Men of War (2013) (5 page)

He
had come to suspect that Orlov was probably in some intelligence arm or
another. Spain had a way of drawing these sorts like maggots on meat as the war
now entered its fifth year. The British SIS had men there, as did the Abwehr,
the French underground, the Vichy French, the Italians, and there was still an
odd mix of shadowy groups in Spain itself, a remnant of their recent civil war.
It would not surprise him to learn that this Orlov was a Russian spy, and with
that thought in mind he decided to hold these men in a locked room below decks,
and have them sent over to British intelligence in Gibraltar. As soon as they
made port, he would make a call once they tied off in the harbor, and have a
squad sent over to pick the men up. He would let them know that Orlov was
clearly not what he professed to be. Let the boys at MI6 have a look at them,
he thought. I’ve enough on my plate as it stands.

* * *

Gibraltar
was more than a vital harbor and airfield for the British it was their gateway
to the Med itself, and one of the most vital bases in all the empire. Often
thought impregnable, the ‘Rock’ was a source of constant anxiety to the
British, who feared that any concerted attack might capture it in spite of all
defensive measures. There were three major Spanish artillery batteries in
range, one in North Africa at Mount
Hacho
, two others
within five miles of the port near
Algiceras
. Over
30,000 Spanish troops were nearby on the mainland of Spain, and the British
feared these could be reinforced by German troops to present an unstoppable
siege force against the 15,000 men that could be garrisoned on the Rock.

A
bastion of British Sea power for centuries, Gibraltar was the home of Force H
under Admiral Somerville, and a nest for the British Special Intelligence
Service, there to defend the vital base from saboteurs of every stripe. The
Italians had been trying to bomb the place for years, and the night sky was
often pierced by the long cold white fingers of search lights during the air
raids. By day the RAF kept a watch on the Rock and discouraged such
visitations, but the enemy tired to subvert operations there by other means as
well.

Italian
frogmen from the
Decima
Flottiglia
MAS
mounted many operations against the harbor, secretly working out of a
private estate at Villa Carmela about three kilometers up the Spanish coast,
and then from the Italian tanker
SS
Olterra
.
They managed to get at a few merchant ships, but did little other harm, though
their presence was also suspected as a means of infiltrating agents and
saboteurs into Gibraltar.

To
improve the defenses, a warren of tunnels and caves, were drilled into the
limestone. Deep beneath the Rock itself was an entire city in a series of
tunnels and caves bored out by British and Canadian engineers with diamond
tipped drills. It had its own power station, hospitals, troop barracks, and
water and food supplies capable of supporting up to 30,000 troops. In fact, the
Rock had more miles of tunnels underground than it had roads above.

It
was into one of these long, labyrinthine tunnels that Orlov and Rybakov were
taken, to a hidden bunker operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service,
MI6. They, too, had a very long look at the pistol Orlov had been carrying, and
a lot of questions for him after they managed to locate a man from the Russian
liaison in the MIL(R) section and get him in as a translator. It was not long
before they called in men from other branches of their intelligence services,
Defense, the Technical Group at MI10, Military Security, Eastern European
Experts from MI3.

Orlov’s
story was not adding up. His weapon was most unusual, and the peculiar scope it
mounted soon astounded them when it emitted a thin, narrow beam of greenish
light the like of which they had never seen. MI6 had more than a drawer full of
its own gadgets: watches, rings, key chains, tie clips, special shoes, but this
one trumped them all. Orlov’s explanation that it was simply a flash light did
not wash. It only deepened their suspicions about this man and his pistol.

Intelligence
services had been more than interested in anything Russian in the waters around
Gibraltar ever since the remarkable “incident” involving a strange warship that
had set the whole Royal Navy charging to the scene the previous August. There
had been a battle off the southern coast of Spain involving the battleships
Rodney
and
Nelson
in the covering force for Operation Pedestal, and it was now
classified information, and very hush, hush. The scuttlebutt had been that a
disaffected sea captain had sailed the battlecruiser
Strausbourg
from
Toulon to try and put some steel in the backbone of Vichy French forces prior
to the Torch landings in North Africa. But there were few men of any experience
who could believe that single ship could have put damage on both British
battleships as it obviously did, and even fewer men in MI6 who bought the
story—until they were told in no uncertain terms that that is exactly the line
they were to hold to on the matter.

Rumors
were that the ship was not French after all, but Russian, and an Able Seaman
who claimed he had been present for a meeting between the Admiral of the rogue
ship and Admiral John Tovey was suddenly reported missing one day. No more was
said about the incident.

The
ship, whatever it was, had been “escorted” to St. Helena for the duration of
the war. That was another official line, though strange rumors had begun to
circulate about it as well. When the veteran diver Lt. Commander Lionel Crabb
had been summarily called to special duty and sent out to St. Helena, the
rumors gathered even more steam.

Crabb,
called simply “Buster” by the Americans on the Rock, was an amiable and
experienced diver who had been instrumental in countering the efforts of
Italian frogmen against ships in the harbor. He made regular dives to check for
the placement of limpet mines on ships, winning him a George Medal and a
promotion for his work. Now the Admiralty wanted him to take a good long look
at the seabed around St. Helena, where it was rumored the mysterious ship had
vanished in a bank of fog in late August, just as it arrived under escort by a
pair of fast cruisers. He found nothing at all, not the slightest trace of any
wreckage of disturbance of the sea bed, though that report was buried and Crabb
was told never to speak a word of it.

He
obeyed that order for years until he let slip in a bar one night in 1956 that
there had been nothing on the seabed off St. Helena even remotely resembling
the wreckage of a ship. Days later Crabb would disappear while again diving to
investigate the propeller assembly of another Soviet ship, the cruiser
Ordzhonikidze
that transported Nikita Khrushchev on a diplomatic mission to the UK.

So
matters ‘Russian’ were suddenly given a special sensitivity in MI6,
particularly at a vital base like Gibraltar. Orlov’s strange appearance
immediately got the attention of a good many branches of the intelligence
service, and he was soon locked away in a cave, deep below the Rock.

Rybakov
was vetted easily enough, a fish that was quickly cast back into the sea of
drifters and vagrants on the Spanish coast. For Orlov, however, it was the
beginning of a long and difficult series of interrogations, and it was not long
before word of this strange Russian prisoner, a supposed ally that the Soviet
authorities seemed to have no record of, got round to Bletchley Park.

Chapter 3

Lieutenant
Thomas Loban leaned back in his chair, regarding the man before him with
concentrated attention. ‘Orlov,’ he thought. It meant ‘Son of
Oryol
,’ the eagle. So where has this one flown in from, I
wonder?

Loban
was a five year veteran of MI6, the son of a wealthy businessman who had
married into equal wealth in the UK after the First World War. His mother was
Elena Chase, landed old money from Cambridge, and she made sure her son had a
good education, seeing him graduate with honors at the university there and
then enter the Special Air Service soon after to ripen up and see a bit of the
empire, and the world it spanned. He was eager to serve, quick minded, and with
a sharp eye for details that soon saw him at a post in the intelligence arm
where his bilingual skills had proved most useful.

Touring
Eastern Europe with his father as a youth, he had a good sense of the culture,
finding it much more to his liking than the stuffy class ridden British
society, and he often spent long summers abroad in Belarus, Ukraine and
eventually Moscow, where his father still had offices trying to manage his
mining business. Loban made quite a few contacts there, and more than a few in
some very dark corners of that city. When the second war came, he was home
visiting his mother, and quickly posted to the Foreign Service Desk where he
soon finagled a position at Gibraltar. He had seen the place on tour with his
family as a younger man, and always yearned to return. Now the dusky
underground tunnel complex beneath the Rock was not quite what he had in mind
all along, but he spent most of his time above ground at the signals desk,
reading and translating reports coming in from the Eastern Front to help the
service paint a good picture of what was going on there.

MI6
did not assign military ranks to its agents, but he kept his SAS rank when he
signed on for the duty, and his mates were fond of calling him “the
Lieutenant.”

This
assignment was something new, a break in his usual routine, and he found it
somewhat interesting. A man had been picked up on a Spanish steamer that struck
a mine in the western approaches. There was nothing all that peculiar about
that, but the more he looked at this man, the more he came to feel that fate
and chance had delivered a very interesting catch to the dragnets of MI6 this
time around, a very interesting catch indeed.

“Let
me sum this up, if you will, Mister Orlov,” he said in perfect Russian. “You
were on a steamer out of Istanbul from the Black Sea, and all the way through
the Med to Cadiz, and yet you cannot name the ship?”

“I
was there for work,” said Orlov. “Who cares what they call the ship? I wanted
passage west and it seemed the only way I was going to get here.”

“You
don’t like your homeland?”

“Mother
Russia?” Orlov gave him a wry smile. “Every son of the east loves the Rodina,
eh? I just had no love for their stinking war, that’s all.”

“You
were in the service there?”

“Everyone
was in the service, and I was no exception.”

“Then
you are a deserter.”

“If
you wish. But I was a very clever one. Most end up dead, or roped into the work
crews, or fodder for the NKVD. I got smart before things got too bad, and I got
out. What of it?”

“What
of it? Well they shoot deserters these days, at least that’s what I hear,
Mister Orlov, and I hear a great deal.”

Orlov
simply folded his arms, cocking his head to one side, unimpressed. “So shoot
me,” he said coolly. “You working for Josef Stalin these days too?”

Loban
smiled at that, then changed the subject. “So you were in the military. Where?
What unit?”

Orlov
had to think fast now, and it had to be convincing, yet he knew what he was
going to say. It was only a matter of fetching the details, because something
told him this man would not be satisfied with the broad strokes. He was going
to want details, and Orlov labored to recall those long hours on the knee of
his grandfather, listening to the old man telling him stories of the war, of
the siege of Sevastopol, and how he made it out on a steamer before the Germans
closed their ring of steel around the city, slipping down to Novorossiysk. The
poor man ended up in Stalingrad.

“Russian
Navy,” Orlov said with conviction this time. “Merchant Marine.
Ukraina
was the ship, though I wasn’t on it too
long. The Germans got to it in Novorossiysk and I was beached. The rumors came
down that they were going to roll us all into the army, and I wanted none of
that. So I took a leave of absence.” Again the smile covering the obvious
admission of the crime of desertion.

Loban
made a note to check on the ship, but he would soon find the story would pan
out.
Ukraina
was indeed a passenger and cargo
ship operated by the Black Sea State Shipping Company. The Germans got it with
Stukas in the harbor as they closed in on the port at Novorossiysk. Orlov had
never been on it, but his grandfather had, and he told his grandson all about
it, many, many times.

“Your
Captain? What was his name?”

“Polovko,”
Orlov replied easily. His grandfather had talked about the man endlessly.
Polovko said this…Polovko did that… Polovko had a great big sea chest where he
kept his vodka and tobacco, and his grandfather had found in him a ready source
of comfort. ‘Always find your Polovokos in this life, Gennadi,’ the old man had
told him many times. ‘Blat and babki get you only so far. The
Povlovkos
do the rest.’ Orlov listened well.

“So
the Germans sunk this ship of yours, and you deserted to avoid conscription
into the army. Is that right?”

“Correct.
I’m navy. I’m a sailing man. I wasn’t going to stick around and end up in
Stalingrad like all the rest.”

“Stalingrad?
Well it looks like the Germans are making a big push for that place now. Your
countrymen are having a rough time there.”

“Sorry
to hear it,” said Orlov. “The Germans will lose, of course, and it won’t be the
first time we kick their behinds. We’ll get Rostov back soon. Kharkov too.”
Orlov had listened to the earbuds tell their tale while he was on the
Duero
,
lazing away an hour on break and thinking he might fill in his knowledge of
what was happening in the world that month. All he had to do was squeeze the
button on his jacket collar or right earbud and then ask his question. The
Portable Wiki would respond like a good short order cook, serving up any
segment of the history he desired. He had learned that this was, indeed, the
month the Germans launched their offensive aimed at Stalingrad, but they would
lose that great battle, and all those other cities as well when the Russian
winter counterattack reached its high water mark before the spring thaw began to
set in. Then there would be the careful consolidation of the line until the
great summer battle of Kursk.