Abdulhalik tried to shrug and winced with the pain. “Ah! Well, it makes sense, yes? There are several radical Tatar independence groups. Any could have done this to further their cause.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean they did it.” He shook his head. “What would they achieve by killing Boychenko? Besides getting themselves stepped on, I mean?”
Abdulhalik didn’t answer. He was unconscious. Tombstone finished his bandaging job and signaled for a stretcher team as they approached the stage. Joyce joined him a moment later.
“You look thoughtful,” she said.
“Hmm. Abdulhalik thinks this was the work of a Tatar nationalist movement.”
“Terrorists?”
“Yeah. But it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Terrorism doesn’t make much sense.”
“No, I mean, this is really far-fetched. What could they hope to achieve with this? If I were a terrorist group who wanted the Crimea back, but with no chance in hell of seeing my aims realized…”
His voice trailed off as he followed the chain of logic.
“Come on,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“The helicopter. That’s probably where they’re taking Boychenko, and I want to get there before they take off.”
“Why? Are you hitching a ride back to the Jeff?”
It was a tempting thought, though Tombstone and the other Navy personnel ashore, except for Tarrant’s staff, of course, were all supposed to remain in Yalta while the UN people took charge. But Tombstone had other ideas.
“No. I want to get on the radio. I think we may have problems.”
She had to hurry to keep up with his long pace as he strode toward the east side of the palace. “What kind of problems?”
“I think Boychenko was only one of several targets,” he told her. “And I’m afraid the Jeff might be next on their list!”
CHAPTER 17
Major Yevgenni Sergeivich Ivanov divided his attention between the radar display and the view out the cockpit. Flying a high-performance attack aircraft at extreme low altitude was always a challenge; he was skimming the waves of the Black Sea at an altitude of less than fifty meters, where the slightest hesitation, the least miscalculation would slam him and his aircraft into the sea at Mach 1.1.
He was flying a Mig-27M attack aircraft, hurtling along at just above the speed of sound, the variable-geometry wings swept back along the aircraft’s fuselage like the folded wings of a stooping hawk.
Ivanov was an experienced pilot, as experienced as any in Soviet Frontal Aviation. At thirty-eight, he was old for a combat aviator, but he’d been flying a fighter of one type or another for over fifteen years. His first combat missions had been over Afghanistan. Later, he’d volunteered for a special Frontal Aviation program that transferred him temporarily to navy command, and he’d spent five years learning how to land on the deck of the new Soviet nuclear aircraft carrier Kreml, then teaching other, younger aviators how to do the same.
With that experience, he was part of a very special fraternity, one of the smallest and most demanding in the world, the brotherhood of pilots trained to operate off the deck of an aircraft carrier. He’d flown off the Kreml in the Indian Ocean, during the India-Pakistan crisis, and again in the great naval battle off the Norwegian coast, the engagement during which the carriers Kreml and Soyuz had both gone to the bottom. With his ship shot out from beneath him while he was in the air, Ivanov almost hadn’t made it home. Short on fuel, he’d nursed his damaged aircraft back across Norwegian and Finnish territory to land at a small airstrip outside of Nikel.
For a time after that, he’d been back in FA ― Frontal Aviation ― on more traditional assignments, flying ground-attack missions for Krasilnikov against the Leonovist rebels. With two of the former Soviet Union’s three aircraft carriers destroyed, and the third kept in careful seclusion in its port facilities at Sevastopol, everyone in FA assumed that the Russian aircraft carrier experiment was dead. If nothing else, Russia was no longer a world power, neither able nor willing to project military force to some far-off corner of a hostile globe. Something as large, as expensive, and as complex as a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was a serious drain on the military’s fast-vanishing resources, and with no strategic purpose to its existence, it would soon be consigned to the wrecker’s yard.
And that, Ivanov reflected as he glanced briefly left and right, checking the positions of the other Mig27s in his attack formation, would have been a tragedy. Pobedonosnyy Rodina was a proud, noble vessel, for all that he’d never yet left port for more than a brief Black Sea shakedown. Operation Miaky had given him the chance to live again.
Ivanov had developed a feel for carriers during the years he’d served aboard them in the naval aviation program. Despite the long-standing rivalry between the Fleet and Frontal Aviation, he liked carrier service. Rodina deserved better than rusting away at his moorings or being broken into scrap to feed the starving, inefficient civilian industries ashore. His affection for carriers and his love of naval flying were shaped, as much as anything else, by the knowledge that he was part of that elite fraternity shared by only a tiny handful of aviators from Russia, Great Britain, France, the United States, and the very few other countries whose navies operated aircraft carriers.
Fraternity. The word he used was bratstvo, “brotherhood.” He’d heard, though, that the Americans had begun allowing Women to fly carrier aircraft. He snorted behind his oxygen mask. Women? The very idea was preposterous. During the long Soviet reign, women had been promised full equality with men, but that was an idea that had never really been reflected by the real world, one composed more of words than of substance. In the years since the collapse of the Soviet government, there’d been an ultraconservative backlash against the whole concept of women’s rights; female equality with men was an idea linked inextricably in the public mind with the Communists, and there was a tendency now to relegate women to the kitchen and a select few professions outside the home ― actresses and street sweepers and doctors and the like.
Ivanov grinned. Like most fighter pilots of his acquaintance, he thought of women as simple and delightful perquisites of his profession, the faster and hotter the better. As far as he was concerned, women belonged in bed, naked and with legs welcomingly spread, not in the cockpit of a jet aircraft.
He thought he would like to meet some of the American women aboard the Thomas Jefferson, however. If even half of the scandalous stories he’d heard were true…
Such a meeting seemed unlikely at best, just now. Once again, politics and the relentless tides of history were about to bring the American and Russian navies into conflict, and if he met an American fighter pilot at any time in the near future, it would be as an opponent, a minute, wildly twisting speck trapped in the targeting reticle of his Mig’s HUD.
Pathetic… the thought of women attempting to meet men on equal terms in combat. The idea was ludicrous in ground combat, since women were so much weaker than men; it was even more ludicrous in air combat, for the demonstrable fact that women simply didn’t have the brains for the highly technical aspects and details of flying high-performance jet aircraft. He’d heard that several American women had been shot down over the Kola; if Black Flight encountered any today, it would be an even more complete slaughter. In the Kola, the Americans had been flying against second-rate units and rear-echelon squadrons, the leftovers after the debacle in and around Norway. Black Flight, and the attendant formations code-named Bastion and Flashlight, were made up of combat aviators scoured from Loyalist units all over Russia and were comprised of the very best of the best.