A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy
Robert Moore
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0609610007
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A At 11:28 a.m. on Saturday, August 12, 2000, high in the Arctic Circle under the roiling surface of the unforgiving Barents Sea, Captain Gennady Lyachin was taking the Kursk, the pride of Russia’s elite Northern Fleet, through the last steps of firing a practice torpedo, part of an elaborate naval exercise. Suddenly, the torpedo exploded in a massive ?reball, instantly incinerating all seven men in the submarine’s forward compartment. The horror, however, was just beginning. The full, gripping story of the remarkable drama inside the Kursk and of the desperate rescue efforts has never been told—until now.
In A Time to Die, a critically acclaimed best-seller in the United Kingdom, international reporter Robert Moore—who covered the Kursk tragedy from Russia as it happened—draws on exclusive access he obtained to top Russian military figures in telling the inside story of the disaster with the factual depth of the best journalism and the compelling moment-by-moment tension of a thriller. He takes us right down inside the Kursk as two massive explosions—the second measuring 3.5 on the Richter scale—rip through compartment after compartment. Bringing the horror of the explosions vividly to life, he details the agonizing drama of the twenty-three men who survived as they fight against time to be rescued.
In a journalistic coup, Moore obtained secret access to the Kursk’s highly restricted Arctic submarine base, and he makes the desolation of that forbidden world palpable on the page. As word of the tragedy breaks, he portrays the fear and growing rage of the families of the crew as they clamor for news of their loved ones and confront Vladimir Putin, Russia’s newly elected president.
Moore also vividly re-creates the nail-biting tension of the heroic but deeply flawed Russian rescue efforts as men are sent down again and again, aboard antiquated mini-subs, in perilous attempts to get to the survivors. As Western rescuers are at last called in, Moore richly describes the fascinating world of the offshore divers who drop everything to make one last, desperate attempt to reach the trapped submariners.
A Time to Die is a riveting, brilliantly researched account of the deadliest submarine disaster in history and its devastating human cost.
Barents Sea. 4. Russia (Federation). Voenno-Morskoaei Flot—Submarine forces. I. Title. VK1282.R8 M66 2003 910’ .9163’24—dc21 2002015802 First U.S. Paperback Edition www.randomhouse.com eISBN: 978-0-307-41969-9 v3.0
preoccupied all Russian sub commanders. Were the test torpedoes being reused too often? Had a warhead been destabilized during poor handling? Were the safety rules about weapons storage being strictly enforced? Once the Peter the Great penetrated the Kursk’s designated area, and Lyachin was satisfied with his line of attack, he would order the launch of two special practice torpedoes in quick succession. The warheads had been removed from the weapons, and in their place devices had been
submarines. But Korablev and Lyachin had exchanged a warm smile and friendly greetings that day. They had laughed as they saw that each of them was carrying instructions from Motsak in a sealed envelope that they would open only once the exercise was under way. As the Karelia was secured to the pier with ropes, Korablev was still several hours away from being able to leave his post, but he asked a fellow officer to pass a message to his wife. He knew it would not be long before word spread among
expected to replace him. Sergeyev now believes that key information about the Kursk accident was deliberately kept from him in the critical first few hours. If Navy officials could make Sergeyev appear inadequately briefed, make him seem incompetent and foolish in front of the president, that might be sufficient to undermine his hold on the Defense Ministry. The overall picture that Sunday morning was certainly a sorry one. The president was on holiday, the defense minister suspected he was
assistance of the ship to recover the remains of the astronauts, but the mission was canceled when the U.S. military said the situation was too sensitive for civilian divers. Nankivell guessed that the same would happen now. As they steamed north, Mann and his team despaired of getting reliable information from the Russians. Instead, they pieced together data from the Internet and combined them with their own educated guesses. On one website, they found a diagram of the layout of an Oscar II