As Sykes had predicted, there wasn’t much of a welcoming committee on hand. A couple of elderly limousines were drawn up on the tarmac a few yards away, with a handful of Russian soldiers clustered around them. As Tombstone cleared the rotors and straightened up to his full height, two figures detached themselves from the waiting group and advanced toward the disembarking naval personnel.
The one in the lead wore a Russian army uniform with insignia that identified him as a colonel. He saluted Whitehead stiffly and spoke in careful, precise English. “Captain… Whitehead. Welcome to Yalta. I am Bravin. General Boychenko has asked me to see you and your party to your accommodations.”
Whitehead returned the salute with a smile. “Thank you, Tovarisch Polkovnik,” he said. “And please convey my thanks to the general, as well.”
Before the stilted conversation could go any further, the second man stepped forward. He was in civilian dress, a short, slight man whose quick movements and brisk manner made Tombstone think of a bird searching for worms. “Captain Whitehead,” he said. He spoke with a distinct Hispanic accent that sounded jarring in these surroundings. “I am Jorge Luis Vargas y Vargas, personal aide to Special Envoy Sandoval. He has placed me at your disposal until you have settled in and there is time to arrange a meeting with him and the rest of the United Nations delegation.” The little man studied the new arrivals for a moment, his forehead creasing in a distinctly disapproving frown. “Captain, you and your people must not appear again without proper uniforms. His Excellency will be most displeased. Most displeased.”
“Proper uniforms?” Tombstone asked.
“Your carrier group is attached to the UN command. You should wear the proper blue berets or combat helmets, and UN armbands.” He gestured at the Sea Stallion, in its dark gray livery and muted rounder. “And for that matter, your helicopter should not display American insignia. Please be sure to let your people know what is expected. His Excellency is very precise when it comes to questions of protocol.” Before either Magruder or Whitehead had a chance to reply, Vargas turned to the Russian lieutenant and spoke in rapid-fire Russian.
The young officer nodded. “Da,” he said curtly. “Captain, if you and your party will accompany me, we will go to your hotel and allow you a chance to refresh yourselves. According to the schedule, there will be no meetings requiring your presence until tomorrow. If you please?..”
Whitehead turned and looked at the group, then locked gazes with Tombstone. “Well, CAG,” he said. “I thought there was more of a hurry to this thing.”
“Hurry up and wait,” Tombstone said with a grin. “It’s the same in every language.” He looked at the UN man. “Senor Vargas, I’m Captain Magruder. I’m supposed to liaise with the press. Are there any members of the media here yet?”
Vargas rolled his eyes toward the sky. “Aye, Madre de Dios, you cannot go anywhere in the city without bumping into them and their equipment. They are staying at the same hotel where you will be staying. I’m sure you will have more to… to liaise with, as you say, than you really care to! Now, if you please?..”
Tombstone was intrigued by the little man’s brusque and impatient manner … not exactly what he would have expected from a diplomat. True, Vargas wasn’t exactly a diplomat ― no more than Tombstone himself was, actually ― but Tombstone had been expecting a little more in the way of common courtesy.
It seemed that he had a lot to learn about the gentle art of diplomacy.
CHAPTER 14
It was a mild and delightful seventy degrees ― warmer certainly than Tombstone had expected for any part of Russia in November. Palm trees swayed in a line along Drazhinsky Boulevard below his window, and the scores of people he could see on the promenade beyond wore shorts or swimsuits. Bikinis were much in vogue with women, especially the young and attractive ones, and Tombstone had to remind himself that this was part of Russia ― or Ukraine, depending on your point of view ― and not some beach in Mediterranean France. Aboard the Jefferson one hundred miles at sea that morning the air temperature had been fifteen degrees cooler ― not unpleasant, certainly, but not warm enough to prepare him for this subtropical Eden.
The Crimea, he decided, was going to prove to be full of surprises.
Most of the Crimea Peninsula, Tombstone had learned from a guidebook he’d picked up in the ship’s store the day before, was actually hot, dry steppe, something that did not mesh easily with his mental image of the vast and sprawling land that was Russia. Like most Westerners, Tombstone had always pictured Russia as basically cold, in the grip of General Winter from October through April, and his experience over the far-northern tundra wastes of the Kola Peninsula in the still-winter month of March had only reinforced that impression.
He’d known, certainly, that the former Soviet Union wasn’t just ice and tundra, and the balmy temperatures and crystal blue skies of his first day in Yalta were enough to convince him that there was more to this land than Siberian wastes.
In fact, though the northern two-thirds of the Crimea was arid, the chain of mountains stretching from Balaklava in the southwest all the way to Kerch in the extreme east created a natural barrier that kept the southern coast subtropically pleasant. The sun along that coast was warm, even in early November, and the sea breeze was delightful, cool and moist and salt-tangy. The climate and the palms reminded Tombstone a lot of southern California; the south Crimean coast was known, in fact, as the Crimean Riviera. For decades, the elite of the old Soviet Union’s vaunted classless society had come to this region on holiday, and the most powerful of Moscow’s rulers had maintained their dachas and summer homes here. During the abortive 1991 coup, Gorbachev had been placed under arrest and held in his dacha estate not far from Yalta, while events elsewhere in the nation had spun far beyond the reach both of him and of the coup plotters.
The air of affluence that permeated much of the southern Crimean coast had marked the region since long before the Soviets had come on the scene. Czars had kept their summer palaces here, and Lenin had issued a decree to the effect that the palaces of the Russian aristocracy in the region should be turned into sanatoria for the people.
The ongoing troubles in Russia, however, had been felt here as well.
From the hotel window, at least, there was actually surprisingly little evidence of the civil war that had been tearing at Russia’s guts for the past months. The buildings were intact, there were no soldiers in the streets, no signs of fortifications or defenses. But the entire city had a depressed air, a depression of the spirit as well as of the economy. The region had depended on tourism for capital, but, reasonably enough, tourism had been in sharp decline for some time now. Most, maybe all, of the people visible on the street were native Russians; there’d been no foreign visitors for some time now, not since the attempted reintegration of the Soviet empire, and the city was showing the absence of their hard currencies. It looked shabby and a bit run-down. There was garbage in the streets ― something unthinkable in the socialist paradise that once had employed women to sweep each street with brooms ― and many of the people Tombstone could see from the window looked less like vacationers than gangs, groups of tough-looking kids in jeans and T-shirts loitering in public areas with the same swaggering aggressiveness Tombstone had seen in their counterparts back in the United States. He’d heard, too, that the region was a magnet for the darker elements of Russia’s disintegrating economy. The Russian Mafia, he’d been told, controlled many of the businesses and most of the business transactions that went on here, while the southern Crimea was a principal meeting place for Armenians, Georgians, Uzbeks, Tatars, and renegade Russian military officers engaged in black market trade.