John Schettler - Men of War

Men no longer stood the watch from a high pagoda tower on this new ship. Instead they huddled below decks their eyes fixed on the glowing screens of their advanced Aegis Fire Control System. The big 14 inch guns of its distant ancestor had been forsaken for deadly new Harpoon missiles. The AA guns that once bristled from the superstructure of the old ship were now SM-2MR Block IV radar homing SAMs. Yet one thing remained the same, the destroyer was a ship of war pledged to bring her wrath and fire to any who might threaten or oppose the interests of her nation on the high seas. The forms and shapes of the ships had changed, and new men sailed within the hard metal frames plying the waters of the misnamed Pacific, but the deadly game they played with one another was still the same.

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.

Orlovknew 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.