God, I’m not ready for this, Pamela told herself as they rode in the backseat of the car up a winding, cliff-top road. Why did he have to be here? Why was I so stupid as to agree to meet him for dinner?
She really wasn’t ready for the confrontation she knew was coming.
Looking sideways at his profile, she had to admit that she still liked him… a lot. Hell, she loved him, but love wasn’t always enough. It would have been great if they could’ve made things work out, but by now Pamela knew that they wouldn’t be able to. She wasn’t about to give up her career, and though she’d been trying for years now to convince Matt that his career was a dead end, she’d finally woken up and realized that the man was simply never going to change.
Matt Magruder was married to the U.S. Navy. It had been that way since she had met him, and so far as she could tell it was always going to be that way. Sometimes she thought the guy had saltwater in his veins instead of blood. Or jet fuel; he loved flying as much as he loved the sea, though he didn’t get to fly as much these days as he had in the past. Still, she’d found the combination of sea and flying impossible to compete with.
And Pamela knew that she was simply not cut out to be a Navy wife.
“You’re awfully quiet,” he told her. He sounded worried, on edge. Maybe he’d already guessed what she was thinking. He’d always been pretty quick on the uptake.
Except when she was trying to get him to see the futility of his continuing career with the Navy.
“I’m pretty tired,” she told him. It wasn’t entirely a lie. “They’ve had us on the run ever since the Georgia thing came up.”
“Is that what you were coming over to cover in the first place?”
“Sort of. The UN peace initiative was being covered okay by Mike Collins and some of our other field people. But then that Army helicopter got shot down.
He nodded. “Big news Stateside, huh?”
“Navy jets shoot down Army helo? I should say so. Those were your planes, weren’t they?”
“They were off the Jefferson, yes. Remember Batman?”
“Of course.”
“He pulled the trigger.”
“God. What happened?”
“is this an official interview?”
She sighed. He tended to get so touchy when she asked probing questions.
“Strictly off the record. I was just wondering.”
“It was an accident,” he said.
Well, she’d known that. She made a face. “I didn’t think you’d done it on purpose.”
“Someone screwed up between Washington and the Black Sea,” he said, looking away at the landscape passing outside. “The IFF codes for that Army helicopter didn’t get delivered. We’re taking steps to make sure the same mistake doesn’t happen again.”
She glanced up at the driver, sitting behind the wheel of the Zil. He was obviously listening in on the conversation.
Tombstone saw her look and smiled. “Don’t worry about the driver. He’s just the FBS’s local spy. Isn’t that right, Abdulhalik?”
“Hey, I just work here,” the swarthy man said, flashing a dazzling grin.
“Your secrets are safe with me!”
“Right.” He turned back to her. “I assume he’s FBS, anyway. But what happened to that helo’s no secret. They probably know all about that. Right, Abdulhalik?”
“Low-grade stuff,” the driver replied. “Doubt that they pay me more than eight, ten thousand ruble. Now, if you want to tell me how many nuclear weapons are on aircraft carrier…”
“Not a chance. Drive, okay?”
“I drive!”
Pamela looked away in disgust. Silly macho games. Those two were actually enjoying their banter!
It was growing dark by the time the aging Zil rental car got them to the cliff-top aerie known as Lastochinko Gnezdo, the Swallow’s Nest, perched high atop the rocky cliff overlooking the sea.
“It looks like a German castle,” Pamela said as Tombstone held the car’s door open for her. “Or someone’s twisted idea of what a German castle should look like.”
“It is,” he said, grinning. “It was built for Baron Steingel, a rich German oil magnate, back in 1912. Photographs of this place must grace every Crimean travel brochure printed since World War I.” He turned to the driver, pulling his billfold from his jacket and extracting some bills. “Here you go. You’ll pick us up?”
“I be right here, Tombstone.” He dug an elbow against Tombstone’s ribs.
“Hey, don’t know how you American Navy do it,” he continued, lowering his voice… apparently on the assumption that Pamela couldn’t hear his conspiratorial semi-whisper. “Two girls in one day! A-okay, man!”
“Never mind the performance critique,” Tombstone told him brusquely.
“Give us a couple of hours, right?”
“A-okay! I be here!”
Pamela pretended to study the architecture. It really did look a little like a fairy-tale castle, perched on the very edge of the cliff. The western sky, beyond the town of Gaspra and the peaceful waters of the sea, was turning pink and blood-red. “It looks familiar,” she told him.
“Did you ever see the movie Ten Little Indians? Agatha Christie?”
“Yes.”
“This is where it was shot. There’s a cafe and restaurant here now.” He took her arm. “Come on.”
And that, Pamela thought with a tightening of her lips, was exactly like the man, always sweeping in and taking charge, as though she and everyone else were just more aviators in his air wing.
The interior was overdone, heavy on the schmaltz and red carpeting. “The people at the hotel said they get a lot of tourists here,” Tombstone told her. “If we get a waiter who only speaks Russian, I’m going to be lost.”
“Well, it’s nice to know you’re not perfect at everything.”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind.”
The waiters did speak English ― or at least the one who served them did.
Most Russian food was actually rather bland, but the Turkish influence in the Crimea could not be missed. They both had shashlik ― chunks of seasoned lamb grilled on a skewer, like Turkish shish kebab. Conversation was limited to news topics ― the new woman Secretary of Defense, the UN mission in Georgia, the return of the Russian submariners to the Crimea.
They stayed away from anything personal, as if by mutual consent.
“So the Russian submarine sailors are all back in Sevastopol?” she asked him, spearing a chunk of lamb.
“As far as I know. They started ferrying them in from the Jefferson early this morning and were scheduled to be finished up by now. I haven’t heard one way or the other, though.”
“And that was really an accident, too? Like the helicopter?”
His fork paused halfway between his plate and his mouth, then completed the trip. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment before answering. “Kind of,” he said. “Our sub was acting within its rights, and within the limits of its orders. Its sonar picked up what sounded like a torpedo launch.”
“Wasn’t it already too late, then? Sinking the Russian sub was just vengeance by that time, wasn’t it?”
“Not really. If it had fired a torpedo at that range, it probably would have been wire-guided, which meant that sinking the sub would stop the torpedo. Our people acted exactly right.” He hesitated again, then tried a disarming grin. “You’re not accusing me of being a warmonger now, are you?”
“No, of course not. But it does make me wonder what the Navy is doing out here. You chalk up two kills, and both of them are mistakes.”
“Believe me, I’ve been wondering the same thing.”
“You sound bitter.”
“I guess I am. There are people in Washington, our defense secretary among them, who still want to use the U.S. military for social experimentation. That’s wrong. They want to loan U.S. troops out to the UN for humanitarian projects.”