Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,5

newfound freedom. Occasionally he would meet other Eastern Europeans there, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and some even spoke his mother tongue, Russian. This was not unusual, for neutral Spain had attracted more than its fair share of wandering souls in the region, men tired of the war, or running from it, lost men of the world that no one would miss or give a second thought to.

One night Orlov met another man who spoke Russian, Ivan Petrovich Rybakov, who worked the coal room on a steamer that had called in the port that morning. The two got on immediately, trading talk of women and wine, drinking together and eventually getting drunk enough to irritate the bar keep, who called the authorities to see if he could have the boisterous men removed.

Two men from the local Guardia Civil showed up some time later, and got a little too pushy with a man accustomed to always doing the pushing himself. The guards were armed with batons, and knew how to use them, but Orlov was in no mood to be prodded an poked by a couple of scrawny Spaniards with an attitude, and he let them know as much, albeit in Russian. The guards heard enough to realize they had trouble on their hands, but they foolishly thought their uniforms, batons, and the insignia on their caps would decide the matter.

They were very wrong.

Orlov exploded, taking one man’s baton away from him and quickly breaking his nose with it. When the other guard joined the fray he ended up with a broken arm, and within minutes the big Chief had laid out both guards stone cold on the smelly sallow straw of the bar room floor.

Rybakov’s eyes widened when he saw how easily Orlov had put the men down, but realized that this was going to cause a lot of trouble, and fairly quickly. Several other patrons had already slipped out the door, and the bar keep was already on the phone again, his face ashen when he saw the fracas and watched Orlov break a chair over one guard’s back to fell the man.

“Come on, my friend,” Rybakov hissed. “Let’s get out of here while we can. I know a place!”

Orlov put his boot into a prone guard’s belly, picked up his beer to finish it off, and then put his big arm around Rybakov and shuffled out into the darkened streets of Cartagena. He had planned on finding a good whorehouse that night, but his new found friend convinced him that would be most unwise.

“Come with me, comrade,” he whispered. “We need to get off the streets for a while. You handled those two mice easily enough, but there are a lot more where they came from.”

“Bother me and they’ll get the same treatment,” Orlov slurred.

“I believe it, my friend, but not tonight. The Guardia Civil will soon be searching every other bar and whorehouse in the port district, but I have just the perfect place we can go. No one will find us there.”

Rybakov lead the way down a dark alley and out along the wharf to where an old rusting steamer was tied off on a long wooden pier. The two men slipped aboard, two shadows, laughing as they went, and the Guardia Civil would not find them that night. They worked their way into the guts of the ship, a tramp steamer out of Cadiz that was pressed into some very risky service at times. Now it was on a voyage from Barcelona, stopping in Valencia and Cartagena to pick up cargo, and bound for Ceuta on the Algerian coast near Gibraltar, before heading for Cadiz on the Atlantic coast.

“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.