Outside was pitch darkness and the icy chill of the ocean’s depths - and the crushing weight of 1,700 feet of water. On the surface, a flotilla of ships and a rescue operation under the command of an eccentric retired naval commander. For three days, the world watched and held its breath.

On August 29, 1973, a routine dive to the telecommunication cable that snakes along the Atlantic sea bed went badly wrong. Pisces III, with Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson onboard, had tried to surface when a catastrophic fault suddenly sent the mini-submarine tumbling to the ocean bed - almost half a mile below.

Badly damaged, buried nose-first in a bed of sand, the submarine and the two men were now trapped far beyond the depth of all previous sub-sea rescues. They had just two days’ worth of oxygen. Rescue was three days away.

The Dive reconstructs the minute-by-minute race against time that took place to first locate Pisces III and then execute the deepest rescue in maritime history. Ricocheting from the smoke-filled “war room” at Vickers, the world famous ship-building headquarters in Barrow-in-Furness, to the surface vessels and then down to depths where three separate dive teams and the mini-submarine struggled in darkness, this thrilling adventure story shows how Britain, America, and Canada pooled their resources into a “Brotherhood of the Sea” dedicated to stopping the ocean depths from claiming two of their own.