It was midnight Sunday when Vice-Admiral Mikhail Motsak spat three times over his left shoulder. “I am a sailor and cannot help respecting signs,” he explained somewhat shyly.

        Mammoet President Jan van Seumeren thought better of resorting to magic and only said dryly: “Let’s get started.” Two minutes later, with a 120-second delay as against the original time schedule, 26 lifting devices took the submarine’s prow off the bottom of the Barents Sea, where it had been since August 12, 2000.

        Its hour struck after 14 months of expectation, hopes and disappointments: the most hazardous and grim maritime project came to its finale. There were doubts remaining till the very last hour that it was possible at all to hoist to the surface wreckage weighing 10,000 tons with two nuclear reactors and twenty missiles inside, buried at a depth of 108 metres in what is one of the most troubled seas on this planet.

        Many saw the plan, the technologically-unprecedented operation conducted by the Russian Navy and a Dutch company that had its first go at underwater work, as the height of insanity. The unconventional joint project was impeded by bad weather and incessant technical problems. So much so that last week, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, responsible for the operation, visibly brimming over with irritation, told this to all those who claimed that Kursk would remain forever on the sea bottom: “President Putin ordered us to lift the submarine to the surface in 2001 and we will do that be it even on the New Year night.”

        This is because aside from reactors, missiles and military secrets, Kursk holds the bodies of 106 sailors, which Putin promised to return to their families at least dead after he had failed to return them alive. Twelve of the 118 crew who died (some instantly, others after hours of agonised waiting for help that never came) during the explosion which wrecked the vessel were brought to the surface for Christian burial in November of last year. The rest could be lifted only with their strategic vault.

        Whatever the cost, the Kremlin did not stint the expenses, putting into action an impressive machine that was due to perform the unprecedented operation worth $130 million. Organized by the Russian government jointly with the Dutch company Mammoet, the lifting lasted 88 days, 24 days longer than originally planned.

        First, the severely-damaged bow compartment was cut off, whereupon divers made 26 holes in the hull and inserted into them the “strands,” each a bundle of 1,054 specialised steel cables connected to the lifting gear aboard the Giant-4. But even people supposed to save the president’s honour in fact disbelieved that the operation would be a success.

        When at 3.55 hours Moscow time the lifting gear heaved to, taking the sub four metres above ground, there was a gleam in the eyes of people atop the bridge. “I couldn’t hold back the tears, all went well,” Igor Spassky, designer of Kursk, confessed. Rear-Admiral Gennady Verich, chief of the Russian Navy’s search and rescue directorate, was also agitated: “For me, it was a night that dissolved all doubts, a night of hope in memory of those who had given their lives for the Fleet and Motherland.”

        Vice-Admiral Motsak’s incantations were effective even at the moment of supreme strain, when it was feared that the first compartment, which had been cut off with an underwater saw, was not fully severed. But divers assured that the separation was complete and that they had covered the resultant aperture with a kapron net to prevent what was inside the ship from falling out. The “beheaded” Kursk continued to edge upward at about 10 metres an hour.

        Everything went so smoothly that around 11 hours in the morning, when a report came in predicting a deterioration of weather (hitherto unusually fair), the operation heads dared to launch the next stage without waiting for the sub to go up all the way so that it might be fixed under the bottom of Giant-4. Two tugs – the Atrek and the Smit – started towing the platform while Kursk, then at the depth of 40 metres, continued its slow ascent.

        19:47 saw the beginning of the last stage, with Kursk, already at a distance of 10 miles from the site of the tragedy, fastened to the specialised “saddle” within the platform, which fitted in well with its “inflated” deck. During the next 36 hours, Giant-4 plodded at four kilometres an hour in the direction of Roslyakovo docks 120 miles away.

        That represented yet another worrisome moment: the docks are located quite near Murmansk, which could be affected by radioactive leaks should there be any. Both Russian and Norwegian measurements show that there is no such danger for now, but the forthcoming dismantling of the reactors inspires fears, so much so that classes have been held at Murmansk schools, teaching children what to do in the event of nuclear accident.

        At Roslyakovo, the submarine will be opened, with forensic experts taking out the sailors’ remains that will be identified and turned over to the families. Investigators will make efforts to understand the causes of the tragedy. One year after, the prevailing version is that the vessel was rocked by an explosion of a defective torpedo, which caused detonation of other munitions, these destroying the bow compartment and sinking Kursk.

        But it is also possible that the truth will never out. The first compartment has been left at depth of 108 metres. It lies next to a marble tombstone the divers erected yesterday in memory of the sailors who died as a result of the explosion and would never return to their families, be it even in a coffin. - Anna Zafezova

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