Ghost Force [antikvár]

PROLOGUE As a general rule, Admiral Arnold Morgan did not do state banquets. He put them in the same category as diplomatic luncheons, congressional dinners, state fairs, and yard sales — all of which required him to spend time talking to God knows how many people with whom he had absolutely nothing in common. Forced to choose, he would even have preferred to spend an hour with the political editor of CBS Television or the Washington Post, either of whom he could cheerfully have throttled several times a year. It was thus a matter of some interest this evening to witness him making his way down the great central staircase of the White House, right behind the President and his guests of honour. The admiral descended in company with the exquisitely beautiful Mrs Kathy Morgan, whose perfectly cut dark-green silk gown made the Russian president's wife look like a middle-line admin clerk from the KGB. (Close. She had been a researcher there.) Arnold Morgan himself wore the dark-blue dress uniform of a US Navy rear-admiral, complete with the twin-dolphin insignia of the US Submarine Service. As 1