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  Games of State

  ( Op-Center - 3 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Jeff Rovin

  The third volume in the bestselling series of high-tech, high-action thrillers created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik — repackaged in a stunning new-look cover. In Tom Clancy's Op-Centre, bestselling author Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, novelist and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, have created an astonishingly popular thriller series, which has already sold over 1 million HarperCollins paperbacks. Now the first three volumes are being repackaged to coincide with the publication of the latest volume in the series, Acts of War. The third volume takes us to the newly unified Germany during the Chaos Days, a time when neo-Nazi groups gather to spread violence and resurrect dead dreams. But this year Germany isn't the only target. Plans are afoot to destabilize Europe and cause turmoil throughout the USA. Paul Hood and his team, already in Germany to buy technology for the new Regional Op-Centre, become entangled in the crisis. They uncover a shocking force behind the chaos — a group that uses cutting-edge technology to promote hate and influence world events.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We would like to thank Jeff Rovin for his creative ideas and his invaluable contributions to the preparation of the manuscript. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Tom Mallon, Esq., and the wonderful people at The Putnam Berkley Group, including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Elizabeth Beier. As always, we would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of The William Morris Agency, our agent and friend, without whom this book would never have been conceived. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  — Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

  CHAPTER ONE

  Thursday, 9:47 A.M., Garbsen, Germany

  Until a few days ago, twenty-one-year-old Jody Thompson didn't have a war.

  Back in 1991, the young girl had been too preoccupied with boys, phones, and acne to pay much attention to the Persian Gulf War. All she remembered were TV images of white flashes tearing through the green night sky, and hearing about Scud missiles being fired at Israel and Saudi Arabia. She wasn't proud of how, little she recalled, but fourteen-year-old girls have fourteen-year-old priorities.

  Vietnam belonged to her parents, and all she knew about Korea was that during her junior year of college, the veterans had finally gotten a memorial.

  World War II was her grandparents' war. Yet oddly enough, she was coming to know it best of all.

  Five days before, Jody had left behind her sobbing parents, her ecstatic little brother, her boyfriend-next-door, and her sad springer spaniel Ruth, and flown from Rockville Centre; Long Island, to Germany, to intern on the feature film Tirpitz. Until she sat down on the plane with the script, Jody knew almost nothing about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, or the Axis. Occasionally, her grandmother spoke reverently about President Roosevelt, and now and then her grandfather said something respectful about Truman, whose A-bomb saved him from being butchered in a prison camp in Burma. A camp where he'd once bitten the ear of a man who was torturing him. When Jody asked her grandfather why he'd done that, didn't it only make the torture worse, the gentle man had replied, "Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do." Other than that, the only time Jody encountered the war was on TV, when she flashed past an A&E documentary on her way to MTV.

  Now Jody was taking a crash course in the chaos that had engulfed the world. She hated to read; TV Guide articles lost her halfway through. Yet she'd been mesmerized by the script of the American/German coproduction. It wasn't just ships and guns, as she'd feared. It was about people. From it, she learned about the hundreds of thousands of sailors who'd served on the icy waters of the Arctic, and the tens of thousands of sailors who'd drowned there. She learned about Tirpitz's sister ship the Bismarck, "the terror of the seas." She learned that factories, based on Long Island, had played a large, proud role in building warplanes for the Allies. She learned that many soldiers had been people no older than her boyfriend, and they'd been just as scared as Dennis would have been.

  And since she'd come to the set, Jody had seen that powerful script come to life.

  Today, by a cottage in Garbsen, outside Hanover, she had watched the cast film scenes in which a disgraced former SA officer leaves his family to exonerate himself on the German battleship. She had seen the gripping special effects footage of the attack by RAF Lancasters that had capsized the battleship in Tromsofjord, Norway, in 1944, entombing one thousand crew members. And here, in the prop trailer, she had touched actual pieces of the war.

  Jody still found it difficult to believe that such madness had taken place, even though the evidence was spread on the tables before her. It was an unprecedented array of vintage medals, lanyards, gorgets, cuff-titles, weapons, and memorabilia on loan from private collectors in Europe and the United States. On the shelves were carefully preserved, leather-bound maps, military books, and fountain pens from the library of General-feldmarschall von Harbou, on loan from his son. In a file box in the closet were photographs of the Tirpitz taken by reconnaissance aircraft and midget submarines. And in a Plexiglass case was a fragment of one of the twelve-thousand-pound Tallboy bombs that had hit the ship. The rusted, six-inch shard was going to be used as a background image for the closing credits crawl.

  Oil could stain the relics, so the tall, slender brunette wiped her hands on her School of Visual Arts sweatshirt before picking up the authentic Sturmabteilung dagger she'd come for. Her large, dark eyes shifted from the silver-tipped brown metal sheath to the brown hilt. In a circle near the top were the silver letters SA. Below them were a German eagle and a swastika. Because of the tight fit, she slowly withdrew the nine-inch weapon and examined it.

  It was heavy and horrible. Jody wondered how many lives it had ended. How many wives it had widowed. How many mothers had cried because of it.

  Jody turned it over. The words Alles fr Deutschland were etched in black on one side. When Jody had first seen the knife the night before, during rehearsals, a veteran German actor in the cast had told her it meant All for Germany.

  "To live in Germany back then, " the man had said, "you were required to give everything to Hitler. Your industry, your life, your humanity. " He'd leaned close to her. "If your lover whispered something against the Reich, you had to betray her. What's more, you had to feel proud about betraying her. " "Thompson, the knife!" Director Larry Lankford's high voice ripped Jody from her reflection. She pushed the dagger back into the sheath and hurried to the trailer door.

  "Sorry!" she yelled. "I didn't know you were waiting!" She jumped down the steps, rushed past the guard, and ran around the trailer.

  "You didn't know?" Lankford yelled. "We're waiting to the tune of two thousand dollars a minute!" The director's chin rose from his red ascot and he began clapping. "That's thirty-three dollars," he said with a clap, "sixty-six dollars, ninety-nine dollars—" "I'm coming," Jody panted.

  "— one hundred and thirty-two—" Jody felt foolish for having believed Assistant Director Hollis Arlenna, who'd said that Lankford wouldn't be ready to shoot for another ten minutes. As a production assistant had warned her, Arlenna was a little man with a big ego, and he fed it by making other people feel small.

  As Jody neared, the AD stepped between her and the director. Breathing heavily, Jody stopped and handed him the dagger. He avoided her eyes as he turned and jogged the short distance to the director.

  "Thank you," Lankford said affably as the young man handed him the blade.

  While the director showed his actor how to hand the dagger
to his son, the assistant director backed away from them. He didn't look at Jody, and stopped well short of where she was standing.

  Why am I not surprised? she thought.

  After less than a week on location, Jody already knew how the film business worked. If you were smart and ambitious, people tried to make you look stupid and clumsy so you weren't a threat. And if you screwed up, people distanced themselves from you. It was probably that way in any business, though movie people seemed to have made a bitchy art form of it.

  As Jody walked back to the prop trailer, she thought about how much she missed the support system she and her friends had had back at Hofstra. But that was college and this was the real world. She wanted to be a film director, and she was lucky to have landed this internship. She was determined, to come through it stronger and wiser. And as pushy as the rest of them, if that was what it took to survive.

  As Jody reached the trailer, the elderly German guard gave her a reassuring wink.

  "These bullies can't yell at the stars, so they yell at you," he said. "I wouldn't worry about it." "I won't, Mr. Buba," Jody lied, smiling. She picked up the clipboard hanging on the side of the trailer. Attached to it was a list of the scenes to be shot that day which detailed the props needed for every scene. "If that's the worst thing that happens while I'm here, I'll survive." Mr. Buba smiled back at Jody as she climbed the steps.

  She would have killed right now for a smoke, but it wasn't permitted in the trailer and there wasn't time to stand around on the outside. She had to admit she'd have killed right now for even less. For instance, just to get Hollis out of her hair.

  Upon reaching the doorway, Jody stopped suddenly and peered into the distance.

  "Mr. Buba," she said, "I think I saw someone moving around in the woods." The guard rose on the balls of his feet and looked over.

  "Where?" "About a quarter of a mile away. They aren't in the shot yet, but I'd hate to be them if they ruin one of Lankford's takes." "I agree," Buba said as he pulled the walkie-talkie from its belt-strap. "I don't know how they could have gotten through, but I'll have someone check on it." As he radioed in the report, Jody returned to the trailer.

  She tried to forget about Lankford and his snit as she reentered a darker world, a world where the tyrants carried weapons, not shooting scripts, and attacked nations instead of interns.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thursday, 9:50 A.M., Hamburg, Germany

  Paul Hood awoke with a start as the big jet thumped down on runway two at the Hamburg International Airport.

  No-! yelled something deep inside of him.

  His head resting against the sun-warmed shade, Hood kept his eyes shut and tried to hold onto the dream.

  Just a moment longer.

  But the engines screamed to slow the aircraft, and their roar blew the remnants of dream away. A moment later, Hood wasn't even sure what the dream had been, except that it had been deeply satisfying. With a silent oath, Hood opened his eyes, stretched his arms and legs, and surrendered to reality.

  The lean, forty-three-year-old Director of Op-Center was stiff and sore after eight hours in the coach seat. At Op- Center, flights like these were called "shorts" — not because that was where they hurt, though they did, and not because the flights were short. They'd gotten the name because they fell short of the thirteen-hour barrier, the minimum flighttime requirement for a government official to buy a spacious business-class seat. Bob Herbert believed that Japan and the Middle East received so much attention from the U.S.

  government because trade negotiators and diplomats liked flying in style. He predicted that the day twenty-four-hour flights earned officials a first-class seat, Australia would become the next trade or political battleground.

  But cramped as Hood had been, at least he felt rested.

  Bob Herbert was right. The secret to sleeping on airplanes had nothing to do with whether one reclined. He hadn't, yet he'd slept wonderfully. The key was silence, and the earplugs had worked perfectly.

  Hood frowned as he sat up straight. We've come to Germany at the invitation of Deputy Foreign Minister Hausen to look at millions of dollars of hi-tech equipment, and fifty cents worth of Brooklyn-made silicone makes me a happy man. There had to be a moral in that.

  Hood removed the plugs. As he poked them into their plastic container, he tried to capture at least the contentment he'd felt in his dream. But even that was gone.

  Hood raised the window shade and squinted into the hazy sunlight.

  Dreams, youth, and passion, he thought. The most desirable things always fade. Could be that was why they were so desirable. In any case, he told himself, what the hell did he have to moan about? His wife and kids were happy and healthy and he loved them and his work. That was more than many people had.

  Annoyed with himself, he leaned toward Matt Stoll. Op- Center's portly Operations Support Officer was sitting in the aisle seat to Hood's right. He was just removing his headphones.

  "Good morning," Hood said.

  "Good morning," Stoll said as he stuffed the headphones in the seat back. He looked at his watch, then turned his big, Kewpie-doll face toward Hood. "We're twenty-five minutes early," he said in his precise, clipped tones: "I really wanted to hear Rockin' '68 cycle through a ninth time." "That's all you did for eight hours? Listened to music?" "Had to," Stoll said. "At thirty-eight minutes in, you get Cream followed by the Cowsills and Steppenwolf. It's like Quasimodo's beautiful ugliness— 'Indian Lake' sandwiched between 'Sunshine of Your Love' and 'Born to Be Wild.' " Hood just smiled. He didn't want to admit that he'd liked the Cowsills when he was growing up.

  "Anyway," Stoll said, "those earplugs Bob gave me melted right out of my head. You forget, we heavy people sweat more than you skinny people do." Hood glanced past Stoll. Across the aisle, the grayhaired Intelligence Officer was still asleep.

  Hood said, "Maybe it would've been better if I'd listened to music too. I was having this dream and then…" "You lost it." Hood nodded.

  "I know the feeling," Stoll said. "It's like a power failure which takes your computer data with it. You know what I do when that happens?" "Listen to music?" Hood guessed.

  Stoll looked at him with surprise. "That's why you're the boss and I'm not. Yeah, I listen to music. Something I associate with good times. That takes me right to a better place." From across the aisle, Bob Herbert said in his high Southern drawl, "Me? I rely on earplugs for peace of mind.

  They're worth stayin' skinny for. How'd they work for you, Chief?" "Fantastic," said Hood. "I was asleep before we passed Halifax." "Didn't I tell you?" Herbert asked. "You oughta try 'em in the office. Next time General Rodgers is in a funk or Martha goes into one of her bootlick rants, just slip 'em in and pretend to listen." Stoll said, "Somehow, I don't think that'd work. Mike says more with silence than he does with words, and Martha's been E-mailing.her screeds all around town." "Gentlemen, cool it on Martha," Hood cautioned. "She's good at what she does—" "Sure," Herbert said. "And she'll haul our asses into court for racial and sexual discrimination if we suggest otherwise." Hood didn't bother to object. The first aspect of leadership he'd learned during his years as Mayor of Los Angeles was that you didn't change people's minds by arguing with them. You just shut up. That put you above the fray and gave you an aura of dignity. The only way your opponent could reach that high ground was by surrendering some of the low ground, which meant compromise. Sooner or later, they all came around to that. Even Bob, though it took him longer than most.

  As the jet came to a stop and the passenger bridge was swung over, Herbert said, "Hell, it's a new world. I guess what we need are electronic earplugs. If we don't hear what we don't like, we don't run the risk of being politically incorrect." "The information highway is supposed to open minds, not close them," Stoll said.

  "Yeah, well, I'm from Philadelphia, Mississippi, and we didn't have highways back there. We had dirt roads that flooded in the spring, an' everyone pitched in to clean 'em up." The seatbelt sign was turned off and
everyone rose except Herbert. As people collected their carry-on luggage, he leaned his head back, his eyes fixed on the overhead reading light. It had been fifteen years since he'd lost the use of his legs in the Beirut Embassy bombing, and Hood knew he was still self-conscious about not being able to walk. Though no one who worked with Herbert gave his handicap a thought, Herbert didn't like to make eye contact with strangers. Of all the things Herbert disliked, pity was at the head of the list.

  "Y'know," Herbert said wistfully, "back home, everyone started from the same end of the road and worked together.

  Differences of opinion were settled by trying it one way. If that didn't work you tried it another way and the job got done. Now," he said, "you disagree with someone and you're accused of hating whatever minority they happen to belong to." Stoll said, "Opportunism knocks. It's the new American dream." "Among some," Hood pointed out. "Only among some." After the door was opened and the aisle had emptied, a German flight attendant came over with an airline wheelchair. Herbert's customized chair, wig its cellular phone and built-in laptop, had been sent along as baggage.

  The young attendant turned the chair around beside Herbert. She leaned across the chair, and offered him a hand, which he declined.

  "Not necessary," Herbert huffed. "I've been doing this since you were in grade school." With his powerful arms, Herbert lifted himself over the armrest and dropped into the leather seat. As Hood and Stoll fell in behind, toting their carry-ons, he led the way through the cabin, wheeling himself.

  The heat of the Hamburg summer permeated the passenger bridge, but it was mild compared to what they'd left behind in Washington, D.C. They entered the bustling, air-conditioned terminal, where the flight attendant turned them over to a government official Lang had sent to help them through customs.