Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,17

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