no-“
“If you will check your orders, Captain,” Pamela said, ice and steel in her voice, “you will see that ACN personnel are not under your military command, or even the UN’s. We’re free agents, and we can come and go as we please.”
“And if I’m still press liaison,” Tomboy added, “my place is here.
Keeping an eye on her.”
The two women exchanged glances… and a “I-guess-that-told-him” nod.
Tombstone sighed. There was no time for argument, and he had no patience at all with political correctness games.
He pointed at Pamela. “You. You’re quite right. I can’t give you orders, but you will stay the hell out of the military’s way. Got me?”
“Certainly, Captain.” She gave him her sweetest smile. “Oh, and will you still be requiring assistance from the civilian sector for your communications?”
He grinned. “That’s a negative. They’re flying in everything we need.
You I don’t need, and if you give me half an excuse, I’ll fly you out of here, orders or no.”
She started to open her mouth and he held up his hand. “And, Ms. Drake, if you insist on staying ashore, you will follow my orders regarding where you can and cannot go, what you may and may not film. I’m not going to telegraph my plans to Dmitriev on the ACN nightly news.”
Pamela started to respond, then nodded. “Okay, Matt. You’re the boss.”
Tombstone shifted his finger to Tomboy. “You, at least, are an officer in the United States Navy and subject to my orders. You will return to the carrier immediately and report for duty with your squadron.”
Her eyes widened. “Tombstone-“
“That’s an order, Flynn. They’re going to need every aviator they can get up there. I want you flying an F-14, not wading around in the mud with the grunts.”
He was remembering that cold tundra in the Kola, and Tomboy on the ground with a broken leg.
“What about you, CAG?” Tomboy demanded. “You’re an aviator.”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, taking in Boychenko and the Marines and a number of Russian soldiers standing on the patio nearby. “I’m also the architect of all of this. I’ve got to see it through… and someone ought to stay with it on this end to make sure the Russians carry out their part of the bargain.” Even yet, he didn’t entirely trust them.
“This is not fair. If you’re trying to send me someplace safe-“
“There is no fair here, Commander. And the front seat of an F-14 isn’t exactly what I would call safe. This has nothing to do with PC or me trying to protect you. It’s what’s best for all of us. Our ship. Our shipmates.” The fewer people he had to worry about…
Besides, he was concerned about her safety. Charging around in the dark behind enemy lines with a bunch of Russian special forces and U.S. Marines wasn’t the sort of thing she’d been trained to do.
He was carefully ignoring the fact that that sort of activity wasn’t listed on his job description either.
Tombstone thought she was going to keep fighting him, but then she took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Aye, aye, sir.” She sounded resigned.
“As for you,” Tombstone told Pamela, “if I thought I’d get away with it, I’d have you hog-tied and dragged on board the first helicopter to hit the LZ.”
“I’m glad to see you know your own limits, Matt.”
He was about to give her a sharp reply when he heard the distant flutter of rotors. He turned, staring out to sea. Moments later, the helicopters materialized out of the night in a throbbing of turning rotors, the far-off whup- whup-whup cascading swiftly to a droning thunder. There were five of them, big, gray CH-53 Sea Stallions off the Guadalcanal, and they came in hot and hard, flaring out one after another as Marines and sailors directed them in with flashlights used as landing signal wands. They settled onto the beach, their rotor washes setting up great, wet swirls of sea spray and blown sand. As soon as the first helo touched down, its rear ramp dropped open and a dozen U.S. Marines spilled out, taking up defensive positions around the aircraft. Waiting men, crouched nearly double to avoid the descending tips of the slowing rotor blades, hurried down the beach, carrying the wounded men on stretchers. Hospital corpsmen dashed out to meet them, beginning to check each man as the stretcher-bearers continued carrying them up the ramp and into the aircraft’s cargo compartment.
Admiral Tarrant, still unconscious, was first up the ramp.
Tomboy was gone. Pamela still stood at his side. “Seriously, Pamela.
This could be your last chance to get out of this hellhole.”
“I told you, Matt. You have your career. I have mine.” He gave a short, hard nod, then left her, trotting down the beach toward one of the helos.
“Captain Magruder?”
A hard-looking man in camouflage fatigues and a floppy, broad-brimmed booney hat, with an H&K MP5 submachine gun slung over his shoulder and his face blackened with paint, approached him. He was carrying two heavy-looking canvas satchels.
“I’m Magruder.”
“Ellsworth,” the man said. “Got your satcom shit here.”
“Great.” Magruder’s eyes narrowed. The man wore no insignia at all but was carrying enough grenades and other gear in his combat load-bearing vest to equip a small army. “Ellsworth. You’re a Marine?”
Ellsworth grinned, his teeth startlingly white in his paint-blackened face. “That’s a negative, sir. I just work with ‘em now and again. And… you can just call me Doc. Everybody else does.”
A SEAL. He had to be, with that outfit and that cocksure attitude.
Tombstone pointed back up the beach. “We’re getting ready to move out, Ellsworth. Get the satcom up to that BMP.”
“Right, Captain.”
Nearby, Joyce Flynn stopped at the ramp long enough to give Tombstone a long, indecipherable look. He waved, and she tossed her head, obviously still angry, and strode up the ramp.
Moments later, the last of the civilians and evacuating UN personnel were on board. The Marines on LZ perimeter defense, who were joining the shore party, leaped to their feet and scrambled up the beach as the helo pilots set their rotors spinning faster once more. Sailors on the beach waved all-clears with their flashlights, and one by one the CH-53s rose off the sand, hovered momentarily, then swung their bows toward the night and the sea and vanished, swallowed by the darkness.
Tombstone watched with a terrible, icy apprehension. It was impossible to see those big CH-53s lifting off from their makeshift LZ without remembering that Operation Eagle’s Claw, the failed Delta Force op to free the American hostages in Iran in 1980, had used Sea Stallions as well. Military operations never went entirely as planned, and mechanical or human failures were constants in any endeavor as big and as complex as Operation Ranger. The entire operation could fail right here, right now, if one of those big aircraft crashed, if two collided in midair, if the enemy attacked…
“I like her,” Pamela said.
He turned. He’d not noticed her approach. “She’s a good person.”
“I wish you hadn’t split us up. I was just getting to know her.”
“You could have gone with her, you know.” She gave him a warning look, and he held up his hands. “Okay! Okay! But, anyway, I had to split you two up. I had the distinct impression you were joining forces against me.”
More aircraft thundered overhead… A-6 Intruders, this time, on their way to hit Dmitriev’s positions north of Yalta. It was time to move out, before the attacks ran out of steam, before Dmitriev’s fighters broke through the American air perimeter, before Boychenko’s people just plain ran out of time.
Boychenko had rounded up a fair-sized transport convoy ? Zil trucks, mostly, but an odd collection of other mismatched vehicles as well, including ZSU-34-4s, BMP personnel carriers, and even a T-80 tank. They were parked along the highway on the north side of the palace complex, engines idling, ready to go. It would be a long and dangerous passage, especially if Dmitriev’s people figured out what Boychenko was up to. The coast highway followed the Crimea’s southeastern coast for nearly 120 kilometers to the point where it joined highway M25 east of Feodosija, then turned east for another hundred kilometers the rest of the way to their final destination.
