Games Of State (1996) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

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

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

  THREE - Thursday, 9:59 A.M., Garbsen, Germany

  FOUR - Thursday, 3:04 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  FIVE - Thursday, 10:04 A.M., Garbsen, Germany

  SIX - Thursday, 10:07 A.M., Garbsen, Germany

  SEVEN - Thursday, 10 :12 A.M., Hamburg, Germany

  EIGHT - Thursday, 11:05 A.M., Hamburg, Germany

  NINE - Thursday, 11:42 A.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  TEN - Thursday, 5:47 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  ELEVEN - Thursday, 11:52 A.M., Toulouse, France

  TWELVE - Thursday, 11:55 A.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  THIRTEEN - Thursday, 6:40 A.M., Quantico, Virginia

  FOURTEEN - Thursday, 8:02 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  FIFTEEN - Thursday, 2:10 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  SIXTEEN - Thursday, 8 :16 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  SEVENTEEN - Thursday, 2:30 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  EIGHTEEN - Thursday, 8:34 A.M., New York, New York

  NINETEEN - Thursday, 2:45 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  TWENTY - Thursday, 8:47 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  TWENTY-ONE - Thursday, 2:55 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  TWENTY-TWO - Thursday, 3:28 P.M., Toulouse, France

  TWENTY-THREE - Thursday, 3:23 P.M., The Leine River, Germany

  TWENTY-FOUR - Thursday, 3:45 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  TWENTY-FIVE - Thursday, 9:50 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  TWENTY-SIX - Thursday, 3:51 P.M., Hanover, Germany

  TWENTY-SEVEN - Thursday, 4:00 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  TWENTY-EIGHT - Thursday, 10:02 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  TWENTY-NINE - Thursday, 4:11 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  THIRTY - Thursday, 4:22 P.M., Hanover, Germany

  THIRTY-ONE - Thursday, 4:33 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  THIRTY-TWO - Thursday, 4:35 P.M., Hanover, Germany

  THIRTY-THREE - Thursday, 11:00 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  THIRTY-FOUR - Thursday, 5:02 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  THIRTY-FIVE - Thursday, 5:17 P.M., Hanover, Germany

  THIRTY-SIX - Thursday, 5:30 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  THIRTY-SEVEN - Thursday, 5:47 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  THIRTY-EIGHT - Thursday, 12:02 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  THIRTY-NINE - Thursday, 6:25 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  FORTY - Thursday, 6:26 P.M., Toulouse, France

  FORTY-ONE - Thursday, 9:34 A.M., Studio City, California

  FORTY-TWO - Thursday, 6:41 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  FORTY-THREE - Thursday, 6:44 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  FORTY-FOUR - Thursday, 6:53 P.M., Toulouse, France

  FORTY-FIVE - Thursday, 6:59 P.M., Hamburg, Germany

  FORTY-SIX - Thursday, 1:40 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  FORTY-SEVEN - Thursday, 8:17 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  FORTY-EIGHT - Thursday, 8:36 P.M., Southwest of Vichy, France

  FORTY-NINE - Thursday, 2:59 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  FIFTY - Thursday, 3:01 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  FIFTY-ONE - Thursday, 9:02 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  FIFTY-TWO - Thursday, 9 :14 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  FIFTY-THREE - Thursday, 9:32 P.M., Toulouse, France

  FIFTY-FOUR - Thursday, 9:33 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  FIFTY-FIVE - Thursday, 9:56 P.M., Toulouse, France

  FIFTY-SIX - Thursday, 10:05 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  FIFTY-SEVEN - Thursday, 10:06 P.M., Toulouse, France

  FIFTY-EIGHT - Thursday, 10:12 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  FIFTY-NINE - Thursday, 10:41 P.M., Toulouse, France

  SIXTY - Thursday, 5:05 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  SIXTY-ONE - Thursday, 11:07 P.M., Toulouse, France

  SIXTY-TWO - Thursday, 11:15 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  SIXTY-THREE - Thursday, 5:15 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  SIXTY-FOUR - Thursday, 11:28 P.M., Toulouse, France

  SIXTY-FIVE - Thursday, 5:41 P.M., Washington, D. C.

  SIXTY-SIX - Thursday, 11:49 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  SIXTY-SEVEN - Thursday, 11:55 P.M., Toulouse, France

  SIXTY-EIGHT - Friday, 12:04 A.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  SIXTY-NINE - Friday, 12:16 A.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  SEVENTY - Friday, 12:17 A.M., Toulouse, France

  SEVENTY-ONE - Friday, 12:51 A.M., Toulouse, France

  SEVENTY-TWO - Friday, 12:52 A.M., Toulouse, France

  SEVENTY-THREE - Friday, 12:53 A.M., Toulouse, France

  SEVENTY-FOUR - Monday, 9:32 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  ABOUT THE CREATORS

  Other titles by Steve Pieczenik

  THE BESTSELLING NOVELS OF

  Tom Clancy

  DEBT OF HONOR

  It begins with the murder of an American

  woman in the backstreets of Tokyo.

  It ends in war....

  "A SHOCKER!" --Entertainment Weekly

  THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

  The smash bestseller that launched Clancy's

  career--the incredible search for a Soviet

  defector and the nuclear submarine

  he commands ...

  "BREATHLESSLY EXCITING!"

  --The Washington Post

  RED STORM RISING

  The ultimate scenario for World War III--the

  final battle for global control ...

  "THE ULTIMATE WAR GAME ...

  BRILLIANT!"--Newsweek

  PATRIOT GAMES

  CIA analyst Jack Ryan stops an assassination--

  and incurs the wrath of Irish terrorists....

  "A HIGH PITCH OF EXCITEMENT!"

  --The Wall Street Journal

  THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN

  The superpowers race for the ultimate Star

  Wars missile defense system....

  "CARDINAL EXCITES, ILLUMINATES...

  A REAL PAGE-TURNER!"

  --Los Angeles Daily News

  CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

  The killing of three U.S. officials in Colombia

  ignites the American government's explosive,

  and top secret, response....

  "A CRACKLING GOOD YARN!"

  --The Washington Post

  THE SUM OF ALL FEARS

  The disappearance of an Israeli nuclear

  weapon threatens the balance of power in

  the Middle East--and around the world....

  "CLANCY AT HIS BEST... NOT TO BE

  MISSED!"

  --The Dallas Morning News

  WITHOUT REMORSE

  His code name is Mr. Clark. And his work for

  the CIA is brilliant, cold-blooded, and

  efficient... but who is he really?

  "HIGHLY ENTERTAINING!"

  --The Wall Street Journal

  Novels by Tom Clancy

  THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

  RED STORM RISING

  PATRIOT GAMES

  THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN

  CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

  THE SUM OF ALL FEARS

  WITHOUT REMORSE

  DEBT OF HONOR

  EXECUTIVE ORDERS

  RAINBOW SIX

  THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON

  RED RABBIT

  THE TEETH OF THE TIGER

  SSN: STRATEGIES OF SUBMARINE WARFARE

  Nonfiction

  SUBMARINE: A GUIDED TOUR INSIDE A NUCLEAR WARSHIP

  ARMORED CAV: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN ARMORED CAVALRY REGIMENT

  FIGHTER WING: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIR FORCE COMBAT WING

  MARINE: A GUIDED TOUR OF A MARINE EXPEDITIONAR
Y UNIT

  AIRBORNE: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIRBORNE TASK FORCE

  CARRIER: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER

  SPECIAL FORCES: A GUIDED TOUR OF U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES

  INTO THE STORM: A STUDY IN COMMAND

  (written with General Fred Franks, Jr., Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  EVERY MAN A TIGER

  (written with General Charles Horner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  SHADOW WARRIORS: INSIDE THE SPECIAL FORCES

  (written with General Carl Stiner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  BATTLE READY

  (written with General Tony Zinni, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  Created by Tom Clancy

  TOM CLANCY'S ENDWAR

  TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL

  TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL: OPERATION BARRACUDA

  TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL: CHECKMATE

  TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL: FALLOUT

  Created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: MIRROR IMAGE

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: GAMES OF STATE

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: ACTS OF WAR

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: BALANCE OF POWER

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: STATE OF SIEGE

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: DIVIDE AND CONQUER

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: LINE OF CONTROL

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: MISSION OF HONOR

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: SEA OF FIRE

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: CALL TO TREASON

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: WAR OF EAGLES

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: HIDDEN AGENDAS

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: NIGHT MOVES

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: BREAKING POINT

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: POINT OF IMPACT

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: CYBERNATION

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: STATE OF WAR

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: CHANGING OF THE GUARD

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: SPRINGBOARD

  TOM CLANCY'S NET FORCE: THE ARCHIMEDES EFFECT

  Created by Tom Clancy and Martin Greenberg

  TOM CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS: POLITIKA

  TOM CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS: RUTHLESS.COM

  TOM CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS: SHADOW WATCH

  TOM CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS: BIO-STRIKE

  TOM CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS: COLD WAR

  TOM CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS: CUTTING EDGE

  TOM CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS: ZERO HOUR

  TOM CLANCY'S POWER PLAYS: WILD CARD

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are

  either the product of the author's imagination or are used

  fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TOM CLANCY'S OP-CENTER: GAMES OF STATE

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  Jack Ryan Limited Partnership and S&R Literary, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / June 1996

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright (c) 1996 by Jack Ryan Limited Partnership and

  S&R Literary, Inc.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced

  in any form without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  eISBN : 978-1-101-00362-6

  BERKLEY(r)

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the "B" design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  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

  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 memorabi
lia 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 fur 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.