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By Root 1325 0

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 I've been replaced by a "technical expert" from the West.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,