Red Storm Rising (1986) (3 page)

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.”

“And if the guards responded so fast, how then did they fail to prevent this act?” the Defense Minister demanded angrily. He examined the photographic pass with palpable hatred in his eyes. “What was this black-ass Muslim doing there in the first place?”

“Comrade, work in the Siberian fields is arduous, and we have had serious difficulties in filling the posts we have there. My predecessor decided to conscript experienced oil-field workers from the Baku region to Siberia. This was madness. You will recall that my first recommendation last year was to change this policy.”

“We have noted it, Mikhail Eduardovich,” the Chairman said. “Go on.”

“The guard post records all telephone and radio traffic. The response team was moving in under two minutes. Unfortunately, the guard post is located adjacent to the original control building. The current building was constructed three kilometers away when new computerized control equipment was obtained from the West two years ago. A new guard post was also supposed to have been built, and the proper materials were allocated for this purpose. It would appear that these building materials were misappropriated by the complex director and local Party secretary, for the purpose of building dachas on the river a few kilometers away. Both of these men have been arrested by my order, for crimes against the State,” Sergetov reported matter-of-factly. There was no reaction around the table. By unspoken consensus, those two men were sentenced to death; the formalities would be worked out by the proper ministries. Sergetov continued: “I have already ordered greatly increased security at all petroleum sites. Also on my orders, the families of the two known traitors have been arrested at their homes outside Baku and are being rigorously interrogated by State Security, along with all who knew and worked with them.

“Before the border guards were able to kill the traitors, they were able to sabotage the oil-field control systems in such a way as to create a massive conflagration. They were also able to wreck the control equipment so that even if the guard troops had been able to get a crew of engineers in to restore control, it is unlikely that anything would have been saved. The KGB troops were forced to evacuate the building, which was later consumed by the fire. There was nothing more they could have done.” Sergetov remembered the sergeant’s badly burned face, the tears flowing down over the blisters as he told his story.

“The fire brigade?” the General Secretary asked.

“More than half of them died fighting the fire,” Sergetov replied. “Along with over a hundred citizens who joined the battle to save the complex. Truly there is no blame to be assessed here, Comrade. Once this bastard Tolkaze began his devil’s work, it would have been as easy to control an earthquake. For the most part, the fire has been put out by now, due to the fact that most of the fuels stored in the refinery were consumed in about five hours; also because of the destruction of the wellheads in the oil field.”

“But how was this catastrophe possible?” a senior member asked. Sergetov was surprised by the quiet mood in the room. Had they met and discussed this affair already?

“My report of December 20 described the dangers here. This room quite literally controlled the pumps and valves for over a hundred square kilometers. The same is true of all of our large oil complexes. From the nerve center, a man familiar with control procedures could manipulate the various systems throughout the field at will, causing the entire complex quite simply to self-destruct. Tolkaze had such skill. He was an Azerbaijani chosen for special treatment for his intelligence and supposed loyalty, an honor student educated at Moscow State University and a member in good standing of the local Party. It would also seem that he was a religious fanatic capable of astounding treachery. All the people killed in the control room were friends of his—or so they thought. After fifteen years in the Party, a good salary, the professional respect of his comrades, even his own automobile, his last words were a shrill cry to Allah,” Sergetov said dryly. “The reliability of people from that region cannot be accurately predicted, Comrades.”

The Defense Minister nodded again. “So, what effect will this have on oil production?” Half the men at the table leaned forward to hear Sergetov’s answer:

“Comrades, we have lost thirty-four percent of our total crude oil production for a period of at least one year, possibly as many as three.” Sergetov looked up from his notes to see the impassive faces cringe as though from a slap. “It will be necessary to redrill every production well and finally reconstruct the pipelines from the fields to the refinery and elsewhere. The concurrent loss of the refinery is serious, but not an immediate concern since the refinery can be rebuilt, and in any case represents less than a seventh of our total refining capacity. The major injury to our economy will come from the loss of our crude oil production.

“In real terms, due to the chemical makeup of the Nizhnevartovsk oil, the net total production loss understates the actual impact on our economy. Siberian oil is ‘light, sweet’ crude, which means that it contains a disproportionately large amount of the most valuable fractions—those which we use to make gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel, for example. The net loss in these particular areas is forty-four percent of our gasoline production, forty-eight percent of kerosene, and fifty percent of diesel. These figures are rough calculations I made on the flight back, but they should be accurate to within two percent. My staff will have more precise figures ready in a day or so.”

“Half?” the General Secretary asked quietly.

“Correct, Comrade,” Sergetov responded.

“And how long to restore production?”

“Comrade General Secretary, if we bring in every drilling rig and operate them around the clock, my rough estimate is that we can begin to restore production in twelve months. Clearing the site of wreckage will take at least three months, and another three will be needed to relocate our equipment and commence drilling operations. Since we have exact information for well locations and depths, the usual element of uncertainty is not part of the equation. Within a year—that is, six months after we commence the redrilling—we will begin to bring the production wells back on stream, and full restoration of the wells will be achieved within two more years. While all this is going on, we will need to replace the EOR equipment also—”

“And what might that be?” Defense asked.

“Enhanced Oil Recovery systems, Comrade Minister. Had these been relatively new wells, pressurized from underground gas, the fires might have lasted for weeks. As you know, Comrades, these are wells from which a good deal of oil has already been extracted. To enhance production we have been pumping water into the wells, which has the effect of forcing more oil out. It may also have had the effect of damaging the oil-bearing strata. This is something our geologists are even now attempting to evaluate. As it was, when power was lost, the force driving the oil from the ground was removed, and the fires in the production fields rapidly began to run out of fuel. They were for the most part dying out when my flight left for Moscow.”