Then the carrier’s roundoff vanished beneath the Tomcat’s nose and he saw his own shadow flashing along the dark steel deck ahead of him.
His wheels struck the deck, a savage clang and jolt. His hand slammed the throttle full forward and his engines thundered with renewed life and power, ready to take him off the deck again in a touch-and-go bolter if his tail hook failed to connect.
But at the same moment as his engines howled to full power, he felt his tail hook snag one of the cables stretched taut across the deck, and his body surged forward hard against his harness. He cut his power back to a grumbling idle as a deck director and a gang of Green Shirts ran toward his aircraft. To the side, he saw other people running toward his aircraft, including the brightly clad fire detail and a number of rescue personnel and duty hospital corpsmen. The yellow-painted mobile crane stood ready close by, but there were so many people on the deck that it would have been difficult for it to get through. That sort of display was against regs, but nobody seemed to care this morning.
Easing back, he spit out the wire, then followed the deck director toward a waiting slot aft of the island. He cracked his canopy as a plane crew chief popped his access steps. He reached up, yanked off his mask and helmet, and gulped down cool, delicious air. It had never tasted so good.
“Nicely done, sir,” the plane chief said as he leaned in and safed the ejection seats. “Welcome home!”
“Give me a hand with Mickey,” he said.
“That’s okay, sir,” a hospital corpsman said, scrambling up alongside the chief. “We’ve got him. You just take care of yourself. Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” His knees felt weak, his legs shaky. Helping hands unfastened his harness and helped him out of the cockpit.
“Well done,” someone called as he set foot on the deck. Someone else clapped him on the shoulder. “Good job, Dixie, bringing old Mickey Moss back!”
“How is he?”
“Can’t tell yet, sir,” a corpsman said. “He’s alive. Can’t find any bleeding. Side of his helmet’s dinged. I think a piece of shrapnel must have whacked him.” Several rescue people worked together to ease a board down behind Mickey’s back and strap him to it. With his head and neck immobilized, they began lifting him out of the cockpit and into a Stokes stretcher.
“Dixie!”
He turned and found himself face to face with Cat Garrity. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, quick and hard. People standing nearby cheered or clapped or laughed.
“That was some damned good flying,” she told him.
He grinned at her. “Does this mean I’m off the shit list?”
“Dixie, my man, I’ll fly with you anytime, anywhere!”
He felt like he was home.
Gunfire crackled in the distance ? the expected attack by Dmitriev’s naval forces. For Tombstone, it was a particularly helpless feeling, to be trapped at the palace with a group of nearly thirty American service personnel, with a pitched battle being fought nearby and nothing that he could do to help himself or the others. His first consideration, certainly, was the treatment of the men wounded in the assassination attempt. There were four dead ? Captain Whitehead, Special Envoy Sandoval, and two civilians. Wounded, besides Admiral Tarrant, were a Lieutenant Billingsly from OC, one Marine private named Garibaldi, five civilians, and Jorge Luis Vargas y Vargas, Sandoval’s personal aide.
Ambulances had shown up within twenty minutes of the shootings, and doctors and medical assistants had provided first aid, but Tombstone had not authorized the release of any of the wounded Navy personnel to the local civilian medical authorities, and the senior UN people had requested that Vargas be taken to a Navy ship as well. The Russians had not been insulted; in fact, they’d been relieved, for facilities at the Yalta hospital, between casualties from the Russian Civil War and the ongoing critical shortage of medical supplies, were already strained to the limit.
The shortcomings in the Russian medical service were legendary, of course. Earlier, a Russian doctor, a woman named Vaselenova, had complained about it to Tombstone as she’d prepared an IV saline drip for the wounded Admiral Tarrant. He’d watched in horror as she’d stropped the tip of a disposable syringe needle on a whetstone, then dropped it into a pot of boiling water. “Da, da,” she’d said a few minutes later, using a spoon to fish the needle out of the water. “There is never enough of what we need. Plasma. Penicillin. Clean sheets at hospital. Beds. Scalpels. Needles. Especially needles. There are never enough.”
So the medics had treated his wounded as well as they could, but left them in one of the sitting rooms in the palace, which had been transformed into a makeshift temporary hospital. If they could just establish communications again with the CBG… if they could arrange at least for helicopters to fly in and carry off the wounded, they could receive decent treatment aboard ship. The Saipan, especially, the MEU’s Tarawa-class LHA, had a three-hundred-bed hospital aboard, with some of the finest military medical facilities afloat.
If they could just reach her…
That, he decided, was a large part of the feeling of helplessness he’d been enduring over the past several hours. It had him pacing restlessly back and forth at the top of the steps to the palace, with occasional stops to stare out across the blue of the sea at the southern horizon… and the battle group invisible beyond it.
Pamela had been able to read what he was feeling, even if he hadn’t put those feelings into words. “You know,” she told him, “that there are some things even the Navy can’t fix.”
He wished she would lay off the Navy. For some reason, the pride he felt for the Navy, justifiable pride, had always seemed to grate on her. He guessed that was one of the incompatibilities she’d talked about at the restaurant. He’d known they had differences, but he was willing to try to work them out.
It still galled him that Pamela didn’t exhibit the same willingness.
There’d been little enough time to worry about that since the attack, however. In the two and a half hours since the assassination attempt, Tombstone had managed to round up all of the Americans in the party and get them into one place ? a difficult operation in itself, given the confusion that seemed to be gripping everyone in the White Palace complex. He’d put Chief Geiger in charge of all personnel, including the officers, by declaring him to be “chief of the boat” and delegating to him the responsibility of keeping everyone together and out of the Russians’ way.
Chiefs did not outrank officers in the command hierarchy, but Tombstone had found long ago that they often outranked them in sense. Almost immediately after making the assignment, he’d overheard a brief exchange between Geiger and Commander Sedgwick, who wanted to go up the beach with a party of Marines to find a place where Navy boats could come ashore and take them all off. Geiger had said, simply, “The captain wouldn’t like that, sir,” in his characteristic deep-throated rumble, and that had been the end of it.
Kardesh he kept with him as his personal translator, while Tomboy Flynn became his aide. Tomboy made herself invaluable by taking on the duties to which he had originally been assigned ? serving as his liaison with the nearly one hundred press and TV news representatives who had become his personal responsibility.
Both women carried out their assigned tasks with quiet efficiency.
Kardesh spoke excellent Russian ? her mother, she told him, was Russian ? while Joyce proved to be a born public relations expert, fielding questions and handling complaints with a light, personal touch that Tombstone knew he never could have managed… even if he’d had the time.
And he’d been working with Pamela a lot during the past few hours, too, trying to set up a radio connection with the battle group. The available Russian equipment, it turned out, didn’t have the range to reach American aircraft which were, in any case, below the horizon, and they didn’t have the codes ? for reasons that were fairly obvious ? that would allow them to tap into U.S. military communications satellites.
American Cable News, however, had equipment that was better in some respects than that of the American military. They’d originally flown into Simferopol Airport with a van-load of sophisticated electronics, including a satellite up-link that gave immediate and secure communications with ACN headquarters in Washington, D.C. It had been a fairly simple task, then, to organize a patch to HQ-NAVTEL, the Naval Telecommunications Command headquarters in Washington, which in turn routed the communications channel through a MILSTAR communications on.
