“Certainly! What’d you expect, youngster? Nice safe milk runs on the open ocean? Getting to be captain of a Love Boat? This here,” he thumped his fist melodramatically on the arm of his chair, “is a man’s Navy.”
“Um,” Tombstone said. “Don’t let Brewer or the other Amazons hear you say that. She could take exception.”
“Shit, you’re right,” Brandt said. “Though I’m more afraid of Madam Secdef and the PC Police. Promise not to turn me in?”
“I won’t tell if you won’t, Skipper.”
“Deal.” He grinned. “You know, Stoney, this is the sort of shit you have to learn to deal with if you want to play with the big boys up here.”
It was a long-standing joke. Tombstone was CAG, commander of CVW-20, the air wing assigned to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Thomas Jefferson, CVN74. Sooner or later, however, he would have to move on in his career… and for most aviators who made it high enough up the chain of command to run an air wing, that meant going on to command a carrier someday. It was possible ― if not entirely likely, at this point ― that Tombstone might one day be sitting in Brandt’s chair, skippering this same CVN through some other strait in some other troubled part of the world. As training for that day, Tombstone was required to spend a certain number of watches on the bridge; at times, he served as acting captain under Brandt’s tutelage. This time, though, he was strictly an observer. The situation, both tactically and politically, called for an experienced captain on the bridge as the supercarrier cruised majestically into new waters.
Like a vast, gray, slow-moving island, the Thomas Jefferson was making her way northeast, threading her way along the narrow channel of the Bosporus and toward the Black Sea proper. Over a thousand feet long, displacing 96,700 tons fully loaded, the nuclear-powered supercarrier U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson was heart and soul of Carrier Battle Group 14, a powerful naval squadron that included the Aegis cruiser Shiloh, the destroyers William B. Truesdale, Alan Kirk, and John A. Winslow, the frigates Stephen Decatur and Leslie, and the Los Angeles-class submarines Galveston and Orlando.
Immediately ahead of the Jefferson, and preceding her through the straits, was a Meko-class frigate, hull number F240, but she wasn’t part of the battle group. Her name was Yavuz, and she was their military escort through Turkish waters. At the moment, the only other American ship visible was the Truesdale, a gray smudge on the northern horizon, far out ahead of the Jefferson and already well into the Black Sea.
It was unnaturally quiet aboard the CVN. Personnel on the bridge stood to their stations, speaking little, and only when required by duty. Outside, on the roof, flight deck personnel gathered in small groups among the closely spaced parked aircraft to watch the slow-passing shore or to enjoy a rare moment of inactivity. The planes themselves looked like so many huge, sleeping gray birds with their wings tightly folded. Hight deck operations had been suspended during the passage through the Bosporus. The transit agreement with Turkey called for Jefferson’s aircraft to stay grounded while the vessel was in Turkish waters, and that was part of what was making Tombstone uneasy. With none of her aircraft aloft, Jefferson was completely dependent on the electronic eyes and ears of those ships of her battle group that had already entered the Black Sea. Shiloh was already out there, beyond the Truesdale and over the horizon, as were Winslow and Leslie, while Decatur brought up the rear. If Washington had guessed wrong about Russian intentions or Russian sensitivity to an American task force entering their traditional waters, enough of the CBG was already in place to protect the carrier as it moved ponderously through the narrow straits.
At least, that was what the CBG Ops Staff hoped. Tombstone, as CAG, had been in on all of the planning sessions and knew the logistical and deployment rationalizations by heart.
Stupid… stupid… stupid…
Leaning forward, he peered up at the sky, a jumbled mix of towering blue-and-white cumulus clouds and patches of blue sky… as if he could spot incoming aircraft before the battle group’s radar could. He shook his head at the thought. An aviator’s hands-on instincts… and impossible to ignore. This was a critical time for the CBG. If the Russians were going to try something, they couldn’t ask for a better moment than now, while the Jeff was pinned in the straits with her air grounded.
Were they still at war with Russia? Tombstone honestly wasn’t sure, and neither was anyone else in CBG-14. Most likely the politicians weren’t sure either; officially a truce was on, and American forces had been directed to fire at Russian units only if the other guy fired first. The trouble was that things were rather confused inside Russia these days, and no one, inside the country or outside, knew for sure who was speaking for them. So far as Tombstone could tell, the truce was strictly unilateral, if only because no one knew whether the people who’d agreed to it in either the Krasilnikov or Leonov factions had the authority to do so.
In fact, the short, hard-fought naval war that had started just after the neo-Soviets had invaded Norway and led up to the Marine landings on the Kola Peninsula had finally ended more through Russia’s internal collapse and exhaustion than anything else. Prisoners taken during that campaign had indicated that Russian morale was at zero, that their troops were short of food, of clothing, of ammunition, of boots, of everything, in fact, that a modern army needed in order to fight.
That was seven months ago, and things within the borders of the former Soviet state had gotten a hell of a lot worse since then. The civil war continued, bloody and relentless, and there was no clear-cut government to deal with, no one to sign a cease-fire or agree to a cessation of hostilities. The UN had been trying to bring about a truce for months now, and the closest they’d come was in establishing a tiny enclave in Georgia ― nominally an independent nation but largely controlled now by one or another of the Russian army factions that were battling it out all across the length and breadth of the vast and once-powerful land of Russia. UN officials hoped, however, that a United Nations peacekeeping victory in those nations would open the way to a UN-bartered peace throughout the Russian Federation.
And that, indirectly at least, was why the Jefferson and her battle group were sailing into this landlocked potential death trap. They’d already arranged to have a Marine Expeditionary Unit ― MEU-25 ― moved to the waters off the Georgian port of Poti, and now the Jefferson was going in to add her air wing to the UN’s arguments. Whether or not American forces should be put under the command of UN commanders was an issue that had been debated for many years now; a group of advisers close to the President had acquired the nickname of the “Internationalists” because of their insistence that the long-touted New World Order would evolve only when the UN possessed the military teeth of a world power, while national armed forces were weakened.
Personally, Tombstone didn’t care for the direction things seemed to be taking. A U.S. carrier battle group under the command of a foreigner just wasn’t right.
In fact, he thought it was downright dangerous.
A scant two hours earlier, Jefferson had cleared the Golden Horn, that freshwater arm of the Bosporus lying just north of the city of Istanbul proper, the Old City, and had slipped into the narrow waterway separating Europe from Asia. Technically, the buildings visible to either side of the strait were still part of Istanbul. The four slender minaret spires of the Sancta Sofia, rising above the sprawl of Topkapi Palace and marking the heart of old Istanbul, had long since receded out of sight astern, but the buildings sliding past to the west, part of a community called Rumeli Kavagi, could be thought of as part of Istanbul’s modern suburbs.