“Welcome to Adak, sir,” the driver said. “I understand this is your first trip here?”
“Sure is.” He glanced at the front of her uniform, wondering what her name was, but her stenciled nameplate was covered up by the bulky cold-weather gear. “And you are?”
“Petty Officer Monk,” she said, the hard edges of a New England accent clipping her words off. “I’ll be your driver while you’re here, Admiral,” she added, candidly assessing him.
“I don’t imagine we’ll need to go a lot of places,” Tombstone said. “After all, the base isn’t that big, is it?”
“No, Admiral, but you’ll want a driver even to get between most of the buildings. This cold,” she said, shaking her head, “I thought I’d be used to it, but this takes even me by surprise.”
“Maine?” Tombstone asked, hazarding a guess.
Her face brightened. “You’ve been there?”
“Several times. Did a lot of skiing up at Sugarloaf years ago.”
She nodded vigorously. “Only about forty miles from my hometown,” she said happily. “Gets cold up there, but nothing compared to Adak.”
Something about the young sailor reminded Tombstone of Tomboy. It wasn’t just the physical similarity, he was sure, although Petty Officer Monk was about the same size as his lover. No, it was something in the set of the eyes, the bright gleam of mischief that not even naval courtesy and custom could entirely dim.
“Oh, by the way, Admiral,” Petty Officer Monk said suddenly, breaking into his reverie. “A few members of the press arrived yesterday on the last C-130 for the decommissioning ceremony. There’re only three reporters, though,” she added hastily, seeing the expression of dismay cross his face. “Just one from a major network.”
As the last passenger climbed into the van, Petty Officer Monk started to pull away from the aircraft. She’d left the engine running while sitting there.
“And just who might that be?” Tombstone asked, already feeling a curious, pleasant fluttering in his stomach. If it were …”
“Miss Pamela Drake,” Monk said cheerfully. “She’s staying at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters — BOQ — but most of us have gotten a look at her. She’s from ACN.”
Pamela Drake. Why wasn’t he surprised? Tombstone shook his head. During the last ten years, Pamela had managed to turn up on every major press pool covering United States Navy operations, particularly those that involved a certain Matthew Magruder. At first he’ thought it was coincidence, but on his last cruise, Pamela had finally admitted that she never passed up an opportunity to cover anything involving Tombstone. When they’d finally broken their engagement, he thought those days would be over.
Evidently not. A new thought struck him, and he grimaced. Now just what would Tomboy have to say if she found out that Pamela Drake was on the same isolated island as her lover? He shook his head, quite sure that it wouldn’t be pleasant.
“Okay, we got it,” the voice said over Tactical. “Solid visual on the COI — contact of interest.”
“About time you guys showed up,” Bird Dog grumbled. “This is a fighter, not a babysitter.”
“We do our best, but our max speed is four hundred and forty knots,” the other pilot retorted. “You might be able to get here faster, but you can’t do a damned thing about her while she’s submerged. We can,” he concluded smugly.
Bird Dog stared out the windscreen at the squat, blunt-nosed S-3 Viking ASW aircraft. She was less than half the size of the Tomcat, he figured, but her long fuel endurance and highly efficient engines enabled her to remain on station far longer than the Tomcat could have dreamed of without tanking. Two Harpoon antiship missiles hung slung on either side of her fuselage, with two torpedoes on each wing occupying the outer weapons stations. Evidently, the carrier took this business seriously, sending out the S-3s fully armed.
While the Tomcat could carry a wide range of antiair missiles and bombs, there was damned little it had against a submarine. Rockeyes, ground-attack missiles that carried a payload of bomblets, could be effective against a submarine on the surface, but the Tomcat had no anti-surface or torpedo capability whatsoever. Indeed, on this flight, which was intended to be a simple quick look-see at the Greenpeace ship, Tomcat 201 carried only a minimal weapons load-out, more for training than for any other purpose. Sidewinders graced the outer weapons stations, with two Sparrows occupying the ones closer to the fuselage. They’d elected to forego the longer-range Phoenix missiles, whose massive weight significantly reduced the Tomcat’s onstation time.
“Okay, we’re out of here. You guys take this bitch out if she even so much as moves like she’s going to take out my stereo,” Bird Dog said.
“Don’t worry about it,” the S-3 pilot said dryly. “You might have noticed that you and I live in the same apartment building.”
CHAPTER 3
Colonel Rogov returned to the submarine after the initial camp setup, leaving the Spetsnaz commandos huddled inside their sleeping bags inside the creaking, groaning cave carved out of the cliff. The small raft had barely made the trip back to the submarine safely, taking two waves completely over it and being turned into a miniature version of its mother ship several times.
He watched the men move around the submarine’s control center, noting with disdain the black circles under their eyes and the fatigue in their every movement. Europeans, all of them. The strong Slavic stock of their ancestors bred out of them and diluted by the effete blood of inbred royalty. None of them would have lasted long under his command. And none of them could have endured the conditions ashore in the ice cavern.
Not that the submarine’s crew would have seen it that way. They saw themselves, he knew, as vastly superior to the Western Europeans that inhabit France, Germany, and England. He snorted. If they only knew. Approximately half of the crew was Russian, the last remnants of a grand race that had done its best to extinguish everything noble and superior in its bloodlines in the coups that destroyed the czars’ line. The remaining crew members were primarily Ukrainian, with a few mongrel Georgians, Azerbiijanis and Armenians thrown in. All in the latter group were at least half Polish, some even with strong German stock mixed in with the historic blood that had first flourished in the fertile steppes of the Ukraine and in the high, craggy mountain regions of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia. Had they but seen what they would become, he doubted that any one of them would have chosen to consort with the invading hordes that swept east from Europe from century to century. Instead, they would have preferred to fight to the last man and woman, chosen defeat over the hybridization and bastardization of their blood.
Not so with his ancestors. The Cossacks, driven out of their homeland surrounding the Black Sea and on the Crimean Peninsula, had remained a closed, insular nation without a country, warlike and incapable of being defeated. The best the Russians could manage was to drive them out into the vast desolation of its most eastern areas, consigning them to Mongolia, Siberia, and the rugged alien terrain of the eastern Soviet Union. Yet even centuries of forced relocation had failed to extinguish their strong tribal instincts, their sense of who and what they were. Primary among those attributes was their identity as Cossacks.
He watched the men again, noting the pale faces, the languid, almost feminine movements as they carefully monitored the complex array of sensors, weapons, and electronics installed on the small submarine. Such a powerful submarine, even for its small size. The Kilo combined ham-handed Russian design with frighteningly advanced electronics and computers obtained from Japan, Korea, and yes, even the United States. A powerful ship, one that deserved better than the masters she now had. That would change.