fist up and hard against the underside of the kid’s jaw.
The blow smashed the would-be mugger backward and into a cement-block
wall. Tombstone was on him an instant later, slamming him twice more
against the cement, hard, as the knife clattered to the floor. He threw
another punch and the kid’s head lolled to the side.
He let him slide to the floor then, face bloody. Tombstone picked up the
knife, rammed the tip hard into a crevice between two concrete blocks,
then applied pressure until the blade snapped with a sharp, metallic
report.
He dropped the useless hilt on the unconscious kid’s chest. “Sorry,
fella,” he said. “But I’ve had a really bad day.”
CHAPTER 16
Thursday, 5 November 0940 hours (Zulu +3)
White Palace Yalta, Crimea Tombstone had to admit that there was a
tremendously rich symbolism in Boychenko’s choice of a meeting place for
the surrender ceremony. The welcome ceremony, he corrected himself
wryly. The Russians weren’t thinking of this as a surrender, but as a
simple transaction, with the United Nations taking responsibility for
the security of the peninsula in exchange for guarantees that the
Russian soldiers would be repatriated.
Livadia was a village less than two miles west of Yalta where the czars
had begun building summer palaces in the 1860s and where Nicholas II had
erected his summer residence in 1912. That sprawling, luxurious
building, known as the White Palace, had been the site of the
famous–the infamous, rather–Yalta Conference of February, 1945, where
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had carved up postwar Europe and
unwittingly launched the Cold War that followed. It was here that yet
another era of Russian history was to be inaugurated, as General
Boychenko turned over the Crimean Military District to UN control.
A stage had been erected in the broad, level park in front of the White
Palace, with plenty of chairs for the various UN and Russian officials
and a massive wooden podium already arrayed with dozens of microphones
of various types, their cables snaking off through the grass. A large
number of people were in attendance, standing in front of the stage in a
large, milling throng; though most were civilians from Yalta, the crowd
included a generous number of reporters as well. As Tombstone climbed
the three wooden steps to take his seat on the stage, he caught sight of
Pamela and her cameraman there. He felt a pang as he caught her eye and
saw the coldness there, but he pretended not to notice and kept walking.
His helmet, the regulation helmet painted baby blue to identify him as a
member of the UN contingent, chafed uncomfortably where the canvas
circle inside rubbed against his head.
He still felt stunned by Pamela’s change of heart. Not for it
suddenness; now that he looked back on it, he realized he should have
seen this coming since last summer, or even before. But he’d been so
delighted at the chance to see her here. .. and it seemed a kind of
betrayal that a romantic dinner in an exotic setting should turn into
the end of their relationship.
In a way, he supposed, it was amusing. Aboard the Jefferson, one of the
most common problems among the enlisted personnel, especially the
younger kids, was the Dear John letter, the dread correspondence from
home explaining that the Stateside partner couldn’t continue this way,
that she’d found someone else, that “it”–whether marriage,
relationship, or affair–was over. Revelations like that could be deadly
when the guy was far away from home, alone, vulnerable, unable even to
make a phone call to straighten things out. It was, Tombstone knew, one
of the problems most frequently encountered by the ship chaplain’s
department, as well as by the XOS of both the Jefferson and of the
various squadrons.
As he found his seat, a folding metal chair in a line behind the podium,
he thought of Brewer, the new XO of the Vipers, and wondered how she
coped with the kids who must be coming to her with problems like his
every day. Or … He frowned, puzzled. Were they? Admitting that your
girlfriend or wife thought you were a jerk and was leaving you didn’t