The account of what happened next comes from Harrison Odjegba Okene, who was the person doing the tapping. Okene, 29, the ship’s cook, had been alive inside the sunken vessel for more than sixty hours. When he touched the diver, the diver’s instinctive reaction — the startled response of a person who expects to be in contact with the dead, not the living — was audible in the footage captured by the helmet camera he was wearing. The diver radioed to the surface that he had found a corpse.
Then the corpse grabbed his hand.
“He’s alive! He’s alive! He’s alive!” Okene recalled hearing, once the diver understood what he was holding.
What followed would take more than two additional days before Okene reached fresh air and natural light. He had survived more than sixty hours in a sealed air pocket at the bottom of the Atlantic. He would spend another sixty hours in a decompression chamber before his body was safe to return to the surface. The mathematics of his ordeal — the survival itself, the physics that made it possible, and the careful medical management that prevented a fatal ending after he was found — each demand a separate kind of accounting.
## The Vessel and Its Work
The Jascon-4 was an anchor-handling tug, the kind of specialized vessel that serves the offshore oil industry in the business of positioning, securing, and moving the equipment that extracts oil and gas from beneath the seabed. Anchor-handling tugs are workhorses of the petroleum industry’s maritime operations — not glamorous, not large by offshore standards, but essential. They tow, they position, they hold things in place while larger operations proceed around them.