kursk's rescue hatch with a pressure-resistant shell, called a transfer skirt. It was still a long shot: Russian minisubs finally reached an escape hatch on the sub late last week, but were unable to latch on because it was mangled. "Sure, we might have done better [than the Russians]," said one U.S. naval official sympathetic to Russian rescuers, "but given the conditions out there, that would mostly have been luck."

The British rescue attempt got underway early Sunday, at least five days after the last tapping was heard from the Kursk. By then some pessimists were doubting that tapping had happened at all; they figured that Russian sonar had merely picked up the metallic pops of the Kursk settling. Those unable to give up on the seemingly doomed men hoped the sailors, knowing that rescuers were on the scene, might have stopped tapping to conserve energy and oxygen. They recalled the time back in 1983 when stranded sailors aboard a Russian sub, aided by an exceptionally levelheaded officer, lasted for three weeks. Those crewmen of the Kursk who survived the initial explosions, however, would have eventually suffered headaches, agitation, perhaps hypothermia and coma. They must have prayed for salvation from above, in whatever form it might come.