The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

and so the best and brightest officers were taken away from their professional
specialties and dropped into things which they knew not the first thing about.
Not that they'd ever learn how to do their new jobs, of course, but they might
learn just enough to be dangerous, plus losing currency in what they were
supposed to do. That was Congress's idea of military reform.
'Coffee, Cap'n?' an Army corporal asked.
'Better make it decaf,' Rosey replied. If my disposition gets any worse, I might
start hurting people.
Work here was career-enhancing. Rosselli knew that, and he also knew that being
here was partly his fault. He'd majored in sub and minored in spook throughout
his career. He'd already had a tour at the Navy's intelligence headquarters at
Suitland, Maryland, near Andrews Air Force Base. At least this was a better
commute – he'd gotten official housing at Bolling Air Force Base, and the trip
to the Pentagon was a relatively simple hop across I-295/395 to his reserved
parking place, another perk that came with duty in the NMCC, and one worth
shedding blood for.
Once duty here had been relatively exciting. He remembered when the Soviets had
splashed the Korean Airlines 747 and other incidents, and it must have been
wonderfully chaotic during the Iraq war – that is, when the senior watch officer
wasn't answering endless calls of 'what's happening?' to anyone who'd managed to
get the direct-line number. But now?
Now, as he had just watched on his desk TV, the President was about to defuse
the world's biggest remaining diplomatic bomb, and soon Rosselli's work would
mostly involve taking calls about collisions at sea, or crashed airplanes, or
some dumbass soldier who'd gotten himself run over by a tank. Such things were
serious, but not matters of great professional interest. So here he was. His
paperwork was finished. That was something Jim Rosselli was good at – he'd
learned how to shuffle papers in the Navy, and here he had a superb staff to
help him with it – and the rest of the day was mainly involved with sitting and
waiting for something to happen. The problem was that Rosselli was a do-er, not
a wait-er, and who wanted a disaster to happen anyway?
'Gonna be a quiet day.' This was Rosselli's XO, an Air Force F-15 pilot,
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Barnes.
'I think you're right, Rocky.' Just what I wanted to hear! Rosselli checked his
watch. It was a twelve-hour shift, with five hours left to go. 'Hell, it's
getting to be a pretty quiet world.'
'Ain't it the truth.' Barnes turned back to the display screen. Well, I got my
two MiGs over the Persian Gulf. At least it hasn't been a complete waste of
time.
Rosselli stood and decided to walk around. The duty watch officers thought this
was to look at what they were doing, to make sure they were doing something. One
senior civilian ostentatiously continued doing the Post crossword. It was his
'lunch' break and he preferred eating here to the mostly empty cafeterias. Here
he could watch TV. Rosselli next wandered over to the left into the Hot Line
room, and he was lucky for a change. A message was announced by the dinging of a
little bell. The actual message received looked like random garbage, but the
encryption machine changed that into cleartext Russian which a Marine