The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

Doktor Manfred Fromm was, on paper, the deputy assistant director of the
Lubmin/Nord Nuclear Power Station. The station had been built twenty years
earlier from the Soviet VVER Model 230 design, which, primitive as it was, had
been adequate with an expert German operations team. Like all Soviet designs of
the period, the reactor was a plutonium producer, which, as had been proven at
Chernobyl, was neither terribly efficient nor especially safe, but did carry the
benefit of producing weapons-grade nuclear material, in addition to 816
megawatts of electrical power from its two functioning reactors.
'The Greens,' Bock repeated quietly. 'Them.' The Green Party was a natural
consequence of the German national spirit, which venerated all growing things on
one hand, while trying very hard to kill them on the other. Formed from the
extreme – or the consistent – elements of the environmental movement, it had
fought against many things equally upsetting to the Communist Bloc. But where it
had failed to prevent the deployment of theater nuclear weapons – and after
their successful deployment had resulted in the INF Treaty, which had eliminated
all such weapons on both sides of the line – it was now successfully raising the
purest form of political hell in what had once been the German Democratic
Republic. The nightmare of pollution in the East was now the obsession of the
Greens, and number one on their hit list was the nuclear-power industry, which
they called hideously unsafe. Bock reminded himself that the Greens had never
truly been under proper political control. The party would never be a major
power in German politics, and now it was being exploited by the same government
that it had once annoyed. Whereas once the Greens had shrieked about the
pollution of the Ruhr and the Rhein from Krupp, and howled about the deployment
of NATO nuclear arms, now it was crusading in the East more fervently than
Barbarossa had ever attempted in the Holy Land. Their incessant carping on the
mess in the East was ensuring that socialism would not soon return to Germany.
It was enough to make both men wonder if the Greens had not been a subtle
capitalist ploy from the very beginning.
Fromm and the Bocks had met five years earlier. The Red Army Faction had come up
with a plan to sabotage a West German reactor, and wanted technical advice on
how to do so most efficiently. Though never revealed to the public, their plan
had been thwarted only at the last minute. Publicity on the BND's intelligence
success would conversely have threatened Germany's own nuclear industry.
'Less than a year until they shut us down for good. I only go in to work three
days a week now. I've been replaced by a "technical expert" from the West. He
lets me "advise" him, of course,' Fromm reported.
'There must be more, Manfred,' Bock observed. Fromm had also been the chief
engineer in Erich Honecker's most cherished military project. Though allies
within the World Socialist Brotherhood, the Russians and the Germans could never
have been true friends. The bad blood between the nations stretched back a
thousand years, and while Germany had at least made a go of socialism, the
Russians had failed completely. As a result, the East German military had never
been anything like the much larger force in the West. To the last, the Russians
had feared Germans, even those on their own side, before incomprehensibly
allowing the country to be unified. Erich Honecker had decided that such
distrust might have strategic ramifications, and had drawn plans to keep some of