especially safe, but did carry the benefit of producing weapons-grade nuclear material, in addition to 816 megawatts of electrical power from its two functioning reactors.
“The Greens,” Bock repeated quietly. “Them.” The Green Party was a natural consequence of the German national spirit, which venerated all growing things on one hand, while trying very hard to kill them on the other. Formed from the extreme — or the consistent — elements of the environmental movement, it had fought against many things equally upsetting to the Communist Bloc. But where it had failed to prevent the deployment of theater nuclear weapons — and after their successful deployment had resulted in the INF Treaty, which had eliminated all such weapons on both sides of the line — it was now successfully raising the purest form of political hell in what had once been the German Democratic Republic. The nightmare of pollution in the East was now the obsession of the Greens, and number one on their hit list was the nuclear-power industry, which they called hideously unsafe. Bock reminded himself that the Greens had never truly been under proper political control. The party would never be a major power in German politics, and now it was being exploited by the same government that it had once annoyed. Whereas once the Greens had shrieked about the pollution of the Ruhr and the Rhein from Krupp, and howled about the deployment of NATO nuclear arms, now it was crusading in the East more fervently than Barbarossa had ever attempted in the Holy Land. Their incessant carping on the mess in the East was ensuring that socialism would not soon return to Germany. It was enough to make both men wonder if the Greens had not been a subtle capitalist ploy from the very beginning.
Fromm and the Bocks had met five years earlier. The Red Army Faction had come up with a plan to sabotage a West German reactor, and wanted technical advice on how to do so most efficiently. Though never revealed to the public, their plan had been thwarted only at the last minute. Publicity on the BND's intelligence success would conversely have threatened Germany 's own nuclear industry.
“Less than a year until they shut us down for good. I only go in to work three days a week now. I've been replaced by a 'technical expert' from the West. He lets me 'advise' him, of course,” Fromm reported.
“There must be more, Manfred,” Bock observed. Fromm had also been the chief engineer in Erich Honecker's most cherished military project. Though allies within the World Socialist Brotherhood, the Russians and the Germans could never have been true friends. The bad blood between the nations stretched back a thousand years, and while Germany had at least made a go of socialism, the Russians had failed completely. As a result, the East German military had never been anything like the much larger force in the West. To the last, the Russians had feared Germans, even those on their own side, before incomprehensibly allowing the country to be unified. Erich Honecker had decided that such distrust might have strategic ramifications, and had drawn plans to keep some of the plutonium produced at Greifswald and elsewhere. Manfred Fromm knew as much about nuclear bomb design as any Russian or American, even if he'd never quite been able to put his expertise into play. The plutonium stockpile secretly accumulated over ten years had been turned over to the Russians as a final gesture of Marxist fealty, lest the Federal German government get it. That last honorable act had resulted in angry recriminations — angry enough that one other cache of material had never been turned over. What connections Fromm and his colleagues had once had with the Soviets were completely gone.
“Oh, I have a fine offer.” Fromm lifted a manila envelope on his cluttered desk. “They want me to go to Argentina. My counterparts in the West have been there for years, along with most of the chaps I worked with.”
“What do they offer?”
Fromm snorted. “One million D-Mark per year until the project is completed. No difficulties with taxes, numbered account, all the normal enticements,” Fromm said with an emotionless voice. And that, of course, was quite impossible. Fromm could no more work for Fascists than he could breathe water. His grandfather, one of the original Spartacists, had died in one of the first labor camps soon after Hitler's accession to power. His father had been part of the Communist underground and a player in a spy ring, had somehow survived the war despite the systematic hunting of the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst, and been an honored local Party member to the day of his death. Fromm had learned Marxism-Leninism while he'd learned to walk, and the elimination of his profession had not enamored him of the new political system which he'd been educated to despise. He'd lost his job, had never fulfilled his prime ambition, and was now being treated like an office boy by some pink-cheeked engineer's assistant from Gottingen. Worst of all, his wife wanted him to take the job in Argentina and was making a further hell of his life so long as he refused to consider it. Finally he had to ask his question. “Why are you here, Gunther? The entire country is looking for you, and despite that fine disguise, you are in danger here.”
Bock smiled confidently. “Isn't it amazing what new hair and glasses can do for you?”
“That does not answer my question.”
“I have friends who need your skills.”
“What friends might those be?” Fromm asked dubiously.
They are politically acceptable to me and to you. I have not forgotten Petra,' Bock replied.
“That was a good plan we put together, wasn't it? What went wrong?”
“We had a spy among us. Because of her, they changed the security arrangements at the plant three days before we were supposed to go in.”
“A Green?”
Gunther allowed himself a bitter smile, “Ja. She had second thoughts about possible civilian casualties and damage to the environment. Well, she is now part of the environment.” Petra had done the shooting, her husband remembered. There was nothing worse than a spy, and it was fitting that Petra should have done the execution.
“Part of the environment, you say? How poetic.” It was Fromm's first attempt at levity, and about as successful as all his attempts. Manfred Fromm was a singularly humorless man.
“I cannot offer you money. In fact, I cannot tell you anything else. You must decide on the basis of what I have already said.” Bock didn't have a gun, but he did have a knife. He wondered if Manfred knew the alternatives he faced. Probably not. Despite his ideological purity, Fromm was a technocrat, and narrowly focused.
“When do we leave?”
“Are you being watched?”
“No. I had to travel to Switzerland for the 'business offer.' Such things cannot be discussed in this country, even if it is united and happy,” he explained. “I made my own travel arrangements. No, I do not think I am being watched.”
“Then we can leave at once. You need not pack anything.”
“What do I tell my wife?” Fromm asked, then wondered why he'd bothered. It wasn't as though his marriage was a happy one.
“That is your concern.”
“Let me pack some things. It's easier that way. How long…?”
“I do not know.”
It took half an hour. Fromm explained to his wife that he was going to be away for a few days for further business discussions. She gave him a hopeful kiss. Argentina might be nice, and nicer still to be able to live well somewhere. Perhaps this old friend had been able to talk sense into him. He drove a Mercedes, after all. Perhaps he knew what the future really held.
Three hours later, Bock and Fromm boarded a flight to Rome. After an hour's layover, their next stop was Turkey, and from there to Damascus, where they checked into a hotel to get some needed rest.
If anything, Ghosn told himself, Marvin Russell was even more formidable-looking than he'd been before. What little excess weight he'd carried had sweated off, and his daily fitness exercises with the soldiers of the movement had only added to an already muscular physique, while the sun had bronzed him until he might almost have been mistaken for an Arab. The one discordant note was his religion. His comrades reported that he was a true pagan, an unbeliever, who prayed to the sun, of all things. It disquieted the Muslims, but people were working, gently, to show him the true faith of Islam, and it was reported that he listened respectfully. It was also reported that he was a dead shot with any weapon to any range; that he was the most lethal hand-to-hand fighter they'd ever encountered — he'd nearly crippled an instructor — and that he had field-craft skills that would impress a fox. A clever, cunning, natural warrior was the overall assessment. Aside from his religious eccentricities, the others liked and admired him.
“Marvin, if you get any tougher, you will frighten me!” Ghosn chuckled at his American friend.
“Ibrahim, this is the best thing I've ever done, coming here. I never knew that there were other folks who
