Red Storm Rising – Clancy, Tom

Book Preview

NIZHNEVARTOVSK, R.S.F.S.R.

They moved swiftly, silently, with purpose, under a crystal ine,

star-fil ed night in western Siberia. They were Muslims, though

one could scarcely have known it from their speech, which was

Russian, though inflected with the singsong Azerbaijani accent

that wrongly struck the senior members of the engineering staff

as entertaining. The three of them had just completed a

complex task in the truck and train yards, the opening of

hundreds of loading valves. Ibrahim Tolkaze was their leader,

though he was not in front. Rasul was in front, the massive

former sergeant in the MVD who had already kil ed six men this

cold night-three with a pistol hidden under his coat and three

with his hands alone. No one had heard them. An oil refinery is

a noisy place. The bodies were left in shadows, and the three

men entered Tolkaze’s car for the next part of their task.

Central Control was a modern three-story building fittingly in the

center of the complex. For at least five kilometers in al

directions stretched the cracking towers, storage tanks,

catalytic chambers, and above al the thousands of kilometers

of large-diameter pipe which made Nizhnevartovsk one of the

world’s largest refining complexes. The sky was lit at uneven