The Sum of All Fears

14 REVELATION

“So, what have you found?”

“He's a most interesting man,” Goodley replied. “He's done some things at CIA that are hardly believable.”

“I know about the submarine business, and the defection of the KGB head. What else?” Liz Elliot asked.

“He's rather well liked in the international intelligence community, like Sir Basil Charleston over in England — well, it's easy to see why they like him — but the same is true in the NATO countries, especially in France. Ryan stumbled across something that enabled the DGSE to bag a bunch of Action Directe people,” Goodley explained. He was somewhat uncomfortable with his role of designated informer.

The National Security Advisor didn't like to be kept waiting, but there was no sense in pressing the young scholar, was there? Her face took on a wry smile. “Am I to assume that you have started admiring the man?”

“He's done fine work, but he's made his mistakes, too. His estimate on the fall of East Germany and the progress of reunification was way off.” He had not managed to learn that everyone else was, as well. Goodley himself had guessed almost exactly right on this issue up at the Kennedy School, and the paper he'd published in an obscure journal was something else that had earned him attention at the White House. The White House fellow stopped again.

“And…?” Elliot prodded.

“And there are some troubling aspects in his personal life.”

Finally! “And those are?”

“Ryan was investigated by the SEC for possible insider-stock trading before he entered CIA employ. It seems there was a computer-software company about to get a Navy contract. Ryan found out about it before anyone else and made a real killing. The SEC found out — the reason is that the company executives themselves were also investigated — and examined Ryan's records. He got off on a technicality.”

"Explain,” Liz ordered.

“In order to cover their own backsides, the company officials arranged to have something published in a defense trade paper, just a little filler item, not even two column inches, but it was enough to show that the information upon which they and Ryan operated was technically in the public domain. That made it legal. What's more interesting is what Ryan did with the money after attention was called to it. He cut it out of his brokerage account — that's in a blind-trust arrangement now with four different money-managers.” Goodley stopped. “You know what Ryan's worth now?”

“No, what is it?”

“Over fifteen million dollars. He's by far the richest guy at the Agency. His holdings are somewhat undervalued. I'd say he's worth closer to twenty myself, but he's been using the same accounting method since before he joined CIA, and you can't critique him there. How you figure net worth is kind of metaphysical, isn't it? Accountants have different ways of doing things. Anyway, what he did with that windfall: He split it off to a separate account. Then a short while ago it all moved out into an educational trust fund.”

“His kids?”

“No,” Goodley answered. “The beneficiaries — no, let me back up. He used part of the money to set up a convenience store — a 7-Eleven — for a widow and her children. The rest of the money is set aside in T-Bills and a few blue-chip stocks to educate her children.”

“Who is she?”

"Her name is Carol Zimmer. Laotian by birth, she's the widow of an Air Force sergeant who got killed in a training accident. Ryan has been looking after the family. He even signed out of his office to attend the birth of the newest child — a girl, by the way. Ryan visits the family periodically,” Goodley concluded.

“I see.” She didn't, but this is what one says. “Any professional connection?”

“Not really. Mrs. Zimmer, as I said, was Laotian. Her father was one of those tribal chieftains that CIA supported against the North Vietnamese. The whole group was wiped out. I haven't discovered how she managed to escape. She married an Air Force sergeant and came to America. He died in an accident somewhere, rather recently. There is nothing in Ryan's file to show any previous connection to the family at all. The Laos connection is possible — to CIA, I mean — but Ryan wasn't in government employ then, he was an undergrad in college. There's nothing in the file to show a connection of any kind. Just one day, a few months before the last presidential election, he set up this trust fund, and ever since he visits them on the average of once a week. Oh, there was one other thing.”

“What's that?”

“I cross-referenced this from another file. There was some trouble at the 7-Eleven, some local punks were bothering the Zimmer family. Ryan's principal bodyguard is a CIA officer named Clark. He used to be a field officer, and now is a protective guy. I wasn't able to get his file,“ Goodley explained. ”Anyway, this Clark guy evidently assaulted a couple of gang kids. Sent one to the hospital. I checked a newspaper clipping. It was in the news, a little item — concerned citizen sort of thing. Clark and another CIA guy — the paper identified them as federal employees, no CIA connection — were supposedly accosted by four street toughs. This Clark guy must be a piece of work. The gang leader had his knee broken and was hospitalized. One other was just knocked unconscious, and the rest just stood there and wet their pants. The local cops treated it as a gang problem — well, a former gang problem. No formal charges were pressed."

“What else do you know about this Clark?”

“I've seen him a few times. Big guy; late forties, quiet, actually seems kind of shy. But he moves — you know what he moves like? I took karate courses once. The instructor was a former Green Beret, Vietnam veteran, all that stuff. Like that. He moves like an athlete, fluid, economical, but it's his eyes. They're always moving around. He looks at you sideways and decides if you're a threat or not a threat…” Goodley paused. At that moment he realized what Clark really was. Whatever else he was, Ben Goodley was no fool. “That is one dangerous guy.”

“What?” Liz Elliot didn't know what he was talking about.

“Excuse me. I learned that from the karate teacher up at Cambridge. The really dangerous ones don't seem dangerous. You just sort of lose track of them in the room. My teacher, he was mugged on the subway station right there by Harvard. I mean, they tried to mug him. He left three kids bleeding on the bricks. They thought he was just a janitor or something — he's an African-American, about fifty now, I guess. Looks like a janitor or something the way he dresses, not dangerous at all. That's what Clark is like, just like my old sensei… Interesting,” Goodley said. "Well, he's a SPO, and they're supposed to be good at their job.

“I speculate that Ryan found out that some punks were bothering Mrs. Zimmer, and had his bodyguard straighten things out. The Anne Arundel County police thought it was just fine.”

“Conclusions?”

“Ryan has done some very good work, but he's blown some big ones, too. Fundamentally, he's a creature of the past. He's still a Cold War guy. He's got problems with the Administration, like a few days ago when you didn't attend the C AMELOT game. He doesn't think you take your job seriously, thinks that not playing those war-games is irresponsible.”

“He said that?”

“Almost a direct quote, I was in the room with Cabot when he came in and bitched.”

Elliot shook her head. That's a Cold Warrior talking. If the President does his job right, and if I do my job right, there won't be any crises to manage. That's the whole point isn't it?"

“And so far, you guys seem to be doing all right,” Goodley observed.

The National Security Advisor ignored the remark, looking at her notes.

The walls were in place, and weather-sealed with plastic sheeting. The air-conditioning system was already running, removing both humidity and dust from the air. Fromm was at work with the machine-tool tables. Table was too pedestrian a term. They were designed to hold several tons each, and had screw jacks on each sturdy leg. The German was leveling each machine with the aid of spirit-levels built into the frames.

“Perfect,” he said, after three hours of work. It had to be perfect. Now it was. Under each table was a full meter of reinforced concrete footings. Once leveled, the legs were bolted into place so that each was a solid part of the earth.

“The tools must be so rigid?” Ghosn asked. Fromm shook his head.

“Quite the reverse. The tools float on a cushion of air.”

“But you said they weigh over a ton each!” Qati objected.

“Floating them on an air cushion is trivial — you've seen photographs of hovercraft weighing a hundred tons. Floating them is necessary to dampen out vibrations from the earth.”

“What tolerances are we seeking?” Ghosn asked.

“Roughly what one needs for an astronomical telescope,” the German replied.

“But, the original bombs—”

Fromm cut Ghosn off. "The original American bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crude embarrassments. They wasted almost all of their reaction mass, especially the Hiroshima weapon — you would not manufacture so crude a weapon any more than you would design a bomb with a burning gunpowder fuse, eh?

“In any case, you cannot use such a wasteful design,” Fromm went on. “After the first bombs, the American engineers had to face the problem that they had limited supplies of fissile material. That few kilos of plutonium over there is the most expensive material in the world. The plant needed to make it through nuclear bombardment costs billions, then comes the additional cost of separation, another plant, and another billion. Only America had the money to do the initial project. Everyone in the world knew about nuclear fission — it was no secret, what real secrets are there in physics, eh? — but only America had the money and resources to make the attempt. And the people,” Fromm added. ”What people they had! So, the first bombs — they made three, by the way — were designed to use all the available material, and because the main criterion was reliability, they were made to be crude, but effective. And they required the largest aircraft in the world to carry them.

"Also… then the war was won, and bomb-design became a professional study and not a frantic wartime project, ja? The plutonium reactor they have at Hanford turned out only a few tens of kilos of plutonium per year at the time, and the Americans had to learn to use the material more efficiently. The Mark-12 bomb was one of the first really advanced designs, and the Israelis improved it somewhat. That bomb has five times the yield of the Hiroshima device for less than a fifth of the reaction mass — twenty-fivefold improvement in efficiency, ja? And we can improve that by almost a factor of ten.

“Now a really expert design team, with the proper facilities could advance that by another factor of… perhaps four. Modern warheads are the most elegant, the most fascinating—”

Two megatons?" Ghosn asked. Was it possible?

“We cannot do it here,” Fromm said, the sorrow manifest in his voice. “The available information is insufficient. The physics are straightforward, but there are engineering concerns, and there are no published articles to aid us in the bomb-design process. Remember that warhead tests are being carried out even today to make the bombs smaller and yet more efficient. One must experiment in this field, as with any other, and we cannot experiment. Nor do we have the time or money to train technicians to execute the design. I could come up with a theoretical design for a megaton-plus device, but in truth it would have only a fifty-percent likelihood of success. Perhaps a little more, but it would not be a practical undertaking without a proper experimental-test program.”

“What can you do?” Qati asked.

“I can make this into a weapon with a nominal yield of between four hundred and five hundred kilotons. It will be roughly a cubic meter in size and weigh roughly five hundred kilos.” Fromm paused to read the looks on their faces. “It will not be an elegant device, and it will be overly bulky and heavy. It will also be quite powerful.” It would be far more clever in design than anything American or Russian technicians had managed in the first fifteen years of the nuclear age, and that, Fromm thought, wasn't bad at all.

“Explosive containment?” Ghosn asked.

“Yes.” This young Arab was very clever, Fromm thought. “The first bombs used massive steel cases. Ours will use explosives — bulky but light, and just as effective. We will squirt tritium into the core at the moment of ignition. As in the original Israeli design, that will generate large quantities of neutrons to boost the fission reaction; that reaction in turn will blast additional neutrons into another tritium supply, causing a fusion reaction. The energy budget is roughly fifty kilotons from the primary and four hundred from the secondary.”

“How much tritium?” While not a difficult substance to obtain in small amounts — watchmakers and gunsight manufacturers used it, but only in microscopic quantities — Ghosn knew supplies over ten miligrams were virtually unobtainable, as he had just discovered himself. Tritium — not plutonium despite what Fromm had said — was the most expensive commercially available material on the planet. You could get tritium, but not plutonium.

“I have fifty grams,” Fromm announced smugly. ”Far more than we can actually use."

“Fifty grams!” Ghosn exclaimed. “Fifty?”

“Our reactor complex was manufacturing special nuclear material for our own bomb project. When the socialist government fell, it was decided to give the plutonium to the Soviets — loyalty to the world socialist cause, you see. The Soviets didn't see things that way. Their reaction”—Fromm paused—“they called it… well, I will leave that to your imagination. Their reaction was so strong that I decided to hide our tritium production. As you know it is very valuable commercially — my insurance policy, you might call it.”

“Where?”

“In the basement of my home, concealed in some nickel-hydrogen batteries.”

Qati didn't like that, not one small bit. The Arab chieftain was not a well man, the German could see, and that did not help him conceal his feelings.

“I need to return to Germany in any case to get the machine tools,” he said.

“You have them?”

“Five kilometers from my home is the Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute. We were supposed to manufacture astronomical telescopes there, visual and X-ray telescopes. Alas, it never opened. Such a fine ‘cover’ wasted, eh? In the machine shop, in crates marked Astrophysical Instruments, are six high-precision, five-axis machines — the finest sort,” Fromm observed with a wolfish grin. “Cincinnati Milacron, from the United States of America. Precisely what the Americans use at their Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats, and Pantex fabrication plants.”

“What about operators?” Ghosn asked.

“We were training twenty of them, sixteen men and four women, each with a university degree… No, that would be too dangerous. It is not really necessary in any case. The machines are ‘user-friendly,’ as they say. We could do the work ourselves, but that would take too much time. Any skilled lensmaker — even a master gunsmith, as a matter of fact — can operate them. What was the business of Nobel Prize winners fifty years ago is now the work of a competent machinist,” Fromm said. “Such is the nature of progress, ja?”

“It could be, then again it could not,” Yevgeniy said. He'd been on duty for twenty hours straight, and only six hours of fitful sleep separated that from yet another, longer stint.

Finding it, if that indeed was what they'd done, had taken all of Dubinin's skill. He'd guessed that the American missile sub had headed south, and that her cruising speed was in the order of five knots. Next came environmental considerations. He'd had to stay close, within direct-path range, not allowing himself to come into a sonar convergence zone. The CZs were annular — donut — shaped areas around a vessel. Sound that went downward from a point within the convergence zone was refracted by the water temperature and pressure, traveling back and forth to the surface on a helical path at semi-regular intervals that in turn depended on environmental conditions. By staying out of them, relative to where he thought his target was, he could evade one means of detection. To do that meant that he had to stay within theoretical direct-path distance, the area in which sound simply traveled radially from its source. To accomplish that without detection, he had to remain on the top side of the thermocline layer — he figured that the American would remain under it — while allowing his towed-array sonar to hang below it. In this way, his own engine-plant noises would probably be deflected away from the American submarine.

Dubinin's tactical problem lay in his disadvantages. The American submarine was quieter than his, and possessed both better sonars and better sonar-operators. Senior Lieutenant Yevgeniy Nikolayevich Ryskov was a very bright young officer, but he was the only sonar expert aboard who might fairly be matched against the American counterparts, and the boy was burning himself out. Captain Dubinin's only advantage lay in himself. He was a fine tactician, and knew it. And his American counterpart was not, Dubinin thought, and didn't know it. There was a final disadvantage. By staying on top of the layer, he made counter-detection by an American patrol aircraft easier, but Dubinin was willing to run that risk. What lay before him was a prize such as no Russian submarine commander had ever grasped.

Both captain and lieutenant stared at a “waterfall” display, looking not at a strobe of light, but instead a disjointed, barely visible vertical line that wasn't as bright as it should have been. The American Ohio-class was quieter than the background noise of the ocean, and both men wondered if somehow environmental conditions were showing them the acoustical shadow of that most sophisticated of missile submarines. It was just as likely, Dubinin thought, that fatigue was playing hallucinatory games with both of their minds.

“We need a transient,” Ryskov said, reaching for his tea. “A dropped tool, a slammed hatch… a mistake, a mistake… ”

I could ping him… I could duck below the layer and hit him with a blast of active sonar energy and find out… NO! Dubinin turned away and nearly swore at himself. Patience, Valentin. They are patient, we must be patient.

“Yevgeniy Nikolay’ch, you look weary.”

“I can rest in Petropavlovsk, Captain. I will sleep for a week, and see my wife — well, I will not sleep entirely for that week,” he said with an exhausted grin. The lieutenant's face was illuminated by the yellow glow of the screen. “But I will not turn away from a chance like this one!”

“There will be no accidental transients.”

“I know, Captain. Those damned American crews… I know it's him, I know it's an Ohio! What else could it be?”

“Imagination, Yevgeniy, imagination and too large a wish on our part.”

Lieutenant Ryskov turned. “I think my captain knows better than that!”

“I think my lieutenant is right.” Such a game this is! Ship against ship, mind against mind. Chess in three dimensions, played in an ever-changing physical environment. And the Americans were the masters of the game. Dubinin knew that. Better equipment, better crews, better training. Of course, the Americans knew that, too, and two generations of advantage had generated arrogance rather than innovation… not in all, but certainly in some. A clever commander in the missile submarine would be doing things differently… If I had such a submarine, not all the world could find me!

“Twelve more hours, then we must break contact and turn for home.”

“Too bad,” Ryskov observed, not meaning it. Six weeks at sea was enough for him.

“Make your depth six-zero feet,” the Officer of the Deck said.

“Make my depth six-zero feet, aye,” the Driving Officer replied. “Ten degrees up on the fairwater planes.”

The missile-firing drill had just begun. A regular occurrence, it was intended both to ensure the competence of the crew and desensitize them to their primary war-fighting mission, the launch of twenty-four UGM-93 Trident-II D-5 missiles, each with ten Mark 5 re-entry vehicles of 400 kilotons nominal yield. A total of two hundred forty warheads with a total net yield of 96 megatons. But there was more to it than that, since nuclear weapons depended on the interlocking logic of several physical laws. Small weapons employed their yield with greater efficiencies than larger ones. Most important of all, the Mark 5 RV had a demonstrated accuracy of ±50 meters CEP (“Circular Error Probable”), meaning that after a flight of over four thousand nautical miles, half the warheads would land within 164.041 feet of their targets, and nearly all the rest within 300 feet. The “miss” distance was far smaller than the crater to be expected from such a warhead, as a result of which the D-5 missile was the first sea-launched ballistic missile with counter-force capability. It was designed for a disarming first-strike. Given the normal two-at-one targeting, Maine could eliminate 120 Soviet missiles and/or missile-control bunkers, roughly ten percent of the current Soviet ICBM force, which was itself configured for a counter-force mission.

In the missile-control center — MCC — aft of the cavernous missile room, a senior chief petty officer lit up his panel. All twenty-four birds were on line. On-board navigation equipment fed data into each missile-guidance system. It would be updated in a few minutes from orbiting navigation satellites. To hit a target, the missile had to know not only where the target was, but also where the missile itself was starting from. The NAVSTAR Global Positioning System could do that with a tolerance of less than five meters. The senior chief watched status lights change as missiles were interrogated by his computers and reported their readiness.

Around the submarine, water pressure on the hull diminished at a rate of 2.2 tons per square foot for every 100 feet of rise towards the surface. Maine's hull expanded slightly as the pressure was relieved, and there was a tiny amount of noise as steel relaxed from the compression.

It was only a groan, scarcely audible even over the sonar systems and seductively close to the call of a whale. Ryskov was so drunk with fatigue that had it come a few minutes later he would have missed it, but though his daydreams were getting the best of him, his mind retained enough of its sharpness to take note of the sound.

“Captain… hull-popping noise… right there!” His finger stabbed the screen, just at the bottom of the shadow he and Dubinin had been examining. “He's coming shallow.”

Dubinin raced into the control room. “Stand by to change depth.” He put on a headset that connected him to Lieutenant Rykov.

“Yevgeniy Nikolay’ch, this must be done well, and done quickly. I will drop below the layer just as the American goes over it.”

“No, Captain, you can wait. His array will hang below briefly, as ours would do!”

“Damn!” Dubinin almost laughed. “Forgive me, Lieutenant. For that, a bottle of Starka.” Which was the best Russian-made vodka.

“My wife and I will drink your health… I'm getting an angle reading… Estimate target five degrees depression from our array… Captain, if I can hold him, the moment we lose him through the layer…”

“Yes, a quick range estimate!” It would be crude, but it would be something. Dubinin rasped quick orders to his tracking officer.

“Two degrees… hull noises are gone… this is very hard to hold, but he's occulting the background a little more now — GONE! He's through the layer now!”

“One, two, three…” Dubinin counted. The American must be doing a missile drill, or coming up to receive communications, in any case he'd go to twenty meters depth, and his towed array… five hundred meters long… speed five knots, and… Now!

“Helm, down five degrees on the bow planes. We're going just below the layer. Starpom, make note of outside water temperature. Gently, helm, gently…”

Admiral Lunin dipped her bow and slid below the undulating border that marked the difference between relatively warm surface water and colder deep water.

“Range?” Dubinin asked his tracking officer.

“Estimate between five and nine thousand meters, Captain! Best I can do with the data.”

“Well done, Kolya! Splendid.”

“We're below the layer now, water temperature down five degrees!” the Starpom called.

“Bow planes to zero, level out.”

“Planes to zero, Captain… zero angle on the boat.”

Had there been enough overhead room, Dubinin would have leaped off his feet. He'd just done what no other Soviet submarine commander — and if his intelligence information was right, only a handful of Americans — had ever done. He'd established contact with and tracked an American Ohio-class fleet ballistic-missile submarine. In a war situation, he'd be able to fire off ranging pings with his active sonar and launch torpedoes. He'd stalked the world's most elusive game, and was close enough for a killing shot. His skin tingled from the excitement of the moment. Nothing in the world could match this feeling. Nothing at all.

“Ryl nepravo,” he said next. “Right rudder, new course three-zero-zero. Increase speed slowly to ten knots.”

“But, Captain…” his Starpom — executive officer — said.

“We're breaking contact. He'll continue this drill for at least thirty minutes. It is very unlikely that we can evade counter-detection when he concludes it. Better to leave now. We do not want him to know what we have done. We will meet this one again. In any case, our mission is accomplished. We have tracked him, and we got close enough to launch our attack. At Petropavlovsk, men, there will be much drinking, and your captain will do the buying! Now, let's clear the area quietly so that he will not know that we were ever here.”

Captain Robert Jefferson Jackson wished he was younger, wished that his hair was still completely black, that he could again be a young “nugget” fresh from Pensacola, ready to take his first hop in one of the forbidding fighter aircraft that sat like enormous birds of prey along the flight line at Oceana Naval Air Station. That all twenty-four of the F-14D Tomcats in the immediate area were his was not as satisfying as the knowledge that one was his and his alone. Instead, as Commander Air Group, he “owned” two Tomcat squadrons, two more of F/A-18 Hornets, one of A-6E Intruder medium-attack aircraft, another of S-3 submarine hunters, and finally the less glamorous tankers, electronic-warfare Prowlers, and rescue/ASW helicopters. A total of seventy-eight birds with an aggregate value of… what? A billion dollars? Much more if you considered replacement cost. Then there were the three thousand men who flew and serviced the aircraft, each of whom was beyond price, of course. He was responsible for all of it. It was much more fun to be a new fighter pilot who drove his personal airplane and left the worrying to management. Robby was now management, the guy the kids talked about in their cabins on the ship. They didn't want to be called into his office, because that was like going to see the Principal. They didn't really like flying with him, because (A) he was too old to be good at it any more (they thought), and (B) he'd tell them whatever he thought they were doing wrong (fighter pilots do not often admit mistakes, except among themselves).

There was a certain irony to it. His previous job had been in the Pentagon, pushing papers. He'd prayed and lusted for release from that job, whose main excitement every day was finding a decent parking spot. Then he'd gotten his command of his air wing — and been stuck with more admin crap than he'd ever faced in his life. At least he got to fly twice a week… if he were lucky. Today was such a day. His command master chief petty officer gave him a grin on the way out the door.

“Mind the store, Master Chief.”

“Roger that, skipper. It'll be here when you get back.”

Jackson stopped in his tracks. “You can have someone steal all the paperwork.”

“I'll see what I can do, sir.”

A staff car took him to the flight line. Jackson was already in his Nomex flight suit, an old smelly one whose olive-drab color was faded from many washings, and threadbare at the elbows and seat from years of use. He could and should have gotten a new one, but pilots are superstitious creatures; Robby and this flight suit had been through a lot together.

“Hey, skipper!” called one of his squadron commanders.

Commander Bud Sanchez was shorter than Jackson. His olive skin and Bismarck mustache accentuated bright eyes and a grin right out of a toothpaste commercial. Sanchez, Commanding Officer of VF-1, would fly Jackson's wing today. They'd flown together when Jackson had commanded VF-41 off the John F. Kennedy. “Your bird is all dialed in. Ready to kick a little ass?”

“Who’s the opposition today?”

“Some jarheads out of Cherry Point in -18-Deltas. We got a Hummer already orbiting a hundred miles out, and the exercise is BARCAP against low-level intruders.” BARCAP meant Barrier Combat Air Patrol. The mission was to prevent attacking aircraft from crossing a line that they were not supposed to cross. “Up to some heavy ACM? Those Marines sounded a little cocky over the phone.”

The Marine I can't take ain't been born yet," Robby said, as he pulled his helmet off the rack. It bore his call sign, Spade.

“Hey, you RIOs,” Sanchez called, ”quit holdin’ hands and let's get it on!"

“On the way, Bud.” Michael “Lobo” Alexander came from around the lockers, followed by Jackson's radar-intercept officer, Henry “Shredder” Walters. Both were under thirty, both lieutenants. In the locker room, people talked by call sign rather than rank. Robby loved the fellowship of squadron life as much as he loved his country.

Outside, the plane captains — petty officers — who were responsible for maintaining the aircraft walked the officers to their respective birds and helped them aboard. (On the dangerous area of a carrier flight deck, pilots are led virtually by the hand by enlisted men, lest they get lost or hurt.) Jackson's bird had a double-zero ID number on the nose. Under the cockpit was painted “CAPT. R. J. Jackson ‘SPADE’” to make sure that everyone knew that this was the CAG’s bird. Under that was a flag representing a MiG-29 fighter aircraft that an Iraqi had mistakenly flown too close to Jackson's Tomcat not so long before. There hadn't been much to it — the other pilot had forgotten, once, to check his “six” and paid the price — but a kill was a kill, and kills were what fighter pilots lived for.

Five minutes later, all four men were strapped in, and engines were turning.

“How are you this morning, Shredder?” Jackson asked over his intercom.

“Ready to waste some Marines, skipper. Lookin’ good back here. Is this thing gonna fly today?”

“Guess it's time to find out.” Jackson switched to radio. “Bud, this is Spade, ready here.”

“Roger, Spade, you have the lead.” Both pilots looked around, got an all-clear from their plane captains, and looked around again.

“Spade has the lead.” Jackson tripped his brakes. “Rolling now.”

"Hello, mein Schatz,” Manfred Fromm said to his wife.

Traudl rushed forward to embrace him. “Where have you been?”

“That I cannot say,” Fromm replied, with a knowing twinkle in his eye. He hummed a few bars from Lloyd Webber's ”Don't Cry for Me, Argentina."

"I knew you would see,” Traudl beamed at him.

“You must not talk of this.” To confirm her suspicion, he handed her a wad of banknotes, five packets of ten thousand D-Marks each. That should keep the mercenary bitch quiet and happy, Manfred Fromm told himself. “And I will only be here overnight. I had some business to do, and of course—”

“Of course, Manfred.” She hugged him again, the money in her hands. “If only you had called!”

Arrangements had been absurdly easy to make. A ship outbound for Latakia, Syria, was sailing from Rotterdam in seventy hours. He and Bock had arranged for a commercial trucking company to load the machine tools into a small cargo container which would be loaded on the ship and unloaded onto a Syrian dock in six more days. It would have been faster to send the tools by air, or even by rail to a Greek or Italian port for faster transshipment by sea, but Rotterdam was the world's busiest port, with overworked customs officials whose main task was searching for drug shipments. Sniffer dogs could go over that particular container to their hearts’ content.

Fromm let his wife go into the kitchen to make coffee. It would take a few minutes, and that was all he needed. He walked down into his basement. In the corner, as far from the water-heater as was possible was an orderly pile of lumber, on top of which were four black metal boxes. Each weighed about twelve kilograms, about twenty-five pounds. Fromm carried one at a time — on the second trip, he got a pair of gloves from his bureau drawer to protect his hands — and placed them in the trunk of his rented BMW. By the time the coffee was ready, his task was complete.

“You have a fine tan,” Traudl observed, carrying the tray out from the kitchen. In her mind, she'd already spent about a quarter of the money her husband had given her. So, Manfred had seen the light. She'd known he would, sooner or later. Better that it should be sooner. She'd be especially nice to him tonight.

“Günther?”

Bock didn't like leaving Fromm to his own devices, but he also had a task to perform. This was a far greater risk. It was, he told himself, a high-risk operational concept, even if the real dangers were in the planning stage, which was both an oddity and a relief.

Erwin Keitel lived on a pension, and not an especially comfortable one at that. Its necessity came from two facts. First, he was a former Lieutenant-Colonel in the East German Stasi, the intelligence and counter-intelligence arm of the defunct German Democratic Republic; second, he had liked his work of thirty-two years. Whereas most of his former colleagues had acknowledged the changes in their country and for the most part put their German identity ahead of whatever ideology they'd once held — and told literally everything they knew to the Bundesnachrichtendienst — Keitel had decided that he was not going to work for capitalists. That made him one of the “politically unemployed” citizens of the united Germany. His pension was a matter of convenience. The new German government honored, after a fashion, pre-existing government obligations. It was at the least politically expedient, and what Germany now was, was a matter of daily struggling with facts that were not and could not be reconciled. It was easier to give Keitel a pension than to leave him on the official dole, which was deemed more demeaning than a pension. By the government, that is. Keitel didn't see things quite that way. If the world made any sense at all, he thought, he would have been executed or exiled — exactly where he might have been exiled to, Keitel didn't know. He'd begun to consider going over to the Russians — he'd had good contacts in the KGB — but that thought had died a quick death. The Soviets had washed their hands of everything to do with the DDR, fearing treachery from people whose allegiance to world socialism — or whatever the hell the Russians stood for now, Keitel had no idea — was somewhat less than their allegiance to their new country. Keitel took his seat beside Bock's in the corner booth of a quiet Gasthaus in what had formerly been East Berlin.

“This is very dangerous, my friend.”

“I am aware of that, Erwin.” Bock waved for two liter glasses of beer. Service was quicker than it had been a few years before, but both men ignored that.

“I cannot tell you how I feel about what they did to Petra,” Keitel said, after the girl left them.

“Do you know exactly what happened?” Bock asked, in a level and emotionless voice.

"The detective who ran the case visited her in prison — he did so quite often — not for interrogation. They made a conscious effort to push her over the edge. You must understand, Günther, courage in a man or a woman is a finite quality. It was not weakness on her part. Anyone can break. It is simply a matter of time. They watched her die,” the retired colonel said.

“Oh?” Bock's face didn't change, but his knuckles went white on the stein handle.

“There was a television camera hidden in her cell. They have her suicide on videotape. They watched her do it, and did nothing to stop her.”

Bock didn't say anything, and the room was too dim to see how pale his face went. It was as though a hot blast from a furnace swept over him, followed by one from the North Pole He closed his eyes for a brief second to get control of himself Petra would not have wished him to be governed by emotion at a time like this He opened his eyes to look at his friend.

“Is that a fact?”

"I know the name of the detective. I know his address. I still have friends,” Keitel assured Bock.

“Yes, Erwin, I am sure you do. I need your help to do something ”

“Anything ”

“You know, of course, what brought us to this.”

“That depends on how you mean it,” Keitel said “The people disappointed me in the way they allowed themselves to be seduced, but the common people always lack the discipline to know what is good for them The real cause of our national misfortune… ”

“Precisely — the Americans and the Russians.”

“Mein lieber Günther, even a united Germany cannot—”

“Yes, it can. If we are to remake the world into our image, Erwin, both of our oppressors must be damaged severely”

"But how?”

“There is a way Can you believe me that much, just for now?”

Keitel drained his beer and sat back He'd helped train Bock At fifty six, it was too late for him to change his ideas of the world, and he was still a fine judge of character. Bock was a man such as himself. Günther had been a careful, ruthless, and very effective clandestine operator.

“What of our detective friend?”

Bock shook his head “As much satisfaction as that might give me, no This is not a time for personal revenge. We have a movement and a country to save ” More than one, in fact, Bock thought, but this was not the time for that. What was taking shape in his mind was a grand stroke, a breathtaking maneuver that might — he was too intellectually honest to say would, even to himself — change the world into a more malleable shape. Exactly what would happen after that, who could say? That would not matter at all if he and his friends were unable to take the first bold step.

“How long have we known each other — fifteen years, twenty?” Keitel smiled. “Aber natürlich. Of course I can trust you.”

“How many others can we trust?”

“How many do we need?”

“No more than ten, but we will need a total of ten.”

Keitel's face went blank. Eight men we can trust absolutely…?

“That is too many for safety, Günther. What sort of men?” Bock told him. “I know where to start. It should be possible… men of my age… and some younger, of your age. The physical skills you require are not difficult to obtain, but remember that much of this is beyond our control.”

“As some of my friends say, that is in God's hands,” Günther said with a smirk.

“Barbarians,” Keitel snorted. “I have never liked them.”

“Ja, doch, they don't even let a man have a beer,” Bock smiled. “But they are strong, Erwin, they are determined, and they are faithful to the cause.”

“Whose cause is that?”

“One we both share at the moment. How much time do you need?”

Two weeks. I can be reached—"

“No.” Bock shook his head. “Too risky. Can you travel, are you being watched?”

“Watch me? All of my subordinates have changed allegiance, and the BND knows that the KGB will have nothing to do with me. They would not waste the assets to watch me. I am a gelding, you see?”

“Some gelding, Erwin.” Bock handed over some cash. “We will meet in Cyprus in two weeks. Make sure you are not followed.”

“I will — I do. I have not forgotten how, my friend.”

Fromm awoke at dawn. He dressed at leisure, trying not to wake Traudl. She'd been more of a wife in the past twelve hours than in the preceding twelve months, and his conscience told him that their nearly failed marriage had not been entirely her fault. He was surprised to find breakfast waiting on the table for him.

“When will you be back?”

“I'm not sure. Probably several months.”

“That long?"

“Mein Schatz, the reason I am there is that they need what I know, and I am being well paid.” He made a mental note to have Qati send additional funds. So long as money kept coming in, she'd not be nervous.

“It is not possible for me to join you?” Traudl asked, showing real affection for her man.

“It is no place for a woman.” Which was honest enough that his conscience allowed itself to relax a little. He finished his coffee. “I must be off.”

“Hurry back.”

Manfred Fromm kissed his wife and walked out the door. The BMW was not affected in the least by the fifty kilos of weight in the trunk. He waved to Traudl one last time before driving off. He gave the house a final look in the mirror, thinking, correctly, that he might not see it again.

His next stop was the Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute. The single-story buildings were already showing their neglect, and it surprised him that vandals had not broken windows. The truck was already there. Fromm used his keys to let himself into the machine shop. The tools were still there, still in hermetically sealed crates, and the crates were still marked Astrophysical Instruments. It was just a matter of signing some forms he'd typed up the previous afternoon. The truck driver knew how to operate the propane-fueled forklift, and drove each crate into the container. Fromm took the batteries from the trunk of his car, and set them in a final, small box, which was loaded on last. It took him an additional half hour to chain things down in place, and then he drove off. He and “Herr Professor Fromm” would meet again outside Rotterdam.

Fromm rendezvoused with Bock in Greifswald. They drove west in the latter's car — Bock was a better driver.

“How was home?”

Traudl liked the money a great deal," Fromm reported.

“We'll send her more, at regular intervals… every two weeks, I think.”

“Good, I was going to ask Qati about that.”

“We take care of our friends,” Bock observed, as they passed over what had once been a border crossing. Now it was merely green.

“How long for the fabrication process?”

“Three months… maybe four. We could go faster,” Fromm said apologetically, ”but remember that I have never actually done this with real material, only in simulation. There is absolutely no margin for error. It will be complete by the middle of January. At that point, it is yours to use." Fromm wondered, of course, what plans Bock and the others had for it, but that was not really his concern, was it? Doch.