The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

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 Astronomical 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.
CHAPTER 15
Development
Ghosn could only shake his head. He knew objectively that it resulted from the
sweeping political changes in Europe, the effective elimination of borders
attendant to the economic unification, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and
headlong rush to join in the new European family. Even so, the hardest part of
getting these five machine tools out of Germany and into his valley had been
finding a suitable track at Latakia, and that had actually been rather
difficult, since negotiating the road into where his shop lay had
incomprehensibly been overlooked by everyone – including, he thought with some
satisfaction, the German. Fromm was now observing closely as a gang of men
labored to move the last of the five tools onto its table. Arrogant as he may
have been, Fromm was an expert technologist. Even the tables had been built to
exactly the right size, with ten centimeters of extra space around each tool so
that one could rest a notebook. The backup generators and UPSs were in place and
tested. It was just a matter of getting the tools set up and fully calibrated,