The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

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
Bundes Nachrichten Dienst – 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