Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,4

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.

Part I

Orlov

“In this, our age of infamy, Man's choice is but to be a tyrant, traitor, prisoner:

No other choice has he.”

—Aleksandr Pushkin

Chapter 1

Orlov knew 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