First Into Action (18 page)
The submarine continued to plummet in the less dense fresh water. Huk was halfway along the casing towards the lurking area when his small RABA set ran out of air due to the sudden increase of depth and pressure. It was at that point that he realised the excursion was a serious one and so instead of continuing on to the lurking area and the large reserve air-bottles, he held his breath, turned around and headed back to warn the others. Huk was every bit the team player and would not have hesitated to risk his life to help an oppo in trouble.
He pulled himself back along the jackstay, now against the heavy water flow, towards the chamber. When he got there Chris and Jim were still in the process of exiting. The casing diver, breathing off his twin-tank mixed-gas long-endurance breathing set and in no immediate danger of running out of air, was receiving loud, explicit orders from the surface via his DUCS, a safety radio connected by a long cable to the surface craft. The diving supervisor, struggling in the water with his own sinking rubber safety boat, was ordering him to get the team up pronto. The casing diver signalled to Chris and Jim to ascend, but in the near darkness the signals were confusing. When Huk arrived he also tried to communicate with hand signals, warning Jim and Chris that they should not change to RABA and to stay on the sub’s BUs in the chamber. Their diving suits, compressed by the depth, were tight on their bodies by now, but Chris and Jim obviously had no idea just how serious the excursion was at that point, nor could they understand the gestures in the black water. Huk could not hold his breath any longer, and since Chris was halfway out of the chamber, blocking it, he could neither climb back inside nor get back to the reserve air-bottles and connect on to them in time, so he kicked off in a bid to reach the surface. Huk had left his ascent dangerously late. His last sight of the sub was the red glow from the chamber below him where Jim and Chris still continued to exit.
Huk had no idea the sub had dropped beyond the eighty-five-foot excursion of the previous day, but he soon realised he was well below his point of neutral buoyancy and was not going up fast enough. He started to ditch equipment. It was decided later that the divers were wearing far too much. After this incident a special life-jacket was designed for SBS divers that, when pulled, inflated a massive air-bag capable of pulling up a man in full operational equipment from a hundred feet. Unfortunately, for now, the only way Huk was going to reach the surface was to fin like mad. He was still operating on the lungful of air he had when he went back to help the others, and he was going into serious oxygen debt. He was exhaling slowly as he ascended to prevent his lungs from exploding as the air expanded in them, but he could feel the world slowly crushing in on his head.
Back on the sub Jim and Chris had transferred to their RABA sets, not knowing they were practically empty now due to the depth. The casing diver was still trying to get them to ascend, but his communications cord suddenly went taut as it reached its limit and he was yanked off the casing from above like a puppet. He was pulled to the surface as he watched Chris and Jim on the black cigar shape of the sub merge into the blackness of the water.
When the sub reached 110 feet the commander ordered an emergency ascent and the ballasts were blown. Everyone hoped that the divers had either managed to get into the lurking area, up into the fin, or back inside the chamber. There was no way of knowing for sure. They listened for any sound on the casing that might indicate where the divers were, but there was only silence. The helpless SBS operatives on the surface waited anxiously.
When the ballasts were blown at 110 feet, Chris and Jim were free of the chamber and on the casing breathing off their RABA sets when they were swept off by the sudden acceleration as the submarine made its way to the surface. They were negatively buoyant and their RABA sets were soon out of air.
They opened up their suit-inflations fully, but at that depth there was little more than a cupful of air. Without ballast they would have needed engine-powered propellers on their feet to move up.
Huk had had a head start but he was still negatively buoyant, and when he emptied his suit-inflation bottle into his dry-bag he could tell by the unchanged tightness of his suit that he was deep. He finned for his life as his lungs and face felt like they were going to explode. He could not tell how close he was to the surface, or if in fact he was going up at all. When you can’t tell where the surface is, in poor visibility or at night, the thing to do is watch for air bubbles. If they stay level with you or go below you, you’re going up. If they overtake you, you’re not going anywhere, or you’re going down. But Huk couldn’t see any bubbles in these conditions, his eyes were too bulged to see anything. When he broke the surface it was a surprise to him. He choked and gulped in air. He had been so close to unconsciousness that everything was out of focus. As the oxygen surged back into his brain and his mind began to recover, he turned in the water looking for the others. The safety boat sped towards him. The submarine suddenly crashed to the surface not far away, and as the water cascaded off its deck submariners were already leaping from the hatches to search every nook and cranny in the hope of finding the divers.
The following day, Chris and Jim were found in 221 feet of water at the bottom of the loch directly under the point where the sub had began its emergency surface. Jim had managed to ditch some of his gear, but in his frantic effort to swim he had lost a fin.
I watched Huk that evening as we travelled back in the tender. He sat in the galley nursing a cup of tea, staring out of the window as the drizzle ran down the glass. I wondered if, along with everything else, he was thinking of the last time he had been caught outside a submarine as it suddenly dived without warning.
That time was in Gibraltar. The sub hadn’t run into a fresh-water patch – not in the Mediterranean – it had had to do an emergency crash dive to avoid a collision with another boat.
Huk was the only diver out on the casing that day. The sub was practising E&RE drills for training a batch of new submarine captains when suddenly its sonar picked up a frigate bearing down on them at high speed. The periscope confirmed it. There were warning buoys dotted all around that part of the ocean indicating the training area boundaries. The frigate was Iranian and the crew either had no clue of international navigation signals or chose to ignore them. The submarine commander had no choice but to order an emergency dive. Huk, on the outside, had no warning and when the sub nosed down he could not hold on and was ripped away. The props missed him by feet and he spun in their vortex. He was left floating in watery space as the sub disappeared below. It was during daylight hours and visibility was good. He finned for all he was worth, and although he had run out of air, in the clear, blue waters he could see he was nearing the surface. When he burst through and gulped in the air his problems were not over. He was facing the bows of the frigate as it cut through the water towards him. He swam out of its way and it passed him by yards. A couple of Iranian crew, leaning on the rails, watched him, no doubt wondering what on earth someone was doing all alone floating in the sea twenty miles from the nearest piece of land. They didn’t bother to help him.
Huk was legendary in the squadron for his near misses. His success in avoiding so many close calls was greatly due to his powerful limbs. He held the record for the fastest run up the Rock of Gibraltar, which stood for fifteen years and was only then lost to a professional racing-snake.
In Oman, with the SAS during the war there in the early seventies, Huk had been carrying out a beach reconnaissance. This consists of taking soundings of the sea-bed by dropping a plunger to measure the depth at intervals while swimming out from the beach on a line. A shark fin passed between him and the beach and then began to circle. Huk threatened the record for the hundred metres front crawl as he swam towards shore.
His last near miss was whilst climbing the famous rail bridge over the River Forth using magnets, a technique on trial for climbing oil platforms. It required three heavy magnets attached to the climber by lines and he moved them up one at a time to climb like Spiderman, always held by no fewer than two magnets at any one time. The method had its drawbacks. On this particular day, Huk was a hundred feet above the river when, after disconnecting one of the magnets whilst hanging off the other two, he stretched up and stuck it on to the metal flank of the bridge support. He could not know he had clamped on to a large flat blister – a tenuous hold on a thin patch of rust under the skin of clean paint. As he disconnected the second magnet to move it up, the high one, unable to support his weight, simply peeled off the rust. With only one magnet left to support him, which was not sufficient, he peeled off and plummeted. As if that was not bad enough, it turned out to be only the first in a sequence of problems. Sticking out of the water directly below him was a series of metal stakes six feet apart. Huk miraculously fell between two of them. Fortunately the water was deep where he hit and he was uninjured, but his next problem was how to get back to the surface while dragging three very heavy magnets with him. He felt a stack of rocks and started to climb them. The rocks made up the foundation of one of the massive pillar supports and went all the way to the surface.
I never talked to Huk, not in those early days, not even after the accident in Loch Long. I was not in his section and as a new boy I only socialised with those I knew from my selection course or my own team. Shortly after the submarine accident in Scotland Huk disappeared from the SBS.
About a year passed before I realised he was gone – operatives were always quietly disappearing for long periods. I asked if anyone knew where he was.
‘He’s away,’ a senior operative said and gave me a look that implied I was to inquire no further.
A couple of years later I quietly went ‘away’ myself and, after a long journey, on arriving at my final destination, to my surprise I was met by Huk, and for a few brief weeks, while he handed over his job to me, we were friends.
7
One rainy afternoon, exactly two years after joining the SBS, I was in the squadron lines in Poole servicing my personal field equipment after a particularly horrendous two-week exercise in Scotland. The exercise was called Haggis Leap and consisted of parachuting into a loch on the west coast at night with canoes then paddling them twenty miles to a landing point. We then bagged them up and prepared to carry them, plus our field equipment (a total of 145 pounds dry), seven miles to an inland loch. But after a couple of the backpack straps, mine included, snapped under the weight where they attached to the packs behind the shoulders, the seven-mile yomp turned into a twenty-one mile relay. The portage was done in two shifts that completely ate into the following day’s sleep period.
Special forces generally sleep during the day and move only in darkness, but on this exercise we were on a very tight schedule, made worse by the equipment failure. On reaching the inland loch, without any rest, we had barely enough time to paddle the fifteen miles in darkness to the lay-up point before moving on to our target. By the time we reached the target we had been going non-stop for forty-six hours, pausing only to grab a quick bite and a wet. I had never been that exhausted even on my selection course and, come dawn, after beaching the canoes and camouflaging them, I fell asleep as soon as I hit the ground, remaining as still as the boulders I was hidden between until the following dusk. I will never forget that night’s paddle, because during the last few hours we all began to hallucinate.
There were six of us in three canoes and as we moved down the centre of the loch which was several hundred yards wide, one man in the front of his canoe suddenly disconnected his paddles, stowed them in the pockets in the sides of the canoe, got out his weapon, unzipped his splash-deck and began to get out of his seat. He almost capsized the canoe as he tried to put a foot in the water.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ his partner behind exclaimed in panic, as he used his paddle to stabilise the boat.
‘Can’t you see the rocks?’ the front man replied. ‘I’m going to pull us round them or we’ll lose the bottom of the boat.’
His partner had to assure him, using their map, that it was at least half-a-mile deep where we were.
We were so exhausted we paddled like sluggish robots. We stopped at one point when one of the lads thought he could see a suspension bridge across the loch just up ahead. Once he suggested it we could all see it. We consulted our maps, but the loch was in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest road, never mind a major bridge. We canoed towards it but it kept its distance. We were staring at the loch where it met the horizon and the thin black line that separated it from the sky had become a bridge in our imaginations. My worst hallucinations were giant effigies of Tom and Jerry above the tall trees that lined one side of the loch, as if a Disneyland had been built there that was now empty and ghostly silent with all the lights turned off. I kept that observation to myself. The next eleven days were pretty much the same but with at least a few hours’ sleep during the light hours and no more hallucinations. An Australian SAS man, a Maori and Vietnam vet attached to the SBS at the time told me I would never hallucinate like that again in my life – it was a one-off phenomenon. I never have, but then I don’t think I have ever been that exhausted since. We covered 150 miles on foot whilst attacking or observing a variety of targets. Halfway we received a food and explosives resupply drop from a C130 transport aircraft. The weather varied between rain, driving snow and sunshine. Because of the weight factor we carried the minimum of everything. For instance, we calculated our minimum daily food intake for those conditions at 4,500 calories (conventional ration-packs have about 3,000 calories per day and Arctic packs 6,000) and carried no more than the exact amount. When I finally got back to Poole and took my first shower in two weeks in the squadron lines, I winced at my full-length naked figure in the mirror. My shoulders and neck muscles had developed in such a way that they seemed to join my ears, and my thighs and calves were bigger than I remember ever seeing them, but my waist had shrunk and my stomach had become inverted. I looked like an ant.