Allen Marin
Allen Marin is the skipper of the Kristal. The first thirty pages or so of the book detail his captaincy of the ship during a severe storm in the waters along the coasts of Spain and Portugal. The weather inexorably leads an accident resulting in the hull splitting in two, leaving the vessel dead in the water.
Jutta Rabe
Rabe is a German TV reporter who became a filmmaker specializing in conspiracy theory stories. She makes a film adapted from her book about the Estonia disaster titled Baltic Storm and featuring Jurgen Prochnow and Donald Sutherland.
Andres Tammes
Tammes appearance in the book is brief, but intensely dramatic. He is just twenty-eight years old and the third officer of the Estonia. His appearance in the book is represented through actual dialogue spoken and recorded on the final night of his life as he transmitted the coordinates of the doomed ship to the Europa in a calm fashion with a desperate plea for assistance while in the background of the recording can be heard the screams of terrified passengers.
Pierre Thiger
Thiger is a thirty-something Swedish ship broker who is enjoying a drink in an on-board pub when he hears the metallic boom that is the first indication of the disaster that will sink the Estonia. The imagery describing the scene in which things rapidly proceeds from Thiger merely having a really bad feeling about that sound to the ship suddenly listing to an angle 30 degrees more than it had been is one of the most memorably terrifying passages in the book.
Tuomo Karppinen
Karppinen is a naval architect from Finland heading up the Accident Investigation Board who becomes a major villain in Rabe’s book. Her portrait of Karppinen is one which leaves the impression of a man fundamentally unsuited for that particular job. Langewiesche, after meeting with him for interviews, comes to what he describes as being the exact opposite opinion and winds up defending the conspiratorial charges leveled either explicitly or implicitly against him for fumbling the investigation into the accident.
