sails and canopies of small craft in the harbor with liquid gold. The clouds were beginning to close in now, but patches of blue sky continued to peep from among the towering piles of fluffy cumulus clouds. Jefferson’s met boys were calling for clear weather for the passage, but probable rain tonight. It looked like this time they’d called it right.
Tombstone was glad the passage was almost over. Bringing a modern Nimitz-class aircraft carrier through the Bosporus wasn’t quite as needle-threading a challenge as guiding the 1092-foot-long vessel through the Suez Canal, but in his opinion it came damned close. He hadn’t felt this hemmed in since the Jeff had hidden from Soviet reconnaissance forces inside a narrow fjord in Norway.
Somehow, though, he didn’t think he’d feel much safer when they entered the Black Sea the Chernoje More.
Stupid… stupid… stupid.
Something about his expression made Captain Brandt chuckle. “It’s okay, Stoney. We’re past the narrow part. You can breathe now.”
Tombstone grinned at him. “You know, sir, we missed a bet. Back there where the straits were really closing in, we could’ve tossed a handful of lira to the kids on either bank and had ‘em scrape down and paint our hull as we passed.”
“Shit,” Brandt said with considerable feeling. “This is nothing compared to the Suez. Man, I hate taking a CVN through there.”
“I don’t know which would make me more nervous,” Tombstone replied.
“Scraping paint to port and starboard, or the security threat.”
Brandt nodded toward the flight deck, where a number of U.S. Marines in full combat gear stood at key positions around the perimeter, facing outward. Jefferson’s Marine contingent, together with an armed party of the carrier’s sailors, were responsible for protecting her from any threat imaginable ? or unimaginable, for that matter ? from gunfire from either shore, to grenades dropped among the aircraft on the flight deck from those suspension bridges, to kamikaze speedboats, and they took their responsibilities very seriously indeed.
“Security, Tombstone,” Brandt said, all trace of bantering gone from his voice. “It’s always the security.”
Then they were up to the final bridge, cruising into its shadow.
Tombstone repressed an instinctive desire to duck as the shadow drifted slowly up the flight deck, then blotted out the sun as the bridge slipped momentarily out of the direct sunlight on the strait. Half of the Marines on the flight deck were scanning the bridge overhead, watching for threats… an impossible task, actually, since the span was crowded with Turks gathered to watch the passing of the American carrier.
Brandt cast a measuring glance toward the Turkish pilot. “I thought your people were supposed to close those bridges off, Mr. Ecevit?”
The pilot replied with an exaggerated shrug. He didn’t care, that much was certain. He ignored Brandt after that, carefully pointing out a set of channel marker buoys to the helmsman, a quartermaster chief standing at the carrier’s wheel. The chief tossed a covert glance at Tombstone and rolled his eyes toward the overhead; he’d obviously seen those buoys and made any necessary adjustments to their course long before. Ninety-thousand- plus-ton supercarriers did not stop on the proverbial dime; even at her current slow and ponderous crawl up the waterway, it would take her the better part of a mile to come to a complete stop if she needed to.
The sun came out again as they cleared the bridge. The shorelines to the east and the west were receding swiftly now. In another few moments, the carrier would be out of the Bosporus and inside the Black Sea.
Tombstone watched the pilot for a moment, trying to decide if he genuinely didn’t care about the botched security arrangements or was pretending nonchalance to mask embarrassment. The latter, probably, Tombstone decided. He was only a minor functionary, a civilian pilot with the Turkish Port Authority, and quite far down in any hierarchy of command.
The Turks had been sticky about allowing a carrier battle group to traverse their territorial waters, formal and correct in their dealings with Navy officials to the point of an almost icy disdain. Their reaction, perhaps, was understandable. Turkey’s government was strictly secular, but there were powerful Moslem fundamentalist groups within the country who would see the Jefferson as a golden target, a symbol of the hated United States and her foreign policy, a high-profile incident to capture a segment on World News Tonight. Ankara did not want a terrorist incident… which made the security failure on the bridge hard to understand.
More than that, though, Turkish-American relations were not good just now, partly because of U.S. support for the Greeks in various recent wars, incidents, and territorial disputes, but more because Turkey feared being dragged into the rapidly spreading wildfire of war and insurrection engulfing her once powerful neighbor to the north. Too, Turkey’s Kurd and Armenian minorities were growing restless again and might use the chaos across the Russian border to resurrect their own hopes of dismembering eastern Turkey and creating states of their own.
When the United Nations had passed Special Resolution 1026 five weeks ago, they’d turned to the United States to provide the military and technological expertise necessary to enforce the newly imposed no-fly zone over Georgia. The United States, in turn, had begun pressuring Turkey to allow the basing of U.S. warplanes on her soil in order to support UN activities. That pressure, as Tombstone had heard it, had damned near caused a complete and final break in Turkish-American relations. Ankara feared that American aircraft and personnel based on Turkish soil would cause an explosion in the country’s Moslem fundamentalists, and they’d refused, point-blank. There’d followed several days of acrimonious exchanges, until at last a deal to allow the entry of a carrier battle group into the Black Sea had been hammered out.
Tombstone didn’t know what deals had been struck or what kind of markers had been called in to induce the Ankara government to permit the Jefferson battle group to traverse the straits to the Black Sea, but he imagined that the promises made had been considerable, something bordering on extortionate. The Montreux Convention of 1936 specifically prohibited foreign aircraft carriers from transiting the Dardanelles and Bosporus. In earlier years, the Soviets had gotten around that restriction with their light carrier Kiev by identifying her as an antisubmarine cruiser; presumably they’d made other arrangements for passages by their larger, more recently built carriers.
What had Washington promised the Turks to get them to permit Jefferson’s transit? Or had the promise been something more on the order of a threat?
He glanced again at Ecevit. He seemed a decent enough sort, if somewhat restrained. Tombstone wondered what he thought of the political storm suddenly howling across his part of the world.
At last the shorelines of the Bosporus were passing abeam, little more now than gray smudges on the horizon. “We’re out of the channel, Captain,” the helmsman called. “Clear to navigate.”
“Very well, Chief,” Brandt replied. “We’ll be heaving to while Mr. Ecevit transfers to the pilot boat.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Commander Hadley?”
Jefferson’s executive officer had been waiting in the wings for his cue.
“Sir!”
“Perhaps you would be good enough to escort Mr. Ecevit to his boat.”
“Aye, aye, Captain!”
“It’s been a pleasure to have you aboard, Mr. Ecevit.”
“Thank you, Captain,” the civilian said in a thick accent, facing Brandt.
“Permit me to say that this, this vessel of yours is truly remarkable. I’ve never had such a view of the water ahead.”
“We like her,” Brandt said.
Tombstone chuckled. “Conning a CVN has been compared to driving Manhattan Island from the top floor of the Empire State Building.”
“I have never been to Manhattan Island,” Ecevit said. “But this ship of yours does have the feel of an island.” He hesitated, then licked his lips, a nervous gesture. “You should be careful out here. An island is an easy thing to find. It would be a pity if the wrong people found it.”
“Just who do you mean, Mr. Ecevit?” Brandt asked casually. “Our status here will be as peacekeepers.” He grinned broadly for a moment, showing clenched teeth. “See? We’re friendly.”
It was a variant on a joke popular aboard the Jefferson, but Ecevit either missed the point or ignored it.
“There are many in this part of the world who do not want peace. To them, this floating island of yours would be a most tempting target. And a vulnerable one.” He shook his head. “I was directed not to discuss politics with you gentlemen. I’ve said too much as it is. But I… I admire this wonderful ship of yours and would hate to see her
