He glanced down to the quayside where soldiers of the Royal Artillery’s Commando regiment, tough, hard-looking men in their famous green berets, shouldering massive bergen rucksacks and encumbered with the full armory of their personal weapons, were waiting to climb the gangways before disappearing into the maw of the ship. A Chinook helicopter hovered as it deposited one of the Gunners’ 105-millimeter light guns on the flight deck in a roar of engine noise.

A hard-headed realist, who’d joined the Senior Service as a junior seaman, Bush was a thirty-eight-year-old whose qualities had been quickly recognized. He’d flourished in the meritocracy that is the Royal Navy. Initially noticed as a Navy First XI footballer, he had applied that same determination to be the best he could be to his job and been commissioned from the lower deck, working his way up the hard way. His father, a veteran petty officer of the old school, who’d survived the sinking of HMS Coventry by Argentine bombs in the Falklands War of 1982, had drilled the importance of ruthless professionalism into him—it was only sheer professionalism that had led to so many surviving that horrific sinking in the lonely wastes of the Southern Ocean.

Bush was now applying the same professionalism to ensure Queen Elizabeth could put to sea in time. Bush was anything but sentimental, but even he allowed himself a moment of pride as he looked at the purposeful activity everywhere on the vast flight deck. He could see that this crew might be newly formed, but they would be OK. To be Executive Officer and second in command of the largest ship ever built for the Royal Navy was a fine thing. Not for the first time, Bush wished his father, who’d died five years before, could see him now.