The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

play with commercials – that would have started a riot in the most civilized
European soccer crowd. TV was even used to regulate play. The field was littered
with referees in striped shirts, and even they were supervised by cameras and,
Russell pointed out, another official whose job it was to look at videotape
recordings of every play and rule on the rightness or wrongness of every
official ruling on the field. And to supervise that, two enormous TV screens
made the same replays visible to the crowd. If all that had been tried in
Europe, there would have been dead officials and fans at every game. The
combination of riotous enthusiasm and meek civilization here was remarkable to
Bock. The game was less interesting, though he saw Russell genuinely enjoyed it,
The ferocious violence of American football was broken by long periods of
inactivity. The occasional flaring of tempers was muted by the fact that each
player wore enough protective equipment as to require a pistol to inflict
genuine harm. And they were so big. There could hardly be a man down there under
a hundred kilos. It would have been easy to call them oafish and awkward, but
the running backs and others demonstrated speed and agility that one might never
have guessed. For all that, the rules of the game were incomprehensible. Bock
had never been one to enjoy sporting contests anyway. He'd played soccer as a
boy, but that was far in his past.
Günther returned his attention to the stadium. It was a massive and impressive
structure with its arching steel roof. The seats had rudimentary cushions. There
was an adequate number of toilets, and a massive collection of concession
stands, most serving weak American beer. A total of sixty-five thousand people
here, counting police, concessionaires, TV technicians. Nearby apartments . . .
He realized that he'd have to educate himself on the effects of nuclear weapons
to come up with a proper estimate of expected casualties. Certainly a hundred
thousand. Probably more. Enough. He wondered how many of these people would be
here. Most, perhaps. Sitting in their comfortable chairs, drinking their cold,
weak beer, devouring their hot dogs and peanuts. Bock had been involved in two
aircraft incidents. One airliner blown out of the sky, another attempted
hijacking that had not gone well at all. He'd fantasized at the time about the
victims, sitting in comfortable chairs, eating their mediocre meals, watching
their in-flight movie, not knowing that their lives were completely in the
control of others whom they did not know. Not knowing. That was the beauty of
it, how he could know and they could not. To have such control over human life.
It was like being God, Bock thought, his eyes surveying the crowd. A
particularly cruel and unfeeling God, to be sure, but history was cruel and
unfeeling, wasn't it?
Yes, this was the place.
CHAPTER 19
Development
'Commodore, I have real trouble believing that,' Ricks said as evenly as he
could manage. He was tanned and refreshed from his trip to Hawaii. He'd stopped
in at Pearl Harbor while there, of course, to look over the sub base and dream
about having command of Submarine Squadron One. That was a fast-attack squadron,