‘I don’t know,’ Tokorev replied. ‘But I find it better to think about it not so much as waiting but more as lying in wait.’

He watched as Starikov’s addled mind slowly began to entertain this new possibility—that they hadn’t just been left or forgotten out in the ocean, but that they were there for a reason, however invisible or incomprehensible to them.

The lieutenant’s body finally relaxed, and Tokorev gestured for him to take a seat on his bunk. He might be a grizzled old cynic, but Tokorev was also a patriot, and he wanted to remind Starikov that he was one too—not to the KGB, or even the Soviet Union, but to Mother Russia.

The captain was old enough to remember the long revolution of 1917 and the civil war that had followed. As a scared child he’d watched a decaying Russian empire collapse around him and witnessed the rise of the Soviet Union from its wreckage. And he’d pledged to protect this brave new version of his homeland with the same fervour with which he’d mourned the death of the old one.

‘Do you know what the true definition of capitalism is?’ he said. ‘There isn’t one. It has no ambition other than to spread around the world, consuming every last corner of it like a cancer. It doesn’t want peace, it only wants victory. A whole planet of workers toiling at their own cost for someone else’s benefit. At least with communism we all have the chance to reap the rewards of what we sow.’

He slipped his jacket off, tossed it onto the bunk next to Starikov, and undid the top buttons of his shirt.

‘We helped the capitalists save the world, twice,’ he continued. ‘And what did it get us? Millions dead, and betrayal. They are, at their most basic level, simply what we are not. And so, we must be forever locked in conflict with them. We may never win the battle, but we will never stop fighting. We can do nothing else. It is our nature. And Russians are very patient people. So we must be content to bide our time.’

Starikov’s body stiffened again and sat him upright on the bed, but this time not out of fear. The rhetoric was working.

‘And while we lie in wait,’ Tokorev said, as he leaned behind himself and opened the drawer of his desk, prompting the bottle of vodka inside to roll and bounce off its sides, ‘we drink’.

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

The nurses at the quiet country hospital were more than a little surprised when a grey Jaguar screeched to a halt on their short drive and a man with a blood-stained scarf wrapped round his thigh was rushed through their front door.