From up front in the cockpit, one of the pilots chipped in: ‘We’ve got some lights out in front of us. Fishing boats perhaps. Nothing bigger than that.’

Chris was in his seat opposite the door where I squatted, his eyes fixed on the radar screen in front of him. ‘There’s Gary coming in now, they’re circling the boats below, they must have seen some survivors.’

No need for us to get in their way while they got on with the job, so we moved off starboard. I carried on looking down continuously for anything that might be a life raft or maybe some survivors gathered together with floatation devices. It was too dark to see individuals just yet, unless they had some sort of flares or reflective devices on them, but a group together might stand out.

An hour before midnight, the Greek passenger ferry Express Samina had capsized and sunk near the island of Paros, in the Aegean, going down in a little over half an hour. With the 500 people on board now in the water it was vital that any rescue was carried out as soon as possible because, we learned, the angle of the hull in the water had made it impossible to launch the lifeboats, while inflatable life rafts had blown away in the strong winds before those fortunate enough to grab one of the few life preservers could reach them. There was, though, one unexpected bit of good fortune in the unfolding tragedy. The Sea King helicopters of 814 Naval Air Squadron, on board HMS Invincible and RFA Fort George, were in the area and ready to answer the desperate call for help. We were airborne less than an hour after being shaken from our beds.

Every second counts when people are in the water, even in somewhere as seemingly benign as the Med. There’s the probability of hypothermia setting in, as someone in the water loses their body temperature much faster in water than they would do on land; if the water is at, say, 10°C, they might expect to die in about an hour if they had no protection like a wetsuit or anything of that sort. The people down below us had already been in for a lot longer than that, because we’d been radioed from the ship as we were flying north to give us full details on what to expect; the ferry had gone down in a matter of minutes, and most of the passengers had no more than a quarter of an hour to get off the sinking ferry.

A voice from one of the Invincible’s aircraft came over the radio. It was Lieutenant Gary Milton, the commander of the SAR duty aircraft, saying, ‘We’ve located some survivors on a rock, and Nick’s going down to start bringing them up.’ Nick Hipkin was one of the Aircrewmen from Invincible.

We listened in as Gary and his co-pilot radioed back what they could see below them – it was useful for us to know what sort of condition the survivors were in and what they might be able to tell all of us about any rescue craft there might be out there. ‘Look at them down there,’ we heard one of the pilots say. ‘How could they survive that long?’

Along with hypothermia, one of the major dangers for a shipwrecked person in the water is panic: there they are in the dark, pushed around by the waves, with no prospect of rescue, and it doesn’t matter who they are – panic is very likely to overtake anyone in a situation like that unless they’ve been trained to deal with it. It’s a deadly enemy – someone in that state stops thinking clearly, calmly assessing their situation, and they start to consider – and do – desperate things. And if you’re the one who goes in to rescue them, that’s when problems can arise.

The two crews from the Invincible – who we were constantly in touch with whenever they, or we, came across somebody in the water so as to help pinpoint where to search next – had come across a small group of people hanging on to a big rock in the water. It must have seemed a good idea to them to climb on there but all that happened was that, with the waves battering them and the rock, those at the bottom kept trying to climb over those above them, hoping to get away from the waves that were threatening to pull them down into the water, to be lost in the darkness, never to be seen again. The two helicopters sat in the dark sky above them – one in the hover position over the rock, the other hanging back to give the duty aircraft some room to work, but close enough to come in to help if needed – and counted a dozen or more people crowded on their bleak shelter. None of these people had survival equipment of any sort with them – they were lucky they’d dragged themselves on to this rock, and there they were, while the sea greedily sucked at them, trying to take them back, one by one.

Nick was winched down to the rock. The women-and-children-first thing was obviously on his mind but certainly not on the survivors’ minds, as grown men were climbing over each other, screaming and kicking and punching their way to that winch hook – which is only human nature. If they got near him, Nick fought back, because he was there to take the weakest first, the ones who had almost no chance of making it, and then come back down to take up the rest. So he punched men off him, trying to rescue the people that he obviously wanted to select, while the stronger ones fought each other as well as him, trying to get off first. It would have seemed weird to someone watching – punching someone you later save – but that’s how best to deal with panicking people. The crew packed as many survivors as they possibly could into the first aircraft: they just kept going, keeping an eye on the weight, fuel and power; luckily they weren’t too far away from the carrier so they could keep filling the cab up till the last minute, almost. Nick carried on, lifting people off, and didn’t stop until he’d finished. The two helicopters returned to Invincible and refuelled before setting off again.

Chris was on the radio to Gary Milton to see what they’d learned from the survivors – if anything.

‘They’re telling us there didn’t seem to be anything like enough lifejackets or life rafts for the people on board the ferry,’ he told Chris. ‘None of them had anything to help them. There was a British girl among the survivors’ – later we learned that there were two of them – ‘and she said that the ship had gone down so quickly that there hadn’t been time for anyone to find a lifejacket or launch a life raft’.

By now I found it easier to see below us, because it was starting to get light. I spotted something and signalled to Chris to look too; it was probably just debris of some kind – I couldn’t see anything that looked like a person, but we had to check. Chris nodded. ‘I see it too, Jay, that looks like something that needs checking out,’ and he spoke to the pilot: ‘Take us down.’ As we circled round and down, I clipped myself on to the winch. Once we were over whatever it was, I swung out over the side of the cab, the winch cable snapping taut as I hoisted myself out over the open air. My feet were still touching the side of the cab and I pushed away at the same time as Chris signalled to me, talking all the while to the guys up front to get them to keep a steady position, and lowered me down.

I didn’t feel tense as I got closer to the object in the water. I could see it was a lifejacket and not a body. It looked empty to me, though I wanted to be sure there was no one hanging below it in the water and signalled to Chris to keep lowering me down to just above the surface so that I could grab it. There was no way of knowing whether or not it had been used; the straps weren’t ripped but were just dangling loose, so I leant down and scooped it out of the water. I indicated to Chris to bring me up, and chucked the jacket into the back of the helicopter before disconnecting from the winch and turning back to stare out over the water below once more.

Two hours went by, two hours during which most of the survivors who were splashing around either had been rescued or had perished, while we were swooping down to pick up lifejackets, pieces of orange material, any debris we could see floating about – we felt we had to investigate every single one, if only to make sure that we didn’t leave something for someone else to come past and assume was a victim in the water. We were dropping down and island-hopping from outcrop to outcrop, picking up loads of different jackets and other stuff floating about in the waves and on the rocks.

‘There,’ one of the pilots called, his voice urgent, ‘out front, a life raft.’ From the cabin behind him, Chris and I craned our necks to peer forward and, sure enough, there was a life raft. But as we flew in over the top we could see it was empty; well, not empty, exactly, just a bundle of shoes in the middle of the raft – otherwise it was totally deserted. I felt a shiver run up my spine; this was more than weird, it was downright spooky; what had happened to the people? It was like being in a movie where something catastrophic has occurred and left no survivors to talk to, to ask what’s going on.

As the sun rose higher, this was something we all felt, until one of us said it: ‘Where is everyone? Where has everyone gone to?’ Sitting by the open door of the helicopter, with the sun warming me up a bit, I started to get a horrible feeling – were there any survivors at all? Little information on what other rescuers and searchers were finding was forthcoming from the Greek side so we only knew what the lads from Invincible had found. But I didn’t voice my feeling as I thought we had to find someone alive out there.

‘There, down there, there’s someone in the water.’

For a fraction of a second hope surged through me but I was soon disappointed. I immediately knew it was a body, floating face down, but the others weren’t so sure.

‘I’m sure it is, look, you’ve got the head to the left, legs to the right, a white T-shirt.’ There was a moment’s pause.

‘Yeah, wait a bit, could be, could be,’ I heard over the intercom. We dropped down – we were flying along at about 500 feet or so to have a good view of the area – to run in at forty feet. Sure enough, there was our first casualty, bobbing about a bit in the waves as we got closer. ‘How’s he look?’ asked one of the pilots. ‘Has he seen us?’ I killed off their optimism: ‘He’s dead, he has to be. He’s not moving at all, and he’s face down.’ There was silence for a while.

‘What are you going to need to recover him, Jay?’ Chris asked. We acted like this was a rescue, even though we both knew that whoever was down there was already dead; they’d been in the water too long for that to be in any doubt. I’d readied what I would need – a single-lift strop and a grabbit hook, something we’d normally use for hoisting stores or similar bulky items. I don’t know why I took the hook; maybe I thought it would give me flexibility in whatever I had to do next. I clipped myself on to the winch and said, ‘OK, I’m hooked up and ready,’ to Chris, and he lowered me out from the airframe and down to the water; as I went down I could hear him talking to the pilot – ‘Hold it there, no, five yards to the left’ – so as to make sure we stayed in the correct hover position over the figure in the water. Chris’s voice faded as the spray from the downwash reached me – now we have waterproof equipment that prevents that, but back then once we were out of the helicopter we relied on hand signals.

The sea was calm so the body wasn’t moving about too much as I got closer to him. I slid into the water alongside him, signalling to Chris to pay out some extra cable for me to work with. I don’t know his name to this day, but he was clearly one of the chefs on board because he was wearing standard chef’s gear of blue-and-white check trousers, black boots and a white T-shirt. I could see immediately that he was lifeless.

At this point I’d just been down to my elbows in the sea so far, hanging on the wire pulling up lifejackets and stuff; as I slid in I instantly realized that it was colder than I’d expected and – more importantly – that I had no buoyancy at all, which up to that point hadn’t mattered. I could have changed into my goon bag up in the aircraft, the green ones that seal around the neck and wrists so as to keep us watertight, but it might have been on my mind not to as we’re only ever supposed to immerse them twice, because after that we write them off and then they’re only good for use in training. Maybe it was because we were in the Med, and I assumed it’d be a lot warmer than the waters off Cornwall I was used to, and maybe it was because I’d had an argument with the survival-equipment clerk back on the Invincible about helping myself to some spare SE kit and only got half of what I wanted – getting an extra suit hadn’t crossed my mind. So there I was in the water trying to get on with my job while breathing in sharply to deal with the cold. I hadn’t inflated my lifejacket and in order to keep alongside the body was treading water like it was going out of fashion, and splashing round as I worked.

As he was dead, I had to concentrate on how to recover the body safely, and I started by observing him carefully. He was face down, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, dark-haired. He’d been in the water a couple of hours by this time and had obviously become very cold at some point because I could see he had folded his arms in tightly around himself as he’d tried to conserve his core-body temperature, and that’s the position he’d died in. That must have been a few hours ago because rigor mortis had set in and his arms had frozen in that position. This was the first difficulty I was going to have; somehow I would have to get his arms open enough to slip the primary strop over them so that he could be safely lifted out of the water. Since I had no buoyancy, as soon as I started trying to do this I was wrestling against his weight just to keep my own head above the water.

I’d just managed to prise his arms open a bit when they suddenly closed up on me. Jesus – what the hell was going on? I tried again, but every time I managed to get his arms a little further apart, they would close back into the position they’d been in – it was as if I was fighting with a dead body. I realized after a moment’s thought that it was only because his arms had been locked by the onset of rigor, but initially it freaked me out.

To get a better chance of slipping the strop into the right place I thought it easiest to go underwater, so instead of trying from the side I would place the strop between his arms from the front and then slide it into place once I’d got the arm furthest away from me into the strop. I had to slide myself under him and at first I tried not to look at his face as I worked with him, but of course I had to anyway.

What came next still haunts me, although I wouldn’t say it scared me. It’s not because I’m trying to be macho about it; it’s just that as with all aircrew in the Royal Navy I’ve been trained so hard there usually isn’t room to feel fear. I’d take anything as just another chance to look at some more options. There is nothing unexpected because we’ve considered every eventuality, that’s how we like to think of it.

Still, on this occasion I’d been fighting with the body, which had been bad enough, and then slipped down under the water; I’d taken a large gulp of air, and I had swum into position underneath him and was under the water fiddling with the strop when I looked up and saw his eyes were open and – literally, like in a horror film – were completely black, sightlessly staring back at me. I’d seen bodies in the past – admittedly, not in such close proximity as that – but nothing like this: no definition to the pupil, the whole eye – just black. What the hell was that? I wanted to rear back; it was as if he was watching me from behind this deathly mask, but I blinked hard and tried to clear my head. Get on with bringing the guy home. I signalled to Chris and the winch wire started tightening; I wrestled with the body a little more before it got clear of the water and we both started being winched back up to the aircraft, water pouring off in sheets as we rose higher and higher.

Chris had seen what was going on and winched us both slowly and carefully back up to the aircraft. All the time we were going up I was holding on tight to the guy, aware that his belt was likely to give way at any moment, because of its being so wet and loose. It was my fear that he would slip and fall out of my grasp; alive or dead, you don’t want to drop anybody from the winch as we’re approaching the aircraft – it just doesn’t get much worse than that, the impact’s horrendous. I checked again and again that the strop was tight around him, but he was a dead body and therefore wouldn’t – couldn’t – do anything to help. I had no idea whether or not the strop would stay on him given that at any moment his arms might suddenly flip upwards and the strop would slide up and off him.

We reached the aircraft and I swung inside and grabbed the body, and finally, just as I heaved him into the cab, his belt split and I fell backwards with his dead weight tumbling in after me. We ended up in an undignified heap. I rolled him off and, winded, pulled him down to the back of the aircraft and away from the door.

‘Jay! Jay!’ Chris shouted over the noise of the engines. ‘Are you all right? Are you okay? Are you injured at all?’ He looked alarmed.

‘I’m all right,’ I tried to reassure him, ‘a bit emotional but let’s get on. Press on with the search.’

I plugged myself back into the aircraft’s comms The co-pilot craned round from the cockpit, and said to Chris, ‘Is he okay?’

‘No.’ Chris shook his head. ‘He’s definitely dead. There’s no point doing CPR because rigor mortis has set in, he’s been gone for hours.’

But Chris was distracted. The look on his face suggested he was more concerned about the state I was in than our new passenger. I didn’t get it. I must have looked puzzled because Chris nodded towards my midriff. I looked down. I was soaked in red. It looked like blood. It was everywhere, on my gloves, all down my front, all down my legs – my overalls were just wrecked. I rapidly patted down the places that might have been cut – my scalp, arms, legs – but I was certain I hadn’t been hurt and sure enough nothing seemed wrong. I got up to take another look at the body, and then I realized what had happened.

‘It’s just paint,’ I told Chris, pointing to a extinguished red flare gripped tight in the chef’s lifeless hand. ‘It’s flare paint of some sort that’s come off him.’ The dead man had gone overboard with nothing else to help in the water but a single flare. And he’d obviously tried to use it, perhaps to see rather than be seen in the darkness. Maybe even to keep himself warm by heating the water around him as the cold started to seep into his bones. Poor bastard. It must have been too dark in the water to see that colour, and as I’d been pressed up against the chef as I brought him up on the winch it had rubbed off on me, while I was too busy making sure he didn’t slip off the winch to worry about anything like that.

We pushed on. After a while we spotted a second person in the water. I don’t remember who saw the body first but as we went into the hover, Chris conning the pilot into position right above the spot, I realized that it was a woman.

‘You all right? Chris asked. ‘Happy?’

I nodded. ‘Yep, fine, let’s go for it,’ and down I went.

She was in her late forties, maybe early fifties, and I noticed her earrings; she looked more like a tourist than a local. She was quite large and also half naked – she didn’t have any top on or anything, her clothes were hanging around her neck and waist. I had to struggle a bit with her body to get the strop round her and, as with the chef, her eyes were lifeless black holes.

Once Chris had raised us both back up to the aircraft, we moved her to the back; only this time I went a bit weird. Perhaps because she was more vulnerable than the chef, being half naked; anyway I decided I had to give her back some dignity, so I started to dress her again, by putting her bra back on. What I didn’t plan to do though was to talk to her at the same time, which is what I did, apologizing as I did so, saying I was sorry I hadn’t got to her in time to bring her out alive, explaining things just as if she were able to hear what I was doing as I put her clothes back on. The totally black eyes were also freaking me out a bit and I tried to close them by pulling down her eyelids, but as the muscles had gone rigid this didn’t work. I carried on talking to her, explaining what I was doing, dressing her, and I guess this must have looked very strange to Chris; but he said nothing about it to me.

The helicopter was moving on to search in the next area; we were working to a grid system now that the Greeks had launched a Hercules, and were organizing the rescue by directing all of the ships and aircraft in the area from this airborne base.

As we flew on, something made me look back to the rear of the helicopter. We hadn’t strapped the bodies in, as not only were we trying to move as fast as possible, hoping that we’d come across survivors, but it is near impossible to strap in a rigid body once rigor mortis has set in. If I’d thought that lifting bodies out of the water with their open sightless eyes was bad enough, what I saw now was worse than any nightmare Hollywood could dream up. The two bodies lay there with their open black eyes, shaking with the vibration of the aircraft, and, as I watched, thick froth began to bubble up from their mouths and out of their noses.

‘What the hell …’ I saw Chris grimace at the sight of it.

There are protocols on a flight and one of them is that we don’t all talk over each other. It’s no good having someone shouting in your ear while you’re trying to make a tricky decision. But on this occasion both Chris and I blurted something out that made the pilots start in their seats.

‘What’s that? What’s going on?’

Chris explained: ‘I guess maybe it’s a mixture of dirty seawater and blood being shaken out of their lungs by the juddering in the cab,’ but he didn’t need to add how when we had first seen the foam coming out of their mouths and noses how horribly scary it had looked.

We came across our third body. I went down again, and it was by now almost automatic; I had switched off, my brain said this is becoming all too much and it just went on to auto. It was a man, older than the first one, and he was heavy and cumbersome to move about in the water. It didn’t help that the cold was really starting to bite. The searching went on, but it was awful; everywhere we went there were bodies, and I went down on the winch a few more times to recover each one. The process was numbing, but then so was the intense cold. I felt no better once I was back in the cab with the door open, the wind blowing and me sitting there soaking wet, bitterly regretting that, in the scramble to get airborne, I’d pulled on nothing more substantial than a thin flight suit. But the big twin-engine Sea King was approaching her limit too.

‘We’re getting a bit low on fuel,’ Chris announced to all of us. ‘Let’s go back.’ It’s everyone’s job on board to keep track of fuel and airtime, but it was Chris’s call to end the search. The helicopter swung round on a new heading towards Invincible, the carrier acting as the command-and-control centre for the Royal Navy helicopters during the whole operation. We radioed in ahead so as to let them know we were on our way and to prepare them for our gruesome cargo.

We touched down on deck on Zero Spot, ahead of the carrier’s island. Teams ready to receive casualties – stretcher-bearers and medical personnel – were upon us as soon as we threw back the cabin door. Aircraft had been coming in with survivors and also bodies at different times during the morning, as all the bodies and the survivors came on to Invincible. We were aware that we should definitely de-conflict both; as far as I’m aware that happened, but there were people all over the bloody place; the deck was busier than ever. There were helicopters all down the carrier’s landing strip; One Spot, right at the front of the aircraft carrier, is now called Zero Spot, with the take-off ramp to one side and the end of the Alaskan Highway on the other (the Alaskan Highway runs down the blind side of the carrier’s superstructure, away from the airstrip). We touched down and I clearly remember the faces of the guys who came to the doors of the helicopter. They were quite shocked, because, I guess, although they realized they were picking up bodies, nothing prepared them for what they were about to see, and, unlike us, they hadn’t been carried along on adrenaline.

Years later I was in a nightclub in Helston and an Air Engineer from our squadron came up to me. ‘All right, Jay?’ I didn’t really know him very well. I knew he was one of the engineers but I never really got to know him – some you do, some you don’t; but I couldn’t figure out why he suddenly decided he wanted a chat with me. And then it came out, because after a few minutes he said, ‘Ah, you did that job didn’t you, that SAR job, the Express Samina.’

‘Yeah, I did, I remember that pretty well.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, in a way that made me look at him a little more attentively, ‘so do I. It really screwed me up, that did.’

I was surprised not so much that the incident had affected him – after all, I still had dreams about it myself – but that he told me there, in a nightclub of all places. He went on, obviously keen to talk to me about this.

‘When we returned to port I had to go and get some counselling. I never told the Navy, didn’t want them thinking me a wacko, I never even told my family.’

‘Wow, it hit you that hard, did it?’

‘Yeah. When I came to the aircraft and saw you covered in red, I thought it was blood at first, you was piss-wet through, white-faced too because you was cold and exhausted. And then you was handing down these dead bodies, froth coming out of their mouths and noses, their eyes open, all this red everywhere …’ He tailed off. The music thumped away in the background but I was suddenly shoved back there, myself, by his recollections.

‘It all just blew me away. I went into mechanical mode, getting on with the job as expected, loading the bodies from the aircraft on to stretchers but inside I was reeling, everything churning away, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.’ He paused. ‘You know, we engineers all take the piss, it’s part of the banter, we have a go at you lot: oh, you aircrew, you don’t do anything, you just go up and buzz about having a laugh. I suppose I half believed that. But that day on Invincible changed everything for me. It’s like it’s on a reel in my head; I never got over what I saw then.’

The Express Samina rescue stayed with me too, but my reaction to it was rather different. Despite the grim nature of the task, I’d found something that I really felt I wanted to do more than anything else since I’d first stepped on board a Sea King. Going down on the winch, getting into the water, pulling people – hopefully alive – out; I had a new goal. I now set my sights on graduating from one of the Navy’s toughest training programmes. I was going to be a Search and Rescue Diver

PART ONE

1. Ready to Fly

You don’t just turn up in a Royal Navy recruiting office and say, I’d like to be an SAR Diver please; it took me years – and some blood along with the sweat and tears – to get there. However, ever since I was a boy I’d known I wanted to join the Royal Navy, and I had always had an interest in helicopters – but I never thought I’d end up flying in them. My training had set me up as an engineer, and I’d started out working on the cabs before I ever got a chance to fly in one of them.

Growing up in the West Country, I’d joined the Sea Scouts and then, at the age of thirteen, the Sea Cadets. I loved sailing and a chap in our village used to take me out regularly in his boat. It was thanks to him I had my first taste of life in the service – he arranged for a small group of us from the Sea Cadets to spend the day out in HMS Onyx, one of the Navy’s submarines.

We were taken through security to the dock, and gathered alongside some rough-looking men hanging around in some sort of little shelter – they were the submarine crew, returning from a night ashore, looking three sheets to the wind. A pass boat came across and picked us up to take us on the short trip across to HMS Onyx, which was moored on a buoy near the mouth of the harbour. Onyx was a diesel-powered submarine of the kind that’s been phased out these days; it had last seen service during the Falklands War, when it was the only non-nuclear sub there. It was great to be on board but even to my teenage mind I knew it was only a Smartie tube that went under the water, and it didn’t feel much bigger than that, either.

It was great to see how it operated. We dived and we snorted, which is when the submarine comes to just above periscope depth and the upper hatches are opened so they can suck in a massive amount of air down – while still staying submerged as they’ve not come to fin depth – to run through the engines because they needed air to charge the batteries, which had to be charged when the sub had to run silent, run deep. We surfaced and did all the drills, hoisting flags and stuff. We were out there for a while before the Captain said, oh, we’ve just had an emergency signal and I’m afraid we’re going to have to drop you back at Plymouth as we’re going to have to sail immediately. Oh, can you tell us where to, or what for? No, sorry. Now this might have been made up just for us but it was still pretty exciting for us boys to hear about.

It was a great day out and when I wrote to thank the Captain, he sent back a photograph of HMS Onyx, which I’ve still got today. I thought quite hard about going into submarines after that, but I wasn’t won over and still preferred to think of my future career being closer to the airborne side of the Navy as my greater passion remained helicopters. I did wonder how people could live in such a confined close space.