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protected the joint US-UK submarine lanes, which led to the Firth of Clyde and the home moorings of the Polaris, and Trident ballistic missile bases at Faslane and Holy Loch. The underwater system could provide early warning too against intruders into the deepwater submarine training grounds of the Western Isles.
    There is no record of any Soviet or Russian submarine ever entering those hallowed waters. At least there wasn’t during all the years those hard-eyed US Naval personnel manned the SOSUS listening stations. But things went very quiet as the 1990s progressed and the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first.
    The glinting eye of America’s longtime secret weapon became inevitably dimmer. Defense cuts meant many of the listening stations on the eastern Atlantic were surreptitiously closed down. Great Britain’s Royal Navy took an endless beating at the hands of political accountants who believed the Silent Service was largely unnecessary.
    Aside from the times when there were no warships to patrol the UK’s island waters, most of the time there were only a half-dozen warships available for deployment. The start of the second decade of the twenty-first century was approximately the time when the world once more became seriously restless.
    And, as ever, in the thick of the ensuing turmoil stood Russia, growing ever richer on the back of its Siberian oil fields and moving steadily backward in its state reliance on a secret police force to keep the populace in order.
    Internationally, too, Russia appeared to have learned nothing, standing by the ayatollahs of Iran, supporting the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas, inflaming the Israelis, all to the anger of the United States.
    Of course, Russia had its own reasons to behave as it did, the close ties to Tehran being one of them. Despite the Kremlin’s endless games with smoke and mirrors, one of its absolutely definite modern programs was to raise its aged navy from the dead.
    The first sea lord had a brief outline on his desk that showed a rising
Russian underwater force, comprising major improvements to the three near-moribund twenty-six-thousand-ton leviathans of the deep, the Typhoon strategic-missile boats, now once more going to sea. There were plans for a total of eight of the supermodern Borey Class intercontinental missile boats and nine improved Deltas.
    The new Yasen Class attack submarines were back on the starting blocks, and ten of the Akula Class hunter-killers were being either refitted or newly built. Sierras, Viktors, and a couple of dozen patrol subs, mostly Kilo Class, were also being brought forward.
    The surface fleet was also undergoing a twenty-first-century facelift. After years of decline, there was a major modernization program for Russia’s old aircraft carrier the Admiral Kuznetsev, the Kirov Class battle cruiser Pyotr Velikiy was in refit, and there were multimillion-dollar expenditures earmarked for three eleven-thousand-ton cruisers.
    Programs to produce some of the world’s most modern frigates and corvettes were well under way. A careful study showed Russia’s naval export orders to China were becoming very strong, and they plainly planned to finance their own new, sleek navy with profits from the Chinese.
    “And here we sit,” growled the first sea lord, “just about the first stop on any southward movement of the Russian battle fleet, and we’re on our last legs as a seagoing nation. It was not so long ago the Soviets were scared shitless of meeting Royal Navy warships and submarines on the high seas. It was not so long ago we quietly put one of their noisy old Oscars on the bottom of the Atlantic for straying too close to our shores. And now look at us! Jesus Christ! ”
    “It’s also pretty bloody tragic we can’t help the Americans much with the reopening of SOSUS,” said Admiral Young. “If important data are located in the British listening stations, we just don’t have the equipment here to intercept, or