Men of War (2013) (35 page)

Sutherland
saw him turn and fired again at something on his left, then he moved as fast as
his feet would take him, running the opposite direction, down the long nine of
trucks that were all suddenly moving, their engines thrumming, wheels spinning
madly in the dirt as the drivers gunned the big engines. The whole column was working
its way back on to the road, and as Sutherland approached he could hear the
screams of women and children.

Damn,
he thought. The man was nowhere in sight, nor was there any sign of the bloody
NKVD men. He heard the renewed firing of Sergeant Terry’s Bren, and now he
looked to see what appeared to be a full company of brown uniformed infantry
running from the edge of the town, up this very road, and across a wide field
to positions at the edge of the Terek river.

Haselden
saw the men coming, heard the crack of small arms fire, the bullets whizzing
by, but he had not seen what Sutherland knew. He was bravely providing cover
fire in the hope that Sutherland could get to their man, but it was a hopeless
cause. Just as he realized that the Russians were about to make a final rush at
his position, he fired one last sharp burst from his STEN and then fell back,
reaching into his breast pocket for a command whistle.

Haselden blew three shrill notes, the signal to fall back
to the secondary position they had scouted and prepared earlier by an old barn.
He knew he had to get quickly back to a position where he could cover Sergeant
Terry’s withdrawal with the heavier weapons and he raced to a low stand of
grapevines at the edge of the vineyard that had once filled the warehouse with
barrels of wine. That was in a better day, and the long, regular rows of vines
had not been properly pruned or well cultivated this year when the war came
south. Yet they were enough to give him a little cover, and he laid down a base
of fire, seeing Sutherland dashing into the same plantation off to his right.

Terry made a skillful withdrawal, and the chaos of the
German attack now commanded the full attention of the Russians. The three men
eventually fell back along a stream bed that wound its way around the north
fringe of the vineyard and made a breathless rendezvous behind an old weathered
barn.

“Bloody hell,” said Haselden. “Anyone hit?”

The others were winded, but unharmed. Sutherland eyed his
right shoulder where a bullet had just nicked his jacket. “Now what?” he
breathed heavily.

They could see the line of ten trucks hurrying down the
road to the north leaving a wake of dust behind them. Then, to their great
surprise, the column stopped briefly, and a moment later the lead truck turned
right onto a secondary road heading east off the main track. One by one the ten
trucks followed, the last of them stopping and disgorging a fist full of dark
coated NKVD men in black Ushankas who fanned out and went to ground. They were
soon firing at something to their north and Haselden snapped up his field
glasses to get a better look.

“Germans!” he rasped. “Three bloody armored cars and
infantry. The road north is cut mates! Sutherland—your map! Where does that
east track lead?”

Sutherland was quick to his breast pocket and had the
wrinkled map open in a heartbeat. “Christ! That’s our road. Remember we worked
our way well south off the road as we approached the city. But that’s it,
Captain. Look, it works its way up round this wine country and then picks up
the main road east to the coast.”

“Then they’re trapped?”

“No, look here, sir. They can take this track and get round
the marshland here to head south. It will take them right on down to
Makhachkala again, and from there south to Baku if they have a mind.”

“Well, the Queen’s luck is with us today, lads. We need to
get this man before he ends up dead. He won’t be much good to us then.”

“Dead men tell no tales.”

“Right you are, Sutherland.”

Haselden squinted at the map then pointed with a dirty
finger. “Here,” he said definitively. “We can work our way through these
vineyards and then follow the north bank of this river heading east. That’s
bound to be bad ground out near those marshes, and slow going even for those
trucks. So if we move quickly we just might be able to get to this bridge
before they do.”

“That’s got to be forty kilometers!” Sutherland had a weary
look on his face.

“No, a bit more like fifty, so we’ll need a vehicle. If we
find anything with wheels that runs we can take this road and cut them off… at
Kazgan
. It’s our only play.”

“Let’s get to it, sir.” Sergeant Terry was already up and
shouldering the PIAT. They had a long road east ahead of them through some very
tough country, but the mission was still on.

Chapter 27

Karpov
stared at the page Fedorov handed him, still reading, a look of shock and
amazement on his face.

“Fedorov,
are you reading this? Are you listening? I know you must have spent many long
nights in your search. Well here I am! Yes, Gennadi Orlov, the Chief, the one
who bruised your cheek that day in the officer’s mess. Here I am at Kizlyar,
out here in the middle of nowhere, and back on a truck for Baku. I came to find
my grandmother, and to see her in all her innocence and youth before she went
north and Commissar Molla put his hands on her, but I was too late. I will find
him soon enough, and kill him before he ever gets the chance to set his eyes on
her again, but we ran into some trouble. The Germans!
Sookin
syn
!

I’m
with Beria’s men, and I don’t think they like my story, or the NKVD badge on my
hat. They couldn’t find me in their book of names. So they gave me an
interesting choice—either to die as a deserter or return to the work crews at
Baku. I chose the latter, and the Germans sent us on our way.
Svoloch
! Something tells me I’m headed for a good long stay
in
Bayil
. I always did have a Bolshevik heart. It’s
not that I am not afraid to die. I worked my ass off in the service because I
love my people, my country, my Motherland. I want to tell my comrades in arms
that I have never known cowardice or panic. I left you all to find a life here
on my own, and one I never could have before. I do not know what may have
happened to you and the ship and crew I once served. My dying wish is that you
destroy our enemies once and for all. Be heroes, be valiant men of war so that
history will remember you as defenders of the Rodina. Should you ever find
this, and learn my fate, I hope that you, courageous Russian sailors, will
avenge my death.”

—Gennadi
Orlov, 30 September, 1942

Karpov folded the paper solemnly, slowly handing
it back to Fedorov. “So Orlov finally found his backbone.”

 “I
found references to that action at Kizlyar, but it wasn’t in our history. Books
we might find here today record that the German Sixteenth Motorized Division
pushed elements of its reconnaissance battalion toward Kizlyar in late
September, 1942. They were after the oil in Baku, of course, but they got
stopped—not only there, but elsewhere along the line of the Terek. The action
seemed to be thought of as particularly important. It prevented a wide general
envelopment of the Terek river line defenses.”

“So
they send him off to Baku.
Where did you
find this letter?”

“The
letter? It took a lot of digging, but it turned up on an obscure web site. A
fellow named
Smerdlov
was publishing the last letters
from Soviet men and women who died in the war, both on the front and in the
prisons and camps. He called it ‘Letters from the Dead.’

“Then
this is Orlov’s last letter? It’s over? You mean to say he is already dead?”

“It’s
2021, of course he’s dead. But he was alive at the time he wrote that, in 1942.
It could be that Orlov wrote this later in a diary at the work camp, or even in
Bayil
—that’s the infamous prison on the  south
bay of the city there, sometimes called
Bailkovka
.
Tens of thousands were shipped off to Siberia during that damn war, but the
prison was full in
Bayil
just the same. It was a
miserable place. Did you know that Stalin even served time there in 1908? Poor
Orlov…Maybe he died there, maybe not. There’s a lot we still don’t know.”

“Well
if he’s dead then Orlov can’t change anything.”

“Think
again, Captain. He’s
already
changed things. The result is what we see
outside—the headlines being written for the newscast tonight. This war is
coming, as sure as night follows day. The Admiral has been haggling with
Moscow, but they’re taking a hard line there, or so I have heard. Here we sit,
getting the ship ready for battle again, and if we thought we had trouble
before, this fight is going to be the real hell. Did Orlov cause all this? Did
we? Or was it meant to happen in any case. We can’t know any of that for sure,
but Orlov changed something, just as we did, just as Markov did. There are
cracks in the mirror, and before long we won’t be able to see ourselves there
any longer. We’ve got to do something about this.”

“Something
tells me you have a plan.”

“Look
at the date on that letter, Captain. The one thing we do know for sure now is
Orlov’s location at a given point in time. He’s at Kizlyar on the 30 September,
1942. He says he was on a truck to Baku, so we have a good fix on his
whereabouts.”

“But
it isn’t 1942, Fedorov. We’re here in the year 2021!”

“At
the moment….” He let that hang there, the implications of what he was saying
obvious to them both. But Karpov pushed on that half open door just the same,
and heard it squeak with an ominous sound.

“What
are you suggesting?”

“You
asked what can we do about it.” Fedorov closed his book with a hard thump.
“Yes, we can still change things, Captain. We can go and get the man, that’s
what we can do. We can find Orlov and bring him back where he belongs—him and
that damn computer jacket he took with him. That’s the real threat now and we
have the power to change things with Rod-25. And we need to get to him before
he ends up in
Bayil
.”

“My
God, Fedorov, your suggesting we pull that hat trick again? With the ship?”

“I
have an idea…”

Karpov
shook his head, somewhat exasperated. Here he was trying to pull the ship and
crew together for imminent war, and now his first officer comes to him with
this! Yet even as he thought this he heard the voice of Admiral Volsky in his
head:
“And one more thing…Fedorov…Listen to him, Captain. Listen to him. He
is Starpom this time around and you have the ship, but don’t forget those
moments on the bridge when that situation was reversed. Become the same mind
and heart together that saw us safely home. Do what you must, but we both know
that there is something much greater than the fate of the ship at stake now,
something much bigger than our own lives. We are the only ones who know what is
coming, Karpov, and fate will never forgive us if we fail her this time.”
He
could at least listen to what Fedorov was saying. He owed him that much.

“Alright,
Fedorov, out with it. What crazy idea do you have this time?”

“There
are two ways we can try this,” Fedorov began, somewhat excitedly. “One way is
to use the ship as before. We would have to get Rod-25 back and mount it as the
maintenance control rod.”

“Then
what?” Karpov would be the devil’s advocate. The grave situation they were
facing demanded it, but he would listen nonetheless. “Do we just sail out and
vanish again?”

“Something
like that,” said Fedorov. “I was thinking we get up into the Sea of Okhotsk, or
in the gulf west of Sakhalin Island south of the Tartar Strait. We’d be less
visible there. The fog is thick as pea soup. Then we put men ashore and travel
to Kizlyar.”

“Who
are you talking about?”

“I’ll
go. And I was thinking of asking Troyak and some of the Marines—volunteers.”

 “A
rescue operation, eh? That’s a thousand miles from the coast. None of our helos
could even fly that far, let alone back again.”

“We
go by the Siberian rail.”

“Then
you get there and do what? Ask around for Orlov? The place would be crawling
with NKVD. And what about the Germans? Meanwhile what do the rest of us do? We
just sit there in the ship off Sakhalin Island, waiting while all hell breaks
loose here with this war? This is madness, Fedorov. And when they learn
Kirov
sailed and disappeared again, what will they think? I’ll tell you as much.
They’ll think a big fat American submarine ripped open our belly and put us at
the bottom of the sea, that’s what. Only they won’t have time to look for us,
because the missiles will be flying. The nation needs this ship desperately now
if it does come to war. All eyes will be on us if we sail again, and the hope
of the nation. Have you considered that?”

“I
have…Not that I relish the prospect of
Kirov
going to war again. All
we’ll do is push the world a little closer to the abyss if we do that, and you
and I both know that this ship has a lot of muscle left, wounded or not. If we
push, we push hard.”

“I
understand what you are saying, but consider the men, they’ve been through
hell. We can’t ask them to do this again. If we have to fight here, that’s one
thing. The men will understand that. It’s why they signed onto the navy in the
first place.”

Fedorov
shrugged. “Alright, then there’s another way. We leave Rod-25 where it is and
go back from the Primorskiy Engineering Center…Just like Markov…”