Autorentext
A little more than thirty years ago**, Tom Clancy** was a Maryland insurance broker with a passion for naval history. Years before, he had been an English major at Baltimore's Loyola College and had always dreamed of writing a novel. His first effort, The Hunt for Red October, sold briskly as a result of rave reviews, then catapulted onto the New York Times bestseller list after President Reagan pronounced it "the perfect yarn." From that day forward, Clancy established himself as an undisputed master at blending exceptional realism and authenticity, intricate plotting, and razor-sharp suspense. He passed away in October 2013.

A native of Texas, Marc Cameron spent almost thirty years in law enforcement. He served as a uniformed police officer, mounted (horse patrol) officer, SWAT officer, and a U.S. Marshal. Cameron is conversant in Japanese, and travels extensively researching his New York Times-bestselling Jericho Quinn novels. Cameron's books have been nominated for both the Barry Award and the Thriller Award.

Zusammenfassung
When possibly Soviet defector offers the CIA details of his government's espionage plans in return for asylum, former Marine and brilliant CIA analyst Jack Ryan goes behind the Iron Curtain to find answers before the Cold War turns into a Red Winter. Simultaneous.

Leseprobe
1

November 1985

The McDonald's off Clayallee seemed an unlikely place for espionage. One might as well attempt to defect at Woolworths.

West Berlin, guarded by twelve thousand Allied troops and surrounded by half a million soldiers of the Warsaw Pact? A defection there would make sense. The dark and snowy hollows of Grunewald Forest, six miles from the Wall and a stone's throw from the Berlin Brigade headquarters? Certainly.

Twenty-nine and single, with a degree in public policy from the University of Maryland, Ruby Keller was a ground-floor Foreign Service officer. She was a newbie to the State Department, handling visa applications, lost passports, and any other piddling issue that confronted U.S. citizens visiting West Berlin. She never admitted it during the daily calls to her mother, but an inordinate amount of her workday was spent getting coffee for all the good old boys in this isolated outpost of the State Department.

Everyone told her she'd be under the microscope, watched by all kinds of alphabet-soup agencies, Russians trying to get her to spy, Americans making sure she didn't. Crazy stuff for an Indiana farm girl. The Clayallee McDonald's (the first restaurant in Germany with a drive-through window) seemed safe, like home, laughably far from all the international intrigue.

Keller stomped her feet when she came in from the cold and shook the snow off her jacket. It was late, after ten, but her internal clock was still jiggered toward the time in Washington, D.C., where she'd attended eighteen months of training and her body thought it was about time to eat dinner.

She'd spent the last fifteen minutes walking from her apartment near the diplomatic mission and had to squint under the stark glare of phosphorescent lighting. It was hard to believe she was still in Germany. The whole place could have been teleported directly from her hometown of Evansville. She ordered a Hamburger Royal (a Quarter Pounder, but that didn't translate into the metric system) and fries. The shake machine was broken.

Ruby was accustomed to chilly winters and had contemplated eating outside during her walk over, but it turned out to be a little too cold for that much adventure. Instead, she found a table by the window and nibbled on her sandwich-just like the ones at home-and people-watched.

Dinner rush was well past, but Europeans eat late-and GIs ate all the time. The kids behind the counter spoke English, as did ninety percent of the customers-most of whom were soldiers or civilian employees of the British or U.S. military. Ruby spoke German, very well in fact, but had hoped to be able to practice a lot more. The vast majority of Germans she'd met since her arrival spoke English. They just gave her a sort of blank stare if she even tried to Deutsch sprechen. With all the chatter among the patrons about new American movies and V-8 hotrods it was easy to forget they were sitting smack in the heart of communist Germany.

State Department Diplomatic Security agents had warned her before she left Washington. Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung-HVA, the counterintelligence operatives of the dreaded Stasi-assumed every single person at Mission Berlin was a spy. The CIA did nothing to dissuade the East Germans of this notion since it caused them to waste manpower. From what Keller had read, that mattered little. The Stasi enlisted pretty much everyone in the country to their cause, giving them an almost unlimited supply of personnel to spy-mostly on one another.

Surveillance was a foregone conclusion. It was prudent to assume every room and telephone outside the embassy was bugged-if not by HVA, then by West German intelligence-BND. A sheltered Indiana orchestra kid, Ruby found the whole thing fascinating.

People called what they were living in a Cold War, and, for the most part, that was right, but when it boiled over, it did so in a very big way. Tensions between East and West were at their worst since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Every month, that knot of war that Khrushchev warned Kennedy about pulled tighter and tighter until it seemed there would be no untying it without swords. Pershing II missiles bristling all over Europe, American overflights of disputed islands, not to mention the President's Strategic Defense Initiative, all had the Soviets feeling twitchy and worried about their future. The rubles that had been used to prop up satellite states were repurposed for missiles meant to counter the capitalist threat of the Main Enemy-the United States. That left East Germany with a dwindling treasury and few resources to replace the missing Soviet assistance. Everyone was on edge.

Two years earlier, a Sukhoi Su-15 fighter had shot down a KAL civilian airliner when it inadvertently veered into Soviet airspace on its way to Seoul from Anchorage, Alaska-murdering 269 people. Keller kept the Life magazine photograph of the victims' shoes that had washed ashore as a reminder of Russian brutality. Just months before, Soviet troops opened fire on a U.S. Army soldier for taking photos of a military installation near Potsdam, killing him. Both sides ran recon missions. In the East, it could be a capital offense.

Ruby's mother was horrified that her little girl had decided to venture into what the nightly news frequently referred to as Ground Zero. But for Ruby, that was the flame that drew her close.

The State Department travel office had flown her into Bonn for her initial briefing, then she'd taken the train across the East German countryside to reach Berlin. For the most part, the journey had been at night, but she'd been too excited to sleep. Ruby Keller, midwestern violin player, found herself living the stuff of spy novels, of impossible missions. A terrifyingly adventurous place with narrow, smoke-filled railcars and curt policemen who were apparently issued scowling frowns with their daily dose of communism.

The uniformed TraPo, or Transport Policeman, had looked the part in his high-crowned hat and blueberry uniform. He'd dashed her preconceived notions when he checked her diplomatic passport and refunded the twenty-five deutsche marks she'd originally paid to transit the GDR. Diplomats, he explained with an easy smile, were exempt from the fee.

Night had given way to morning and curtains of smudgy haze from East Germany's ubiquitous brown coal. This was, she'd been warned, the smell of the place-lignite and rot. You could get away from it in Bonn or the countryside of West Germany, but here in Berlin, surrounded on all sides, the abject …