Men of War (2013) (3 page)

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. Perhaps 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 two 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.