The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [159]
Bock took his exit outside Greifswald, driving east through the town of Kemnitz. The attempts at road repair had not yet reached the secondary roads. After hitting half a dozen potholes Gunther had to pull over and consult his map. He proceeded three kilometers, then made a series of turns, ending up on what had once been an up-scale neighborhood of professionals. In the driveway of the house he sought was a Trabant. The grass was still neatly trimmed, of course, and the house was neatly arranged, down to the even curtains in the windows - this was Germany, after all - but there was an air of disrepair and depression not so much seen as felt. Bock parked his car a block away and walked an indirect route back to the house.
"I am here to see Herr Doktor Fromm." he told the woman, Frau Fromm, probably, who answered the door.
"Who may I say is calling?" she asked formally. She was in her middle forties, her skin tight over severe cheeks, with too many lines radiating from her dull blue eyes and tight, colorless lips. She examined the man on her front step with interest, and perhaps a little hope. Though Bock had no idea why this should be so, he took the chance to make use of it.
"An old friend," Bock smiled to reinforce the image. "May I surprise him?"
She wavered for a moment, then her face changed and good manners took hold. "Please come in."
Bock waited in the sitting room, and he realized that his impression was right - but why it was right struck him hard. The interior of the house reminded him of his own apartment in Berlin. The same specially-made furniture that had once looked so good in contrast to what was available for ordinary citizens in the German Democratic Republic did not impress as it once had. Perhaps it was the Mercedes he'd driven up, Bock told himself, as he heard footsteps approaching. But no. It was dust. Frau Fromm was not cleaning the house as a good German Hausfrau did. A sure sign that something was badly wrong.
"Yes?" Dr Manfred Fromm said, as a question before his eyes widened in delayed recognition. "Ah, so good to see you!"
"I wondered if you'd remember your old friend Hans," Bock said with a chuckle, stretching out his hand. "A long time, Manfred."
"A very long time indeed, funge!. Come to my study." The two men walked off under the inquisitive eyes of Frau Fromm. Dr Fromm closed the door behind himself before speaking.
"I am sorry about your wife. It was unspeakable what happened."
"That is past. How are you doing?"
"You haven't heard? The "Greens" have attacked us. We're about to shut down."
Doktor Manfred Fromm was, on paper, the deputy assistant director of the Lubmin/Nord Nuclear Power Station. The station had been built twenty years earlier from the Soviet WER Model 230 design, which, primitive as it was, had been adequate with an expert German operations team. Like all Soviet designs of the period, the reactor was a plutonium producer, which, as had been proven at Chernobyl, was neither terribly efficient nor 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