Men of War (2013) (6 page)

“Wait
until things thaw out this summer,” Orlov bragged. “We’ll kick their asses all
the way to Berlin.” He folded his arms, realizing he was straying just a bit,
but thinking he could pass that off as sheer bravado.

“Well
I surely hope you are correct, Mister Orlov, though it seems they will do so
without any help from you.” Loban left that out there for a moment, goading
Orlov a bit to see if he would get a reaction. The big Chief was stolid and
unmoved.

“They
won’t miss an Able Seaman from the fire room.”

“I
see… You don’t much look the part, if I may say. Our Captain Maud says he’s
seen a thousand stokers and shovel men, but never one as clean as you.”

Orlov
knew he had to tidy up these little details, and he was doing what he had
learned long ago in the Russian underground. When somebody questions you, then
tidy up that loose shirttail, and tuck it in with a nice little lie, a little
lozh
to cover your weak point—but always remember it. It was clear to him that he
had been singled out because he did not look the part of a vagrant ship hand.
There was little he could do about that for the moment, so he tried to simply
pass it off.

“I’ll
take that as a compliment,” Orlov said with a grin. “Does your Captain Maud
want to dance with me as well?”

Loban
smiled. “Oh I wouldn’t want to run afoul of Wee Mac. You’ve seen the man, built
like this rock we’re under. Get cheeky with Mac and he rap you with that walking
stick of his, and make it sting.”

“I
can handle myself,” said Orlov, his eyes narrowed, arms folded over his broad
chest.

“I
don’t doubt it,” said Loban. “But in point of fact, I would say you were not an
Able Seaman at all, Mister Orlov. Your jacket there has shoulder buttons. Our
officer’s coats have the same.” He looked at Orlov, his point obvious. “So I
would think only an officer would have such a fine jacket, yes? Or are you
going to say you stole this one from someone else? I think not. Your name is
plain to see on the breast pocket.”

Orlov
knew he was in a bit of a corner now, and a lie would just not do, so he told
the truth. “Officers get demoted,” he said sullenly. He was quick to find some
sure footing in that response, for it wasn’t a lie, and he didn’t have to make
anything up on the fly that he might forget about and get caught in a
contradiction later.

“Demoted?
Then you were an officer?”

“They
called me the Chief,” said Orlov matter of factly. “I got things done on the
ship—kept the men in line—that sort of thing.”

“Why
were you demoted?”

“I
have a bad temper,” said Orlov quickly. “Somebody bothered me and I busted his
face open. The Captain didn’t like it so he made me an Able Seaman and said I
could learn what it was like to work my way up the ranks again and learn to
treat the men properly. Bullshit to that! The Germans did me a favor when they
sank that damn ship. So I gave myself a promotion and slipped away. Good
riddance.” He had the bit between his teeth now, and was enjoying his tale,
half true, half fabricated, and easy to remember.

“Very
good…” Loban made another note, then turned to a different matter. “This pistol
you were carrying, was it government issued?” He held up the weapon, eying it
in the wan overhead lighting then setting it down on the plain wooden table in
front of him. It wouldn’t be normal procedure to interrogate a detainee with a
weapon in the room, but the clip had been removed, and there were men on the
other side of the mirror watching the whole scene very closely, and
transcribing the conversation.

“Of
course not,” said Orlov, smart enough to realize that it was the damn pistol
that had landed him in this mess in the first place. ‘Comrade Glock’ had raised
the eyebrows of every man who laid eyes on it, and he knew he had to come up
with a convincing story about it. “It was custom made for me in Moscow by a
dealer.”

“Custom
made? By who?”

“A
man named Glock, his name is right there on the gun, can you see it?” It was a
safe play, as Gaston Glock, the Austrian engineer who designed the weapon would
be a boy of 12 years now, and would not found his company until the 1980s.

“This
bit here? I see…And this Mister Glock makes guns for a living in Moscow?”
Another note. “What about this peculiar scope that was attached? Mister Glock
made that for you as well?”

“Of
course. I told him, I needed a light so I could target things in the dark. He
said he knew just what to do.”

“So
you’re saying this is nothing more than a flashlight?”

Orlov
nodded.

“It’s
a very odd light. Doesn’t give off any illumination at all.”

“It’s
only for targeting,” said Orlov. “You see the light, and then you know what you
are likely to hit, eh? What’s so mysterious about a stupid flash light?”

“Well
it’s like no other torch I’ve ever seen. Such a narrow beam. And green? Does it
shine through some kind of tinted glass?” The first working laser would not be
developed for another eighteen years, in 1960, an intense and very narrow beam
of concentrated light on a single wavelength.

Orlov
simply shrugged. He knew there was nothing his grandfather had ever told him
about it, and it was one of the dangling shoe laces that was likely to trip him
up and tear his whole story apart if he got into it. The laser range finder,
the earbuds, and the jacket, how would he explain those away if these men got
too curious? They were going to be real problems if he couldn’t talk his way
out of this mess soon. Thus far they had fished out the earbuds in his jacket
pocket, but he told them they were merely for sleep, simple earplugs, and said
nothing more. It would never occur to any of them that they were actually
wirelessly in communication with the Polyflex-fabric computer in his jacket
lining, powered by solar sensitive fibers that constantly charged a wafer thin
battery. They had never heard of computers, so how could they look for
something they knew nothing about?

He
was wrong. This man had the earbuds out again, and the jacket was hung on a
wall peg across the empty room, too close this time, and well in range of the
computer. The man was toying with the earbuds, which made Orlov somewhat edgy
and nervous, though he tried to appear unconcerned.

“These
ear plugs of yours…Somewhat solid, eh? Not very comfortable for sleeping I
would imagine.”

Again,
Orlov simply shrugged. The man was rolling the earbuds between his fingers,
then peering at the thin metal screen attached to one side, and Orlov knew his
story might come cascading down in a heartbeat.

“Also
custom made? By this Mister Glock, I suppose?” The lieutenant fixed him with a
sure eye now, knowing that they had to be ear pieces for a communications
device of some sort. But it was most unusual. A wireless unit this small? He
wondered how it could possibly function. The chaps in the technical group
wanted to pry the damn things open to have a look, but he persuaded them to
wait until they went over the matter with the detainee. He could now see that
the ear plugs were a sensitive spot for this man. He noted how Orlov shifted
uneasily, looked away when he brought the matter up, a sure sign that he was
uncomfortable about the plugs.

Orlov’s
silence was as damning as anything he might have said at that moment. It told
Loban that these were, in fact, very special devices. They had a peculiar raised
area on one side that seemed to give slightly when he squeezed the ear plug….

And
then it happened, one of those moments of pure happenstance that would change
the whole tenor of the interrogation. The quaint, tinny voice of a woman
sounded from the ear plug in his hand, speaking in Russian! Loban’s eyes
widened, and he looked at the plug. It had come from there, from the little
metallic screen on one side.

“My,
my…” he said, raising one plug to his ear and pressing on the raised area
again. The voice was much louder now, clear and sweet in his ear.
“Please
speak clearly, and ask your question.”

He
took the plug from his ear, his mind racing now. This man was obviously wired
to receive communications from another accomplice, but for the signal to reach
way down here beneath the Rock meant that the other party would have to be very
close. It suddenly occurred to him that Orlov may have had every intention of
infiltrating this place, in just the manner he had been brought in!

Loban
cradled the ear plugs in the palm of his hand now as he looked the red-faced
Orlov squarely in the eye with another question.

“Who
is she?” he said slowly. “Is she your control or just a local contact? Suppose
you tell me who you are
really
working for, Mister Orlov.”

Part II

The
Watch

“May
He who holds in his hands the destinies of nations make you worthy of the
favors He has bestowed, enabling you with pure hearts and hands and sleepless
vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time, the great charge

He
has committed to your keeping.”

—
J.
Reuben Clark

Chapter 4

The
Golf
, Cheese and Chess Society had been working overtime again that summer.
The men of that elite group of analysts and code breakers were again having
their feet held to the fire over the
Geronimo
incident, though there
wasn’t time for golf or chess any longer, and very little cheese to go around.
The ‘Society” had been given that humorous handle instead of calling it the
official name, which was the Government Code & Cipher Station at Bletchley
Park, some 40 miles from London up a country lane outside Milton Keynes.

Also
called “Station X” or simply “BP” for Bletchley Park, the unit had been
embarrassed in recent months by its inability to run down the true origin of
the strange naval raider that had been putting holes in Royal Navy ships again,
much to Whitehall’s dissatisfaction. The ship had first appeared in the
Norwegian Sea, ran the Denmark Strait with a quiver of deadly new weapons,
which they nearly put right on top of Churchill and Roosevelt when the two
leaders met at Argentia Bay for the Atlantic Charter conference a year earlier.
That part of the “incident” was now a closely watched secret, never revealed to
the public or even most arms of the military itself. Only a very few men knew
the whole story of what had happened that cold, stormy week of August, 1941,
and Alan Turing was one of them.

Holding
forth in ‘Hut 4’ off the main estate buildings, Turing had been instrumental in
breaking the Enigma code to give the British a head start against the Germans,
but it had not helped the intelligence nest in the
Geronimo
incident.
‘The ship,’ as it was now sometimes called in hushed conversations, had been
dubbed
Geronimo
since its sudden disappearance off the coast of
Newfoundland. The official line was that it sunk that week, a victim of a pack
of American Destroyers who went down to a man to put the demon ship in its
grave. Yet those very few in the know were well aware that
Desron 7
was
only a cover story, more for public consumption than anything else. The odd
thing about it was that the destroyer flotilla had indeed vanished, initially
presumed sunk, until they sailed merrily into Halifax harbor twelve days after
they had been reported missing in action.

The
story they told was difficult to believe, though each and every man interviewed
on the five surviving ships corroborated it. They claimed that they had
suddenly lost sight of the enemy raider in the thick of their torpedo run,
finding themselves alone on an empty sea, with the weather all wrong and no
sign of the massive explosion they had spotted moments earlier off their
starboard aft quarter. The once turbulent seas were now strangely calm, and
they could not reach anyone on the radio, resorting to signal flags and lamps
until their commander could gather his five remaining destroyers together and
conduct a search of the area. But the enemy was gone.

Captain
Kauffman, the group leader aboard DD
Plunkett
, eventually decided to
turn about and head back to Argentia Bay to join the throng of ships anchored
there for the Atlantic Charter meeting. When they got there they claimed the
entire settlement, airfield and harbor facilities were a burned and blackened
ruin. Astounded by what they saw, Kauffman claimed he even put men ashore to
look for survivors or signs of what may have happened, but saw only charred
ground, burned to glass in some places, and utter devastation.

Shaken
by the discovery, and believing that Roosevelt and Churchill had perished in
the gruesome attack, they searched about for some days before finally giving up
hope and heading for Halifax. To their great relief, the city was still there.
The five destroyers came sailing in, their crews waving at stunned stevedores
and wharf workers in the harbor, for these were the five ships that had been
missing! Time had caught another big fish in her net when
Desron 7
disappeared, but now she threw these little fish back, in to the seas of 1942
where they belonged.

Their
‘report’ was not received well by the Americans, and it stretched the bounds of
credulity to think that these men could have claimed to have searched the ruins
of Argentia Bay when they knew damn well that the Atlantic Charter was well
underway at that very same time. The men of
Desron 7
were either
deluded, insane, or lying. They had to have made a navigation error, or so it
was said, but the US Navy found no sign of anything remotely close to the
description the men of the destroyer group gave. Every island in the region,
and every bay, was sitting there quite unbothered. To make matters worse, they
had reported that these were the brave ships that had sunk the enemy raider,
and now their cover story was about to go down the tubes as well.