Personally, Tombstone didn’t care for the direction things seemed to be
taking. A U.S. carrier battle group under the command of a foreigner
just wasn’t right.
In fact, he thought it was downright dangerous.
A scant two hours earlier, Jefferson had cleared the Golden Horn, that
freshwater arm of the Bosporus lying just north of the city of Istanbul
proper, the Old City, and had slipped into the narrow waterway
separating Europe from Asia. Technically, the buildings visible to
either side of the strait were still part of Istanbul. The four slender
minaret spires of the Sancta Sofia, rising above the sprawl of Topkapi
Palace and marking the heart of old Istanbul, had long since receded out
of sight astern, but the buildings sliding past to the west, part of a
community called Rumeli Kavagi, could be thought of as part of
Istanbul’s modern suburbs.
The Bosporus, the strait linking the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara,
was eighteen miles long and averaged two miles in width, though it was
only half a nautical mile wide at its narrowest. While the historic Old
City was huddled on the tightly crowded peninsula at the extreme
southern end of the waterway, Istanbul, the modern city, sprawled
exuberantly clear to the airport fourteen miles west, north to the
shores of the Black Sea itself, and eastward, across the Bosporus and
deep into Anatolia. An important seaport and trading center since the
times of the ancient Greeks, it was today a bustling, crowded
metropolis, with modern skyscrapers vying for space with centuries-old
Ottoman minarets and the onion-shaped domes of mosques.
Most unforgettable for Tombstone, however, had been the waters just off
the Golden Horn in the shadow of Sancta Sofia. There, the garish
spectacle of Old Istanbul had crowded in on every side of the carrier, a
cluttered profusion of shapes and colors, the only city in the world
straddling Europe and the Asian mainland. Through the open window at
Brandt’s elbow, Tombstone had heard the eerie, wailing cries of the
muezzins atop the city’s myriad minarets, calling the faithful to
afternoon prayer, mingled with the sound of horns and traffic in the
city’s crowded streets. The straits themselves had been packed with
boats and small craft of every description, from modern yachts to
sail-driven coasting vessels that looked like galleys out of the Arabian
Nights. Fishing boats were especially thick here, for the straits
provided access for a number of species of fish that migrated between
the Black Sea and the Aegean; at times, Tombstone felt as though the
carrier were shooing whole flocks of waterfowl out of her way as the
fishing boats scattered left and right just beneath the CVN’s towering
prow.
The next two hours had been a period of slowly mounting tensions as the
carrier navigated up the waterway, slipping–with just room to
spare–beneath two of the three suspension bridges spanning the
Bosporus. The oldest and southernmost dated only to 1973; the newest,
stretching now across the water directly ahead of the Jefferson, the
final barrier between the carrier and the open sea, had been opened only
a few years ago. To Tombstone’s eye, none of those bridges looked high
enough to give the top of Jefferson’s superstructure and radio masts
clearance beneath their gray-silver girders. Ismet Ecevit, the pilot
who’d come aboard at Canakkale, had insisted that there was plenty of
room to spare, and so far, at least, he’d been right. Just one more
bridge to clear, now. ..
The straits had been tight and narrow, but at last they were opening up
and the waters of the Black Sea were spreading out ahead. The sky had
been partly cloudy all day; at Istanbul, shafts of sunlight had sliced
through high-stacked blue-gray clouds, touching the centuries-old
mosques and towers and ancient-looking walls and the sails and canopies
of small craft in the harbor with liquid gold. The clouds were beginning
to close in now, but patches of blue sky continued to peep from among
the towering piles of fluffy cumulus clouds. Jefferson’s met boys were
calling for clear weather for the passage, but probable rain tonight. It
looked like this time they’d called it right.
Tombstone was glad the passage was almost over. Bringing a modern