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 War, 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
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
