John Schettler - Men of War

“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.