War with Russia

And now, as he surveyed the deck of Queen Elizabeth—“longer than the Houses of Parliament” as the official blurb liked to emphasize, and the pride of the Royal Navy—Bush was satisfied that preparations for putting to sea were under way as effectively as they could be. “Lucky we were preparing to deploy to sea next week anyway,” he muttered to himself, as he watched dockside cranes lifting palleted loads of supplies, ammunition and all the materiel of war onto trailers on the flight deck. From there they were pulled by small tractors onto the elevators and lowered to the hangar below to be stowed.

Quite where some of this war materiel should be stowed, and in what order it would be needed, would require guesswork, experience and common sense. However, Bush knew that nearly all the more senior officers, and certainly all the senior ratings, would have had some experience of war-fighting conditions in Britain’s many adventures in the Middle East, which meant there was no shortage of the latter two on board the vast ship.

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.

But then the chill of concern hit him again in the pit of his stomach; an aircraft carrier without aircraft. It was a contradiction in terms. His Captain had briefed him early that morning before he’d assembled the O Group. Queen Elizabeth had been ordered to deploy as the flagship in command of a Littoral Maneuver Group with the Royal Marines and an eclectic mix of helicopters—RAF Chinooks and Navy Merlins, Army Apaches and the new Navy Wildcat Lynx—and all without any helicopter work-up training to iron out any problems; some as basic as whether the RN, RAF and Army helicopters would even be able to talk to each other, let alone the ship. But that was a minor wrinkle compared to his second major concern: Bush knew without being told that the Task Group would be deploying without a strong-enough escort screen. Aircraft carriers do not sail on their own, they need to be protected by rings of escorts: anti-submarine frigates, anti-aircraft destroyers and hunter-killer submarines. But, thanks to the government defense cuts of 2010 and earlier, there simply were not enough fighting ships available and within reach to meet the needs of this new emergency.

This is going to be the mother of “Come As You Are” parties, thought Bush.

Still, they managed it on no-days’ notice with the Task Force in 1982. But then he could hear his father’s voice: “We only did that because, back in Maggie’s day, we had a proper navy—before the latest lot of bloody Tory politicians chopped it to pieces. Maggie Thatcher would be turning in her grave if she could see what this shower has gone and done…”