The Yorsh had surfaced fifteen minutes ago, as per its prearranged schedule, ten nautical miles south of Weymouth. It had taken five minutes to send a short radio blast requesting clarification of their last ZEVS message, and five more to receive a coded confirmation of them. The sub’s communication window was a strict twenty minutes. It might be able to hide from sonar underwater thanks to its anechoic tiles, but it had no protection against radar sweeps when its turret poked above the water. This meant Tokorev had only a few more minutes to quietly enjoy his cigar—until a voice behind him interrupted his peace.

‘Are you planning on following our orders?’ Lieutenant Maksim Starikov asked.

Every boat in the Russian navy was assigned a KGB officer, and Starikov was the Yorsh’s. Tokorev had dealt with a lot of KGB, and Starikov was the worst kind of representative of the Soviet security agency. He was young, arrogant, inexperienced, and generally didn’t have a clue what was going on. Tokorev also didn’t like the implication that he needed constant observation to check he was doing his job properly. He would happily have left Starikov on the dockside in Murmansk, or not minded much if he’d accidentally been tossed overboard somewhere along the Norwegian coast or in the North Sea as the Yorsh made its way to the English Channel.

‘I am following our orders,’ Tokorev replied, not turning round to face Starikov and keeping his eyes focused on the point where he’d bet with himself that the sea turned into sky.

He was irritated that he’d been disturbed, but he smiled to himself knowing Starikov would hate being outside in the rain. In this kind of weather, the stiff KGB-issue wool coat the young man had arrived at Murmansk in would already be soaked through.

‘We are to surface for twenty minutes every four days unless in exceptional circumstances to give our status and confirm our orders,’ Tokorev said, reciting the instructions that had been repeated to him over and over again.

‘Which we have done,’ Starikov replied.

‘And what do you think they mean?’

Tokorev had questioned the orders they’d received barely a few hours ago over the ZEVS array because they fundamentally changed his mission parameters, which up until then had essentially been to see how much of a nuisance they could be in the Channel without getting caught. Now he was being asked to do something that would almost guarantee they’d be spotted and tracked.

‘That is not our concern,’ Starikov said, the usual answer given by junior KGB officers keen to conceal their own ignorance. ‘Only following them is.’

‘Ours is not to reason why,’ Tokorev replied, sighing as he paraphrased ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. ‘Ours is but to do and die.’