Captain Tokorev and Lieutenant Starikov stood next to each other on the Yorsh’s turret, leaning on the railing that ran all the way round the small oval of deck. The night was calm, there was no wind or rain, and it was warm enough that neither of them needed to fasten their coats against a chill. They were both looking in the same direction, towards a dark horizon pitted with specks of light: land.

‘Have you ever been to France?’ Starikov asked.

‘Not the mainland,’ Tokorev replied.

Starikov missed the allusion to some interesting tale in the old seafarer’s past. Instead he took a deep breath of fresh air.

‘It’s so close,’ he said, a sliver of wistfulness in his voice. ‘Almost swimmable.’

‘Perhaps we should invade,’ Tokorev suggested.

Starikov straightened, and so did his voice. ‘Those weren’t our orders.’

Tokorev grinned. ‘No, they weren’t.’

The submarine captain had softened towards the KGB lieutenant, once he’d finally started to mellow and made impressive inroads into Tokorev’s alcohol supply. But perhaps he hadn’t got through to the younger man as much as he’d thought. Their long conversation in his quarters had ended up with them debating fanaticism, the kind so strong it becomes brittle, and how easy it was to be led astray by blind loyalty. But Starikov was still KGB, and still young, and now he had a mission again it seemed like he would follow his orders without question.

Tokorev’s smile faded as he thought about the message the Yorsh had received from the ZEVS array two hours ago instructing the submarine to re-enter the Channel, hold position barely ten kilometres from the French coast, and surface and dive at twenty-minute intervals for three hours. Once the three hours were up, or before ‘if new instructions were received’, the submarine was to head straight for Murmansk at depth. No further details had been provided about what those new instructions might be, or who might give them.

Tokorev had been sanguine about his shakedown cruise being hijacked without explanation, but this latest set of commands worried him.

To get to the coordinates he’d been sent he’d had to plot a tight course between Jersey, Guernsey, and Sark, the islands off Normandy that were de facto British territory, and then sit in French waters with just a stubby peninsula between the Yorsh and the naval base at Cherbourg. Thankfully the sun had set before the submarine had surfaced for the first time, so anyone looking out to sea would be unlikely to spot the small turret poking out of the water in the distance. But if someone did, it would be hard to consider the sudden appearance of a Soviet submarine as anything other than a provocation and have a couple of destroyers sent to scare it off or sink it.