"Clancy, Tom - Op-Center 05 - Ballance of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

Martha was still shaking her head as they turned toward the
imposing Palacio de las Cortes, where they
BALANCE OF POWER 7
were scheduled to meet very unofficially and very quietly with
Deputy Serrador. According to what the veteran
politician had told Ambassador Barry
Neville in a very secret meeting, tension was
escalating between the impoverished Andalusians in the
south and the rich and influential Castilians of
northern and central Spain. The government wanted
help gathering intelligence. They needed to know from which
direction the tension was coming-and whether it also involved the
Catalonians, Galicians, Basques, and
other ethnic groups. Serrador's fear was that a
concerted effort by one faction against another could rend the
loosely woven quilt of Spain. Sixty
years before, a civil war, which pitted the
aristocracy, the military, and the Roman Catholic
Church against insurgent Communists and other anarchic
forces, had nearly destroyed Spain. A modern
war would draw in ethnic sympathizers from France,
Morocco, Andorra, Portugal, and other nearby
nations. It would destabilize the southern flank of
NATO and the results would be
catastrophic-particularly as NATO sought to expand
its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
Ambassador Neville had taken the problem
back to the State Department. Secretary of State
Av Lincoln decided that the State Department
couldn't afford to become involved at this early stage.
If the matter exploded and they were shown to have had a
hand in it, it would be difficult for the United States
to help negotiate a peace. Lincoln asked
Op-Center to make the initial contact and ascertain
what, if anything, the United States could do
to defuse the potential crisis.
8 OP-CENTER
Martha zipped her blue windbreaker against the sudden
chill of night. "I can't stress this enough," she
said. "Madrid is not the underbelly of Mexico
City. The briefings at Op-Center
didn't cover this because we didn't have time. But as
different as the various peoples of Spain are, they
all believe in one thing:
honor. Yes, there are aberrations. There are bad
seeds in any society. And yes, the standards aren't
consistent and they definitely aren't always
humanistic. There may be one kind of honor among
politicians and another kind among killers. But
they always play by the rules of the profession."