the ship, or if pug faced Nikolin had ever heard the message he tapped out in Morse one night after breaking into a telegraph station while drunk in Cartagena. Nikolin, Nikolin, Nikolin…you lose.
It was his last, plaintive good-bye to the life he once knew. Yes, they were all a bunch of losers in his mind now. Let them all go to hell. They could have their ship and its private war, he had something else, and it was going to make him the most powerful man in the world. Yes, Orlov was not educated, but he wasn’t stupid either. He knew that he could never learn the things Fedorov had in his head, the dates, times, and dimensions of the world ahead. But Kirov’s library had a lot of very useful information in it, and Orlov was smart enough to download a good bit of it into the computer built right in to his flight jacket, which he still wore.
The touch screen devices of the early 21st century had revolutionized the world of computing, and ushered in what came to be called the “era of personal computing in the post-PC world.” Everyone had cell phones, touch pads and they carried them virtually everywhere they went. Their only liability was the short battery life, which forced them to always be plugged in and recharged on a regular basis. Then an enterprising man came up with a new idea, that we no longer needed fingers to poke at glass screens to do our computing, we could go one step further and simply use our voices.
Computers soon became part of common clothing and other personal items like eyewear and jewelry. Orlov had a clever system where the flexible and highly durable circuitry was built right into the lining of his flight jacket within a watertight Polyflex container, and the outer fabric was laced with solar sensitive filaments that would charge the computer any time he stood in sunlight. Orlov’s military model was particularly durable, designed for the rigors of combat. There was a microphone in his collar, allowing him to speak commands to the voice recognition software, and earbuds would let him listen to results. So he went to the ship’s library and he downloaded “The Portable Wikipedia” into his jacket memory so he could use the info to his advantage and become wealthy. All he had to do was whisper a question now, and then listen to the answer spoken to him by Svetlana, the voice of Russia’s Wiki, and he would have all the knowledge Fedorov spent years stuffing into his head. Yes, Orlov was a very clever man, or so he believed.
He thought that the next night as well after he had satisfied himself in Ceuta, though with funds running low he had to haggle over the price and nearly caused another ruckus. He eventually returned to the harbor, planning to jump ship later that night after a brief rest. Instead he fell into a deep, dreamless, self-satisfied stupor and slept the night away. Rybakov let him languish in a hammock until almost ten, and by that time the ship was well out to sea again. Orlov was going to end up paying much more than he thought for that last night in the brothels of Spanish Morocco…much more…
U-118 was out on her third wartime patrol that night, and the pickings looked good. She had completed her training three months earlier than the history might record it in Fedorov’s books, where she wasn’t due to start her first patrols until 19 Sep, 1942. This third patrol would have happened in late January of 1943, but it was happening now, just another odd shifting of the fault lines of history after Kirov had passed through the region.
Kapitan Werner Czygan, had little luck on his first two patrols, mostly in the Atlantic operating with Wolfpacks Wotan and Westwall. He had returned to Lorient empty handed and disheartened, with nothing to show for his efforts but a damaged bow when a plane had spotted him on the surface near dusk one evening and put a depth charge right off his starboard side.
That had been a close call, he knew, but it angered him more than anything else, and now he was even more determined to get some kills to his name and remove some tonnage from the allied shipping rolls. The problem was his torpedoes, or so he thought. They just did not seem to be running true, and he had more than his fair share of surface runners in the mix.
One night in Lorient he had a long discussion about it with his first officer, Oberleutnant Herbert Brammer, and it resulted in a change of tactics that was to prove as fateful as it was successful.
“Face it, Werner,” Herbert said over his beer. “There aren’t many boats in our class these days, and we get little respect. They assign us to the wolf packs because we’re big and fat and can carry all those supplies in the mine racks. We have no business being out in the middle of the Atlantic anyway. We should be inshore, looking for shipping traffic around Gibraltar. This boat was built for mining operations.”
“You’re probably right,” Herbert, “but we go where they send us.” The Kapitan knew what his First Officer was trying to tell him. He was commander of a big Type XB boat, one of only eight ever built, and commissioned in 1938. They were designed and laid down as ocean-going submersibles, all of 2700 tons when fully loaded, though as Brammer had sadly pointed out, most of that extra weight too often went to cargo and supplies. The boat carried up to 15 torpedoes, yet in a very odd design with only two torpedo tubes, both on the stern.
“It’s hard enough to hit anything when you can face it full on and fire from the bow,” said the Captain. “Every time we see anything worth sinking our teeth into we have to turn our backside to them first and fart at them. And we haven’t hit a goddamned thing in sixty days.”
“I tell you that’s not what they built these boats for, Kapitan. And you know it as well as I do. What do you think we have all those mine racks on board for? That’s our real job, laying mines in enemy ship lanes. They put those torpedo tubes on our ass so we could fire at anything they send out to chase us. You want to fight like a cat, and stalk and pounce on your enemy like the others, but this boat is not up to the task. No. We must fight like a spider. We lay our web of little mines and then we wait to see who comes along and gets hit. There’s a nice big 105 millimeter gun on the deck, and if a steamer runs afoul of our handiwork, we can also surface and give them a little more with the deck gun. But not in the Atlantic! You don’t drop mines out there in the middle of nowhere. We need to get down to the Straits of Gibraltar and lay our eggs in the western approaches. That’s where the ship traffic is, and that’s where you get your kills and tonnage.”
The Captain took a good long swig of his beer, brushing the foam from his upper lip when he finished. “Right again, Brammer. I’m going to make a special request for our next patrol. I want those damn cargo containers off the mine racks and a full load of mines this time. Then we’ll do exactly what you suggest, my friend. Let’s drink on it!” He raised his mug and the two men threw back some good dark ale, sealing a pact that was to have the most dramatic consequences imaginable, though neither man would ever know or realize what they had just done.
Time, life and the subtle contours and convoluted twists of history would take care of the rest. The Captain with the impossible last name, Czygan, was going to have more success with his mine laying tactic than many other U-boat commanders in Lorient that night, too proud to stoop to such devices as they fancied themselves members of Hitler’s undersea elite, the silent wolves of the sea.
Czygan took U-118 south on the 25th of August, 1942 excited to spot the long fast lines of battleships and cruisers from Admiral Tovey’s Home Fleet sailing north for Scapa Flow. His orders had been to observe and not engage, and the tall ships soon disappeared over his horizon. After cruising south for a little over a week, and trying to line up on an errant freighter, he forsook his aft torpedoes and began laying his mines in the western approaches to the Strait of Gibraltar.
This was the same place that the Royal Navy would often stage large convoys and military task forces before they entered the Med. The five aircraft carriers that had been assigned to Operation Pedestal had staged there that summer, and the ships he had just observed apparently conducted a major fleet exercise there. Perhaps one of his mines would find a nice warship sometime soon in these busy waters, and if not, there was always plenty of shipping in the area that might stumble upon his web. Yes, he would fight like a spider, just as his XO had advised him, and it paid off good dividends in short order.
U-118 laid all sixty-six SMA type mines off Cape Espartel in the western approaches, and then sailed southwest to look for errant traffic and a possible use for the twelve torpedoes they also brought along. A few days later they got some very good news.
On a dark night in early September, convoy MKS-7B out of Algiers and bound for Liverpool, transited the Straits of Gibraltar. It was a nice fat convoy too, with just over sixty merchantmen steaming in twelve columns abreast, and it ran right over U-118’s web of freshly laid mines. Czygan would claim three kills that night, the small 2000 tonner Baltonia, the much bigger Empire Mordred at just over 7000 tons, and another respectable kill with the sinking of the Mary Slessor at a little over 5000 tons. He was elated-three kills in one night, and without a single torpedo fired! He had quickly racked up 14,064 tons, and was well on the way to earning his Iron Cross of the 1st Class with his new tactics. He was finally fighting his boat the way it was meant to be fought.
The minefield U-118 had laid was to be a nuisance and threat to shipping for some time thereafter. Three
