The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

system was so decrepit that getting phone calls through had never been easy, and
for obvious security reasons the former associates had not lived in the same
areas, but when another married couple had failed to make a rendezvous for
dinner, Günther and Petra had sensed trouble. Too late. While the husband made
rapid plans to leave the country, five heavily armed GSG-9 commandos had kicked
down the flimsy door of the Bock apartment in East Berlin. They'd found Petra
nursing one of her twin daughters, but whatever sympathy they might have felt at
so touching a scene had been mitigated by the fact that Petra Bock had murdered
three West German citizens, one quite brutally. Petra was now in a
maximum-security prison, serving a life sentence in a country where 'life' meant
that you left prison in a casket or not at all. The twin daughters were the
adopted children of a Munich police captain and his barren wife.
It was very odd, Günther thought, how much that stung him. After all, he was a
revolutionary. He had plotted and killed for his cause. It was absurd that he
would allow himself to be enraged by the imprisonment of his wife . . . and the
loss of his children. But. But they had Petra's nose and eyes, and they'd smiled
for him. They would not be taught to hate him, Günther knew. They'd never even
be told who he and Petra had been. He'd dedicated himself to something larger
and grander than mere corporeal existence. He and his colleagues had made a
conscious and reasoned decision to build a better and more just world for the
common man, and yet – and yet he and Petra had decided, also in a reasoned and
conscious way, to bring into it children who would learn their parents' ways, to
be the next generation of Bocks, to eat the fruits of their parents' heroic
labor. Günther was enraged that this might not happen.
Worse still was his bewilderment. What had happened was quite impossible.
Unmöglich. Unglaublich. The people, the common Volk of the DDR had risen up like
revolutionaries themselves, forsaking their nearly perfect socialist state,
opting instead to merge with the exploitative monstrosity crafted by the
imperialist powers. They'd been seduced by Blaupunkt appliances and Mercedes
automobiles, and – what? Günther Bock genuinely did not understand. Despite his
inborn intelligence, the events did not connect into a comprehensible pattern.
That the people of his country had examined 'scientific socialism' and decided
it did not work and could never work – that was too great a leap of imagination
for him to make. He'd committed too much of his life to Marxism ever to deny it.
Without Marxism, after all, he was a criminal, a common murderer. Only his
heroic revolutionary ethos elevated his activities above the acts of a thug. But
his revolutionary ethos had been summarily rejected by his own chosen
beneficiaries. That was simply impossible. Unmöglich.
It wasn't quite fair that so many impossible things piled one upon another. As
he opened the paper he'd bought twenty minutes before at a kiosk seven blocks
from his current residence, the photo on the front page caught his eye, as the
paper's editor had fully intended.
CIA FETES KGB, the caption began.
'Was ist das denn für Quatsch?' Günther muttered.
'In yet another remarkable turn in a remarkable time, the Central Intelligence
Agency hosted the First Deputy Chairman of the KGB in a conference concerning
"issues of mutual concern" to the world's two largest intelligence empires . .