The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

'Want a paper, sir?' the attendant asked. It was a girl for a change, and a
pretty one. Also married and pregnant. A pregnant staff sergeant. It made Ryan
uneasy to be served by someone like that.
'What d'you have?'
'International Trib.'
'Great!' Ryan took the paper – and nearly gasped. There it was, right on the
front page. Some bonehead had leaked one of the photos. Golovko, Ryan, the
directors of S&T, Ops, Admin, Records, and Intelligence, plunging through their
lunches. None of the American identities were secret, of course, but even so . .
.
'Not a real good picture, sir,' the sergeant noted with a grin. Ryan was unable
to be unhappy.
'When are you due, Sarge?'
'Five more months, sir.'
'Well, you'll be bringing your child into a much better world than the one
either one of us was stuck with. Why don't you sit down and relax? I'm not
liberated enough to be waited on by a pregnant lady.'
***
The International Herald Tribune is a joint venture of the New York Times and
the Washington Post. The one sure way for Americans traveling in Europe to keep
track of the ball scores and important comic strips, it had already broadened
its distribution into what had been the Eastern Bloc, to serve American
businessmen and tourists who were flooding the former communist nations. The
locals also used it, both as a way to hone their English skills and to keep
track of what was happening in America, more than ever a fascination to people
learning how to emulate something they'd been raised to hate. In addition it was
as fine an information source as had ever been available in those countries.
Soon everyone was buying it, and the American management of the paper was
expanding operations to broaden its readership still further.
One such regular reader was Günther Bock. He lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, having
left Germany – the eastern part – rather hurriedly some months before, after a
warning tip from a former friend in the Stasi. With his wife, Petra, Bock had
been a unit leader in the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and after that had been crushed
by the West German police, in the Red Army Faction. Two near arrests by the
Bundeskriminalamt had frightened him across the Czech border, and thence on to
the DDR, where he had settled into a quiet semi-retirement. With a new identity,
new papers, a regular job – he never showed up, but the employment records were
completely in Ordnung – he deemed himself safe. Neither he nor Petra had
reckoned with the popular revolt that had overturned the government of the
Deutsche Demokratische Republik, but they both decided that they could survive
that change in anonymity. They'd never counted on a popular riot storming into
Stasi headquarters, either. That event had resulted in the destruction of
literally millions of documents. Many of the documents had not been destroyed,
however. Many of the rioters had been agents of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the
West German intelligence agency, who'd been in the front ranks of the intruders,
and known exactly which rooms to savage. Within days, people from the RAF had
started disappearing. It had been hard to tell at first. The DDR telephone