Afterburn c-7

by Keith Douglass

  Abdulhalik was leaping forward toward the front of the stage, fumbling inside his jacket for his own weapon. Other security men were also reaching for their guns, but slowly… too slowly. Except for Whitehead, who sat stunned and unmoving, Tombstone was closest to Boychenko. He leaped forward with the suddenness of an F-14 catapulted from the bow of a carrier, his chair flying off the back of the stage; he hit Boychenko low and from behind, driving the man forward into the podium and the forest of microphones, then toppling man and podium together in a splintering crash.

  Gunfire cracked, a thundering, stuttering fusillade as the trench-coated assassins opened up with their weapons on full auto. Tombstone heard the bullets snapping through the air overhead or thumping loudly into the heavy podium. Microphones clashed together, and the sound system gave a shrill squeal of feedback that mingled with the steady crack-crack-crack of automatic weapons. Shrieks from the audience rose to a shrill, terror-stricken cacophony mingled with cries of pain.

  Everything was chaos, raw and uncontrolled. He was lying on top of Boychenko, one arm thrown protectively over the Russian’s back. Rolling to the side, he looked up, past the toppled podium and off the stage. One gunman was going down under the combined gunfire from Abdulhalik and another security man. The man with the pistol was out of sight at the moment, but Tombstone could see the other assault-rifle-armed assassin clearly as he ran up to the edge of the stage, firing wildly as he ran. Abdulhalik staggered, dropped his weapon, and collapsed onto his back, legs sprawling. Captain Whitehead flailed his arms and fell off the back of the stage, his face a mask of blood. Tarrant was down, too… and Sandoval. The assassins had sprayed the entire front row of VIPS, killing or wounding eight or ten of them in one long burst.

  There was the man with the pistol, collapsing under a hail of automatic fire as he exchanged shots with the security guards. But the running man was closer, much closer now, so close now Tombstone could see his bushy mustache, see the wild light in his Oriental-looking eyes. Reaching the stage, he leaned over the railing, aiming directly at Tombstone and Boychenko from a range of less than five feet.

  He pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

  Tombstone was up and on his feet in the same instant, scooping up an overturned metal chair, pivoting, and hurling it as hard as he could. The gray chair struck the gunman and momentarily tangled with his weapon, knocking him back a step and confusing him. Tombstone was in the air right behind the chair, lunging for the man’s throat even as he tossed the chair aside and tried to bring his AKMS to bear once more. He hit the man high, hands lancing toward the throat, his arms held stiff before him; the impact of his legs splintered the frail structure of the railing as he crashed through and knocked the assassin down. The gunman continued fumbling with his weapon, dragging a loaded magazine out from inside one of the capacious pockets of his trench coat. Tombstone battled him for that heavy black magazine, wresting it away from him, picking it up like a flat rock and bringing it down on the side of the man’s head with tremendous force. The gunman raised his arm, trying to block the attack. Tombstone struck him again, and the man’s head lolled to the side.

  Tombstone looked up, blinking. People were still screaming, shrieking, and running in all directions as security troops converged on the stage. Half a dozen civilians were down on the grass, faces and clothing smeared with bright scarlet blood. Pamela!..

  There she was, apparently all right, kneeling on the grass a few yards away next to the body of her cameraman. She looked up and locked gazes with him, but there was no recognition in her eyes, none at all. She looked like she was in shock.

  Then a half-dozen troops arrived, muscling Tombstone aside and pouncing on the semiconscious would-be assassin with an almost gleeful viciousness.

  “Don’t kill him!” Tombstone shouted as one soldier hammered at the man with his rifle butt, but he didn’t even know if any of them spoke English. He reached out and grabbed the soldier’s arm before he could strike again. “Nyet!” Tombstone yelled. The soldier spun, face a twisted mask of anger. “Nyet!” he yelled again. Damn, how did you say “Don’t kill him” in Russian? The foreign country guidebooks never gave you the really useful phrases.

  One soldier, though ― a lieutenant ― barked orders and cuffed two of the soldiers aside. In a few moments, they’d sorted things out and half dragged, half carried the man away.

  Tombstone scrambled back onto the stage and raced to Tarrant’s side. The admiral had taken one round through his chest, up high, and was unconscious.

  “Tombstone!” Joyce cried, reaching his side. “My God, are you okay?”

  “Fine, Tomboy,” he said. “Fine.” He wasn’t sure he was ready to believe that yet. His knees now, as reaction began to settle in, felt terribly weak, and his breaths came in short, almost panting gasps. He looked at her. Her dress uniform was disheveled and she’d lost her hat. His eyes widened as he saw a bright smear of blood on her jacket.

  “It’s not me,” she said, reading his expression.

  “You’re okay?”

  “Yeah. What about the admiral?”

  “Damn. I don’t know. I don’t know!” They needed a doctor. No… they needed a Navy doctor, someone off the Jeff.

  Nearby, Boychenko was standing again, staring around at the carnage with an expression as dazed as Pamela’s. Several soldiers, eyes nervously on the building and the milling, panicky crowd, started to urge him away to safety, but he shrugged free and walked over to Tombstone.

  “Captain Magruder,” he said, the words heavily accented. He took Tombstone’s hand in both of his, shook it, then pulled the American close and hugged him. “Spasebaw. Thank you, for my life. That was very brave deed.”

  “It was nothing,” Tombstone said. “I was running for cover and tripped.”

  Boychenko blinked, looking puzzled. He probably didn’t speak enough English to be able to understand more than a word or two of what Tombstone was saying.

  “Is Admiral Tarrant?”

  “He needs medical help. A hospital.”

  “We do what we can.”

  One of his security men tugged at the general’s elbow, imploring him with his expression to hurry. Tombstone could understand their worry. There might well have been more than three assassins, should have been, in fact, given the number of Boychenko’s guards.

  As they hurried him away, Tombstone moved to the far side of the stage and found Abdulhalik sitting up, one hand clutching a shoulder soggy with blood. “Lie down,” Tombstone told him. “Damn it, get down!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sandoval was lying nearby, his eyes wide open in death. Whitehead was dead as well. Damn… damn!

  The security man complied and Tombstone used a length of cloth torn from the man’s sleeve as a pressure bandage on Abdulhalik’s wound. It looked as though the bullet had smashed through his chest, high up near his shoulder, shattering his scapula but, so far as Tombstone could tell, missing his lung. At least there was no blood in his nose or mouth, and he seemed to be breathing okay.

  “Tatars,” Abdulhalik said, his voice weak.

  “Sorry?”

  “Damned… Tatars. Descendants of the Mongols. You know Genghis Khan?”

  Tombstone kept working, tying the packing in place with more strips of cloth. “Not personally. I never met the man.”

  “Think… Crimea is their… homeland.”

  “It is, from what I’ve heard.” He’d read the history in a guidebook several days ago. Before the Russian Revolution, the first revolution in 1917, the Crimean Peninsula had been settled largely by Tatars ― as Abdulhalik had said, descendants of the Mongol hordes that had swept across southern Russia in the thirteenth century. Crimea had been their final stronghold in Russia until the time of Catherine the Great, and they’d still been a significant part of the population well into the twentieth century. After the Communists had taken over, Crimea was redesignated as a Tatar Autonomous District.

  Then had come the Second World Wa
r, and the invasion by Hitler’s legions.

  Crimea had been occupied, then liberated, but with liberation came persecution. Stalin accused the Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis and used that excuse to exile all of them to central Asia. The ban against their return to Crimea had been lifted in the 1980s, and they’d been returning ever since, in larger and larger numbers. Many were now demanding that the Crimea be returned to them, as an autonomous district or as a free homeland.

  Those demands, Tombstone reflected, would muddy the waters a bit but had no chance at all of being realized. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians were willing to relinquish the embattled little triangle of land, and for damned sure they weren’t going to turn it over to the Tatars.

  Looking up, Tombstone watched as soldiers picked up one of the bodies of the would-be assassins. “You think they tried to kill the general to get their homeland back?”

  Abdulhalik tried to shrug and winced with the pain. “Ah! Well, it makes sense, yes? There are several radical Tatar independence groups. Any could have done this to further their cause.”

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean they did it.” He shook his head. “What would they achieve by killing Boychenko? Besides getting themselves stepped on, I mean?”

  Abdulhalik didn’t answer. He was unconscious. Tombstone finished his bandaging job and signaled for a stretcher team as they approached the stage. Joyce joined him a moment later.

  “You look thoughtful,” she said.

  “Hmm. Abdulhalik thinks this was the work of a Tatar nationalist movement.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “Yeah. But it just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Terrorism doesn’t make much sense.”

  “No, I mean, this is really far-fetched. What could they hope to achieve with this? If I were a terrorist group who wanted the Crimea back, but with no chance in hell of seeing my aims realized…”

  His voice trailed off as he followed the chain of logic.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The helicopter. That’s probably where they’re taking Boychenko, and I want to get there before they take off.”

  “Why? Are you hitching a ride back to the Jeff?”

  It was a tempting thought, though Tombstone and the other Navy personnel ashore, except for Tarrant’s staff, of course, were all supposed to remain in Yalta while the UN people took charge. But Tombstone had other ideas.

  “No. I want to get on the radio. I think we may have problems.”

  She had to hurry to keep up with his long pace as he strode toward the east side of the palace. “What kind of problems?”

  “I think Boychenko was only one of several targets,” he told her. “And I’m afraid the Jeff might be next on their list!”

  CHAPTER 17

  Thursday, 5 November

  0954 hours (Zulu +3)

  Black Leader

  Over the Black Sea

  Major Yevgenni Sergeivich Ivanov divided his attention between the radar display and the view out the cockpit. Flying a high-performance attack aircraft at extreme low altitude was always a challenge; he was skimming the waves of the Black Sea at an altitude of less than fifty meters, where the slightest hesitation, the least miscalculation would slam him and his aircraft into the sea at Mach 1.1.

  He was flying a Mig-27M attack aircraft, hurtling along at just above the speed of sound, the variable-geometry wings swept back along the aircraft’s fuselage like the folded wings of a stooping hawk.

  Ivanov was an experienced pilot, as experienced as any in Soviet Frontal Aviation. At thirty-eight, he was old for a combat aviator, but he’d been flying a fighter of one type or another for over fifteen years. His first combat missions had been over Afghanistan. Later, he’d volunteered for a special Frontal Aviation program that transferred him temporarily to navy command, and he’d spent five years learning how to land on the deck of the new Soviet nuclear aircraft carrier Kreml, then teaching other, younger aviators how to do the same.

  With that experience, he was part of a very special fraternity, one of the smallest and most demanding in the world, the brotherhood of pilots trained to operate off the deck of an aircraft carrier. He’d flown off the Kreml in the Indian Ocean, during the India-Pakistan crisis, and again in the great naval battle off the Norwegian coast, the engagement during which the carriers Kreml and Soyuz had both gone to the bottom. With his ship shot out from beneath him while he was in the air, Ivanov almost hadn’t made it home. Short on fuel, he’d nursed his damaged aircraft back across Norwegian and Finnish territory to land at a small airstrip outside of Nikel.

  For a time after that, he’d been back in FA ― Frontal Aviation ― on more traditional assignments, flying ground-attack missions for Krasilnikov against the Leonovist rebels. With two of the former Soviet Union’s three aircraft carriers destroyed, and the third kept in careful seclusion in its port facilities at Sevastopol, everyone in FA assumed that the Russian aircraft carrier experiment was dead. If nothing else, Russia was no longer a world power, neither able nor willing to project military force to some far-off corner of a hostile globe. Something as large, as expensive, and as complex as a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was a serious drain on the military’s fast-vanishing resources, and with no strategic purpose to its existence, it would soon be consigned to the wrecker’s yard.

  And that, Ivanov reflected as he glanced briefly left and right, checking the positions of the other Mig27s in his attack formation, would have been a tragedy. Pobedonosnyy Rodina was a proud, noble vessel, for all that he’d never yet left port for more than a brief Black Sea shakedown. Operation Miaky had given him the chance to live again.

  Ivanov had developed a feel for carriers during the years he’d served aboard them in the naval aviation program. Despite the long-standing rivalry between the Fleet and Frontal Aviation, he liked carrier service. Rodina deserved better than rusting away at his moorings or being broken into scrap to feed the starving, inefficient civilian industries ashore. His affection for carriers and his love of naval flying were shaped, as much as anything else, by the knowledge that he was part of that elite fraternity shared by only a tiny handful of aviators from Russia, Great Britain, France, the United States, and the very few other countries whose navies operated aircraft carriers.

  Fraternity. The word he used was bratstvo, “brotherhood.” He’d heard, though, that the Americans had begun allowing Women to fly carrier aircraft. He snorted behind his oxygen mask. Women? The very idea was preposterous. During the long Soviet reign, women had been promised full equality with men, but that was an idea that had never really been reflected by the real world, one composed more of words than of substance. In the years since the collapse of the Soviet government, there’d been an ultraconservative backlash against the whole concept of women’s rights; female equality with men was an idea linked inextricably in the public mind with the Communists, and there was a tendency now to relegate women to the kitchen and a select few professions outside the home ― actresses and street sweepers and doctors and the like.

  Ivanov grinned. Like most fighter pilots of his acquaintance, he thought of women as simple and delightful perquisites of his profession, the faster and hotter the better. As far as he was concerned, women belonged in bed, naked and with legs welcomingly spread, not in the cockpit of a jet aircraft.

  He thought he would like to meet some of the American women aboard the Thomas Jefferson, however. If even half of the scandalous stories he’d heard were true…

  Such a meeting seemed unlikely at best, just now. Once again, politics and the relentless tides of history were about to bring the American and Russian navies into conflict, and if he met an American fighter pilot at any time in the near future, it would be as an opponent, a minute, wildly twisting speck trapped in the targeting reticle of his Mig’s HUD.

  Pathetic… the thought of women attempting to meet men on equal terms in combat. The idea was ludicrous in ground com
bat, since women were so much weaker than men; it was even more ludicrous in air combat, for the demonstrable fact that women simply didn’t have the brains for the highly technical aspects and details of flying high-performance jet aircraft. He’d heard that several American women had been shot down over the Kola; if Black Flight encountered any today, it would be an even more complete slaughter. In the Kola, the Americans had been flying against second-rate units and rear-echelon squadrons, the leftovers after the debacle in and around Norway. Black Flight, and the attendant formations code-named Bastion and Flashlight, were made up of combat aviators scoured from Loyalist units all over Russia and were comprised of the very best of the best.

  “Black Leader, this is Bastion One-one-seven” sounded in his headset.

  “Do you read me? Over.”

  “Bastion One-one-seven, Black Leader reads. Go ahead.”

  “We are being painted by American radar, almost certainly from their naval AWACS.”

  “What about ECM?”

  “We have been jamming steadily for fifteen minutes, sir. The Americans have been increasing the power of their scans and at this point are probably burning through our interference. They will not be able to judge our numbers, but they know we are here, and probably where we are going.”

  “That does not matter. They will not be concerned with us unless they believe us to be threatening their battle group.”

  “Just keep your ears sharp, Yevgenni,” the voice of Captain Oleg Nikiforov added over the tactical channel. “Once they figure out what we’re up to, they will be after us like a cat pouncing on mice.”