enemy ship. A damn minesweeper, he thought. We can’t even sink a damn mining trawler!
The AA guns barked as the trawler’s boat master spun the wheel hard to bring his bow around and give his 76mm deck gun a chance for another shot, but Orlov knew it would come to naught. What he did not know, however, was that Peterson’s stubborn act of defiance would have consequences he did not expect. The 20mm rounds raked the trawler, some skidding off the metal siding of the pilot house as Orlov instinctively crouched low. One of the rounds had found a target, and he looked, astonished to see that Kamkov had fallen hard and was now slumped on the deck beside him, shot through the chest. Then the enemy fire halted and Orlov could see the distant silhouette of the Germans working their gun.
Svetlana’s words came back to him, playing again in his mind as he recalled the history record he had called up. “After U-24 had fired and missed with her last torpedo at 00:38 hrs, the boat surfaced and exchanged fire with the 20mm AA gun…”
It seemed there were a lot of little details written between the broad strokes of history. Svetlana had said nothing whatsoever about Kamkov, he thought, and he realized that those rounds could just have easily raked across his own chest. Now Kamkov was quite dead, and Orlov was quite angry. He stood up, glaring at the German U-Boat as he heard the 76mm deck gun fire in futile rage, its shot well over the enemy boat and missing by a wide margin.
Infuriated, Orlov strode over to the NKVD guard where he crouched behind the gunwale, and in one swift motion he snatched away the man’s submachine gun. “Piz-da!” He cursed at the U-boat, flipping off the safety and opening up on the Germans, pleased to see his machine gun fire snapping off the conning tower in a shower of sparks. His cigarette butt was still between his pursed lips as he fired, sneering at his enemy.
“Don’t fuck with me you stupid sons of bitches!” he shouted, spitting out the cigarette butt and grinning evilly when he saw the Germans secure their AA gun and run for the deck hatches. The little battle on the Black Sea was over, and he knew why. Svetlana had told him the whole story: “… the boat surfaced and exchanged fire with the 20mm AA gun, which malfunctioned shortly afterwards, forcing U-24 to break off the attack with light machine gun damage to the conning tower.”
Orlov smirked inwardly, handing the smoking submachine gun back to the astonished NKVD man, who looked at him with awe and respect when he saw the German U-Boat quickly vanish beneath the sea again.
“Watch for torpedoes!” the boat master shouted, but Orlov simply laughed. He had written his little line in the history, with a PPD-40 submachine gun firing Tokarev 7.62x25mm pistol rounds, but it was enough.
“Don’t worry,” he shouted back at the boat master. “If they had any more torpedoes do you think they would have come up to shoot with us? It’s over. Get some rest.”
For Klaus Peterson, it was a very frustrating night. His boat was now toothless, and little more than a scouting unit. He would have to slink back to Constanza with nothing to show for his first war patrol here, but he would learn a lesson from the incident. Now he recalled Wohlfarth’s story of the impotence he felt when he had to watch the Bismarck sink with no torpedoes to use to defend her.
Peterson’s fate was not so unkind, but he would have to wait nine long months before he would get another target in his sights, for it was truly slim pickings in the Black Sea. On that night, in June of 1943, he would find and sink a 441 ton Soviet fleet minesweeper, much like this one that would now escape his grasp. It was boat 411- Zashchitnik (No. 26), and he would get it with a spread of two torpedoes, never trusting to a single shot again.
Peterson didn’t get his kill against T-492 that night, but he had unknowingly achieved much more. His inexperience, a torpedo running deep, and another a dud along with that jammed AA deck gun had all conspired to do one essential thing-they spared the life of Gennadi Orlov, though Kamkov was stone cold dead. Now none of the other NKVD guards assigned to bring Orlov to Poti knew a thing about that diplomatic pouch, or anything it might have contained.
Chapter 21
Tashkent was new to the Lend Lease run into Vladivostok that year. Built in 1914 by Maryland Steel, she was actually owned by the American Hawaiian Steamship Company for their Panama Canal Line, and licensed through the Far East State Shipping Company. In June of 1942, however, the ship had been re-flagged with the hammer and sickle and turned over to the U.S.S.R. to carry Lend-Lease shipments into Vladivostok. Amazingly, over 8,400,000 tons of food, arms trucks and planes had been delivered through open sea lanes on the Sea of Okhotsk, or flown in from Alaska, as Russia was effectively a “neutral” in the Pacific conflict of WWII. Tashkent was one of the intrepid general cargo ships bringing home the bacon.
The ship had borrowed the name from a real Russian transport ship that had been sunk in a German air attack on Fedosia on new year’s day of 1942. Now the resurrected name was quietly passed on to the American owned boat, and no one was the wiser.
That day, in September of 1942, the ship also had a curious young seaman aboard, Jimmy Davis. An Able Seaman and cargo handler, he had just finished offloading some containers to the quays of the Golden Horn Harbor, Vladivostok, when he happened to witness a very strange scene.
A man came running down Kalinina Street, crossing the old railroad tracks and hurrying toward the quay, and it was soon clear that he was being pursued by several uniformed military police. Davis heard their shrill whistles as they chased the man, and shouts to other men coming down along the rail where a line train of cars waited to receive Tashkent’s much needed stores. The man stumbled and fell, and some papers slipped from his back pocket as he struggled to his feet again. Then he was up, rushing along the quay right past Davis, his eyes wide with fear.
He stopped, breathing heavily, an anguished look on his face and stared out into the harbor. Then he put both hands to his head as though he was trying to keep his mind in one piece and retain his sanity, screaming something unintelligible Russian. There was a crack, and Davis jerked around to see that a Soviet MP had fired a pistol. The man fell to his knees, then slumped forward on the quay, unconscious as the three policemen rushed to the scene. Davis gawked at them for a while, then thought the better of sticking around, as there would likely be questions. As he was set to leave and head back up the gangway to Tashkent, his eye fell on the papers the man had lost, and he slipped behind an empty wooden cargo container to have a look. He picked it up, first thinking it might be something ferreted out by a spy. Seeing it was only a Russian, magazine he almost discarded it. Then he thought some of the Russian crewmen might like it, so he took it with him hastening back to the ship.
A day later Tashkent was well out to sea again and heading home to Seattle. The Russian crew showed great interest in the magazine, and the it widened more than one eye. Davis noted how the men would pass it from one to another, pointing at things, clearly bemused. He thought they were looking at girly photos, and kicked himself for not looking it over before he dropped it on the mess hall table. But later he saw that it was just photos of strange looking vehicles, odd devices that looked like folding metal cases with pictures on them, advertisements for products he had never seen before. He had no idea he was looking at Toyota Corollas, Dell Laptops, and other modern devices like cell phones in the ads. To him they were just curious photos, and nothing more.
The ship made a brief stop in the Aleutians on the way home, and word of the strange magazine got round to a British liaison officer, Lt. William Kemp at Dutch Harbor. The Brits had a few Nissen huts set up on the islands to listen to Japanese radio traffic and report back home. When the liaison officer saw the magazine, noted the odd map in one of the articles, and the strange dates affixed there, he asked one of the Russians to translate a few lines, then realized he had something very unusual. He gave the man a one pound note for the magazine, carefully tore out the article, and handed it back to him with a smile. Back at his desk he penned and attached a brief note: ‘Found published in Russian periodical!’ The article soon started a very long journey in a plain leather pouch that would eventually make its way to Bletchley Park.
It was the dates on the map that first caught Kemp’s eye, 13–14 September, 1942, and the Russian crewman had translated something about an operation code name “Agreement,” a raid on the German bastion at Tobruk that the British had carried out, with disastrous results. Kemp took the whole thing for some odd way of conveying intelligence in the midst of drivel. The shocker was this: the date that morning was September 7, 1942, a full week before this operation was supposedly carried out!
He got the article quickly on a signal intelligence pouch, which was flown to Seattle, and from there to New
