Men of War (2013) Read Free Page A

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 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