tail hook snag one of the cables stretched taut across the deck, and his
body surged forward hard against his harness. He cut his power back to a
grumbling idle as a deck director and a gang of Green Shirts ran toward
his aircraft. To the side, he saw other people running toward his
aircraft, including the brightly clad fire detail and a number of rescue
personnel and duty hospital corpsmen. The yellow-painted mobile crane
stood ready close by, but there were so many people on the deck that it
would have been difficult for it to get through. That sort of display
was against regs, but nobody seemed to care this morning.
Easing back, he spit out the wire, then followed the deck director
toward a waiting slot aft of the island. He cracked his canopy as a
plane crew chief popped his access steps. He reached up, yanked off his
mask and helmet, and gulped down cool, delicious air. It had never
tasted so good.
“Nicely done, sir,” the plane chief said as he leaned in and safed the
ejection seats. “Welcome home!”
“Give me a hand with Mickey,” he said.
“That’s okay, sir,” a hospital corpsman said, scrambling up alongside
the chief. “We’ve got him. You just take care of yourself. Are you all
right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” His knees felt weak, his legs shaky. Helping
hands unfastened his harness and helped him out of the cockpit.
“Well done,” someone called as he set foot on the deck. Someone else
clapped him on the shoulder. “Good job, Dixie, bringing old Mickey Moss
back!”
“How is he?”
“Can’t tell yet, sir,” a corpsman said. “He’s alive. Can’t find any
bleeding. Side of his helmet’s dinged. I think a piece of shrapnel must
have whacked him.” Several rescue people worked together to ease a board
down behind Mickey’s back and strap him to it. With his head and neck
immobilized, they began lifting him out of the cockpit and into a Stokes
stretcher.
“Dixie!”
He turned and found himself face to face with Cat Garrity. She threw her
arms around his neck and kissed him, quick and hard. People standing
nearby cheered or clapped or laughed.
“That was some damned good flying,” she told him.
He grinned at her. “Does this mean I’m off the shit list?”
“Dixie, my man, I’ll fly with you anytime, anywhere!”
He felt like he was home.
1235 hours (Zulu +3)
Yalta, Crimea Military District Gunfire crackled in the distance–the
expected attack by Dmitriev’s naval forces. For Tombstone, it was a
particularly helpless feeling, to be trapped at the palace with a group
of nearly thirty American service personnel, with a pitched battle being
fought nearby and nothing that he could do to help himself or the
others. His first consideration, certainly, was the treatment of the men
wounded in the assassination attempt. There were four dead–Captain
Whitehead, Special Envoy Sandoval, and two civilians. Wounded, besides
Admiral Tarrant, were a Lieutenant Billingsly from OC, one Marine
private named Garibaldi, five civilians, and Jorge Luis Vargas y Vargas,
Sandoval’s personal aide.
Ambulances had shown up within twenty minutes of the shootings, and
doctors and medical assistants had provided first aid, but Tombstone had
not authorized the release of any of the wounded Navy personnel to the
local civilian medical authorities, and the senior UN people had
requested that Vargas be taken to a Navy ship as well. The Russians had
not been insulted; in fact, they’d been relieved, for facilities at the
Yalta hospital, between casualties from the Russian Civil War and the
ongoing critical shortage of medical supplies, were already strained to
the limit.
The shortcomings in the Russian medical service were legendary, of
course. Earlier, a Russian doctor, a woman named Vaselenova, had
complained about it to Tombstone as she’d prepared an IV saline drip for
the wounded Admiral Tarrant. He’d watched in horror as she’d stropped
the tip of a disposable syringe needle on a whetstone, then dropped it
into a pot of boiling water. “Da, da,” she’d said a few minutes later,
using a spoon to fish the needle out of the water. “There is never
enough of what we need. Plasma. Penicillin. Clean sheets at hospital.