Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,94

tramp deck hand. So he donned a warmer leather jacket from one of the NKVD guards over his own lighter computer jacket, and also took a good sheep’s wool Ushanka with hammer and sickle badge indicating he was now a captain in the NKVD. It kept people away from him, and meant he would not be asked too many questions.

He was quick to the train station, his pockets filled with rubles taken from the guards, and soon on his way, east through the dark night of Georgia and on into Azerbaijan. He rode the train all the way through Tblisi, breathing deeply and smelling the scent of home there. His grandmother had a farm in Azerbaijan, and some inner compass yearning for home was leading him there like a salmon swimming upstream to find its spawning ground.

The route took him south to Yevlakh, past the tall ice and snow covered peaks of the Caucasus Mountains. There he saw high Mount Elbrus, where the German mountain troops had climbed to the summit to surprise Hitler by planting the Nazi flag atop Europe's highest peak just a few weeks earlier. The Fuehrer was not amused. In fact he exploded with rage when he learned of the incident, for his mind had been set on securing the vital ports along the Black Sea coast so that his navy there could gain control and move supplies from the Crimea.

Hitler ranted for some time, exclaiming that: “Those crazy mountain climbers belong before a court-martial!” He viewed their feat as mere grandstanding, and of no military value whatsoever, and he was correct. Yet the loss of twenty-three men detached of mountain troops for a photo opportunity that had backfired on them did little to slow the German advance north of the jagged snow covered peaks. Hoth was making very good progress with his fast motorized divisions, and soon news that he had enveloped Grozny and unhinged the Russian defense along the Terek River line brought a smile to the Fuehrer’s weary face.

There, well south of the Caucasus mountains where the German Operation Edelweiss was reaching its high water mark, Orlov left the train behind to head up into the foothills for his grandmother’s old farm. He slipped away into the countryside, traveling mostly by night, sleeping mostly by day and haunting small hamlets for food, water and shelter. Occasionally he would make his way into a town for better fare, or a woman if one caught his eye. And yes, there was always a need for a good drink and some idle chat with a bar fellow when he could find one. Money was never a problem. When he expended his cash from the guards, he simply took more from any unsuspecting drifter he encountered on the road.

In time he found himself up in the southern foothills of the mountains in Azerbaijan and slowly made his way northwest of Baku. He thought he would visit his grandmother first, quietly, hoping to find and watch her from the shadows, for she would just be a young woman of eighteen years. In fact, she would not meet his grandfather for some years yet, and Orlov spent more than one long night staring up at the stars and wondering whether they might both survive the war. What would happen to him if his grandfather got swept away into the chaos at Stalingrad and a stray bullet took his life? Orlov's own father had not been born to the couple until 1957. If either his grandmother or grandfather died this time around would he simply vanish, just as the ship had vanished, and drift away like a vapor on the mist of time?

So the powerful magnetic draw of the old farm pulled at him for more than one reason. He remembered being taken there often by his father as a young boy, and the smell of the tall green grass, crops growing in the fields, the cows and chickens all spoke to him of home. Yet on another level he wanted to make sure that his grandmother was still there, still alive, before she eventually went north as he had been told, to a very hard life and more than one moment of pain and sorrow.

When he was much older, his grandfather once told the story of how his dear wife to be had been mishandled badly on that long road north. When he finally did find his grandmother's farm, he was too late. The young woman was gone, already