THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Torn by wildly variable interest rates and renewed pessimism about the world economy, the turmoil in Europe’s financial markets intensified yesterday. Despite frantic interventions by their central banks, the British pound and the Italian lira continued their free fall against the German mark and the French franc. Angry exchanges between government officials in London, Rome, Paris, and Berlin seemed likely to doom any hope for an early end to the chaos.…
JANUARY 1994 — ”RACE RIOTS FLARE IN MAJOR EUROPEAN CITIES,”
WASHINGTON POST
Angered by a new surge of economic refugees from poverty-stricken Eastern Europe and North Africa, neo-Nazis, skinheads, and radical leftists went on a bloody rampage through industrial towns and cities across western Europe. In day-long rioting that left dozens dead or seriously injured…
JULY 1994 — ”‘TRADE CRISIS LOOMING,’ U.S. WARNS,”
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Recent French and German moves to protect their industries against fair international competition raise the specter of a devastating global trade war, key U.S. officials warned. On Capitol Hill, congressional leaders are already considering legislation to impose retaliatory tariffs and restrictions on goods imported from the two European countries.…
DECEMBER 1994 — ”EASTERN EUROPE ON THE AUCTION BLOCK,”
THE ECONOMIST
Desperate for the foreign monetary and food aid they need to stay afloat through the winter, several of Eastern Europe’s newly installed military regimes have signed pacts that give French- and German-owned corporations a stranglehold over their trade and economic development. So-called Governments of National Salvation in Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania were among the first to mortgage their future to Paris and Berlin.…
FEBRUARY 1995 — ”NATO ALLIANCE DISSOLVES,”
BALTIMORE SUN
An era of unprecedented international defense cooperation came to an end today in rancor, bitterness, and suspicion. Outraged by French and German policies they blame for the continuing world recession, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Norway formally withdrew from the NATO Alliance.…
SEPTEMBER 1996 — ”WORLDWIDE SLUMP WORSENS,”
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
With whole segments of international trade at a complete standstill, the global economic downturn worsened last month. As unemployment rose to near-record levels in all major industrialized countries and famine spread throughout the third world, many economists are now labeling this a depression.…
COMMENTARY, ABC NEWS
“Poverty. Despair. Rising ethnic and national hatreds. Fear. This is Europe today.” Grim images flashed across the screen in time with the somber words. Pictures of miles-long unemployment lines, hollow-cheeked, hungry children, and twisted corpses scattered through burning villages. “A Europe in shambles, bleak, bitter, and adrift.
“A divided continent where old and dangerous ambitions the world thought safely buried are on the march again.” More pictures told the story. National flags of different designs and colors waved above a dozen different, strutting crowds in a dozen interwoven news clips.
The veteran journalist’s voice took on a sad, wistful edge. “When we won the cold war against communism, the world’s democracies had a fleeting opportunity to secure a lasting peace founded on free trade and prosperity. We did not lose this historic opening by chance or simple bad luck. We threw it away.”
CHAPTER 1
Provocation
The two men lay quietly on a thinly wooded hillside overlooking their target. Clouds covered the night sky above them, rolling slowly eastward in an ever-thickening band that promised rain before morning.
Down in the valley below, dim yellow lights outlined vague shapes in the darkness — huge aluminum-sided warehouses and factory buildings, a concrete and glass administration center, and boxcars waiting empty on a railroad siding. Other lights were strung at widely spaced intervals along a wire fence enclosing the whole compound. A single wooden guardhouse blocked an access road leading to the Budapest-Vienna highway and the Austrian border.
Nothing moved. Money and energy were both too scarce in the wreckage of Europe’s economy to warrant around-the-clock manufacturing. Too scarce even for the high-tech tilt-rotor assemblies built by the French-owned Sopron plant.
Major Paul Duroc glanced at his companion. “Ready, Michel?”
“Yes.” The big man’s guttural French tagged him as an Alsatian — a man born in one of the twin provinces torn back and forth between France and Germany for centuries. He was half a head taller and massed at least ten kilos more than Duroc, extra weight and extra height that often came in handy for the physical side of their work. He slipped a pair of night-vision goggles over his eyes and quickly scanned the darkened factory compound. “Still clear.”
Duroc tapped the transmit button on the tiny walkie-talkie clipped to his web gear. Two soft clicks sounded in his earphones. The other members of his team were in place and alert. Perfect.
He flipped his goggles down, rose to his feet, and moved downhill. Michel Woerner followed close behind — cat-quiet despite his size. Neither man had any trouble avoiding the trees, thorn-crowned clumps of underbrush, and moss-covered stumps in their path. Their goggles magnified all available light, turning the nighttime world into an eerie array of sharp-edged blue-green images.
Duroc paused at the edge of the woods, carefully studying the narrow band of open ground separating them from the factory’s wire fence. There weren’t any signs that Sopron’s security personnel had set up new motion sensors, video cameras, or other detection devices to cover this part of the perimeter. The single camera assigned to monitor this stretch of fence scanned slowly back and forth in a regular, dependable pattern. Men who knew the pattern in advance, and who moved quickly enough, could avoid its unblinking gaze. He allowed himself a quick, cold grin that flitted across a narrow face quite unused to smiling. For once the mission planners had been right. The Eurocopter complex was wide open. The fence, the lights, and the rest would keep out thieves, but not professionals with access to detailed information on the factory’s security systems and routines.
He nodded once to Woerner and loped across the open ground, dropping prone next to the fence. The other man slid into place beside him a second later, already reaching for the wire cutters he carried in a pocket of his equipment vest. Duroc slipped the razor-edged jaws of his own cutters over the lowest strand of barbed wire and waited for his subordinate to do the same. Six short, powerful snips cut through three strands in rapid succession, opening a gap just wide enough for them to wriggle through. They were past the first barrier.
The two men scrambled upright and headed deeper into the darkened factory complex. Despite the continued silence, they moved cautiously, skirting pools of light and staying out of sight of the main gate guardhouse. Both men were veterans of more than a dozen “special” operations conducted in half a dozen countries around the world. And professionals never took unnecessary chances.
Duroc led the way, picking a roundabout path through the man-made maze of warehouses, assembly lines, and loading docks. The hours he’d spent studying detailed maps and photographs were repaid with every surefooted step. Ten minutes after they’d cut through the security fence, he crouched beside the waist-high rear wheels of a tractor-trailer truck — surveying the deserted parking lot and empty lawn surrounding the plant’s administration center and an adjacent staff canteen. Near the main walkway, a large, floodlit billboard proclaimed “Safety Comes First” in French, German, and Hungarian. His lips twitched upward at the irony. That might almost be his own motto.