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other Royal Navy attack submarine had ever been, with one heck of a wallop—thirty-eight weapons on board, guided torpedoes, plus submerged-launch guided missiles with a range of twelve hundred miles capable of knocking down a North African mosque from a parking spot in the English Channel.

    That kind of weaponry unfailingly warmed the heart of any seagoing commander, but this first sea lord was more than that. He was a navy politician, expert in the infighting of Westminster, a master at arguing the case for bigger budgets.
    And while, after three years, he was severely bloodied by the slings and arrows of half-witted politicians, he was triumphant in his endless campaign to preserve the new Astute Class submarines. They were late, yes, but still under construction at $1.2 billion each. Of the five scheduled hulls, two of them were floating, with three chugging along toward completion in the great dry docks of BAE, Barrow-in-Furness (British Aerospace Electronic Systems, the world’s largest defense manufacturing conglomerate).
    “You’d think they’d get it, wouldn’t you?” mused the boss. “BAE has six thousand people working on the Astute program alone. Imagine the shattering loss if some government canceled it. Imagine the desolation in Barrow, the thousands of skilled men who would go on welfare programs: the loss of confidence, the smashing of morale.
    “Not to mention the irreparable loss to the town—because it would quickly become a place that had lost its soul. It does not take long for engineers to forget, for sons of engineers to look elsewhere for work, for an entire industry with a sensational history simply to let their skills slip away. And when that happens, it’s damned hard to get them back.
    “And pretty soon it’s all gone, a great British shipbuilding center no longer in the front line of its profession, highly skilled young British scientists, shipwrights, and engineers looking for work in Korea or Japan. For me it’s heartbreaking every time I have to go and fight those numbskull ministers, whose only talent is making fucking speeches. Jesus Christ, it makes me madder than hell.”
    “As you know, sir, you’re preaching to the converted here. But I do wish we had those next three Astutes. I know no one seems to care, but we all love this country, and it gives me the creeps to think of us being virtually defenseless for the first time in centuries.
    “We should have three fast-attack boats patrolling home waters at all times, whatever the cost. That way I think we’d both sleep a lot better. Especially with the fucking Russians somehow creeping around our most private seaways. Because they bloody well are, and now it’s obvious.”
    The first sea lord was pensive. He leaned back in his chair and said, “I
wonder what they want, or, more pertinently, what they are looking for. I mean, they know the danger of prowling around other people’s coastlines. I just cannot understand why they would take those risks, unless they were looking for something specific.”
    “Beats me,” said the submarine flag officer. “But they have been claiming in recent months to have advanced electronic surveillance able to hack into cell phones and even shore-based computer systems. I’d guess they’re on the hunt for anything that might prove useful.
    “Unlike our own government, they appear to understand that navy personnel get paid anyway, so you may as well put them to work doing something useful. And in our trade, sir, any private information is likely to be precious. Especially electronic.”
    “I suppose fuel’s the only cost involved in running attack submarines around Europe’s national waters,” muttered the navy’s highest-ranked officer. “And these days the Russians have tons of that.”
    “It still seems pretty bloody weird,” said Admiral Young. “Wandering around the Hebrides in the middle of the night and getting tangled up with the stupid cod nets.”
    “Unless they had