General Sir David McKinlay, sitting in the VTC room in the CCOMC from where he had taken part in the NAC, leaned back in his chair and watched on the screen as Kostilek stood up and left the chamber, followed by SACEUR, Admiral Max Howard. At last, he thought, common sense has prevailed.

Major General Skip Williams, the hawk-faced American Deputy Chief of Staff Operations at SHAPE, looked at McKinlay.

“Too bad they couldn’t have reached that conclusion a week ago, Sir.”

“Aye, Skip. And the tragedy is that it took our two ships to be sunk and a lot of American, German and British lives lost before they could get their act together,” replied McKinlay, relapsing into his broadest Falkirk accent. As a proud member of the Naval Service, he felt deeply for the sailors who had been lost in the air attack on Riga.

He stood up, wincing as his weight bore down on the stump of his amputated leg. When he was tired, as he was now, the dull ache of the phantom pains always seemed worse. This was no time for feeling sorry for himself, though. “It’s too late to help the Baltics . . . and God alone knows how we’ll ever push the Russians out. But at least the Russians haven’t prevailed over the wobblers in NATO—as no doubt they’ve been trying to do behind our backs. They overplayed their hand. That simple. If they’d contented themselves with only attacking local forces, the usual suspects would have had the perfect excuse to stay out. But even the Germans are angry and that really is saying something. I can imagine the President kicking a few butts in Moscow,” he said, with a grim smile.

Group Captain Jamie Swinton appeared at his elbow. “The Force Generation team are in your office now, Sir. And Lorna’s fixed you a brew.”

Shortly afterward, McKinlay, mug of tea in hand, looked around his conference table at the team. Headed up by Colonel Fritz Hansen, a former panzer battalion commander of the Bundeswehr, the multinational team of Norwegians, Americans, Italians and British was responsible for the detailed engagement with the member nations to deliver the forces required for NATO operations.

I couldn’t ask for a better bunch, McKinlay thought to himself. But NATO could only be as good as the nations wanted it to be and too often the political rhetoric did not match the military reality.

“It’s looking really bad, Sir,” said Hansen, getting straight to the point. “We’re struggling with the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force. The lead battalion group is some way from being ready to deploy. Hardly surprising since it’s a composite battalion of three different nations and they have never trained together properly. As well as that, the British tell me that most of the reserves they depend on are some way off being ready.”