Afterburn by Keith Douglass

Author:Keith Douglass [Douglass, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Action & Adventure, Mystery & Detective, General, Technological, Fiction, Espionage
ISBN: 9780515119145
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Published: 1996-06-30T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Wednesday, 4 November 1515 hours (Zulu +3)

Yalta, Crimean Military District

It was a mild and delightful seventy degrees—warmer certainly than Tombstone had expected for any part of Russia in November. Palm trees swayed in a line along Drazhinsky Boulevard below his window, and the scores of people he could see on the promenade beyond wore shorts or swimsuits. Bikinis were much in vogue with women, especially the young and attractive ones, and Tombstone had to remind himself that this was part of Russia—or Ukraine, depending on your point of view—and not some beach in Mediterranean France. Aboard the Jefferson one hundred miles at sea that morning the air temperature had been fifteen degrees cooler—not unpleasant, certainly, but not warm enough to prepare him for this subtropical Eden.

The Crimea, he decided, was going to prove to be full of surprises.

Most of the Crimea Peninsula, Tombstone had learned from a guidebook he’d picked up in the ship’s store the day before, was actually hot, dry steppe, something that did not mesh easily with his mental image of the vast and sprawling land that was Russia. Like most Westerners, Tombstone had always pictured Russia as basically cold, in the grip of General Winter from October through April, and his experience over the far-northern tundra wastes of the Kola Peninsula in the still-winter month of March had only reinforced that impression.

He’d known, certainly, that the former Soviet Union wasn’t just ice and tundra, and the balmy temperatures and crystal blue skies of his first day in Yalta were enough to convince him that there was more to this land than Siberian wastes.

In fact, though the northern two-thirds of the Crimea was arid, the chain of mountains stretching from Balaklava in the southwest all the way to Kerch in the extreme east created a natural barrier that kept the southern coast subtropically pleasant. The sun along that coast was warm, even in early November, and the sea breeze was delightful, cool and moist and salt-tangy. The climate and the palms reminded Tombstone a lot of southern California; the south Crimean coast was known, in fact, as the Crimean Riviera. For decades, the elite of the old Soviet Union’s vaunted classless society had come to this region on holiday, and the most powerful of Moscow’s rulers had maintained their dachas and summer homes here. During the abortive 1991 coup, Gorbachev had been placed under arrest and held in his dacha estate not far from Yalta, while events elsewhere in the nation had spun far beyond the reach both of him and of the coup plotters.

The air of affluence that permeated much of the southern Crimean coast had marked the region since long before the Soviets had come on the scene. Czars had kept their summer palaces here, and Lenin had issued a decree to the effect that the palaces of the Russian aristocracy in the region should be turned into sanatoria for the people.

The ongoing troubles in Russia, however, had been felt here as well.

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