She looked back over her shoulder.
“Good work.”
The smile she gave him would have launched a thousand special couriers.
The natural gas pipeline compressor station sprawled over several acres near the Polish-Ukrainian border. Machine shops, chemical labs, fire-fighting stations, and administrative offices surrounded a long metal-roofed shed and an adjacent cooling tower. Steam rose from the cooling tower, white against a clear blue sky.
Although nearly a foot of new-fallen snow covered the empty fields around the station, very little was left inside the compound. Work crews with shovels, the passage of wheeled and tracked heavy equipment, and the heat produced by dozens of massive machines running around the clock were more than a match for nature.
Inside the compressor shed, two men knelt beside an enormous reciprocating engine — a gas-fired monstrosity three meters high and ten meters long. Each of its sixteen cylinders was as big as a beer keg. The engine was one of eighteen mounted in pairs down the shed’s long axis. Color-coded pipes wove in and out of each compressor assembly.
Chief engineer Tomasz Rozek clapped his coworker on the shoulder. “Nice job, Stanislaw! Now, tighten it down and you’re done!” He had to yell to be heard over the constant, deafening roar.
The younger man flashed him a thumbs-up and then went back to work replacing an inspection hatch near the engine’s gas intake valve.
Rozek stood up slowly, silently cursing his aching back and knees. As a young man, he’d have been able to scamper through the tangle of piping and machinery around him like a chimpanzee. Well, not anymore. Thirty-five years spent toiling in Poland’s labor-intensive energy industry had left their mark.
He limped toward a thick metal door at the far end of the shed, performing a quick visual inspection on each pair of gigantic compressors he passed. That was standard operating procedure for any engineer moving through the shed. When his subordinates bitched about the time they wasted in such routine inspections, he ignored them. In Rozek’s view, anything that cut the chances of a major mechanical failure was worth doing. As the station’s chief engineer he set high standards for his crews, but he also made damned sure that he lived up to them himself.
You didn’t screw around with high-pressure natural gas. Not and live to regret it.
Przemysl was one of several similar stations strung out along the Druzhba II Pipeline as it stretched from Russia through Belarus and Ukraine, into southeastern Poland, and on to Germany. Sited roughly two hundred miles apart, their massive compressors kept natural gas flowing through the network’s twin meter-wide pipelines at the required pressure — around eleven hundred pounds per square inch, roughly seventy-five times the force in earth’s atmosphere.
And high pressure meant high temperature. You couldn’t pack that many gas molecules into that small a space at that speed without generating heat. A lot of heat. The natural gas moving through the station’s compressors and piping ran at close to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Even a pinhole rupture in the pipeline could create a deadly fireball twenty meters or more wide — a fireball that would burn until it ran out of fuel.
Rozek had seen the charred corpses of those who’d found that out the hard way. He didn’t want to see any more.
The control room at the end of the compressor shed was a blessed haven of relative peace and quiet. Thick insulation reduced the shed’s steady, pounding roar to background noise. Four technicians sat facing a dial-studded console, continuously monitoring readings from the flow meters laid every twenty miles or so up the line to the next pumping station.
The engineer took his earplugs out as he closed the door. “Everything okay here?”
“Smooth as a pretty woman’s behind, chief.”
Rozek snorted. “That’s good. Because this is as close to a pretty woman as any of you lot are likely to get.”
He dropped behind a battered steel desk parked next to a window overlooking the rest of the complex. Although his rank entitled him to an office in the administration building, he’d never used it. He preferred being closer to the action. The one concession to comfort he allowed himself was a cushioned swivel chair.
With a small sigh, Rozek settled in to wade through the pile of maintenance reports, time sheets, and union grievances waiting for him. Paperwork was the one constant in his working day. And he loathed it.
Alarm bells shattered his concentration.
“We’ve got gas pressure falling rapidly on both One and Two! Down to one thousand p.s.i.!”
Mother of God. Rozek whirled toward the window, fully expecting to see a pillar of flame streaming skyward somewhere close by. Nothing. The break must be further up the pipeline. But how the hell had anyone cut through both lines simultaneously? They were buried several meters apart as a precaution against just that kind of accident.
“Pressure at nine hundred and still falling!”
The chief engineer jumped to his feet and ran for the control console. Suddenly his back didn’t hurt at all.
He leaned over the senior technician’s shoulder, squinting to read the old-fashioned dial meters. They’d been hoping to put in more modern digital readout equipment, but the government hadn’t been able to afford it yet. The indicators were still plunging, plummeting past 850 pounds per square inch.
In the shed outside the control room door, the regular, chugging roar from the compressors was changing, speeding up as they ran faster with less natural gas flowing through them. The sound sent a chill down Rozek’s spine. The engines were overrevving. Much more of that and they were likely to tear themselves apart, slashing through piping still filled with highly flammable gas.
He reached past the technician and slapped down switches controlling the first pair of compressors, turning them off. “Knock ’em down! Shut everything down! Now!”
His men hurried to obey the order while he grabbed the phone connecting Przemysl to the next station up the pipeline — two hundred miles to the northeast, on the border between Belarus and Ukraine.
A technician, an ethnic Russian by his clear diction, answered on the first ring. “Compressor Station Six.”
“This is the chief engineer at Przemysl.” Rozek fumbled for the right Russian words. He’d learned the language out of necessity, not because he liked it. “I think we’ve got a line break somewhere between us. We’re closing down right away.”
“There is no accident, chief engineer.” The Russian technician’s voice was guarded.
“No? Then what in God’s name is going on?”
“Please hold for a moment.”
Rozek could hear clicking sounds as the man switched him to another line.
A new voice came on, colder and more precise. “You are the engineer in charge at Przemysl?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Colonel Viktor Polyakov. As the Commonwealth military representative for this district, I now command this station. I suggest you put your facility on permanent standby.” The Russian Army officer delivered his next bombshell bluntly. “My orders are to inform you that all oil and gas deliveries to your country are being stopped. Effective immediately.”
Rozek gripped the phone tighter. “Orders? From where?”
“From Moscow, chief engineer.” The phone line went dead.
Rozek stood clutching the phone for several seconds as his mind sorted through the implications of what he’d just been told. “Oh, shit.”
He slammed the red emergency phone down and reached for the black phone next to it. This one was a dedicated line to Poland’s Ministry of Mining and Power. “This is Rozek. I need to speak with the minister. We have a problem.”
The senior members of the National Security Council filled the White House Cabinet Room. They were meeting here because the basement Situation Room they ordinarily used was being given a multimillion-dollar face- lift. Work crews were busy installing the latest computer-driven displays and secure communications gear, including equipment intended to allow real-time teleconferences with military commanders and other leaders around the
