Men of War

Chapter 19

The fishing boat slipped away from the rocky shore, off the northeast of Gibraltar, soon joining fifteen others just like it where brown skinned fishermen with gnarled hands tended to their nets and lines, hoping to bring in enough to feed themselves and their family, and still have some left over to sell in the local markets.

Orlov was tired, and settled into a small room below deck to get some sleep. Hours later he found that the small boat had hove to next to a weathered old steamer and soon the three men and their very important charge were scrambling up rope nets and onto the decks of the Sarkoy, and heading east across the Mediterranean Sea.

Neutral Turkey enjoyed a rare privilege in the Med, as both the Axis and Allied forces were interested in bringing her into their respective alliances to gain possession of the vital Turkish Straits. The Vichy French even tried to occasionally dress out their own merchantmen as Turkish ships so they could slip past the watchful eyes of the British at Gibraltar, and a few did exactly that while others were unmasked and caught by wary Royal Navy sea captains. Thankfully, Sarkoy made it all the way through to Istanbul with only one close call when two Italian planes made a low overflight in the Sicilian narrows. One shadowed the ship for some time until it was well past Malta, then vanished in the overhead mist, leaving the hapless steamer to its own fate.

Orlov was content to stay where he was for the moment, though he had already considered how he would kill the three men who kept a watchful eye on him now. He noted their habits, shift rotations, and thought it would be quite easy to slip away whenever he had a mind. In time he actually came to like the tall Russian, Sergei Kamkov, and the two spent long nights talking, smoking cigarettes, and drinking vodka that Kamkov had produced from haversack. Orlov could not help but do a little boasting in those conversations, even though he suspected that Kamkov was working for the Soviet intelligence.

“The British almost had you,” Kamkov had teased. They were going to fly you off to London on plane and go over you with a fine toothed comb. Tell me, Orlov, why are they so interested in you?”

“Why? I suppose because I know so much.” He took another swig of his vodka.

“Oh, what is it you know? Loban is usually very careful. He has never once risked blowing his cover to pass a man over as he did with you. He must have thought you were a really big fish, yes?’

“Big as they come,” said Orlov. “I can tell you things that will amaze you, my friend.”

“Tell me this, then. What’s in the pouch?”

“What pouch?”

“The diplomatic pouch Loban gave me. What’s so special, eh? We were told not to open it or we’d have our fingers snapped off one by one, and with Loban, you believe what he says.”

“Well Loban said nothing to me about it. Let me see it and I’ll have a look inside.”

“I don’t think so,” said Kamkov. “We’ll leave it safe in the haversack for now. So you don’t know much after all, it seems.”

“Bullshit,” said Orlov. “He’s probably got my wireless in there.”

“Wireless? You were wearing a wireless device? A radio set? Where? How could you?”

“We’ve learned how to make things very small where I come from. I had some ear plugs with a microphone and a little speaker. That’s most likely what he stuck in that pouch.”

“Ear plugs? Impossible. That small? Who made this for you.”

“Never mind who made it, Kamkov. Just play your hand.”

If anything, this lot was a far better circumstance than being locked away in a cave beneath that accursed Rock, thought Orlov. The Bosporus would be an easy place to jump ship, when they got there and he wondered where he might go next.

Orlov wanted nothing to do with the war on the east front. He knew that no matter where he went there he would likely be picked up and pressed into service in the nearest Russian company, battalion or regiment at hand. The Germans already controlled the Crimea, and Sevastopol, and were fighting for Novorossiysk by the time Orlov found himself approaching Istanbul.

There, to his great surprise, the Sarkoy was met by a small trawler on foggy night in the Bosporus. Three more men came aboard, wearing black leather jackets, and dark Ushanka caps with insignia, and Orlov realized, much to his chagrin, that he was now being turned over to the Soviet authorities in the Black Sea. So much for his plan to jump ship, he thought with some regret. Kamkov transferred over to the trawler with these newcomers. As he stepped down the ladder Orlov looked around, thinking he might make a jump into the water, but quickly discarding the notion. So far the Russians had handled him a lot better than the Spanish or British might have. As he jumped the last few feet down to the old wooden deck of the trawler he noted the number T-492 on its rusting hull.

The other two men stayed behind on the Turkish ship, and he noted that Kamkov had carefully taken the haversack with the diplomatic pouch. This was a coastal lighter, and Orlov watched his stars to make out their heading, soon realizing that they were gradually working their way along the northern coast of Turkey and over towards Georgia. Of course, he thought. A boat like this would be too small to risk crossing the heart of the Black Sea, particularly with the German Luftwaffe hovering about like black crows. No. They’ll work their way all along this coast to Poti and beyond.

That would be his last chance, he thought. If I let these fur hats get me any farther up that coast they’ll likely drop me at Sochi or Tuapse, right in the middle of the damn war again. If these men are NKVD they’ll soon want to know who I am, and why they have no record on my name in their recruitment books. Yet this has been an easy cruise so far. If the food is good on this trawler I just may stick around a while longer. At least we don’t have to worry about the God cursed German U-Boats out here. And this boat looks like a minesweeper, so there’s little to fear from that as well.

He was very wrong.

Oberleutnant Klaus Peterson was the second frustrated U-Boat commander that was to become the hand of fate in this strange tale, just like Kapitan, Werner Czygan of U-118. Peterson’s boat was U-24, a sub that had inherited a very proud number, for this was the second boat to bear that designation. The first had been commissioned in 1913, and fought during the Great War with much success and many laurels. On Oct 26, 1914 she had the dubious distinction of being the first German U-Boat to ever attack an unarmed merchant ship without warning, the SS Admiral Ganteaume. Her very next kill was something a little more spectacular, and gained her real distinction when she hit and sunk the 15,000 ton dreadnaught Formidable. Before that war ended, U-24 had hit a remarkable 39 ships, sinking 34 of them, badly damaging three others and taking one more as a prize. In all she inflicted pain and death on 137,560 tons of enemy shipping.

The U-24 of the Second World War was another ship entirely, a small Type IIB boat commissioned in 1936. Unlike her ancestor, to date U-24 had little to brag about. The boat had only one kill, the merchant steamer Carmarthen Coast hit off the shores of the UK on 9 November, 1939, and that by a mine, just as Czygan had scored his hit on the hapless Duero. Since that time three other commanders had taken their turns behind the periscope with no success, and by May 1940 she had come to be thought of as an unlucky boat, and was soon retired as a “School Boat” for training with the 21st Flotilla. Then in late 1942, U-24 had been secreted into the Black Sea by a very devious route, and transferred to the 30th Flotilla there under the command of another U-Boat Kapitan who had been caught up in this bizarre web of fate, Werner Rosenbaum, formerly of U-73.

Kapitan Rosenbaum had just earned his Knight’s Cross in the Mediterranean while in action against the British Operation Pedestal. He was one of the very few German U-boats to claim an aircraft carrier for a kill when he sunk the HMS Eagle, and after a strange run-in with another large enemy ship that he had never been able to identify, Rosenbaum sailed home to La Spezia and was soon transferred to Constanza on the Black Sea Coast for a new mission-command of the 30th Black Sea U-Boat flotilla, Hitler’s “lost fleet” in the inland waters of southern Europe.

In an ingenious and daring operation, the Germans had partially disassembled a flotilla of six Type IIB Coastal U-Boats at Kiel, removing their conning towers by oxyacetylene torches before they moved them overland on the most powerful land haulers and tractors in Germany. They eventually reached the Danube where they were packed in pontoon crates and then made their way slowly by barge to the Black Sea. Originally scheduled to arrive there in October of 1942, they were two months early, and the young twenty-five year old Oberleutnant zur See Klaus Peterson would serve under Rosenbaum and be privileged to go out on some of the 30th flotilla’s very first patrols.

He was excited about the prospect of suddenly surprising the enemy here, who had not seen a whisper of a German U-boat even in their dreams throughout the war. Peterson had trained under another well known U-Boat commander while he was on U-14, Herbert Wohlfarth and remembered the story that man had told him of how he had witnessed the tragic loss of the great battleship Bismarck. Wohlfarth had been there, watching the final battle through his periscope, yet with no torpedoes to make good his pledge to keep the great battleship safe from all harm. He had used his last torpedoes on a couple of old cargo ships days earlier, and bitterly regretted the choice for the rest of his life. Peterson never forgot the story.

Life and fate had a very strange way of crossing life lines and making odd connections like that. For Wohlfarth trained Peterson, and now he would serve under Rosenbaum, a man who was only alive now because Anton Fedorov has recalled the KA-40 that had spotted Rosenbaum’s sub where it hid like an eel in Fornells Bay, Menorca. Fedorov’s avid interest in the Second World War had brought the men who fought it to such life in his mind that he could not bring himself to strike Rosenbaum down. His act of mercy was to have dramatic and far reaching consequences, the first of which was instilling a moment of restraint in another man, Vladimir Karpov. When Karpov had come on duty and learned that Fedorov spared the sub, his first instinct had been to go back and kill it, but he, too, stayed his hand. It would not be the first time he spared an enemy submarine.

So Rosenbaum lived. He took command of the secret 30th U-boat Flotilla in the Black Sea a few months earlier than he might have, and he sent out a hungry young U-Boat commander named Klaus Peterson in a boat that was straining to make its first kill since 1939. It would get its chance against another very fated ship that night, the Russian minesweeper trawler T-492.

The sun had been down for three hours and it was a dark and quiet night on the still waters of the Black Sea. Peterson’s U-24 had made the long journey from Constanza, leaving several days ago and angling southeast to the Turkish coast to look for small Russian craft that used that route to avoid German air operations. At 19:00 hours it was very dark, as the moon would not rise until 22:30, and even then it would only be a slim morning crescent, so conditions were perfect for a U-boat to be riding on the surface in search of unwary prey.

The 325 ton Type-II U-boats were among the very first new boats built by Germany after the repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles, with twelve being built in secret pens. From the first they were conceived as small coastal boats, just 140 feet in length and thirteen feet wide. With a crew of only twenty-five men and limited range they were only useful for training or deployment in restricted waters like the Black Sea. In the open ocean they would roll too heavily, and came to be called “dugout canoes,” but in quieter inland waters and coastal zones their agile maneuverability and rapid diving speed of thirty seconds made them very effective. The Type IIB could run 1800 miles at 12 knots, more than enough endurance for operations in the Black Sea. The boat had three 21 inch bow tubes for a load of six torpedoes, but that night Oberleutnant Klaus Peterson had only three left, having fired unsuccessfully at a couple of lighters along the Turkish coast the previous day.

At 19:18 hours his lookouts spotted what appeared to be a small tug or barge tender well off Poti, and Peterson silently turned his boat, aiming the nose to fire. More often than not, a U-boat might fire its torpedoes on the surface like this, and the young Oberleutnant was eager for a kill on his first patrol here. He was from the well known “Olympia Crew” of 1936, taking that name from the Berlin Olympics held the year they graduated, and Peterson hoped to win a medal or two before he was through tonight. The ship ahead did not look like much of a prize, yet he would take what he could get without complaint.

“I’m lined up perfectly, Otto,” he whispered to his Executive Officer. “Fire tube one!”

The G7e torpedo was away with a quiet swish, running true and right at the unwary Tszcz-492 where Gennadi Orlov dozed in a hammock below decks under the casual watch of two NKVD guards. Then a man shouted from above and the thump of heavy soled boots was hard on the wooden deck. Orlov was jostled awake, hearing men yelling out an alarm.

The two NKVD men were up and running for the ladder, foolishly leaving Orlov alone. He heard the word torpedo, then submarine, and the boat master was shouting for men to man the forward 76mm deck gun that had been well concealed under a heavy tarp. In that brief moment of uncertainty, Orlov’s eye fell on Kamkov’s haversack, and he moved, almost without thinking, rushing over and fishing about to get at the diplomatic pouch. There it was! He had the looped string open in a heartbeat, and groped inside, finding the earbuds and then quickly securing the pouch again and putting it right back where he found it.

He heard the sound of something warbling in the water, then a high pitched hum that he knew was a torpedo, and his heart raced to think these might be his last moments alive. But the unlucky history that had plagued U-24 since it dared assume the mantle of its illustrious WWI predecessor would continue to plague Klaus Peterson that night. The shot was perfect, dead center on the small ship ahead, which was actually a Soviet mine sweeper trawler, but the torpedo depth was wrong for the target’s shallow draft, and it ran right under the boat!

Orlov heard it pass and sighed with relief. He considered trying to sneak on deck but he did not know where the trawler was and the prospect of diving into the sea was less than appealing. So instead he waited in the noisy darkness, hearing the grind of metal above as the deck crews worked the 76mm gun. Then he heard a loud boom, as they fired their first round back at the enemy sub, and something in him pulled for the Russian crew, not only because his life depended on it, but because they were his countrymen, distant ancestors of the nation he had left, but countrymen nonetheless.

Oberleutnant Peterson was surprised by the gunfire, hearing the round soar in and splash heavily in the water off his starboard side. “Damn! We were dead on and the fish was too deep! And that’s no tug boat, it’s a minesweeper! Dive the boat!”

The harsh claxon sounded and men scrambled from the tiny conning tower above. Thirty seconds later U-24 had slipped beneath the wine dark sea and turned fifteen points to port. Peterson heard another round come in above them but it thankfully missed, and so now he wiped the sweat from his brow and struggled to calm himself. His first pounce had failed to catch his prey, so the deadly game of stalking would now begin. He angled away, thinking the best thing to do now was make the enemy think they had driven him off while he slowly circled to see if he could line up on the target again. First he needed to get well away from the place he had taken his first shot. A periscope here would only invite trouble.

He did not know that fate and time were now watching his every move, inscribing it all in their ledgers, and that one man, Gennadi Orlov, was now about to steal a peek at the books.

Chapter 20

Aboard T-492, Orlov had a sudden thought. He looked at the earbuds in his palm and slipped one into his right ear, clicking the collar button to activate his Jacket Computer, grateful and amused that the British had been too stupid to make any connection between the earbuds and his jacket. He would see what he could find out about this incident, if anything had been recorded about it, and the Portable Wiki of 2021 did not disappoint. Svetlana was in his ear with a little story in no time:

“…19:18 hours, off Poti, Georgia: U-24 fired a G7e torpedo at Soviet M/S trawler T-492 which passed beneath its target below the bridge. The trawler then forced U-24 to dive with gunfire.”

How convenient, thought Orlov, smiling. He could sit there and learn what his fate would be, and whether he had to make a run for it and hit the water if this damn ship was going to be sunk that night. Now he understood why Fedorov always had his nose buried in his books and computer data while they were up in the Atlantic, and he remembered how he would advise both Volsky and Karpov on the history. He smiled, whispering “continue” and listening to what Svetlana would tell him.

The next line sent his pulse up, but he soon smiled… “U-24 scored a hit at 21:37 hrs…” Orlov continued listening, hearing fate breath her mandate in his ear, and then he put the earbud away in a hidden pocket of his jacket, turned the system off, and was up on his feet to go above.

The tang of the sea was sweet in his nostrils as he stuck his head up through the ladder hole, climbing on deck. He saw men standing tensely at the watch, field glasses pressed tightly to their eyes, and heard a third round fire from the deck gun. He was up, moving forward along the gunwale past the pilot house when one of the NKVD men saw him.

“What are you doing up here? Get your ass below!”

“Fuck you,” Orlov shot back at him. “Those bastards are trying to kill me!” He pointed along the line where the deck gun was sighting. “You think I want to sit down there and take a fucking torpedo up my ass?”

The NKVD man smiled, relenting, but decided to keep an eye on Orlov, watching the easy way the big man moved on deck, the sureness of his footing, and how he shifted his weight and balance when the boat rolled. He knew at once this man was navy, an old salt of the sea. The men were still excited on deck, and the boat’s master was shouting orders. Kamkov was in the pilot house with him, and when he saw Orlov he waved for him to come inside.

“Bastard snuck up on us,” he said. “It’s so damn dark we couldn’t see him before he got that torpedo off. Lucky for us it ran too deep.”

“He won’t make that mistake again,” said Orlov quietly, reaching in his pocket for a cigarette.

“You think he’s still out there?”

“Of course! You surprised him as well. I don’t think he expected that deck gun. Probably thought this was just a fishing trawler.”

“The bastard must be pretty damn hungry to waste a good torpedo on a ship this size. I wonder if it was German. How could they get the damn thing in here?”

“It’s German,” said Orlov matter of factly. He had asked Svetlana a follow up question before he put his earbuds away, and he knew all about U-24, and how it came to find itself in the Black Sea. Yes, the Germans were crafty little shits. This boat was no different. Its captain must be very good if he could put a torpedo right amidships on the first shot… and scored a hit on the second!

“What time is it?” Orlov asked, looking for the moon that was still not there.

“19:30 hours, or thereabouts. Getting sleepy again, Orlov?”

The Chief smiled. He still liked Kamkov, and hoped he would not have to kill him soon. There was still plenty of time, he knew, but the action would begin again in about an hour. Duels like this were not like the fast wild frenzy of a surface action. The minute the U-boat submerged successfully, it became a game of cat and mouse. The only question was this: which boat was the cat?

There was no doubt in Klaus Peterson’s mind that he was in charge of the engagement now. He had been in charge of it all along. He caught the enemy by surprise, and soon he would angle in and line up on the target one more time. He decided to risk a look through the periscope on this moonless night, and soon saw that his quarry had put on speed, but was foolishly circling instead of making a beeline for the coast as he thought it might. What are they doing? He wondered?

What they were doing was quietly dropping a few mines off the stern, leaving a little web of bristling iron behind them to hopefully ensnare the silent enemy beneath the sea. Orlov smiled inwardly when the boat master gave the order, but let them play, saying nothing. T-492 had no depth charges or sonar equipment of any kind, so the boat could not actively go after the enemy U-boat. It had to wait until the enemy showed himself again, or simply run. This was a clear case where discretion was the better part of valor, but Orlov admired the pluck and courage of these men. They were stupidly dropping sea mines as if they had any chance of hitting this sub, but they were determined.

“That’s a waste of time,” he said eventually to the boat master.

“You have a better idea?” The grizzled man shot back.

The clock was ticking on, and the tension winding up. It had been nearly an hour and a half now since those first wild moments. That was life at sea—hurry up and wait. One minute it was chaos and adrenaline, then long minutes or hours of doldrums. But soon the wait was over.

“Torpedo!” a watchman shouted. “Starboard side and close!”

“Sookin sin!” The boat master swore as he labored to turn the wheel. Kamkov’s eyes were white with fear, but Orlov seemed calm and unconcerned. “Don’t worry,” he whispered to his friend. “It’s a dud.”

He reached out and took hold of the man’s wrist to see his watch. The enemy was right on schedule. Svetlana had whispered her truth, and Orlov only hoped she had been correct, that the history still held true as recorded. The dates were off but the little details like the time seemed perfect to the second. Now he again knew why Fedorov was so edgy when he thought Kirov would do something to upset the thin, fragile scrawl of history in his books and records. Orlov’s life depended on it running true, just at this second torpedo was again running true, right at the heart of the trawler.

They could hear it, a distant whine in the sea getting louder and louder. A man shouted, another cursed, pointing at the sea. The torpedo came lancing in and struck the boat dead on this time, and right amidships. There was a hard thump on the hull, and every man around him instinctively closed their eyes, their faces strained with fear. All except Orlov, for the curse on U-24 was still holding the enemy in its firm grip. Peterson’s second shot was indeed a dud, just as Svetlana had told Orlov it would be, and just as Orlov had told Kamkov it would be. The devil was in the details.

Kamkov opened his eyes, looking at the boat master, who was exhaling heavily with relief, then at Orlov, a strange look on his face.

“How did you know?” he breathed.

Orlov cocked his head to one side nonchalantly. “I can hear it.” He pointed to his ear. “Yes, I’ve spent some time on destroyers. You get a very good ear for these things after a while. I knew the first one was running deep too,” a little lozh now to put icing on his cake. “And I knew this one was going to misfire. Don’t get yourselves all worked up. He’s got one more fish in the tank, but he won’t hit anything with it. Then you get your chance later. Relax. It will be a long wait this time.”

“You sound very sure of yourself,” said Kamkov.

“I’m always sure,” said Orlov with a grin. “That’s why I took your shirt at poker, eh? I’m going below. The moon will be up soon and you’ll feel better. Wake me at midnight, will you Kamkov?”

Svetlana had whispered it all in his ear, and Orlov knew what was coming next. He had plenty of time, so he settled into the hammock below, trying to doze off again, but bothered by the sound of heavy footfalls on the deck above as the men of T-492 kept up their fitful watch. They were still stupidly fooling around with the mines on the aft deck, trying to rig them with weights to set their depth, and just listening to them made him laugh. It was a god-like feeling of power to know the fate of these men tonight, right down to the minutes and seconds. There they were, blundering about in the night on the cold wet deck above, their hands raw on ropes and chains, or tight on the wheel of the boat as T-492 wended her way slowly east towards Poti, leaving a wake of mines behind her that would now probably cause more problems for local shipping than they would for the unseen German U-boat.

A little after midnight Kamkov stuck his head down the hatch and called him. “Wake up, Orlov. The moon is up, just like you said. But there’s no sign of that submarine.”

Orlov climbed back up, yawning and reaching for another cigarette, which he shared with Kamkov this time. The crew seemed much more at ease now. The long three hour wait had lulled them with a sense of false security. Some were lounging on deck, talking quietly with one another, the men by the deck gun were sitting on the ammo crates, one of the NKVD guards was slowly pacing back and forth, his submachine gun slung over his shoulder, black Ushanka tilting this way and that as he watched the slivered moonlight glimmer on the sea.

Orlov had his quiet smoke as the time slipped by. Then it began again. One of the men working the mining operation at the back of the ship shouted with alarm. There was another torpedo inbound off their port quarter, and every man on the ship was up with sudden energy, heads craned to look, eyes squinting, tensely alert—all except Orlov. The torpedo missed, just as Orlov said it would.

Aboard U-24, Klaus Peterson’s luck had run out, for that was his last torpedo. He cursed inwardly, angry to think that he had put his first two torpedoes right on the mark and neither one could score a hit.

“Damn unlucky boat,” said Otto on his left as Peterson lowered the periscope, clearly upset.

“To hell with that,” said the Oberleutnant. “We’re behind him now. Surface at once and we go after him with the AA gun!”

“That’s not a very good idea,” said Otto. “They have a deck gun!” But he could see the steely eye of determination in Peterson now, and he seconded the order.

U-24 surfaced in a white swell of bubbles and the hatch opened, men scrambling forward to the twin 20mm AA gun forward of the conning tower. Peterson followed them up, standing in the tower with his field glasses, and shouting at the men to be quick on the gun. He had nothing more than these 20mm rounds to throw at the enemy now, and he knew his executive officer had been correct. This was just a stupid act of defiance, but when the gun fired he took some heart, and some satisfaction in seeing the tracers chew up the water near the back of the enemy ship. A damn minesweeper, he thought. We can’t even sink a damn mining trawler!

The AA guns barked as the trawler’s boat master spun the wheel hard to bring his bow around and give his 76mm deck gun a chance for another shot, but Orlov knew it would come to naught. What he did not know, however, was that Peterson’s stubborn act of defiance would have consequences he did not expect. The 20mm rounds raked the trawler, some skidding off the metal siding of the pilot house as Orlov instinctively crouched low. One of the rounds had found a target, and he looked, astonished to see that Kamkov had fallen hard and was now slumped on the deck beside him, shot through the chest. Then the enemy fire halted and Orlov could see the distant silhouette of the Germans working their gun.

Svetlana’s words came back to him, playing again in his mind as he recalled the history record he had called up. “After U-24 had fired and missed with her last torpedo at 00:38 hrs, the boat surfaced and exchanged fire with the 20mm AA gun…”

It seemed there were a lot of little details written between the broad strokes of history. Svetlana had said nothing whatsoever about Kamkov, he thought, and he realized that those rounds could just have easily raked across his own chest. Now Kamkov was quite dead, and Orlov was quite angry. He stood up, glaring at the German U-Boat as he heard the 76mm deck gun fire in futile rage, its shot well over the enemy boat and missing by a wide margin.

Infuriated, Orlov strode over to the NKVD guard where he crouched behind the gunwale, and in one swift motion he snatched away the man’s submachine gun. “Piz-da!” He cursed at the U-boat, flipping off the safety and opening up on the Germans, pleased to see his machine gun fire snapping off the conning tower in a shower of sparks. His cigarette butt was still between his pursed lips as he fired, sneering at his enemy.

“Don’t fuck with me you stupid sons of bitches!” he shouted, spitting out the cigarette butt and grinning evilly when he saw the Germans secure their AA gun and run for the deck hatches. The little battle on the Black Sea was over, and he knew why. Svetlana had told him the whole story: “…the boat surfaced and exchanged fire with the 20mm AA gun, which malfunctioned shortly afterwards, forcing U-24 to break off the attack with light machine gun damage to the conning tower.”

Orlov smirked inwardly, handing the smoking submachine gun back to the astonished NKVD man, who looked at him with awe and respect when he saw the German U-Boat quickly vanish beneath the sea again.

“Watch for torpedoes!” the boat master shouted, but Orlov simply laughed. He had written his little line in the history, with a PPD-40 submachine gun firing Tokarev 7.62x25mm pistol rounds, but it was enough.

“Don’t worry,” he shouted back at the boat master. “If they had any more torpedoes do you think they would have come up to shoot with us? It’s over. Get some rest.”

For Klaus Peterson, it was a very frustrating night. His boat was now toothless, and little more than a scouting unit. He would have to slink back to Constanza with nothing to show for his first war patrol here, but he would learn a lesson from the incident. Now he recalled Wohlfarth’s story of the impotence he felt when he had to watch the Bismarck sink with no torpedoes to use to defend her.

Peterson’s fate was not so unkind, but he would have to wait nine long months before he would get another target in his sights, for it was truly slim pickings in the Black Sea. On that night, in June of 1943, he would find and sink a 441 ton Soviet fleet minesweeper, much like this one that would now escape his grasp. It was boat 411—Zashchitnik (No. 26), and he would get it with a spread of two torpedoes, never trusting to a single shot again.

Peterson didn’t get his kill against T-492 that night, but he had unknowingly achieved much more. His inexperience, a torpedo running deep, and another a dud along with that jammed AA deck gun had all conspired to do one essential thing—they spared the life of Gennadi Orlov, though Kamkov was stone cold dead. Now none of the other NKVD guards assigned to bring Orlov to Poti knew a thing about that diplomatic pouch, or anything it might have contained.

Chapter 21

Tashkent was new to the Lend Lease run into Vladivostok that year. Built in 1914 by Maryland Steel, she was actually owned by the American Hawaiian Steamship Company for their Panama Canal Line, and licensed through the Far East State Shipping Company. In June of 1942, however, the ship had been re-flagged with the hammer and sickle and turned over to the U.S.S.R. to carry Lend-Lease shipments into Vladivostok. Amazingly, over 8,400,000 tons of food, arms trucks and planes had been delivered through open sea lanes on the Sea of Okhotsk, or flown in from Alaska, as Russia was effectively a “neutral” in the Pacific conflict of WWII. Tashkent was one of the intrepid general cargo ships bringing home the bacon.

The ship had borrowed the name from a real Russian transport ship that had been sunk in a German air attack on Fedosia on new year’s day of 1942. Now the resurrected name was quietly passed on to the American owned boat, and no one was the wiser.

That day, in September of 1942, the ship also had a curious young seaman aboard, Jimmy Davis. An Able Seaman and cargo handler, he had just finished offloading some containers to the quays of the Golden Horn Harbor, Vladivostok, when he happened to witness a very strange scene.

A man came running down Kalinina Street, crossing the old railroad tracks and hurrying toward the quay, and it was soon clear that he was being pursued by several uniformed military police. Davis heard their shrill whistles as they chased the man, and shouts to other men coming down along the rail where a line train of cars waited to receive Tashkent’s much needed stores. The man stumbled and fell, and some papers slipped from his back pocket as he struggled to his feet again. Then he was up, rushing along the quay right past Davis, his eyes wide with fear.

He stopped, breathing heavily, an anguished look on his face and stared out into the harbor. Then he put both hands to his head as though he was trying to keep his mind in one piece and retain his sanity, screaming something unintelligible Russian. There was a crack, and Davis jerked around to see that a Soviet MP had fired a pistol. The man fell to his knees, then slumped forward on the quay, unconscious as the three policemen rushed to the scene. Davis gawked at them for a while, then thought the better of sticking around, as there would likely be questions. As he was set to leave and head back up the gangway to Tashkent, his eye fell on the papers the man had lost, and he slipped behind an empty wooden cargo container to have a look. He picked it up, first thinking it might be something ferreted out by a spy. Seeing it was only a Russian, magazine he almost discarded it. Then he thought some of the Russian crewmen might like it, so he took it with him hastening back to the ship.

A day later Tashkent was well out to sea again and heading home to Seattle. The Russian crew showed great interest in the magazine, and the it widened more than one eye. Davis noted how the men would pass it from one to another, pointing at things, clearly bemused. He thought they were looking at girly photos, and kicked himself for not looking it over before he dropped it on the mess hall table. But later he saw that it was just photos of strange looking vehicles, odd devices that looked like folding metal cases with pictures on them, advertisements for products he had never seen before. He had no idea he was looking at Toyota Corollas, Dell Laptops, and other modern devices like cell phones in the ads. To him they were just curious photos, and nothing more.

The ship made a brief stop in the Aleutians on the way home, and word of the strange magazine got round to a British liaison officer, Lt. William Kemp at Dutch Harbor. The Brits had a few Nissen huts set up on the islands to listen to Japanese radio traffic and report back home. When the liaison officer saw the magazine, noted the odd map in one of the articles, and the strange dates affixed there, he asked one of the Russians to translate a few lines, then realized he had something very unusual. He gave the man a one pound note for the magazine, carefully tore out the article, and handed it back to him with a smile. Back at his desk he penned and attached a brief note: ‘Found published in Russian periodical!’ The article soon started a very long journey in a plain leather pouch that would eventually make its way to Bletchley Park.

It was the dates on the map that first caught Kemp’s eye, 13–14 September, 1942, and the Russian crewman had translated something about an operation code name “Agreement,” a raid on the German bastion at Tobruk that the British had carried out, with disastrous results. Kemp took the whole thing for some odd way of conveying intelligence in the midst of drivel. The shocker was this: the date that morning was September 7, 1942, a full week before this operation was supposedly carried out!

He got the article quickly on a signal intelligence pouch, which was flown to Seattle, and from there to New York, then Iceland, and eventually London. Now Alan Turing was looking at it with Peter Twinn in Hut 4 at Bletchley Park.

The whole thing had been translated and transcribed, and the article was very shocking, raising alarm bells all the way to Naval intelligence in Hut 8. The article was entitled: ‘British Remember Fallen in Agreement Gone Bad.’ It was about Operation Agreement, slated to run in just another day, yet here was the whole thing written up as though it had already happened…as though it were history! It clearly detailed how the British destroyers Sikh, and Zulu, with 350 Marines aboard would leave Alexandria and meet up with the AA cruiser Coventry and the 5th DD flotilla for the planned raid on Tobruk in a little over thirty-six hours.

The details in the article were astounding! It listed officers involved, and the fate of ships and men who had yet to even join this fight. More than this, it described the sad outcome of the raid: Sikh damaged by German 88s and sunk while taken under tow; Coventry hit by JU-87 Stukas and scuttled; Zulu also sunk; Haselden’s commando raid from the landward side beaten off with heavy losses, and he himself killed in that action; 576 allied prisoners taken and valuable code and cypher equipment captured by the enemy. In short, it was a disaster.

Twinn was a straight laced man, dressed in a tweed sport coat with vest and tie that day, his eyes bright above his starched white collar and a shock of brown hair falling on his right forehead as he leaned over the desk. He was a brilliant mathematician from Oxford who had been signed on to Hut 4 to train under Dilly Knox on code breaking methods—for all of five minutes before Knox told him to get started. Twinn worked with Turing on the Enigma code and was instrumental in solving the riddle. Now the two of them set their minds on solving this riddle.

“Could it be a warning?” said Twinn. “They’ve obviously gotten wind of the operation and they put this out quite plainly to scare us off.”

“But the details, Peter,” said Turing. “They’ve got the damn thing nailed down with brass tacks! Dates, times, ships involved—”

“Casualties and outcome,” Twinn put in. “That’s the giveaway. They want to tell us they’re on to us and ready to meet this operation with full force. There’s no other way to look at it.”

“Turing glanced at him for a moment, saying nothing, then his eyes darkened on the article again, complete with a map detailing the location of the planned landings, right down to the minute. It was very unnerving. It was as if they had an almost omniscient awareness of the plan.

“I can see them getting the broad strokes of this,” said Turing. “They intercept our traffic even as we do theirs. But the details? They would have to come from someone inside operations to be that specific. Could we have a mole, Peter?” There was a look of warning in Turing’s eyes now.

“Odd that it came from the Russians,” said Twinn. “Could they be trying to tip us off that the code is compromised? After all, they are our allies in this business.”

“So we’d like to believe,” said Turing. “But how did they get the information?”

“It would have to come from someone inside, just as you say, Alan. This isn’t the sort of detail you get from the occasional odd message intercept. They’ve got it all, hook, line and sinker. You may be correct. We could have a problem here. After all, they’ve just been bringing in people off the streets, chess players, artists, a whole menagerie of eclectic minds here. I was just a dizzy eyed mathematician myself, out of work and looking for an opportunity. Now here I am in the thick of it. Would it be too much of a stretch to think that someone was planted by the other side?”

“That would be rather disastrous,” said Turing. “Just like this planned raid is likely to be now. We’ll have to cable Alexandria at once, Peter. The party is off on this one. The operation must be cancelled immediately.”

They started putting their heads together to find out exactly where, or who this information could have possibly come from, though Turing harbored a deep inner misgiving over the source—Russian—another leaf fallen from the Rodina’s tree that seemed almost prescient in its prediction of an event that had not even happened.

Even as Turing thought this he suddenly recalled his long conversation with Admiral Tovey. His own words to the Admiral returned to haunt him: “If it were to be learned that one of these men on our list does something… compromising, then he becomes an enemy of fate and time as it were. If you mean to set this watch on the history, then you’ll have to be prepared to do some unpleasant things, Admiral.”

What if this article wasn’t merely an effort to inform us that this operation had been compromised, thought Turing? What if it truly was what it seemed to be—a peek into the future seen by men who had already lived through and beyond those days. By that logic Haselden, fated to die in this raid, would be made a Zombie if the party was cancelled. Turing was suddenly locked in agonizing contradiction. By saving the lives of the men slated for Operation Agreement he might now be changing all future history.

“Here’s the information,” Twinn said excitedly. “It was right here, attached to the source document in this note. Look here, it says “Found in Vladivostok Harbor.”

“Then it had to have been found by someone off a lend lease merchant ship,” said Turing definitively. It came from Kemp at Dutch Harbor. Those ships transit that route on a regular basis.”

It had come, of course, from a man named Markov, a junior rate in the engineering division assigned to the battlecruiser Kirov. It had been a magazine on the coffee table in the waiting area that Markov snatched up during his work rotation break, and slipped into the reactor test bed room at the Primorskiy Engineering Center across the bay at Vladivostok. Markov had disappeared on that same day, in the year 2021, and appeared, strangely, in the same location, but seventy-nine years in the past. The space he had occupied was the living room of a private home, and when Marta Vayatin walked in and saw Markov sitting on one of two chairs with an expression of utter shock on his face, she ran screaming out of the house, raising a ruckus and setting the police hastening to the scene.

Poor Markov eventually came to his senses, and ran out as well, immediately seeing that he was, indeed, in Vladivostok and looking out on the Golden Horn Bay, but everything looked completely different! The city was much smaller. Most of the new high-rise apartment buildings were gone! It had a sallow, grey look to it, and there was virtually no traffic to be seen on the major roadways. In fact, many of the streets were dirt and gravel tracks wending their way through old weathered housing blocks. He ran, as fast as his legs would take him, down the muddied hillside roads toward the harbor quays below, instinctively hoping to find Kirov berthed quietly there as before, a rat coming home to the ship. The rest was now history—a very personal end to Markov’s place in that story when he died of both shock and a gunshot wound on the cold concrete quay of the Golden Horn Harbor.

Turing took a long breath, realizing he had to make a very important decision now. What to do about this raid on Tobruk?

“I need to make a phone call, Peter. Hold off on this for the moment, will you?” He walked solemnly out of the room to a secure area, thinking deeply as he went. Some minutes later he returned, still troubled, but with more sense of direction. He had called Admiral Tovey to discuss the matter. “The question is this,” he had told him plainly. “Either we save these men and ships and hope that works to the good, or we send them in as planned and then see what happens. If the results mirror the account we have in hand with this document, why…then we’ve got another problem, Admiral. It would have to mean that someone was alive, in the here and now, perhaps at Vladivostok, and with knowledge of our future.”

“Damn maddening,” said Tovey. There was a long pause before he spoke again. “You warned me about this, Professor, but I don’t think I want to look into Pandora’s jar just yet. We can deduce what you say without having to sacrifice 576 men and three ships for the information. Nobody knew the full details of that mission. You know very well that the target, force composition, and time of attack are all kept in three separate heads and they only come together for the final officer’s briefing at the eleventh hour. And I can tell you one other thing. The final force composition has not even been fixed yet. I spoke with Cairo on this yesterday. It was only just suggested that we take the AA cruiser Coventry off guardship duty in the Suez and add it to this mission, and this report you speak of had to have been written weeks ago if it came all the way from Vladivostok. How could it name that ship? No. I can’t send these men in there now knowing that this intelligence report exists on the matter. Cancel the raid, and then I think we’ll have to put all these men on our list, but I’d rather have them there alive and not dead on the coast of North Africa. We’ll talk again soon.” The Watch had made its first life or death choice. It would not be the last.

Yet that was not the only effect the coffee table magazine would end up having. Seventy-nine years later, Anton Fedorov was aboard Kirov after a long shift making rounds to get the vessel seaworthy again. He took a brief meal in the officer’s dining room, quietly alone with his Chronology Of The Naval War At Sea. He had been reading from the volume he had found here in a local book store, comparing it to his own copy, which he still kept close at hand. Whenever he came to a passage that differed, he would highlight it with a yellow marker.

Yesterday he had been reading about events in September of 1942 to see if Kirov’s recent sojourn in the Pacific had any immediate ramifications and to find out what may have been written about it. Now his brow was furrowed, eyes worried, and an odd expression hung on his face. He looked around, like a man who had lost something, or forgotten his watch, or wallet. Then he quickly turned pages in the new volume he had bought recently, his finger working its way down the long, narrow columns of text.

It was gone! Where was it? He had read about it just the other day, and now it wasn’t there. The passage describing the operation was entirely missing! Checking carefully, he looked to see if any of the pages were missing from the book, finding nothing amiss. Yet he clearly remembered reading about the British raid on Tobruk that was supposed to happen mid-month in September of 1942. It was no longer there.

He shifted quickly to his own older volume and, sure enough, there was the passage. Could he have mixed up the two books and read it there yesterday? No, he thought decisively. He could clearly remember taking a yellow highlighter and marking off lines at the top and bottom of the two paragraph entry in the newer volume to remind himself to double check it with a second source, and there were no such marks in his old book.

“What in God’s name…?”

Something had changed. His mind was a sudden whirl of possibilities as he struggled to understand what he had just discovered. Something had just changed the history again! The alteration had been so final that it even affected the new volume he had purchased, and the thought occurred to him that he might now go to every such book published and find the same text missing there from page 164. But yet his own volume, the one that had traveled with Kirov, remained completely unaltered.

Physical changes! The impact of his conclusion struck him like a hammer. Physical changes! Something had altered the history and the consequences extended to these real and tangible objects, winking out of existence for the barest fraction of a quantum second, and then winking back to the here and now again, but different, subtly changed, altered by something that had happened in the past. It was astounding! The form and appearance of the whole seemed unchanged, but the devil was in the details…Was his book spared because it had come from another world, another complete version of the universe itself? It was mind-boggling!

Then he thought about the hours he had spent talking with Karpov and Volsky about their strange dilemma. They had worried about Orlov, fretted that he would wreak havoc on the history if he indeed survived. But Fedorov had come to the conclusion that whatever Orlov had done, it was now a finished and permanent new fact. Surely the man was dead long ago, and his legacy would have hardened like concrete in the matrix of time and life. The history would have calcified again and it could be read, if he could simply do the research on information he might find here in this new world.

But the discovery that Operation Agreement had suddenly been stricken from the rolls of time, and that the volume where he read it had physically changed to reflect that, had shaken him severely. Now he realized what had happened to the records of those thirty-six dead men in Moscow’s archives. Dead men tell no tales…and now he knew his guess had been correct—these men had never been born. Time found a way to neatly expunge them from her ledgers, and then every last trace of their existence had quietly vanished as well!

Another thought struck him, even more unsettling as he realized it. The book had changed, and yet he still remembered the old passage. He recalled himself reading and highlighting the text as easily as he might summon up a memory of that last confrontation between Karpov and Kapustin in the sick bay. If something as solid and tangible as this book could change on a whim of fate, then why could he still remember the old text? It was most disturbing. And if a book could be edited by the hand of fate overnight, then might people also simply disappear—vanish from one moment to the next, as if they had never been there?

Then he remembered the two missing names on the duty rosters that morning. All hands were present and accounted for except two—Yolkin and Markov. They were gone and listed as AWOL. Yolkin had been in the city picking up supplies for the quartermaster, and Martinov had complained that he had not returned. Markov was over at the Primorskiy Engineering Center, but reported missing, though Fedorov had not learned the details of that incident. Then his train of thought was suddenly derailed by footsteps in the hallway outside the dining room, and the door swung open.

“There you are, Captain. I’ve been needing to speak with you. The Admiral has gone up to Naval Headquarters at Fokino and something very odd has just happened.”

It was Chief Engineer Dobrynin.