The Bosporus, the strait linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, was eighteen miles long and averaged two miles in width, though it was only half a nautical mile wide at its narrowest. While the historic Old City was huddled on the tightly crowded peninsula at the extreme southern end of the waterway, Istanbul, the modern city, sprawled exuberantly clear to the airport fourteen miles west, north to the shores of the Black Sea itself, and eastward, across the Bosporus and deep into Anatolia. An important seaport and trading center since the times of the ancient Greeks, it was today a bustling, crowded metropolis, with modern skyscrapers vying for space with centuries-old Ottoman minarets and the onion-shaped domes of mosques.
Most unforgettable for Tombstone, however, had been the waters just off the Golden Horn in the shadow of Sancta Sofia. There, the garish spectacle of Old Istanbul had crowded in on every side of the carrier, a cluttered profusion of shapes and colors, the only city in the world straddling Europe and the Asian mainland. Through the open window at Brandt’s elbow, Tombstone had heard the eerie, wailing cries of the muezzins atop the city’s myriad minarets, calling the faithful to afternoon prayer, mingled with the sound of horns and traffic in the city’s crowded streets. The straits themselves had been packed with boats and small craft of every description, from modern yachts to sail-driven coasting vessels that looked like galleys out of the Arabian Nights. Fishing boats were especially thick here, for the straits provided access for a number of species of fish that migrated between the Black Sea and the Aegean; at times, Tombstone felt as though the carrier were shooing whole flocks of waterfowl out of her way as the fishing boats scattered left and right just beneath the CVN’s towering prow.
The next two hours had been a period of slowly mounting tensions as the carrier navigated up the waterway, slipping ― with just room to spare ― beneath two of the three suspension bridges spanning the Bosporus. The oldest and southernmost dated only to 1973; the newest, stretching now across the water directly ahead of the Jefferson, the final barrier between the carrier and the open sea, had been opened only a few years ago. To Tombstone’s eye, none of those bridges looked high enough to give the top of Jefferson’s superstructure and radio masts clearance beneath their gray-silver girders. Ismet Ecevit, the pilot who’d come aboard at Canakkale, had insisted that there was plenty of room to spare, and so far, at least, he’d been right. Just one more bridge to clear, now…
The straits had been tight and narrow, but at last they were opening up and the waters of the Black Sea were spreading out ahead. The sky had been partly cloudy all day; at Istanbul, shafts of sunlight had sliced through high-stacked blue-gray clouds, touching the centuries-old mosques and towers and ancient-looking walls and the sails and canopies of small craft in the harbor with liquid gold. The clouds were beginning to close in now, but patches of blue sky continued to peep from among the towering piles of fluffy cumulus clouds. Jefferson’s met boys were calling for clear weather for the passage, but probable rain tonight. It looked like this time they’d called it right.
Tombstone was glad the passage was almost over. Bringing a modern Nimitz-class aircraft carrier through the Bosporus wasn’t quite as needle-threading a challenge as guiding the 1092-foot-long vessel through the Suez Canal, but in his opinion it came damned close. He hadn’t felt this hemmed in since the Jeff had hidden from Soviet reconnaissance forces inside a narrow fjord in Norway.
Somehow, though, he didn’t think he’d feel much safer when they entered the Black Sea the Chernoje More.
Stupid… stupid… stupid.
Something about his expression made Captain Brandt chuckle. “It’s okay, Stoney. We’re past the narrow part. You can breathe now.”
Tombstone grinned at him. “You know, sir, we missed a bet. Back there where the straits were really closing in, we could’ve tossed a handful of lira to the kids on either bank and had ‘em scrape down and paint our hull as we passed.”
“Shit,” Brandt said with considerable feeling. “This is nothing compared to the Suez. Man, I hate taking a CVN through there.”
“I don’t know which would make me more nervous,” Tombstone replied.
“Scraping paint to port and starboard, or the security threat.”
Brandt nodded toward the flight deck, where a number of U.S. Marines in full combat gear stood at key positions around the perimeter, facing outward. Jefferson’s Marine contingent, together with an armed party of the carrier’s sailors, were responsible for protecting her from any threat imaginable ― or unimaginable, for that matter ― from gunfire from either shore, to grenades dropped among the aircraft on the flight deck from those suspension bridges, to kamikaze speedboats, and they took their responsibilities very seriously indeed.
“Security, Tombstone,” Brandt said, all trace of bantering gone from his voice. “It’s always the security.”
Then they were up to the final bridge, cruising into its shadow.
Tombstone repressed an instinctive desire to duck as the shadow drifted slowly up the flight deck, then blotted out the sun as the bridge slipped momentarily out of the direct sunlight on the strait. Half of the Marines on the flight deck were scanning the bridge overhead, watching for threats… an impossible task, actually, since the span was crowded with Turks gathered to watch the passing of the American carrier.
Brandt cast a measuring glance toward the Turkish pilot. “I thought your people were supposed to close those bridges off, Mr. Ecevit?”
The pilot replied with an exaggerated shrug. He didn’t care, that much was certain. He ignored Brandt after that, carefully pointing out a set of channel marker buoys to the helmsman, a quartermaster chief standing at the carrier’s wheel. The chief tossed a covert glance at Tombstone and rolled his eyes toward the overhead; he’d obviously seen those buoys and made any necessary adjustments to their course long before. Ninety-thousand-plus-ton supercarriers did not stop on the proverbial dime; even at her current slow and ponderous crawl up the waterway, it would take her the better part of a mile to come to a complete stop if she needed to.
The sun came out again as they cleared the bridge. The shorelines to the east and the west were receding swiftly now. In another few moments, the carrier would be out of the Bosporus and inside the Black Sea.
Tombstone watched the pilot for a moment, trying to decide if he genuinely didn’t care about the botched security arrangements or was pretending nonchalance to mask embarrassment. The latter, probably, Tombstone decided. He was only a minor functionary, a civilian pilot with the Turkish Port Authority, and quite far down in any hierarchy of command.
The Turks had been sticky about allowing a carrier battle group to traverse their territorial waters, formal and correct in their dealings with Navy officials to the point of an almost icy disdain. Their reaction, perhaps, was understandable. Turkey’s government was strictly secular, but there were powerful Moslem fundamentalist groups within the country who would see the Jefferson as a golden target, a symbol of the hated United States and her foreign policy, a high-profile incident to capture a segment on World News Tonight. Ankara did not want a terrorist incident… which made the security failure on the bridge hard to understand.
More than that, though, Turkish-American relations were not good just now, partly because of U.S. support for the Greeks in various recent wars, incidents, and territorial disputes, but more because Turkey feared being dragged into the rapidly spreading wildfire of war and insurrection engulfing her once powerful neighbor to the north. Too, Turkey’s Kurd and Armenian minorities were growing restless again and might use the chaos across the Russian border to resurrect their own hopes of dismembering eastern Turkey and creating states of their own.