Men of War (2013) Read Free

Maritime Self
Defense Force in the late 1990s. In an odd echo of the history they had just
lived, Kirov would soon come to hear the name of ship that had hunted
them, pursuing them through the long nights as they struggled to find safe
waters in a sea of war. DDG Kirishima wasnow fated to have a
major part to play in the war that was still looming.
    Men
no longer stood the watch from a high pagoda tower on this new ship. Instead
they huddled below decks their eyes fixed on the glowing screens of their
advanced Aegis Fire Control System. The big 14 inch guns of its distant
ancestor had been forsaken for deadly new Harpoon missiles. The AA guns
that once bristled from the superstructure of the old ship were now SM-2MR
Block IV radar homing SAMs. Yet one thing remained the same, the destroyer was
a ship of war pledged to bring her wrath and fire to any who might threaten or
oppose the interests of her nation on the high seas. The forms and shapes of the
ships 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 joinedthe navy would now
serve him very well, for he knew when to speak, and when to keep