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 going 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.”
“But surely you don’t have to-” she began, then cut herself off. It was always the same whenever they talked about politics, particularly politics as they affected the military. They were worlds apart in their ideas, and while
