Afterburn c-7

by Keith Douglass

She made a face at the militarism. “Whatever.”

  He was pretty sure that she was still upset about his staying in the Navy. Damn it, why couldn’t she see that he had a career, just as she had? They’d had this argument over and over again during the past three or four years, and it seemed like she could never see his side of things. He never squawked when she went gallivanting all over the world gathering news stories. Why couldn’t she just accept the fact that he had the same kind of dedication and drive, the same kind of responsibility?

  Tomboy stepped up next to him as Pamela walked off. “You know her?”

  “Pamela Drake? Yeah, I’ve known her for, oh, four years, I guess. Met her when the Jeff was in Thailand.”

  Her dark eyes widened. “Oh, that was that Pamela! I never made the connection.”

  Tombstone chuckled. “I have trouble with that too. Connecting the woman I see when I get back off a deployment with the face on the evening news. Yes, that’s Pamela.” He’d told Joyce about the love of his life, back when they’d been flying together. Aviators and RIOS often shared more or less intimate details during long flights ― or during the longer watches in the ready room.

  “An ACN anchor, yet,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

  “Nothing to be impressed about. She’s got a job. Just like the rest of us.”

  Tomboy glanced in the direction in which Pamela had gone. “Well, flyboy, it looks to me like you’ve been stood up.” She jerked her head toward the lobby entrance. “Want me to show you the town?”

  Tombstone considered the offer, then grinned. “Why not?” He offered her his arm. “Let’s see the sights.”

  As they started out the front door of the hotel, however, a lanky, swarthy-skinned man with black curly hair and a closely trimmed mustache almost collided with them. “You like guide? See city?”

  Tombstone looked the man over. He might just be an eager entrepreneur, but there was something about him, a sharpness of character, a focus behind those liquid brown eyes, that suggested he was also a watchdog.

  Possibly he was only on someone’s payroll, Tombstone thought. More likely, he was working for either the FBS or for military intelligence ― the GRU. In any case, both he and Tomboy were wearing their dress Navy uniforms, making them somewhat conspicuous. Tombstone decided he would actually feel safer wandering the town with someone who belonged here. “How much?”

  The man broke into a toothy smile. “For you, ten dollars American, each day! I have car, A-okay!”

  Their guide’s name was Abdulhalik, and it turned out to be a remarkably pleasant afternoon. They ignored his car for the time being in favor of a stroll along the waterfront.

  It was a bit disconcerting, walking through the town with Joyce at his side. He was remembering when he’d first started falling in love with Pamela … while walking with her through the streets of Bangkok, seeing the sights of Thailand’s exotic capital, and exploring Thonburi’s floating markets.

  Yalta was not as glamorous as Bangkok had been. The climate might have been like southern California, but the town itself reminded him of the more depressing and concrete-clad parts of Atlantic City, without as much in the way of advertising or gambling casinos. There were occasional surprises. Many of the buildings showed a distinct Turkish flavor, especially on the western side of town, and in some areas it was almost possible to forget that they were in the former Soviet Union, but for the most part the buildings were drab, Stalinist-utilitarian and in a depressing state of decay. There was a boardwalk, of sorts, along the waterfront ― though there were no boards in sight. Instead, the strip between highway and water had been paved over, an endless expanse of sterile concrete… sterile in the aesthetic sense, at least. The uncollected garbage had attracted clouds of flies; in the full heat of summer, Tombstone thought, the stink must be atrocious. From time to time, he relieved his eyes by looking up at the Crimean Mountains, bulging huge against the horizon northwest of the town. Some of the tallest peaks there reached to over fifteen hundred meters, and the breeze coming down off their slopes was fresh and pleasantly cool. Tramlines were in place to take tourists up to the top of the mountain overlooking the town, but the queues were impossibly long.

  “So why’d you join the Navy, Captain?” Tomboy asked.

  He made a face. “Not “Captain,’ please. Or “CAG.’ Not when we’re out like this, just you and me.”

  “Tombstone, then?”

  “Or “Stoney.’ Or “Matt.’”

  “I like Matt. And I’m Joyce. If that doesn’t bend the regs too far.”

  Official Navy protocol required personnel to call one another by their last names only, a regulation that was rarely followed outside of the strict limits of duty. “Oh, I think the regs can stand that. Joyce.”

  “So how come?”

  “How come what?”

  “How come you joined the Navy?”

  He grinned. “Because I always wanted to fly jets. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to fly.”

  “So why not the Air Force? They do jets.”

  “Well, I had some relatives that wouldn’t have let me forget that.”

  “Ah. Your uncle, the admiral.”

  “Navy family,” he said, nodding. “Going way back. I guess I was just continuing the tradition.” He sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it, though.”

  “How come?”

  He glanced around at their “guide.” Abdulhalik was trailing behind them along the promenade, keeping them in sight but granting them privacy. When they had a question, he was right there with an answer, but the rest of the time he kept his distance. A nice guy, Tombstone decided, whatever his true colors.

  “I guess I’ve always felt a need to make some kind of a difference,” he admitted after a moment.

  “I’d say you have,” she said. She took his arm and snuggled up to him as they walked. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

  He looked down at her sharply, but she wasn’t even looking at him. She’d said it in a simple, matter-of-fact way, no coyness, no hidden messages.

  “Well, if it hadn’t been for me, you might not have ended up sitting on the tundra in the Kola Peninsula with a busted leg in the first place. And you shot the guy first, as I recall.”

  She glanced up at him and grinned. “Yeah, but you distracted him. How many times did you shoot at him and miss?”

  “Hell, I lost count,” Tombstone admitted. He grinned back. It was funny … now. It hadn’t been funny then, though, as he’d tried to shoot a Russian soldier with a pistol while running flat out across a field ― definitely a no-good way to practice marksmanship. It worked in the movies, all right, but in the real world, handguns were appallingly inaccurate in anything other than a static, proper stance on a target range. “And you took him down after I slowed him up a bit, as I recall.”

  “Teamwork.” She snuggled a bit closer. “Teamwork,” she agreed.

  CHAPTER 15

  Wednesday, 4 November

  1825 hours (Zulu +3)

  10 kilometers east of Yalta, Crimea

  God, I’m not ready for this, Pamela told herself as they rode in the backseat of the car up a winding, cliff-top road. Why did he have to be here? Why was I so stupid as to agree to meet him for dinner?

  She really wasn’t ready for the confrontation she knew was coming.

  Looking sideways at his profile, she had to admit that she still liked him… a lot. Hell, she loved him, but love wasn’t always enough. It would have been great if they could’ve made things work out, but by now Pamela knew that they wouldn’t be able to. She wasn’t about to give up her career, and though she’d been trying for years now to convince Matt that his career was a dead end, she’d finally woken up and realized that the man was simply never going to change.

  Matt Magruder was married to the U.S. Navy. It had been that way since she had met him, and so far as she could tell it was always going to be that way. Sometimes she thought the guy had saltwater in his veins
instead of blood. Or jet fuel; he loved flying as much as he loved the sea, though he didn’t get to fly as much these days as he had in the past. Still, she’d found the combination of sea and flying impossible to compete with.

  And Pamela knew that she was simply not cut out to be a Navy wife.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” he told her. He sounded worried, on edge. Maybe he’d already guessed what she was thinking. He’d always been pretty quick on the uptake.

  Except when she was trying to get him to see the futility of his continuing career with the Navy.

  “I’m pretty tired,” she told him. It wasn’t entirely a lie. “They’ve had us on the run ever since the Georgia thing came up.”

  “Is that what you were coming over to cover in the first place?”

  “Sort of. The UN peace initiative was being covered okay by Mike Collins and some of our other field people. But then that Army helicopter got shot down.

  He nodded. “Big news Stateside, huh?”

  “Navy jets shoot down Army helo? I should say so. Those were your planes, weren’t they?”

  “They were off the Jefferson, yes. Remember Batman?”

  “Of course.”

  “He pulled the trigger.”

  “God. What happened?”

  “is this an official interview?”

  She sighed. He tended to get so touchy when she asked probing questions.

  “Strictly off the record. I was just wondering.”

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  Well, she’d known that. She made a face. “I didn’t think you’d done it on purpose.”

  “Someone screwed up between Washington and the Black Sea,” he said, looking away at the landscape passing outside. “The IFF codes for that Army helicopter didn’t get delivered. We’re taking steps to make sure the same mistake doesn’t happen again.”

  She glanced up at the driver, sitting behind the wheel of the Zil. He was obviously listening in on the conversation.

  Tombstone saw her look and smiled. “Don’t worry about the driver. He’s just the FBS’s local spy. Isn’t that right, Abdulhalik?”

  “Hey, I just work here,” the swarthy man said, flashing a dazzling grin.

  “Your secrets are safe with me!”

  “Right.” He turned back to her. “I assume he’s FBS, anyway. But what happened to that helo’s no secret. They probably know all about that. Right, Abdulhalik?”

  “Low-grade stuff,” the driver replied. “Doubt that they pay me more than eight, ten thousand ruble. Now, if you want to tell me how many nuclear weapons are on aircraft carrier…”

  “Not a chance. Drive, okay?”

  “I drive!”

  Pamela looked away in disgust. Silly macho games. Those two were actually enjoying their banter!

  It was growing dark by the time the aging Zil rental car got them to the cliff-top aerie known as Lastochinko Gnezdo, the Swallow’s Nest, perched high atop the rocky cliff overlooking the sea.

  “It looks like a German castle,” Pamela said as Tombstone held the car’s door open for her. “Or someone’s twisted idea of what a German castle should look like.”

  “It is,” he said, grinning. “It was built for Baron Steingel, a rich German oil magnate, back in 1912. Photographs of this place must grace every Crimean travel brochure printed since World War I.” He turned to the driver, pulling his billfold from his jacket and extracting some bills. “Here you go. You’ll pick us up?”

  “I be right here, Tombstone.” He dug an elbow against Tombstone’s ribs.

  “Hey, don’t know how you American Navy do it,” he continued, lowering his voice… apparently on the assumption that Pamela couldn’t hear his conspiratorial semi-whisper. “Two girls in one day! A-okay, man!”

  “Never mind the performance critique,” Tombstone told him brusquely.

  “Give us a couple of hours, right?”

  “A-okay! I be here!”

  Pamela pretended to study the architecture. It really did look a little like a fairy-tale castle, perched on the very edge of the cliff. The western sky, beyond the town of Gaspra and the peaceful waters of the sea, was turning pink and blood-red. “It looks familiar,” she told him.

  “Did you ever see the movie Ten Little Indians? Agatha Christie?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is where it was shot. There’s a cafe and restaurant here now.” He took her arm. “Come on.”

  And that, Pamela thought with a tightening of her lips, was exactly like the man, always sweeping in and taking charge, as though she and everyone else were just more aviators in his air wing.

  The interior was overdone, heavy on the schmaltz and red carpeting. “The people at the hotel said they get a lot of tourists here,” Tombstone told her. “If we get a waiter who only speaks Russian, I’m going to be lost.”

  “Well, it’s nice to know you’re not perfect at everything.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Never mind.”

  The waiters did speak English ― or at least the one who served them did.

  Most Russian food was actually rather bland, but the Turkish influence in the Crimea could not be missed. They both had shashlik ― chunks of seasoned lamb grilled on a skewer, like Turkish shish kebab. Conversation was limited to news topics ― the new woman Secretary of Defense, the UN mission in Georgia, the return of the Russian submariners to the Crimea.

  They stayed away from anything personal, as if by mutual consent.

  “So the Russian submarine sailors are all back in Sevastopol?” she asked him, spearing a chunk of lamb.

  “As far as I know. They started ferrying them in from the Jefferson early this morning and were scheduled to be finished up by now. I haven’t heard one way or the other, though.”

  “And that was really an accident, too? Like the helicopter?”

  His fork paused halfway between his plate and his mouth, then completed the trip. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment before answering. “Kind of,” he said. “Our sub was acting within its rights, and within the limits of its orders. Its sonar picked up what sounded like a torpedo launch.”

  “Wasn’t it already too late, then? Sinking the Russian sub was just vengeance by that time, wasn’t it?”

  “Not really. If it had fired a torpedo at that range, it probably would have been wire-guided, which meant that sinking the sub would stop the torpedo. Our people acted exactly right.” He hesitated again, then tried a disarming grin. “You’re not accusing me of being a warmonger now, are you?”

  “No, of course not. But it does make me wonder what the Navy is doing out here. You chalk up two kills, and both of them are mistakes.”

  “Believe me, I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “I guess I am. There are people in Washington, our defense secretary among them, who still want to use the U.S. military for social experimentation. That’s wrong. They want to loan U.S. troops out to the UN for humanitarian projects.”

  “Like Georgia and the Crimea.”

  “Like Georgia and the Crimea. Why don’t they loan us out to the Red Cross and the Camp Fire Girls as well?”

  “What’s wrong with humanitarian programs?”

  “Nothing. Except that that’s not what we’re for, not what we’re trained for. It’s a waste of resources, misusing us this way. It’s also dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” She thought he was exaggerating. “How?”

  “Because each warm and fuzzy mission like this one, each make-work deployment, extends our resources a little farther. Weakens us a bit more. And because somewhere back in Washington, someone is trying to hammer our square peg into his round hole. When mission parameters are vague, when orders are jumbled or self-contradictory, when there’s more politics involved than fighting, well, that leads to mistakes. Bad ones.”

  “Like the one that got the helicopter shot down.”

  “Exactly. It also means that someday a real crisis is g
oing to come up, one that only the military can solve. And we won’t be able to do it because we’re going to be tied down with relief efforts in Mongolia, or carrying out a UN mission in Uzbekistan, or God knows what else.”

  She shook her head. “It won’t get that bad.”

  “Won’t it? Reagan wanted to build a fifteen-carrier, six-hundred-ship Navy. He wasn’t able to, and his successors in office, along with Congress, managed to gut the Navy building program, especially once the Soviet Union fell apart and everybody was looking for the so-called peace dividend.”

  “It was decided twelve would be enough.”

  “Who decided?” He shrugged. “Congress, I guess. We’ve never had more than twelve carriers, and with the need to send them in for refit and modernization every so often, what’s called the SLEP program, we usually don’t have more than ten on active duty at any one time. Ideally, half of those carriers are deployed around the world, while the other half are home-ported, engaged in training exercises, taking on new personnel, and so on. So we have what, five? Five carriers at any one time to handle crises from the Med to the North Sea to the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf to the Far East. In fact, we often have to cut the Stateside rotation short, like we did for the Jeff last time in Norfolk. Anyway you cut it, though, we’re stretched way, way too thin. Tie up just one of our supercarriers with something like delivering food to Ethiopia, and we could have big problems if some two-bit tyrant somewhere decides he’s going to take us on.”

  She shook her head. “I’m still not sure I understand why you’re upset.

  I mean, a mission’s a mission, right? And it’s not up to you to worry about the politics of the thing. The military is supposed to stay separate from politics.”

  “Pamela, the five-thousand-and-some men and women aboard a carrier can’t just turn their personal feelings off. We’re not allowed to, oh, stage a protest in front of ACN cameras, say, or call the President a scumbag on national TV, but there’s nothing that says we can’t have our own opinions. About the decisions that hang us out to dry in impossible situations. And about the politicians who put us there.”