Men of War (2013) Read online

  Escort Squadron 6 was a part of Flotilla 2 assigned to the Sasebo Naval District, and tonight DDG Kirishima led a group of three warships as they prowled the dark waters near the disputed Senkaku Islands, called the Diaoyutai by rival China. English sailors of old had called them the Pinnacles, deserted specks in the sea that seemed to hold little interest before lucrative oil and gas fields had been discovered on the seabed beneath them in the 21st century. Now the largest of the tiny group, once called the “Island of Peace” would become a terrible new flashpoint for war. History had a way of spoiling human expectations with its cold ironic smirk.

  Peace was far away that night, a will-o the-wisp notion that had been laid aside in the service of more immediate interests. The 21st century was starving for energy. China has risen like a great fire breathing dragon, and her hot breath now needed fuel to stoke those flames. Japan too, was hungry again, and the same search for oil and natural resources that had sent her to war in the 1940s now saw her slowly set aside the pledge of non-belligerence written into her constitution at the end of that last great conflict. It was a new world, but some things never changed.

  Just as fate brought the name Kirishima back from the dead that night, she was also to start a new, cruel dance for the men who had served, and fought and endured aboard another proud ship of war, the battlecruiser Kirov. For that ship also seemed to return from the dead when the Kirov suddenly radioed home to Vladivostok, and reserved a berth in the Golden Horn Harbor for her weary crew….All but one.

  As it turned out, fate was not so kind to the man who had shirked his duty in a wild leap of violent self-interest. Yes, Gennadi Orlov found a new life when he jumped from the KA-226 that day, yet it was not the life he had imagined. Time, fate, and the British Special Intelligence Service had other plans for him. And Fate had plans for Fedorov, and Karpov, and Volsky too, their names written in some bizarre ledger in the Book of Time, right next to the names of men like Alan Turing and Admiral John Tovey, and many others you are now about to meet. For this, dear reader, is that strange tale, and it began, quite unexpectedly, with a couple of frustrated U-Boat commanders, the first one in the western approaches to the Straits of Gibraltar on a dark night in September, 1942.

  Part I

  Orlov

  “In this, our age of infamy, Man's choice is but to be a tyrant, traitor, prisoner:

  No other choice has he.”

  —Aleksandr Pushkin

  Chapter 1

  Orlov knew exactly what he had to do, and how to go about it. His long years in the dangerous Russian underground before he joined the navy would now serve him very well, for he knew when to speak, and when to keep his mouth shut tight, and how to mix with every sort from beggar to brigand, and blend inconspicuously into the riff-raff of the world. But he also had more than his fair share of foibles and bad habits, urges that he was all too eager to fulfill now that he found himself a wolf at large in a world of sheep.

  That was how he thought of himself, a big and terrible wolf that had fallen from the sky like a demigod, pulled out of the sea by unknowing fishermen. He landed in Cartagena, where he soon worked his way into the commercial district, ferreting out one bar and whorehouse after another. There was always a need for a good drink and some idle chat with a bar fellow when he could find one who spoke Russian. Money was never a problem, as he could simply take from any unsuspecting drifter he encountered, filling his pockets with ready cash. The fishermen had tried to warn him to be cautious, but they did so in Spanish, a language he found incomprehensible. Instead he got on with gestures, his natural aggressive nature, and a goodly amount of sheer nerve.

  A big man, brawny and well muscled, there were few who ever wanted to cross him in the bars where he drank and reveled in his newfound freedom. Occasionally he would meet other Eastern Europeans there, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and some even spoke his mother tongue, Russian. This was not unusual, for neutral Spain had attracted more than its fair share of wandering souls in the region, men tired of the war, or running from it, lost men of the world that no one would miss or give a second thought to.

  One night Orlov met another man who spoke Russian, Ivan Petrovich Rybakov, who worked the coal room on a steamer that had called in the port that morning. The two got on immediately, trading talk of women and wine, drinking together and eventually getting drunk enough to irritate the bar keep, who called the authorities to see if he could have the boisterous men removed.

  Two men from the local Guardia Civil showed up some time later, and got a little too pushy with a man accustomed to always doing the pushing himself. The guards were armed with batons, and knew how to use them, but Orlov was in no mood to be prodded an poked by a couple of scrawny Spaniards with an attitude, and he let them know as much, albeit in Russian. The guards heard enough to realize they had trouble on their hands, but they foolishly thought their uniforms, batons, and the insignia on their caps would decide the matter.

  They were very wrong.

  Orlov exploded, taking one man’s baton away from him and quickly breaking his nose with it. When the other guard joined the fray he ended up with a broken arm, and within minutes the big Chief had laid out both guards stone cold on the smelly sallow straw of the bar room floor.

  Rybakov’s eyes widened when he saw how easily Orlov had put the men down, but realized that this was going to cause a lot of trouble, and fairly quickly. Several other patrons had already slipped out the door, and the bar keep was already on the phone again, his face ashen when he saw the fracas and watched Orlov break a chair over one guard’s back to fell the man.

  “Come on, my friend,” Rybakov hissed. “Let’s get out of here while we can. I know a place!”

  Orlov put his boot into a prone guard’s belly, picked up his beer to finish it off, and then put his big arm around Rybakov and shuffled out into the darkened streets of Cartagena. He had planned on finding a good whorehouse that night, but his new found friend convinced him that would be most unwise.

  “Come with me, comrade,” he whispered. “We need to get off the streets for a while. You handled those two mice easily enough, but there are a lot more where they came from.”

  “Bother me and they’ll get the same treatment,” Orlov slurred.

  “I believe it, my friend, but not tonight. The Guardia Civil will soon be searching every other bar and whorehouse in the port district, but I have just the perfect place we can go. No one will find us there.”

  Rybakov lead the way down a dark alley and out along the wharf to where an old rusting steamer was tied off on a long wooden pier. The two men slipped aboard, two shadows, laughing as they went, and the Guardia Civil would not find them that night. They worked their way into the guts of the ship, a tramp steamer out of Cadiz that was pressed into some very risky service at times. Now it was on a voyage from Barcelona, stopping in Valencia and Cartagena to pick up cargo, and bound for Ceuta on the Algerian coast near Gibraltar, before heading for Cadiz on the Atlantic coast.

  “We are leaving in the morning, but don’t you worry. Come with us! The captain will sign you on. They can use a good strong man like you shoveling coal, and I will show you around Ceuta tomorrow. You want a whore that will fuck your eyes out? I know just the place, my friend.”

  Ships like this would hire on vagrant crewmen for such missions, with little asked and little said. So Orlov signed on as raw bulk muscle, and they put his big arms and shoulders to good use in the fire room, shoveling coal to feed the old steam engine. There were five men there, two other Eastern Europeans like himself, and his new found comrade in crime, Ivan Petrovich Rybakov. They were all disaffected souls caught up in the dredging nets of the Second World War. It was no easy life, but it was one way Orlov could finally get out of the city without having to make an equally hazardous journey overland.

  He had thought about heading east to Russia, but the prospect of traveling through occupied France and then most of Europe now under German control was not encouraging. Perha
ps he could loiter in Algeria for a while, jumping ship in this port Rybakov was talking about and truly sampling the wares in the local brothels there. Thankfully his ship, Duero would make the day’s journey without incident.

  Ironically, Orlov was soon cruising south along the Spanish coast through the very same waters that Kirov had navigated just a few months earlier. Yet his old ship, and the life he once had there, were now long gone, lost in the mist of time. While he wasted away the days in Cartagena, Kirov had fought its battle in the Med, negotiated safe passage to St. Helena, and then vanished into the fire of the Pacific. The ship was already forsaken the world of 1942, and the war that Orlov now found himself struggling to avoid.

  One day, he knew he would have to get serious about his situation and start using the incredible knowledge of days to come to better his lot in life. Yet Orlov was content, for the moment, to drink, and fuck his way along the Spanish coast, and forget the old life he once knew completely. One day soon I will start remembering, he thought, and asking questions. Yes, he would start to remember what the days ahead would hold, and soon, very soon, he would be a wealthy and powerful man.

  He was not an educated man—not like Fedorov, who could call up statistics and names from memory as he lectured everyone else on the ship….Kirov, the most powerful ship in the world. It had come to the war by accident, or so Orlov believed, and they had raised hell wherever they went. He wondered what had happened to the ship, or if pug faced Nikolin had ever heard the message he tapped out in Morse one night after breaking into a telegraph station while drunk in Cartagena. Nikolin, Nikolin, Nikolin…you lose.

  It was his last, plaintive good-bye to the life he once knew. Yes, they were all a bunch of losers in his mind now. Let them all go to hell. They could have their ship and its private war, he had something else, and it was going to make him the most powerful man in the world. Yes, Orlov was not educated, but he wasn’t stupid either. He knew that he could never learn the things Fedorov had in his head, the dates, times, and dimensions of the world ahead. But Kirov’s library had a lot of very useful information in it, and Orlov was smart enough to download a good bit of it into the computer built right in to his flight jacket, which he still wore.

  The touch screen devices of the early 21st century had revolutionized the world of computing, and ushered in what came to be called the “era of personal computing in the post-PC world.” Everyone had cell phones, touch pads and they carried them virtually everywhere they went. Their only liability was the short battery life, which forced them to always be plugged in and recharged on a regular basis. Then an enterprising man came up with a new idea, that we no longer needed fingers to poke at glass screens to do our computing, we could go one step further and simply use our voices.

  Computers soon became part of common clothing and other personal items like eyewear and jewelry. Orlov had a clever system where the flexible and highly durable circuitry was built right into the lining of his flight jacket within a watertight Polyflex container, and the outer fabric was laced with solar sensitive filaments that would charge the computer any time he stood in sunlight. Orlov’s military model was particularly durable, designed for the rigors of combat. There was a microphone in his collar, allowing him to speak commands to the voice recognition software, and earbuds would let him listen to results. So he went to the ship’s library and he downloaded “The Portable Wikipedia” into his jacket memory so he could use the info to his advantage and become wealthy. All he had to do was whisper a question now, and then listen to the answer spoken to him by Svetlana, the voice of Russia’s Wiki, and he would have all the knowledge Fedorov spent years stuffing into his head. Yes, Orlov was a very clever man, or so he believed.

  He thought that the next night as well after he had satisfied himself in Ceuta, though with funds running low he had to haggle over the price and nearly caused another ruckus. He eventually returned to the harbor, planning to jump ship later that night after a brief rest. Instead he fell into a deep, dreamless, self-satisfied stupor and slept the night away. Rybakov let him languish in a hammock until almost ten, and by that time the ship was well out to sea again. Orlov was going to end up paying much more than he thought for that last night in the brothels of Spanish Morocco…much more…

  * * *

  U-118 was out on her third wartime patrol that night, and the pickings looked good. She had completed her training three months earlier than the history might record it in Fedorov’s books, where she wasn’t due to start her first patrols until 19 Sep, 1942. This third patrol would have happened in late January of 1943, but it was happening now, just another odd shifting of the fault lines of history after Kirov had passed through the region.

  Kapitan Werner Czygan, had little luck on his first two patrols, mostly in the Atlantic operating with Wolfpacks Wotan and Westwall. He had returned to Lorient empty handed and disheartened, with nothing to show for his efforts but a damaged bow when a plane had spotted him on the surface near dusk one evening and put a depth charge right off his starboard side.

  That had been a close call, he knew, but it angered him more than anything else, and now he was even more determined to get some kills to his name and remove some tonnage from the allied shipping rolls. The problem was his torpedoes, or so he thought. They just did not seem to be running true, and he had more than his fair share of surface runners in the mix.

  One night in Lorient he had a long discussion about it with his first officer, Oberleutnant Herbert Brammer, and it resulted in a change of tactics that was to prove as fateful as it was successful.

  “Face it, Werner,” Herbert said over his beer. “There aren’t many boats in our class these days, and we get little respect. They assign us to the wolf packs because we’re big and fat and can carry all those supplies in the mine racks. We have no business being out in the middle of the Atlantic anyway. We should be inshore, looking for shipping traffic around Gibraltar. This boat was built for mining operations.”

  “You’re probably right,” Herbert, “but we go where they send us.” The Kapitan knew what his First Officer was trying to tell him. He was commander of a big Type XB boat, one of only eight ever built, and commissioned in 1938. They were designed and laid down as ocean-going submersibles, all of 2700 tons when fully loaded, though as Brammer had sadly pointed out, most of that extra weight too often went to cargo and supplies. The boat carried up to 15 torpedoes, yet in a very odd design with only two torpedo tubes, both on the stern.

  “It’s hard enough to hit anything when you can face it full on and fire from the bow,” said the Captain. “Every time we see anything worth sinking our teeth into we have to turn our backside to them first and fart at them. And we haven’t hit a goddamned thing in sixty days.”

  “I tell you that’s not what they built these boats for, Kapitan. And you know it as well as I do. What do you think we have all those mine racks on board for? That’s our real job, laying mines in enemy ship lanes. They put those torpedo tubes on our ass so we could fire at anything they send out to chase us. You want to fight like a cat, and stalk and pounce on your enemy like the others, but this boat is not up to the task. No. We must fight like a spider. We lay our web of little mines and then we wait to see who comes along and gets hit. There’s a nice big 105 millimeter gun on the deck, and if a steamer runs afoul of our handiwork, we can also surface and give them a little more with the deck gun. But not in the Atlantic! You don’t drop mines out there in the middle of nowhere. We need to get down to the Straits of Gibraltar and lay our eggs in the western approaches. That’s where the ship traffic is, and that’s where you get your kills and tonnage.”

  The Captain took a good long swig of his beer, brushing the foam from his upper lip when he finished. “Right again, Brammer. I’m going to make a special request for our next patrol. I want those damn cargo containers off the mine racks and a full load of mines this time. Then we’ll do exactly what you suggest, my friend. Let’s drink on it!” He raised his mug and the tw
o men threw back some good dark ale, sealing a pact that was to have the most dramatic consequences imaginable, though neither man would ever know or realize what they had just done.

  Time, life and the subtle contours and convoluted twists of history would take care of the rest. The Captain with the impossible last name, Czygan, was going to have more success with his mine laying tactic than many other U-boat commanders in Lorient that night, too proud to stoop to such devices as they fancied themselves members of Hitler’s undersea elite, the silent wolves of the sea.

  Czygan took U-118 south on the 25th of August, 1942 excited to spot the long fast lines of battleships and cruisers from Admiral Tovey’s Home Fleet sailing north for Scapa Flow. His orders had been to observe and not engage, and the tall ships soon disappeared over his horizon. After cruising south for a little over a week, and trying to line up on an errant freighter, he forsook his aft torpedoes and began laying his mines in the western approaches to the Strait of Gibraltar.

  This was the same place that the Royal Navy would often stage large convoys and military task forces before they entered the Med. The five aircraft carriers that had been assigned to Operation Pedestal had staged there that summer, and the ships he had just observed apparently conducted a major fleet exercise there. Perhaps one of his mines would find a nice warship sometime soon in these busy waters, and if not, there was always plenty of shipping in the area that might stumble upon his web. Yes, he would fight like a spider, just as his XO had advised him, and it paid off good dividends in short order.