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
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.
