Once we were in position, the BUs tested and final equipment checks carried out, the sub flooded its ballasts and dived. The sea gushed in through holes in the casing all around us and then spilled in over the top through our roofless metal trench. One moment we were in a thundering gale on the surface, the next we were under the chilly, clear, silent waters of the North Sea. Tiny salt-water lights beside each operative and the swirling, fluorescent micro-creatures made it lighter than on the surface. Everyone kept an eye on those closest to them in case they had breathing problems. I cleared my ears as the sub gently dropped to around sixty feet and increased forward speed. Any deeper and, because of the time we would spend below the surface, we would have to do stops before surfacing or we might suffer from the bends.
The sub cut smoothly through the water like a whale, but our trench, a huge gouge in the sub’s smooth side, upset the hydrodynamics. The faster it got, the more violent the turbulence became as the water dipped into our recess. Where I was sitting, at the back looking forward, I was hit by the full force in the face and my BU hose oscillated wildly. I kept a tight hold of it. Losing it meant serious trouble. At this speed, anyone who needed to leave the trench to escape to the surface would be swept along the casing and through the props.
The first time this form of multiple-man release was tried, no one had any idea what speed a diver could bear inside the trench. My wig-wearing date in Northern Ireland, Bonzo, had been in a trench during trials in a Scottish loch a year earlier when the sub hit a fresh-water patch and plummeted. It lurched violently as it increased speed. Bonzo said it was like being in a washing machine during the spin cycle. After the sub surfaced and the submariners hurried out to check on him, Bonzo had been pushed far towards the tail and was jammed amongst the pipes and bracings. It took a while to extricate him. If he had lost his BU he would have been a goner.
A foil, like the spoiler on the back of a sports car, was fitted to the front of the trench on the casing to force the main power of the water up and over us. It helped. We trundled along for well over an hour before we sensed a slowing down. I was cold and shivering hard by then. Another twenty minutes of that and I might have found myself suffering from hypothermia. I was cold by my own choice. Others had worn more clothing under their dry-bags. Physically, there were two phases to this rehearsal. Half would be spent inactive, sitting around motionless in the cold water, the other half would be extremely active, climbing an oil platform, which was exhausting enough in calm weather with no equipment. I had not climbed a platform carrying this much weight before. If I had worn too many clothes I might have seriously overheated on the climb. Therefore I chose to freeze now so I wouldn’t get heat exhaustion on the climb.
By the time the sub came to a stop, I was very anxious to get going and move my limbs to warm up. But I had to wait my turn. Because I was the man with heavy equipment, I was to bring up the rear. However, what happened next caused me enough excitement to forget any other concerns.
When the sub stopped completely, and was dead in the water, a series of bangs on the casing from inside was our signal to change from BU to our personal breathing apparatus. This in itself was tricky. It was not like an ordinary air-set. If any water got into the mouthpiece and soaked the carbon dioxide absorbing powder it would create an alkaline cocktail rendering it unusable and the diver would have to emergency surface. Every diver transferred from the sub’s air to their pure oxygen sets without a problem. We took a few minutes to ensure all our equipment was secured to our bodies and ready for use. We were buddied up in pairs as an added safety precaution against the upcoming swim through the storm.
After an all round thumbs-up, the overall team leader signalled the sub with the hammer and, with his partner, led the ascent of team one. The four teams departed at three-minute intervals so as not to cause congestion at the foot of the oil rig. When my team came to leave, the first pair gave a thumbs-up and ascended. My partner, Steve, followed them and, clutching my equipment, I kicked off out of the now empty trench and headed for the blackness above. As soon as I left the sub I ran into a serious problem.
My special equipment, a very bulky cylinder which was a new trial item to the squadron, was wrapped in styrofoam flotation rings tested to make it just positively buoyant at thirty feet. But it had never been used in this situation before, and the hour-long submersion in the buffeting trench along with the occasional excursion to deeper waters, and therefore greater pressure, if only for a minute or two, had gradually squeezed and collapsed many of the tiny air-sacs around the surface of the rings – something I had not allowed for. To add to the problem, the sub was not at thirty feet, where it was supposed to have been when it released us, but more like sixty, making my equipment even more negatively buoyant and therefore heavier. As I pushed off from the sub I let go of the equipment, expecting it to float up beside me. Instead I felt it yank hard at my waist, where it was attached by a line. I was shocked how heavy it was. It was like swimming with an anvil tied to me. I increased my finning to full power but I had the horrible feeling I was not going up. This was confirmed when I saw the vast shadow of the black sub yards to my side seemingly moving slowly above me, for it had not changed its depth. I suddenly felt a sharp tug on my arm from above. It was Steve on the other end of my buddy line. I was pulling him down too. I finned with the desperation of someone suddenly recognising the distinct possibility of biting the big one if he did not. I was breathing rapidly as I worked furiously in an effort to gain some vertical headway. My breathing apparatus had a regulator set to dispense enough oxygen for a normal, relaxed swim, and I soon began to suck on an empty bag having used it all up. I yanked the tap of the bypass valve to put a blast more oxygen into the system. Steve was pulling hard from above but I still had no sense of ascending. The sub had disappeared from view by now and as the sky was black there was no indication of any progress north. I noticed bubbles were passing me on their way up. I was going down and pulling my buddy along with me. My only option was to ditch everything. Not to lose equipment was ingrained in us and, stupid as it sounds, it was a difficult decision to make even then. But I was at the point of desperation and so I gripped the taut equipment line attached to my belt to release it. But I could only use one hand to unclip it because my other was being pulled above me, attached to Steve who was a powerhouse of a swimmer and finning hard himself. The device was too heavy to pull up and unclip. I scrambled with my free hand to find the diving knife strapped to my calf. As I ripped it from its housing it was a complete shock to me when I broke the surface and found myself in the swirling storm. The moment Steve had kicked in, we had in fact been moving gradually upwards, not as fast as the bubbles, but up nevertheless. I pulled out my mouthpiece and shut it off so as not to let the water in. I took in great gulps of air. Steve was doing the same. He looked at me with a red-faced, knackered expression.
‘Fuck’s sake, Duncan. You fall asleep or what?’
Steve was not angry or vexed in the least. He rarely got mad at anything and was a steady, strong operative in any environment, especially in the Arctic, where he was most at home above the tree-line. The truth was, Steve didn’t know how desperate the situation had been. He thought I was just taking my time and he wanted to get to the surface. Had he not pulled me up, I would have sunk far below my point of neutral buoyancy, which meant that even after cutting away the equipment I would have continued to the bottom of the North Sea.
When I told Steve in detail later what had happened he thought I was exaggerating. Many years afterwards, at his SBS leaving bash on his way to civvy street, I described to him again exactly what had happened that night. His reaction was the same as when I first told him. He gave me a nod and a soft smile, suggesting that I was still exaggerating, then changed the subject.
The distance between the troughs and peaks of the waves ranged between thirty to forty feet. My equipment floated beside me, where it was now only just positively buoyant. Steve was a few yards away on the other end of my buddy line and I scanned around for the rest of my team. They were several waves away, bobbing in the blackness, one moment above us, the next below or obscured from view altogether. We finned towards each other. I pulled my face-mask up on to my head, keeping it handy in case the spray got heavier, and we settled in for the ride. We would not need to fin to the rig. A raging current would take us there.
The navigation lights on the rig were visible over a mile away. It looked like a Christmas tree. There was no sign of the other three teams but I didn’t expect there to be. If all went well we would soon meet up. We were riding a tidal-stream that swept through these waters at six to seven knots. It would deliver us straight to the rig in ten minutes, provided the sub had dropped us off at the correct spot and the senior NCO (whose job it was to calculate the speed and direction of the tide) had got his end right. If we were not on a precise collision course with the platform we would sail right by it, next stop Iceland.
We needed to pass directly between the legs, underneath the mass of the platform. If not we would be unable to ‘grab’ it. We could not estimate whether or not we were going to miss the platform until we were close. By then we would have little chance of making up more than a few yards of error.
The first team would be at the rig nine minutes ahead of us, with the other two teams equally spaced behind them, which was why we could not see them. We each carried emergency lights and SABE Tac-B emergency radio beacons in the event we did miss the rig, but in these conditions it would be a hit-and-miss business finding us. The incentive to catch hold of the rig was a big one.
This was the enjoyable part, drifting effortlessly through the night as if in space. In the SBS I often had experiences that have made this planet appear un-earthlike. Free falling between layers of clouds where mountaintops poke through like islands in a sea of cottonwool. Or on a plateau far above the tree-line in Norway in the dead of winter, skiing in the eye of a white-out when the wind has ceased and feeling as if the entire world has disappeared and there is nothing but me left in the emptiness. This was one of those moments. The sea and sky were so black it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began, and we were black specks with white bloated faces in tight, black hoods floating in a vast emptiness towards what looked like a space station. There were no other lights in sight, no land, and the only sound was the wind snipping the peaks off the swells and hurling them into the next ones.
Before long we could make out objects on the rig such as the windows of living quarters and the many catwalks and stairways illuminated by the safety lights that hung above them, flickering as the gusting wind shook them to their bolted mounts. The size of these North Sea structures never ceased to impress me. The angle that I approached them from made them look even more imposing. The structure was assaulted by wind and rain and the huge, rolling swells that thumped against the massive supporting legs – large enough to drive a freight train through their centre and down into the earth. It looked devoid of life, but there were some three hundred people on board. All knew we were coming some time tonight and only essential crew were outside. Anyone else would be terrorists and we would have to deal with them. The rig had everything you might expect to find in a small city – postman, blacksmith, bartender and surgeon, all there to support a corps of engineers and construction workers. I always felt it would take a particularly insane terrorist to actually try to capture a North Sea oil platform and then hold on to it. Many of the so-called roughnecks who work on them have military backgrounds. It would not be like taking over a cruise ship with its mostly elderly clientele and soft crew. If a terrorist turned his back for a second on one of these roughnecks, it is likely his next experience would be a wrench crashing through his skull.
Nevertheless, the taking of an oil platform by terrorists was a possibility and we would be ready to take it back if that day ever came. Besides, there was a flip-side to all this dynamic work we were doing. The British government has always made an income from selling its military’s knowledge and skills, as well as using them to cement political relationships with other countries. The SBS and SAS were constantly abroad on training missions. Nearly every terrorist incident in recent years has had an SAS or SBS operative behind the scenes advising, or in some cases, disguised in that country’s military uniform and leading the assault, such as in Mogadishu for the German special forces unit GSG9 several years ago. It was all part of our arms trade. Security is big business and if countries or major corporations want the best, Britain is the first place they shop. If a friendly foreign government wanted to know how to secure an oil platform, there was only one place in the world they could buy the knowledge, tried and tested and, like any good product, constantly being updated.
With four or five hundred yards to go we decided, thankfully, wewereontrack. Thenavigatorhaddonehis job perfectly. It was time to snap out of the pleasantries of the free ride and prepare for the most difficult, most strenuous and most dangerous phase.
Our speed was deceiving as we closed on the platform and we had to make ready quickly. I could not yet see any of the other teams, but I had no doubt they were there.
Each team had its own hook-on-man, whose job it was to snag one of the legs and provide a leash for the others to attach to. A fairly important job, for if he failed we were back to the missed rig scenario and sailing off into the blackness. The hook man had only a few seconds to secure the leash. The rest of the team then hooked on to it, strung out in a line like beads on a thread. Once secured each team member prepared for the climb.