Meanwhile, through persistence, hard work and skill, Chernavin had demonstrated his competence in the black arts of the submariner and been rewarded with the Krasnokamensk. After two years in command, she was a tight ship with a well-trained crew and now was his time. He’d monitored many NATO exercises, followed the UK’s Trident nuclear submarines close into Faslane—particularly after the demise of Britain’s maritime patrol aircraft had allowed the Russian submarine fleet to go where they had never been able to before—but he had never come up against anything like the contact the sonar operator had been tracking for the past hour. It was huge and he knew he had to get eyes on it, however fleetingly.

The nearest he had come to it, sonar and acoustics-wise, were the vast cruise liners so beloved of elderly Westerners. So, before proceeding, he first needed to see his target. He also knew that the golden rule for submariners was “don’t be counter-detected.” If the enemy found Krasnokamensk, they would be meat for the crabs, crushed to death by the pressure of multiple underwater explosions as vengeful escort frigates rained down depth charges on them.

But Chernavin was now worrying about those escorts. Krasnokamensk’s sonar had indicated that they had come close to a destroyer, almost certainly one of the Royal Navy’s new Type 45s, operating a sonar buoy with its anti-submarine helicopter. But they’d dived and applied a sprint-and-drift maneuver to give it the slip, running deep at maximum speed of 17 knots for fifteen to twenty minutes before drifting at five knots to minimize the sound of the submarine’s engines, in order to throw the British sonar off the trail.

But the enemy escorts had to be near. Any large, capital ship would have them in profusion, particularly the flagship of an amphibious group. In the Russian Navy, it would be deemed criminal negligence to put to sea without proper defense in depth, so the others must be out there somewhere. But there appeared to be nothing.

Surely, it can’t be so easy? Chernavin thought to himself. It must be a trap.

The orders from HQ Baltic Fleet operations on the last occasion he had surfaced and picked up a radio signal were unambiguous. A British amphibious task group was expected in the western Baltic. He was to get close enough to track it. Furthermore, it was the direction of the President himself, repeated so there could be no mistake, that if the opportunity for a hard, killer blow against the NATO aggressors presented itself, it was his duty to take it. To Chernavin, the President’s order could not be clearer: if he had the chance, it was his duty to sink the new British super carrier Queen Elizabeth.

The silence in the control room was broken by one of the sonar operators: “Range of unidentified contact now 10,000 meters. Contact appears to be zigzagging at speed.”