some lying sprawled on oil-smeared blankets, others, unhurt but clearly in shock, sitting slumped with their backs against steel, heads cradled in their arms. Jefferson’s complement of hospital corpsmen moved among them, making those that appeared to be in shock lie down, handing out blankets, talking reassuringly to others, even though few spoke English. The more seriously injured men had already been moved below to Jefferson’s sick bay.
Coyote spotted a familiar figure squatting next to one of the survivors and walked over. “Stoney!” he called.
Tombstone looked up, then stood. “Hey, Coyote. How’s things in the Deputy CAG department?”
“They were quiet until a few minutes ago. I was just getting ready to go to chow when I heard the incoming helo call.”
Tombstone grinned. “Me, too. No rest for the wicked, I guess. When’s your watch?”
“Twenty-hundred hours. What the hell happened?”
“We’re still sorting it all out. As far as I can tell, though, we were playing tag with a Russki sub, pinging him hard to make him unwelcome.”
“A concert, huh?”
“That’s right. He popped a decoy, hoping to confuse things enough to make a getaway. Orlando was in his baffles and thought he was loosing a war shot.”
“Oh, God.”
“Orlando’s on the surface now, taking survivors aboard. The Russian sub’s gone. It only stayed on the surface for a few minutes before taking the big dive.”
“How many survivors?” Coyote asked.
Tombstone shook his head. “Hell, they’re still fishing them out of the drink. A Victor III has a complement of about eighty-five. We’ve got maybe a quarter of them on board so far. But the evening’s still young.”
Coyote nodded, then dropped to a crouch next to a Russian officer. His face, hands, and uniform tunic were coated slick-black with oil, and the stuff was thickly matted in his hair and beard, contrasting startlingly with the whites of his eyes. He scarcely looked human. “Hey, tovarisch,” Coyote said. “You understand what I’m saying?”
“Shtoh?” the man asked. His eyes looked tired, and very, very old. “Ya nee paneemayu.”
“You speak English?”
“Meenyq zavoot Kapitahn pervogo ranga Aleksei Aleksandrovich Vyatkin,” the man said with quiet, exhausted dignity. “Podvodnaya lodka Kislovodsk.”
“Did he say “Captain’?” Coyote asked.
“Captain first rank,” Tombstone replied. “See the shoulder boards? He must’ve been that boat’s skipper.” He squatted next to the man. “Ya plane mayu.”
“Damn, you speak Russian, Stoney? You never cease to amaze me!”
Tombstone shook his head. “Not more than a few words, I’m afraid. I just told him I don’t speak it very well. What did you want to ask him, Coyote?”
Coyote stood up, hands on hips. “Well, this’ll sound crazy.”
“Yeah?”
“I was just wondering if we were at war with them. With Russia, I mean.”
“I doubt that these guys know any more about it than we do, actually. My guess is that we’re both waiting to hear from the big boys up our respective chains of command.”
“Anybody been talking to them yet? Their fleet, I mean. About this…
incident.”
“I really don’t know,” Tombstone replied. “I think Tarrant’s been on the horn, but I haven’t heard the word yet.”
“Damn,” Coyote said. “So here we don’t even know if these guys are guests or POWS.”
“I imagine we’ll find out soon enough,” Tombstone said. He shouted, to make himself heard above the clatter of the next incoming helicopter. “Maybe sooner than we really want to know.”
And Coyote knew he was right.
“Come in, Nikolai Sergeivich.”
Vice-Admiral Dmitriev entered the ornate, luxurious office. The place was richly furnished, paneled in dark red wood, and with an elaborate and expensive parquet wood floor. General Sergei Andreevich Boychenko was not known for his abstemious or purse-pinching habits.
“You sent for me, Admiral?”
“I did. I did. Sit and be comfortable.” Boychenko, a lean, hawk-like man with silver hair and a vast array of medals on his uniform coat, was sitting behind the expanse of his desk. An elaborate silver samovar rose from a wheeled cart beside the desk. The commanding officer of the entire Crimean Military District gestured at a glass. “Tea?”
“Thank you, sir.” As he helped himself to the tea service, Dmitriev wondered why he’d been summoned here. He assumed it had to do with the sudden loss of contact with the Kislovodsk… and the subsequent loss of contact with the American carrier group. He tried to read Boychenko’s manner but failed utterly. The man betrayed no emotion ? if, indeed, he possessed any at all in the furst place. Boychenko had always struck Dmitriev as something of a cold fish.
With the dark Russian tea steaming in his glass, he took a seat opposite the desk. Boychenko’s corner office overlooked the port of Sevastopol, as his did, but had larger windows and a more expansive view. The harbor was spread out practically at his feet; normally, city and waterfront together made a splendid sight, colored lights agleam on still, black water, but a blackout was in force and there was little to see now. The entire district was on full alert, of course, with the threat from Ukraine hanging over the Crimea. Too, the Crimea was suffering from a general power shortage, and the blackout helped save electricity. Dmitriev thought it a singular mark of disgrace that so great a city as Sevastopol, or the fleet anchored there, could no longer afford to keep its lights on at night.
A third wall of the wood-paneled office was taken up by a large framed map of southern European Russia and Ukraine. Unit positions were plotted by pins bearing tiny colored flags, red or blue for Russian forces, gray for Ukrainian. The gray flags were heavily clustered along the northern Black Sea coast, from Odessa in the west to the shores of the Sea of Azov in the east. Dmitriev noted, with a cold, sinking sensation, the number of Ukrainian flags clustered north of the Crimean isthmus… and how few red flags opposed them.
“We have had word from the Kislovodsk,” Boychenko said without further preamble.
“What!” Dmitriev sat up straighter in his chair, nearly spilling his tea. “How? When?” As commander of the Black Sea Fleet, he should have been the one to hear, not Boychenko, his immediate superior.
“About an hour ago. Ah, do not worry, my friend. You were not cut out of the chain of communications. It was not the Kislovodsk, precisely, that contacted us.”
“Not the Kislovodsk. What do you mean, Comrade General?”
“My office received a radio communique, in the open, from an Admiral Tarrant, aboard the American cruiser Shiloh. The Kislovodsk was sunk ? by accident ? at about eighteen hundred hours this evening.”
“Sunk!” Dmitriev’s eyes narrowed. “An accident, you say?”
“That is what we were told, and I am inclined to believe the story.
Captain Vyatkin, apparently, was being urged to leave the area by antisubmarine warfare forces. He chose to fire a noisemaker torpedo in order to deceive the Americans and was torpedoed when they assumed he was firing on their carrier.”
“Were there… were there survivors?”
“Surprisingly, yes. Apparently the Americans initiated rescue operations as soon as they realized that a mistake had been made. At last report, sixty-eight officers and men had been pulled from the sea. Fifteen were seriously injured and are receiving treatment in the carrier’s onboard medical facility.”
“Has this been reported to Novgorod?” The headquarters of Krasilnikov’s neo-Soviet government was currently in Novgorod, about four hundred kilometers east of embattled Moscow.
