"Yes?" Dr Manfred Fromm said, as a question before his eyes widened in delayed recognition. "Ah, so good to see you!"

"I wondered if you'd remember your old friend Hans," Bock said with a chuckle, stretching out his hand. "A long time, Manfred."

"A very long time indeed, funge!. Come to my study." The two men walked off under the inquisitive eyes of Frau Fromm. Dr Fromm closed the door behind himself before speaking.

"I am sorry about your wife. It was unspeakable what happened."

"That is past. How are you doing?"

"You haven't heard? The "Greens" have attacked us. We're about to shut down."

Doktor Manfred Fromm was, on paper, the deputy assistant director of the Lubmin/Nord Nuclear Power Station. The station had been built twenty years earlier from the Soviet WER Model 230 design, which, primitive as it was, had been adequate with an expert German operations team. Like all Soviet designs of the period, the reactor was a plutonium producer, which, as had been proven at Chernobyl, was neither terribly efficient nor especially safe, but did carry the benefit of producing weapons-grade nuclear material, in addition to 816 megawatts of electrical power from its two functioning reactors.

"The Greens," Bock repeated quietly. "Them." The Green Party was a natural consequence of the German national spirit, which venerated all growing things on one hand, while trying very hard to kill them on the other. Formed from the extreme - or the consistent - elements of the environmental movement, it had fought against many things equally upsetting to the Communist Bloc. But where it had failed to prevent the deployment of theater nuclear weapons - and after their successful deployment had resulted in the INF Treaty, which had eliminated all such weapons on both sides of the line - it was now successfully raising the purest form of political hell in what had once been the German Democratic Republic. The nightmare of pollution in the East was now the obsession of the Greens, and number one on their hit list was the nuclear-power industry, which they called hideously unsafe. Bock reminded himself that the Greens had never truly been under proper political control. The party would never be a major power in German politics, and now it was being exploited by the same government that it had once annoyed. Whereas once the Greens had shrieked about the pollution of the Ruhr and the Rhein from Krupp, and howled about the deployment of NATO nuclear arms, now it was crusading in the East more fervently than Barbarossa had ever attempted in the Holy Land. Their incessant carping on the mess in the East was ensuring that socialism would not soon return to Germany. It was enough to make both men wonder if the Greens had not been a subtle capitalist ploy from the very beginning.

Fromm and the Bocks had met five years earlier. The Red Army Faction had come up with a plan to sabotage a West German reactor, and wanted technical advice on how to do so most efficiently. Though never revealed to the public, their plan had been thwarted only at the last minute. Publicity on the BND's intelligence success would conversely have threatened Germany's own nuclear industry.