With the master pipeline switches, Tolkaze had a special plan. He rapidly typed in a computer command, thanking Allah that Rasul was so skillful and had not damaged anything important with his rifle. The main pipeline from the nearby production field was two meters across, with many branchlines running to all of the production wells. The oil traveling in those pipes had its own mass and its own momentum supplied by pumping stations in the fields. Ibrahim’s commands rapidly opened and closed valves. The pipeline ruptured in a dozen places, and the computer commands left the pumps on. The escaping light crude flowed across the production field, where only one more spark was needed to spread a holocaust before the winter wind, and another break occurred where the oil and gas pipelines crossed together over the river Ob’.
“The greenskins are here!” Rasul shouted a moment before the quick-response team of KGB border guards stormed up the staircase. A short burst from the Kalashnikov killed the first two, and the rest of the squad stopped cold behind a turn in the staircase as their young sergeant wondered what the hell they had walked into.
Already, automatic alarms were erupting around him in the control room. The master status board showed four growing fires whose borders were defined by blinking red lights. Tolkaze walked to the master computer and ripped out the tape spool that contained the digital control codes. The spares were in the vault downstairs, and the only men within ten kilometers who knew its combination were in this room—dead. Mohammet was busily ripping out every telephone in the room. The whole building shook with the explosion of a gasoline storage tank two kilometers away.
The crashing sound of a hand grenade announced another move by the KGB troops. Rasul returned fire, and the screams of dying men nearly equaled the earsplitting fire-alarm klaxons. Tolkaze hurried over to the corner. The floor there was slick with blood. He opened the door to the electrical fusebox, flipped the main circuit breaker, then fired his pistol into the box. Whoever tried to set things aright would also have to work in the dark.
He was done. Ibrahim saw that his massive friend had been mortally hit in the chest by grenade fragments. He was wobbling, struggling to stay erect at the door, guarding his comrades to the last.
“‘I take refuge in the Lord of the worlds,’ ” Tolkaze called out defiantly to the security troops, who spoke not a word of Arabic. “ ‘The King of men, the God of men, from the evil of the whispering devil—’ ”
The KGB sergeant leaped around the lower landing and his first burst tore the rifle from Rasul’s bloodless hands. Two hand grenades arched through the air as the sergeant disappeared back around the corner.
There was no place—and no reason—to run. Mohammet and Ibrahim stood immobile in the doorway as the grenades bounced and skittered across the tiled floor. Around them the whole world seemed to be catching fire, and because of them, the whole world really would.
“Allahu akhbar!”
SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
“God almighty!” the chief master sergeant breathed. The fire which had begun in the gasoline/diesel section of the refinery had been sufficient to alert a strategic early-warning satellite in geosynchronous orbit twenty-four thousand miles above the Indian Ocean. The signal was downlinked to a top-security U.S. Air Force post.
The senior watch officer in the Satellite Control Facility was an Air Force colonel. He turned to his senior technician: “Map it.”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant typed a command into his console, which told the satellite cameras to alter their sensitivity. With the flaring on the screen reduced, the satellite rapidly pinpointed the source of the thermal energy. A computer-controlled map on the screen adjacent to the visual display gave them an exact location reference. “Sir, that’s an oil refinery fire. Jeez, and it looks like a real pisser! Colonel, we got a Big Bird pass in twenty minutes and the course track is within a hundred twenty kilometers.”
“Uh-huh,” the colonel nodded. He watched the screen closely to make sure that the heat source was not moving, his right hand lifting the Gold Phone to NORAD headquarters, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
“This is Argus Control. I have Flash Traffic for CINC-NORAD.”
“Wait one,” said the first voice.
“This is CINC-NORAD,” said the second, Commander-in-Chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
“Sir, this is Colonel Burnette at Argus Control. We show a massive thermal energy reading at coordinates sixty degrees fifty minutes north, seventy-six degrees forty minutes east. The site is listed as a POL refinery. The thermal source is not, repeat not moving. We have a KH-11 pass close to the source in two-zero minutes. My preliminary evaluation, General, is that we have a major oil-field fire here.”
“They’re not doing a laser-flash on your bird?” CINC-NORAD asked. There was always a possibility the Soviets were trying to play games with their satellite.
“Negative. The light source covers infrared and all of the visible spectrum, not, repeat not, monochromatic. We’ll know more in a few minutes, sir. So far everything is consistent with a massive ground fire.”
Thirty minutes later they were sure. The KH-11 reconnaissance satellite came over the horizon close enough for all of its eight television cameras to catalog the chaos. A side-link transmitted the signal to a geosynchronous communications satellite, and Burnette was able to watch it all “in real time.” Live and in color. The fire had already engulfed half of the refinery complex and more than half of the nearby production field, with more burning crude oil spreading from the ruptured pipeline onto the river Ob’. They were able to watch the fire spread, the flames carried rapidly before a forty-knot surface wind. Smoke obscured much of the area on visible light, but infrared sensors penetrated it to show many heat sources that could only be vast pools of oil products burning intensely on the ground. Burnette’s sergeant was from east Texas, and had worked as a boy in the oil fields. He keyed up daylight photographs of the site and compared them with the adjacent visual display to determine what parts of the refinery had already ignited.
“Goddamn, Colonel.” The sergeant shook his head reverently. He spoke with quiet expertise. “The refinery—well, it’s gone, sir. That fire’ll spread in front of that wind, and ain’t no way in hell they’ll stop it. The refinery’s gone, total loss, burn maybe three, four days—maybe a week, parts of it. And unless they find a way to stop it, looks like the production field is going to go, too, sir. By next pass, sir, it’ll all be burnin’, all those wellheads spillin’ burnin’ o’l . . . Lordy, I don’t even think Red Adair would want any part of this job!”
“Nothing left of the refinery? Hmph.” Burnette watched a tape rerun of the Big Bird pass. “It’s their newest and biggest, ought to put a dent in their POL production while they rebuild that from scratch. And once they get those field fires put out, they’ll have to rearrange their gas and diesel production quite a bit. I’ll say one thing for Ivan. When he has an industrial accident, he doesn’t screw around. A major inconvenience for our Russian friends, Sergeant.”
This analysis was confirmed the next day by the CIA, and the day after that by the British and French security services.
They were all wrong.
2
Odd Man In
DATE-TIME 01/31-06: 15 COPY 01 of 01 SOVIET FIRE
BC-Soviet Fire, Bjt, 1809•FL•
Disastrous Fire Reported in Soviet Nizhnevartovsk Oil Field•FL•
EDS: Moved in advance for WEDNESDAY PMS•FL• By William Blake •FC•
AP Military/Intelligence Writer
WASHINGTON (AP)—“The most serious oil field fire since the Mexico City disaster of 1984, or even the Texas City fire of 1947,” sundered the darkness in the central region of the Soviet Union today, according to military and intelligence sources in Washington.
The fire was detected by American “National Technical Means,” a term that generally denotes reconnaissance satellites operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA sources declined comment on the incident.
/> Sources in the Pentagon confirmed this report, noting that the energy given off by the fire was sufficient to cause a brief stir in the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which was concerned that the fire was a possible missile launch directed at the United States, or an attempt to blind American Early-Warning satellites with a laser or other ground-based device.
At no time, the source pointed out, was there any thought of increasing American alert levels, or of bringing American nuclear forces to higher states of readiness. “It was all over in less than thirty minutes,” the source said.
No confirmation was received from the Russian news agency, TASS, but the Soviets rarely publish reports of such incidents.
The fact that American officials referred to two epic industrial accidents is an indication that many fatalities might result from this major fire. Defense sources were unwilling to speculate on the possibility of civilian casualties. The city of Nizhnevartovsk is bordered by the petroleum complex.
The Nizhnevartovsk oil production field accounts for roughly 31. 3 percent of total Soviet crude oil, according to the American Petroleum Institute, and the adjacent, newly built Nizhnevartovsk refinery for approximately 17.3 percent of petroleum distillate production.
“Fortunately for them,” Donald Evans, a spokesman for the Institute explained, “oil underground is pretty hard to burn, and you can expect the fire to burn itself out in a few days.” The refinery, however, depending on how much of it was involved, could be a major expense. “When they go, they usually go pretty big,” Evans said. “But the Russians have sufficient excess refining capacity to take up the slack, especially with all the work they’ve been doing at their Moscow complex.”
Evans was unable to speculate on the cause of the fire, saying, “The climate could have something to do with it. We had a few problems in the Alaskan fields that took some careful work to solve. Beyond that, any refinery is a potential Disneyland for fire, and there simply is no substitute for intelligent, careful, well-trained crews to run them.”
This is the latest in a series of setbacks to the Soviet oil industry. It was admitted only last fall at the plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee that production goals in both the Eastern Siberian fields “had not entirely fulfilled earlier hopes.”
This seemingly mild statement is being seen in Western circles as a stinging indictment of the policies of now-departed Petroleum Industry minister Zatyzhin, since replaced by Mikhail Sergetov, former chief of the Leningrad Party apparatus, regarded as a rising star in the Soviet Party. A technocrat with a background of engineering and Party work, Sergetov’s task of reorganizing the Soviet oil industry is seen as a task that could last years. AP-BA-01-31 0501EST•FL•
* *END OF STORY* *
MOSCOW, R.S.F.S.R.
Mikhail Eduardovich Sergetov never had a chance to read the wire service report. Summoned from his official dacha in the birch forests surrounding Moscow, he’d flown at once to Nizhnevartovsk and stayed for only ten hours before being recalled to make his report in Moscow. Three months on the job, he thought, sitting in the empty forward cabin of the IL-86 airliner, and this has to happen!
His two principal deputies, a pair of skilled young engineers, had been left behind and were trying even now to make sense of the chaos, to save what could be saved, as he reviewed his notes for the Politburo meeting later in the day. Three hundred men were known to have died fighting the fire, and, miraculously, fewer than two hundred citizens in the city of Nizhnevartovsk. That was unfortunate, but not a matter of great significance except insofar as those trained men killed would eventually have to be replaced by other trained men drawn from the staffs of other large refineries.
The refinery was almosty totally destroyed. Reconstruction would take a minimum of two to three years, and would account for a sizable percentage of national steel pipe production, plus all the other specialty items unique to a facility of this type: Fifteen thousand million rubles. And how much of the special equipment would have to be purchased from foreign sources—how much precious hard currency and gold would be wasted?
And that was the good news.
The bad news: the fire that had engulfed the production field had totally destroyed the welltops. Time to replace: at least thirty-six months!
Thirty-six months, Sergetov reflected bleakly, if we can divert the drillrigs and crews to redrill every damned well and at the same time rebuild the EOR systems. For a minimum of eighteen months the Soviet Union will have an enormous shortfall in oil production. Probably more like thirty months. What will happen to our economy?
He pulled a pad of lined paper from his briefcase and began to make some calculations. It was a three-hour flight, and Sergetov did not notice it was over until the pilot came back to announce they had landed.
He looked with squinted eyes at the snow-covered landscape of Vnukovo-2, the VIP-only airport outside of Moscow, and walked alone down the boarding stairs to a waiting ZIL limousine. The car sped off at once, without stopping at any of the security checkpoints. The shivering militia officers snapped to attention as the ZIL passed, then returned to the business of keeping warm in the subzero temperatures. The sun was bright, the sky clear but for some thin, high clouds. Sergetov looked vacantly out the windows, his mind mulling over figures he had already rechecked a half-dozen times. The Politburo was waiting for him, his KGB driver told him.
Sergetov had been a “candidate,” or nonvoting member, of the Politburo for just six months, which meant that, along with his eight other junior colleagues, he advised the thirteen men who alone made the decisions that mattered in the Soviet Union. His portfolio was energy production and distribution. He had held that post since September, and was only beginning to establish his plan for a total reorganization of the seven regional and all-union ministries that handled energy functions—and predictably spent most of their time battling one another—into a full department that reported directly to the Politburo and Party Secretariat, instead of having to work through the Council of Ministers bureaucracy. He briefly closed his eyes to thank God—there might be one, he reasoned—that his first recommendation, delivered only a month earlier, had concerned security and political reliability in many of the fields. He had specifically recommended further Russification of the largely “foreign” workforce. For this reason, he did not fear for his own career, which up to now had been an uninterrupted success story. He shrugged. The task he was about to face would decide his future in any case. And perhaps his country’s.
The ZIL proceeded down Leningradskiy Prospekt, which turned into Gor’kogo, the limousine speeding through the center lane that policemen kept clear of traffic for the exclusive use of the vlasti. They motored past the Intourist Hotel into Red Square, and finally approached the Kremlin gate. Here the driver did stop for the security checks, three of them, conducted by KGB troops and soldiers of the Taman Guards. Five minutes later the limousine pulled to the door of the Council of Ministers building, the sole modern structure in the fortress. The guards here knew Sergetov by sight, and saluted crisply as they held open the door so that his exposure to the freezing temperatures would last but a brief span of seconds.
The Politburo had been holding its meetings in this fourth-floor room for only a month while their usual quarters in the old Arsenal building were undergoing a belated renovation. The older men grumbled at the loss of the old Czarist comforts, but Sergetov preferred the modernity. About time, he thought, that the men of the Party surrounded themselves with the works of socialism instead of the moldy trappings of the Romanovs.
The room was deathly quiet as he entered. Had this been in the Arsenal, the fifty-four-year-old technocrat reflected, the atmosphere would have been altogether like a funeral—and there had been all too many of those. Slowly, the Party was running out of the old men who had survived Stalin’s terror, and the current crop of members, all “young” men in their fifties or early sixties, was finally being heard. The guard was being changed. Too slowly—too
damned slowly—for Sergetov and his generation of Party leaders, despite the new General Secretary. The man was already a grandfather. It sometimes seemed to Sergetov that by the time these old men were gone, he’d be one himself. But looking around this room now, he felt young enough.
“Good day, Comrades,” Sergetov said, handing his coat to an aide, who withdrew at once, closing the doors behind him. The other men moved at once to their seats. Sergetov took his, halfway down the right side.
The Party General Secretary brought the meeting to order. His voice was controlled and businesslike. “Comrade Sergetov, you may begin your report. First, we wish to hear your explanation of exactly what happened.”
“Comrades, at approximately twenty-three hundred hours yesterday, Moscow Time, three armed men entered the central control complex of the Nizhnevartovsk oil complex and committed a highly sophisticated act of sabotage.”
“Who were they?” the Defense Minister asked sharply.
“We only have identification for two of them. One of the bandits was a staff electrician. The third”—Sergetov pulled the ID card from his pocket and tossed it on the table—“was Senior Engineer I.M. Tolkaze. He evidently used his expert knowledge of the control systems to initiate a massive fire which spread rapidly before high winds. A security team of ten KGB border guards responded at once to the alarm. The one traitor still unidentified killed or wounded five of these with a rifle taken from the building guard, who was also shot. I must say, having interviewed the KGB sergeant—the lieutenant was killed leading his men—that the border guards responded quickly and well. They killed the traitors within minutes, but were unable to prevent the complete destruction of the facility, both the refinery and production fields.”