“Well, Third Division HQ has just done a useful exercise with a French brigade, so with some concentrated work-up training we could form a multinational division of two brigades, with an artillery brigade attached . . . Give me two weeks, Prime Minister, and I’ll give you a force you can be proud of . . . But you need to engage right now with NATO Heads of State.”

“What do you need?”

“NATO has nearly three and a half million men and women under arms. That far outnumbers Russia’s armed forces. But NATO needs to get its act together and that needs political leadership. Without that, the fucking Russians are going to walk all over us.”

“I’ll get on the case,” the Prime Minister answered, looking at Walker who nodded in agreement.

“You’re going to need to, Prime Minister,” retorted Kydd. “I want you to be in no doubt what I’m talking about here. These are troops from different countries, who have never or only rarely trained together. They fire different-sized ammunition from different weapon systems; they’ve got radios which may or may not talk to one another, and they speak multiple different languages. None of which is exactly clever when you are trying to call down accurate artillery fire, while enemy rounds are killing the men around you, and one mistranslated number might result in a ton of so-called friendly fucking shells landing on you or your mates. There’s nothing simple about this and . . .”

“General,” Everage interrupted, seeing his opportunity to defend himself. “We’ve listened to you lecture us on our defense cuts, but you know perfectly well that NATO agreed to deliver a reinforced Response Force at the Cardiff Summit three years ago. Now you’re telling us that you can’t deliver what you promised.”

Kydd looked Everage up and down before replying. “Wrong yet again, Secretary of State. You defense ministers sat round a table and then told us lot about the brave new world of multinational force projection and so-called agile fucking forces that you had invented, while you stuffed your faces with lobster and Chateau de Whatever. Who knows, it might even have worked. That is if you hadn’t slashed the very forces you promised each other and removed the budgets that would have allowed us to train together so we could try to make it work.

“Well, congratulations. We emphatically don’t have the forces or working equipment that you will doubtless tell me we have. And we certainly haven’t trained for this. So this will be very touch and fucking go. And it’s only because of the Americans that it might even be possible to pull it all together . . . and also because I have total respect for our fighting men and women and I believe in the extraordinary things they can achieve when asked to . . .”