Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,67

Patrick. I hope you'll be coming with me?" The unmarried children of both men were in college, and both had sent their wives west the day before.

"I don't know. I've never run away before." Flynn scowled at the empty stage at the end of the room. He had the scars to prove it. "They pay me to report the news."

"You'll be reporting no bloody news from inside Lefortovo Prison, my friend," Calloway observed. "Isn't one Pulitzer Prize enough?"

Flynn laughed. "I thought nobody but me remembered. What do you know that I don't, Willie?"

"I know I wouldn't be leaving without a damned good reason. And if it's good enough for me to leave, Patrick, it's bloody good enough for you." He'd been told only the night before that a peaceful resolution of this crisis was now less than a 50-percent probability. For the hundredth time, the Reuters correspondent blessed his decision to cooperate with the SIS.

"Here we go." Flynn took out his notepad.

The Foreign Minister entered from the usual door and moved to the lectern. He looked uncharacteristically frazzled, his suit rumpled, his shirt collar dingy, as though he'd been up all the previous night laboring to resolve the German crisis through diplomatic means. When he looked up, his eyes squinted through his reading glasses.

"Ladies and gentlemen, a year that has gone so well for East-West relations has turned to ashes in the mouths of us all. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the other nations that accepted our invitation to Vienna are within weeks of a comprehensive agreement on the control of strategic nuclear arms. America and the Soviet Union have agreed upon and implemented a grain sales agreement with unprecedented speed and cooperation, and even as we speak, deliveries are being made in Odessa on the Black Sea. Western tourism within the Soviet Union is at an all-time high, and this is perhaps the truest reflection of the spirit of detente--now our peoples are finally beginning to trust one another. All this effort, the efforts of East and West to bring about a just and lasting peace, have been brought to ruin by a handful of revanchist men who have not taken the lessons of the Second World War to heart.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Soviet Union has received irrefutable evidence that the government of the Federal Republic of Germany exploded its bomb in the Kremlin as part of a plot to bring about the reunification of Germany by force. We have in our possession classified German documents which prove that the West German government planned to bring down the Soviet government and use the resulting period of internal confusion to achieve their aim of remaking Germany into the principal continental power in Europe yet again. All Europeans know what that would mean to world peace.

"In this century, Germany has invaded my country twice. Over forty million Soviet citizens died repelling those two invasions, and we do not forget the deaths of so many millions of our fellow Europeans who were also the victims of German nationalism--Polish, Belgian, Dutch, French, English, and American men and women labored as our allies to safeguard the peace of Europe. After the Second World War, we all thought that this problem was completely at an end. Such was the reasoning behind the treaties which divided Germany and Europe into spheres of influence--remember that these spheres were ratified further by the Helsinki Accords in 1975--whose balance would serve to make a European war impossible.

"We know that the rearming of Germany by the West, supposedly a defensive measure against the imagined threat from the East--despite the fact that the Warsaw Pact was not even formed until well after the NATO alliance was formed--was the first step in the West's own plan to unify Germany as a pawn to counterbalance the Soviet Union. That this was a foolish and unnecessary policy is now manifestly clear. I ask you if there is anyone in Europe who truly wants a unified Germany. The NATO countries themselves stopped agitating for this years ago. Except, of course, for some Germans who remember the days of German power in rather a different light from those of us who were its victims.

"The Federal Republic of Germany has evidently turned the tables on her Western allies, and plans to use the NATO alliance as a shield behind which to launch her own offensive operations, the objective of which can only upset the power balance that has safeguarded the peace in Europe for two