Pipeline (5 page)

Svetlana’s voice came over the intercom. “I have the chairman’s assistant on the line.”

Uggin scooped up the white telephone—it had an extra-long coiling wire connecting the handset to the set, an item he had person
ally installed to satisfy his constant need to pace. “Uggin speaking,” he barked into the phone.

“One moment and I will connect you to Chairman Zhironovsky.”

An instant later, a low growl could be heard on the phone. Like the warning sound a dog made if one came too close to its food bowl. Zhironovsky.

“Chairman, it’s a pleasure to speak to you. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to call you back. I hope your office was informed that I was out of cellular range.” Uggin hoped to God that this would suffice. He did not want to lie directly to the old man.

“Yes, yes, fine,” snapped the voice from Moscow. Uggin felt an initial wash of relief. It looked like he would not have to do more explaining.

“Listen to me carefully, Daniel Vladimirovich. I want you to hear every word of what I am going to say. I will say this only once. Furthermore, we will never exchange a written word about this. This subject will remain between you and me—you will not talk about it with anyone. Is this understood?”

Uggin stopped pacing. He sat down, picked up a pencil, and dragged a white piece of notepaper closer. He put the pencil down, then picked it up again as his mind raced between taking notes or not. He finally decided to write.

“It is clearly understood, Chairman.”

“Good. Now here are my instructions. As of midday today, your pumping and collection stations in Kursk Oblast will register a reduction of the gas flow heading toward Ukraine. The flow will continue to diminish throughout the day. Do not call or notify anybody about this. Do not report it. Do not mark this down on the log-books. Am I clear so far?”

Uggin looked down at his notes. He had written nothing; the paper was blank. He was in such a state of shock that the pencil had not moved. Did the chairman know what he was saying? Uggin
struggled to remember the relevant numbers. Ukraine consumed about eighty billion cubic meters of gas a year; half of its gas came from Russia. Most of it was needed for heating in the frigid winter-time. Right now.

Even worse—Uggin’s mind was now racing—the Ukrainian pipeline fed Russian gas to homes and industries in western Europe.

Damnit, what were the numbers? As an engineer, he always knew his numbers. Why couldn’t he remember now! Wait, they were returning. Nearly 40 percent of Germany’s gas consumption was Russian. Twenty-five percent of France’s consumption was Russian. Thirty percent of Italy’s.

Uggin forced his attention back to the telephone. Zhironovsky was still talking.

“Once your last metering station in Russia registers the gas at below two cubic meters per second, I want you to shut the system down. Everything. Stop the pumps. Close the collections stations. Not one centimeter of gas leaves Russia as of midnight tonight. Am I understood?

“Uggin, listen to me carefully. You will not accept a contravening order on this matter from anybody but me. You may get calls from God knows where. Perhaps the press. Foreign government officials. Others here in Moscow. People will scream bloody murder. I don’t care whether you take these calls or not; perhaps, like today, you will instruct your secretary to tell people that you are again out of cell phone range. Only
I
will have the authority to instruct you to reopen the pumps.”

Silence invaded the phone line. Uggin’s brain was in swirling confusion. Clearly, the chairman had not thought through the consequences of this order. Perhaps there was a break in another gas line that required immediate need elsewhere in Russia. But surely there were other ways to redirect gas without such a radical approach.

“Daniel Vladimirovich, I pay you to execute the orders of Volga Gaz. I do not want to be questioned about any of the issues that are
now going through your head. I will ask you again and I expect an answer: Am I understood?”

“Yes, Mr. Zhironovsky, you are understood,” Uggin answered. His mouth formed to ask a question in the politest of terms. He never got it out.

“Good. I will be in touch.” Viktor Zhironovsky had hung up the phone.

KURSK OBLAST
THE SAME DAY, 12:05 P.M.
VOLGA GAZ LOCAL HEADQUARTERS

Daniel Vladimirovich Uggin sat frozen at his desk after hanging up with Viktor Zhironovsky. He stared blankly at his office’s white wall, in front of his eyes. He was a midlevel employee at Volga and he had no choice but to execute his orders.

Uggin tried to shake himself out of his stupor. He hardly knew what to do next. Vainly hoping that the telephone call with Viktor Zhironovsky was a figment of his alcoholic evening, he logged on to the Volga Gaz intranet system with his password. He searched and clicked on the small icon at the top-right-hand corner of the Web site entitled Management. Once again, he was prompted for identification. He tapped in his employee number and password. This part of the Volga intranet site was reserved for management only.

Uggin moved quickly along the ultrasophisticated computer site. He knew exactly where to go. He clicked the pipeline metering portal and a map appeared of Volga Gaz’s crisscrossed network of pipelines. Every time Uggin logged on to the pipeline metering map, he was newly impressed with the company Volga Gaz had become.

Notwithstanding its listing on Moscow’s stock exchange, 51 percent of Volga Gaz was owned by the Russian State. It was, in effect, the state-owned gas company of the country with the world’s largest
reserves of natural gas. Through savvy purchases, sheer gumption, and considerable controversy, Volga had wrangled its way to control of over 85 percent of Russia’s gas production and 100 percent of its gas exports. By owning the Russian pipeline network, it had muscled out any potential competitors. It had become—in short—the world’s largest gas producer. Now it was busy buying both “up-stream” gas fields in Siberia and “downstream” production and distribution facilities in western Europe. Volga Gaz was a company on the move.

Daniel Vladimirovich moved his head closer to the computer to identify his largest trunk line into Ukraine, the Urengoy-Uzhgorod pipeline. There were other gas lines that passed through his district of control, but the “U-U,” as he had nicknamed the Urengoy-Uzhgorod pipeline, was all he needed to see.

The U-U pipeline—56 inches in diameter—traveled thousands of kilometers southwestward from the Urengoy gas field, in the northwestern Siberian Basin. Urengoy was the second-largest field in the world, with 300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Along the way, the pressure in the pipeline was secured by over 100 pumping and compressor stations that squeezed 1,500 pounds per square inch of pressure into the line to keep the gas moving at the fast clip of 6 cubic meters per second. It was an amazing feat of construction and engineering.

Uggin hesitated a moment before the maze of color-coded zigzagging stripes prior to clicking on the blue line that denoted the Urengoy-Uzhgorod pipeline. The Volga service network kept a real-time monitoring of the gas flow’s speed through each line; with merely a click of a mouse, senior managers could look up the flow rate in any Volga-owned pipeline. What he saw made his blood freeze. The U-U was now at half its usual rate of speed. There was no doubt about what was happening. The gas was slowing to a trickle.

He had followed the news about the increasingly acerbic dispute with Ukraine’s government over gas pricing. Negotiations on esca
lating cost increases for Ukrainian gas purchases had fallen apart. Like most educated people, Daniel Vladimirovich had suspected it wasn’t price that ultimately separated the two sides. Rather, recent Ukrainian elections had led to a pro-Western government in Kiev. He had known that what really bugged the Kremlin was political, not financial.

Yet Daniel Uggin also understood—very, very clearly—that any opinions regarding Viktor Zhironovsky’s orders and motivations were completely irrelevant. His career and future would hang on the actions he would take in just a few hours.

Suddenly, one thought occurred to him: Piotr! Chairman Viktor Zhironovsky had been very clear that he was not to talk to anybody about his orders. But Piotr Rudzhin was now a senior government official. As vice minister of the interior, Rudzhin commanded the Russian federal police, the district prosecutors, and the criminal magistrates. Most important, Rudzhin was his dear friend; he would know what to do. Perhaps he could even find a way to turn the decision around.

Yes, of course. Rudzhin! Piotr had an answer for everything.

Daniel Vladimirovich donned his otter-fur hat and once again flew past Svetlana, slowing just enough to bark a few orders.

“Svetty, do me a favor. Call Piotr Rudzhin and tell him I’m on my way over to his house. Tell him that I need to talk to him alone for an hour—that I need some advice. Oh yes, tell him that I will need coffee and cigarettes.”

That should get Piotr’s attention. Rudzhin, like many Russian men, chain-smoked. But Rudzhin would know that Daniel smoked only when nervous. He would immediately understand the coded urgency of the message.

Piotr’s parents’ house was only a ten-minute drive from Volga Gaz’s office. When home for the holidays, Rudzhin stayed with his mother and father, his verve and energy reinjecting a pulse of life into the frail old couple’s home. Well into their eighties, the elderly pair was rightly proud of their famous son. They planned their lives
around Piotr’s well-programmed visits, parading him from one table to the next in the town’s coffeehouses and restaurants.

Daniel Vladimirovich pulled up to the building, bounded out of the car, and pushed open the door of the old, four-story apartment complex. The parents lived on the third floor. Uggin ignored the elevator. He took the steps two at a time and started counting. His eyes and mind concentrated on the stair count and, just as his left leg stretched onto the fifty-fourth step, he slammed into Piotr Rudzhin, waiting for him on the third-floor landing.

He hugged his friend and planted a loud, needy kiss on both cheeks. “Piotr, thank God you were here. I just told them to call you and ran out of the office.”

Daniel Vladimirovich tried to calm down.

Rudzhin laughed his deep bellow. “What a night, eh? Come on, Daniel, admit that you had fun.” Rudzhin took his friend into a huge bear hug as they walked into the living room.

The home was hot, airless, and dark. It smelled of age. It wasn’t so much that the apartment itself was old, but rather that the inhabitants had long ago lost the energy to clean the plates, change the sheets, replace the lightbulbs, and scrub the bathrooms with the same intensity as before.

There was a sense that time had just stopped in the apartment.

“It was great fun yesterday,” Rudzhin giggled on, once they were seated. “And everybody from the old gang was there. Misha looks twenty years older with his bald head, but he still drinks like a fish. And Bela, he looks happy with that young new wife…”

Rudzhin stopped in his tracks. He had noticed that his friend Daniel wasn’t listening. Piotr did a U-turn in the conversation. “Daniel, I’m all ears. I got the message that you wanted cigarettes. That’s enough for me to know that something is up.”

Daniel Vladimirovich Uggin took a deep breath. He started right in. “Something has happened at work, Piotr. Something really worrying. I need to tell you about it.”

“You can tell me anything, friend. It will stay with us. Can I help fix this problem?”

“Listen, listen. I got a call from Viktor Zhironovsky this morning. It had to be serious if Zhironovsky himself was calling me. He’s never done that before. And it was the strangest conversation.”

Uggin proceeded to tell his friend everything. Oversleeping. Zhironovsky’s three calls. His tough warning about taking orders only from him. Volga Gaz’s computers already registering diminished gas speeds in the trunk pipelines to Ukraine. And, finally, the clincher. That by midnight, Uggin would have to shut the compressors down.

It took ten minutes to tell the story from start to finish.

“So, when the gas slows to between one and two cubic meters per second, I am supposed to shut down the gas flow into Ukraine. Stop it completely,” Uggin had concluded.

Piotr Rudzhin let the last line hang over the old living room, like a blanket of ash. He reached over to his pack of Marlboros and lit a cigarette with a single, determined stroke of a match. Smoke slowly seeped through his nose. Daniel’s arm stretched out for the cigarettes too.

Piotr Rudzhin got up and paced slowly to the far window of the living room. He looked out and took two drags from the cigarette. The ash burned hot. After a few moments of silence, he spoke.

“So what? Just do it,” Rudzhin sentenced.

Daniel Uggin was aghast. He couldn’t believe what he had just heard from his friend.

“But? But?” Uggin sputtered, realizing that he was repeating himself. “Piotr, are you sure about this? For seventy years of Soviet rule, foreigners took us seriously only because we had a nuclear arsenal big enough to destroy the United States and a military big enough to march into Europe, right?”

Uggin took a breath before continuing.

“Fifteen years ago, we Russians decided that we no longer wanted
to be the world’s principal adversary. We were on our way to becoming Europe’s new, dynamic partner. There have been mistakes, sure. But we’ve come a long way from where we started just a few years ago. Don’t you worry that shutting off the gas—tonight—could turn the clock back?”

He wasn’t finished. Everything that had crossed his mind since speaking to Zhironovsky now came pouring out.

“You’ve known me a long time. I’m good at the gas transportation business, not the political discussion business. The numbers are clear; by 2030, Europe will import two-thirds of its gas from Russia, as compared to one-third today. For the twenty-five EU members, dependence on our gas will rise from fifty percent to eighty percent. When I shut that line down tonight, apartments in Paris, factories in Dusseldorf, and churches in Rome will feel the effect in two days. And what about the Ukrainians? For all practical purposes, they have no heat source other than our gas in the middle of winter.”