Men of War (2013) (4 page)

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.

U-118
laid all sixty-six SMA type mines off Cape
Espartel
in the western approaches, and then sailed southwest to look for errant traffic
and a possible use for the twelve torpedoes they also brought along. A few days
later they got some very good news.

On
a dark night in early September, convoy MKS-7B out of Algiers and bound for
Liverpool, transited the Straits of Gibraltar. It was a nice fat convoy too,
with just over sixty merchantmen steaming in twelve columns abreast, and it ran
right over
U-118’s
web of freshly laid mines. Czygan would claim three
kills that night, the small 2000 tonner
Baltonia
,
the much bigger
Empire
Mordred
at just over
7000 tons, and another respectable kill with the sinking of the
Mary
Slessor
at a little over 5000 tons. He was elated—three
kills in one night, and without a single torpedo fired! He had quickly racked
up 14,064 tons, and was well on the way to earning his Iron Cross of the 1st
Class with his new tactics. He was finally fighting his boat the way it was
meant to be fought.

The
minefield
U-118
had laid was to be a nuisance and threat to shipping for
some time thereafter. Three more steamers would happen across those mines and
die, adding another 12,870 tons to
Czygan’s
tally. It
was ship number four, however, that was to really put a feather in
Czygan’s
cap, a lowly steamer out of Cadiz, christened as
the
Monassir
.
The ship was renamed
Switzerland
for a time, before being loaned to the Spanish Republicans during the civil war
when it was flagged Italian and called the
Urbi
to keep a low profile while carrying contraband and other unsavory cargos along
the Spanish coast. After the civil war concluded, the ship was returned to its
owner, who favored it with the name
Duero
, after the flat, rocky wine
region of north central Spain centered on the town
Aranda
de Duero.

It
was always considered bad luck to rename a ship, though the practice was
common. But to rename a ship four times was uncommonly bad. And so it happened
that the ship with four names was also the fourth to happen upon a mine in
U-118’s
stealthy web on the night of the 10th of September, 1942, exactly 5
months sooner than it should have suffered that same fate.

It
seemed like a small thing, a lowly tramp steamer hitting a mine laid by a
hungry, frustrated U-boat captain, but it was the night that changed the entire
course of history—not only of the war, but for every day that followed. For a
very special passenger was aboard the ship that night, a drifter, indigent
laborer, and a virtual nobody that had been taken on as cheap labor in the fire
room a few weeks earlier.

His
name was Gennadi Orlov.

Chapter 2

At
only
2000 tons,
Duero
had no armor to speak of, and damage from the mine
explosion that shook them all awake that night was enough to
hole
the hull and ship a good deal of seawater. It was only
the steamer’s good fortune that a British destroyer was close by, and able to
respond quickly to take the ship under tow and drag
Duero
back to
Gibraltar. With many compartments flooded and sealed off, the ship’s captain
accepted an offer to send a good number of his crew over to the British
destroyer on a lifeboat, and Orlov and Rybakov were among them.

“Now
don’t say anything, Orlov,” Rybakov had warned him. “Remember, we’re neutral
non-combatants. I’ve been aboard several British ships in my day, and never had
much to worry about, but you need to keep a good head on your shoulders, and
keep your mouth shut too.”

Orlov
was only too happy to get off the rusty old steamer, thinking he could just as
easily disappear and jump onto any other ship in the harbor once they made
landfall, and continue on his merry way. But they had not counted on fate and
time having their say in the matter, for the British ship that had come to
their aid that night was the destroyer HMS
Intrepid
, out on routine
channel patrol and captained by one Lieutenant Commander Colin Douglas Maud.

That
same boat had made a wild run at a strange phantom ship in the Med some months
ago, as Maud desperately charged in to fire his torpedoes. He would not score a
hit that night against
Kirov
, but now he unknowingly had a piece of the
ship right in the palm of his hand. It wasn’t long before Orlov came under his
watchful eye, for there was something about the man that belied his being a
simple and common laborer on an old Spanish steamer.

Maud
was an old salt, as seasoned as they ever came in the navy, and he knew sea
faring men when he saw them. Orlov caught his eye immediately, just as the life
boat was tied off and the men came aboard. It was the way he moved on the boat,
handled the ropes, reached for all the right places as he climbed, his footing
sure and steady while the other men clamored, and slipped, and fairly well looked
like a bunch of land-
lubbing
monkeys—but not Orlov.
There was a man who knew the tang of salt in the air, and a man who knew the
sea. Maud was sure of it from the moment he set eyes on him. And there was
something more… the easy assurance of the man, the sense of presumed authority
about him, and the revolver in a side holster that he spied easily enough,
though the man was making more than a reasonable effort at concealing the
weapon.

Wee
Mac, as he was called in the Royal Navy was on to this stranger in a heartbeat,
and some inner sense was telling him to be wary. His easy handle was a bit of a
misnomer, for Maud was as stout a man as they came, barrel-chested, with a full
black beard and the aspect of a pirate on the Barbary coast. He took one look at
Orlov, noticed the revolver, and then tapped the Hawthorne cane he always held
on the rim of the gunwale to get a warrant officer’s attention.

“See
that man there,” he pointed with the cane. “He’s armed. I won’t have armed men
on my ship not sworn to the service of his majesty’s Royal Navy. Get round to
the Master of Arms and have him see to the matter at once.”

“Very
good, sir.”

Orlov
was indeed armed, and with a Glock pistol that would not be conceived, designed
or built for many decades. It was “Comrade Glock,” the very same pistol he had
brandished on the bridge of
Kirov
as insurance that he and Karpov might
pull off their quiet little mutiny without any trouble. The weapon would be
seized, in spite of Orlov’s boisterous complaint, putting his hand protectively
on the holster and prompting two Royal Marine Guards to quickly chamber rounds
and take aim at his chest. Rybakov quickly intervened, whispered to him that
they would have it returned once they reached port, and diffused what might
have become a very ugly situation. But the revolver was taken to the bridge to
satisfy one Lieutenant Commander Colin Douglas Maud, and being a curious man,
he had a good long look at it. And so it began.

* * *

At
first
glance Captain Maud thought the pistol was a Russian TT-33,
particularly when he learned the man it was taken from was apparently Russian
himself. Yet when he flipped open the holster and slid the weapon out he could
see that it wasn’t a
Tokarev
after all. Very curious.
Maud knew something of handguns, and it wasn’t a Polish Vis, or a Browning Colt
M1911 either, weapons
Tokarev
was thought to have
relied upon when he designed the TT-33. He had a very long look at the pistol
indeed.

It
was, in fact, a high performance Glock-31, firing the formidable .357 SIG
cartridge from a 15 round clip. The weapon was designed in the mid-1990s, and
noted for its considerable stopping power and accuracy over long ranges. It’s
name was engraved along the flat barrel siding, though not apparent to the
uneducated eye. The first letter of Glock was enlarged and almost looked like a
circle, broken at one end where the letters LOCK had been inserted to the
interior and rested on the lateral horizontal line that would designate the
letter “G.” To the right of this he had his first clue as to the origin of the
weapon, for the word ‘AUSTRIA’ was engraved next, and then the weapon caliber
of ‘.357’ The same odd Glock logo also appeared on the gun’s handle.

Maud
had never seen this make and model, whatever it was, and for good reason. There
wasn’t another like it in the entire world—at least the world of 1942, for this
particular handgun had been manufactured in 1998, all of fifty-six years in the
future. And there was something most unusual mounted along the underside of the
barrel…something that looked for all the world like a viewing scope, though it
would be impossible to sight through it given its present position, mounted by
a pair of clips or brackets forward of the trigger guard. Perhaps it was meant
to simply be carried in that position, then removed and re-mounted on top of
the barrel when needed, or so he thought.

It
was not a view scope of any kind, however. It was a Russian made laser range
finder that Orlov had adapted to his weapon some years ago, and it never
entered his head that it might seem just a tad perplexing to anyone of this era
who might inspect the gun, because he never expected that anyone ever
would
inspect the gun.

The
long list of unanswered questions about this man and his weapon now began to
mount up in Captain Maud’s mind, and he quietly told his Executive Officer to
have the Russians brought up to the Ward Room, along with a couple of Marine
guards. He wanted to start asking his questions, and see what he might learn
about these men.

When
he finally got a look at the two men he could clearly see the vast difference
between them. One man, calling himself Ivan Petrovich Rybakov, clearly had the
look of an itinerant sea slug, his hands and face blackened with coal stains,
and a raw, unkempt look about him that spoke of a scoundrel. This man managed
some broken English, which made things a bit easier for Maud that night,
because the man he was interested in could speak only Russian.

His
name, he soon learned, was Gennadi Orlov, for the Chief had no qualms about
using his real name here. He knew that no one aboard
Kirov
would ever
know of his whereabouts or have any way to possibly find him. Rybakov did most
of the talking at first, telling the Captain that they had signed on some time
ago as common labor. He said he had come west from Hungary when it seemed
likely that the war was going to come east. He wanted to get away from it,
slipping beneath the advancing front to make his way through Southern France to
Spain.

The
other man’s story wasn’t as believable. When questioned, Orlov told Rybakov to
say he had been on a Russian merchant ship in the Black Sea, and also tired of
the war he had jumped ship in Turkey before catching another tramp steamer west
through the Med. That was what he told Maud, but the burly Captain seemed
suspicious.

“Well,
you’re a long way from home,” said Maud, looking the man over with a careful
eye now. It would have been a very hard life to be on a steamer in the Black
Sea. The Germans had U-boats there now, or so he had heard. They had
disassembled the damn things, rafted them down the Danube and put them back
together again in the Black Sea! In fact, they were under the
able
command of one Helmut Rosenbaum, former Kapitan of
U-73
in the Med, the very same submarine
Kirov
had dueled with off the coast
of Menorca. He was only there because Fedorov had given him a life, even though
the man had done his best to try and put a torpedo into the Russian
battlecruiser.

Yes,
thought Maud, it would have been a hard life in the Black Sea, and an even more
arduous journey west through the Med to reach Spain, yet this man did not have
the gaunt, hungry look of his companion. He was well built, well fed, and had a
cocky, self-assured look about him that said many things to Captain Maud as he
watched the man. This Orlov was someone accustomed to giving orders, not taking
them. He seemed quietly irritated with this interrogation, answering with curt
and hard-edged statements in Russian that did not seem to paint a very credible
picture. He had forgotten the name of the ship he came west on. He claimed he
worked in the fire room the whole long way to Spain, but Maud had seen stokers
and knew their look at once. Orlov’s brief few days at the job did not see him
get that charred look, hands smudged, fingernails blackened and sometimes
impossible to wash. No, he had nothing of the look of a real stoker, or shovel
man. In short, he was lying.

The
longer Maud sat with these men the more he was certain of that. They were
liars, both of them, and most likely up to no good. Rybakov he could dismiss.
He seemed to be what he claimed, but not this Orlov. No, this man had a
military air about him. His story had more holes in it than a sieve, and he had
a most unusual pistol in his possession. His jacket, too, had a military cut to
it, and an odd way of catching the light. He did not fail to note the buttons
at each shoulder that were clearly there to mount missing rank insignia, though
he said nothing of this. The jacket’s collar also had places to mount pips.
Yes, this man was an officer, and he was sure of it as he tapped his Hawthorne
walking stick on the deck, concluding his interview.