Craig Thomas' Sea Leopard and British Naval Power

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS

I have remarked previously that by the '80s techno-thrillers centered on Britain had become a rarity. Still, there were some, like John Gardner's Bond novel Win, Lose or Die (clearly written to capitalize on the height of the genre's boom, and the success of Top Gun), and Craig Thomas' Sea Leopard, which centers on the intrigue surrounding a British submarine equipped with a revolutionary stealth technology. Of course, in imagining British industry achieving such a technical triumph the book may appear to be a bit of pious hope or wish fulfillment that Britain could, at the least, still "punch above its weight class in the military-industrial realm," enough so as to be a major actor in world affairs, thanks to the prowess of its boffins (on which such hopes had so often been based). The same might also go for Britain's saving its own bacon in this rare, Britain-centric techno-thriller, at least where the high-tech is concerned. (An American intelligence officer completes the critical action on the ground, but it is a British Harrier jet that infiltrates him into the country, while a British Nimrod controls the operation.)

Still, any such feeling is mixed with an acute consciousness of Britain's decline as a major power since 1945, and especially as a naval power. One sees it in the fact, that just as in Firefox, a British spymaster ends up relying on an American agent to pull off the mission he dreamed up, but it is given explicit treatment when Commander Richard Lloyd, the captain of the sub at the story's center, after his vessel is captured and brought to the Soviet harbor of Pechenga. He sees

[t]wo "Kara"-class cruisers at anchor . . . Three or four destroyers . . . Frigates, a big helicopter cruiser, two intelligence ships festooned with electronic detection and surveillance equipment. A submarine support ship, minesweepers, ocean tugs, tankers.

It all makes a very strong impression on him, the sheer "numbers" of the vessels " "overaw[ing] him, ridiculing Portsmouth, Plymouth, Faslane, every naval port and dockyard in the UK" in his time, the only point of comparison in Britain's naval history he could think of "some great review of the fleet at Spithead between the world wars, or before the Great War," though even that is undermined by "the threatening, evident modernity" of the ships on display. That Pechenga is a mere "satellite port" of Murmansk, that the Soviet coast is dotted with dozens of facilities equally or more impressive--and this not a "great review of the fleet" but Soviet navy business as usual, makes it all the more daunting.