once was.
Case in point: just five kilometers east of the Sphinx, near the town of Tirsa, was another sprawling complex of buildings, tunnels, and soaring structures rising out of the desert that, many thought, easily eclipsed even the majesty of the Pyramids: Kingman Tirsa, Africa’s largest petroleum refinery complex. The refinery was so close, and the complex so large, that at night the flames from the refinery’s numerous cracking towers were bright enough to fully illuminate the Great Pyramids when the floodlights were turned off.
While all of Egypt’s existing refineries and petroleum handling facilities were meant to handle product coming out of the Gulf of Suez and the Nile Delta in the Mediterranean Sea, and had already begun to see a decline in both volume and efficiency, Kingman Tirsa’s entire reason for being was to handle product coming out of Egypt’s newly explored Western Desert, five hundred kilometers to the west. The Western Desert explorations had already resulted in proven oil and natural gas reserves that exceeded all of Egypt’s previously known reserves combined.
Over four square kilometers in size, with thousands of kilometers of pipe controlled by a vast network of computers, the Kingman Tirsa refinery, twice as large as the Mostorod refinery northeast of Cairo, was designed to someday process three hundred thousand barrels of crude oil per day, over half of Egypt’s total production, and produce a diverse range of petroleum products with modern efficiency. Vast underground pipelines under construction tied Kingman Tirsa to transshipment ports in the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea, and pipeline routes were being tied in to oil fields in Sudan, Libya, and Chad.
As Egypt’s largest refinery, Kingman Tirsa was vitally important to the Egyptian government, so much so that an entire brigade of the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior’s Central Security Force, fully 20 percent of Egypt’s entire paramilitary homeland defense force, was assigned to guard the facility. The Kingman Brigade, as it was called, headquartered in Tirsa, had responsibility to patrol not only the refinery complex itself but its network of pipelines and pumping stations stretching all the way to the Western Desert and its ports along the Nile River and along the Gulf of Suez, as well as provide security for the dozens of residential subdivisions built for the refinery that housed the workers.
As with all of TransGlobal Energy’s facilities around the world, Harold Kingman employed his own handpicked administrative, security, and engineering staff within the main part of the complex, which left the rest of the security forces far outside, around the periphery. While the Kingman Brigade paramilitary forces were only just a bit above standard Central Security Force quality in training and weapons, the security forces in the main headquarters and control building had the best of everything…
…which is why Boroshev and his Egyptian counterparts decided to recruit an additional one hundred and ninety men from four companies within the Kingman Brigade to turn on their comrades, leave their barracks and desert their posts, eliminate any opposition and any officers that dared try to get in their way, and take the headquarters building. Boroshev led a platoon of snipers and commandos and eliminated the outer Central Security Force guards that chose not to surrender or join the infiltrators, then cut the communications and power lines tied into the city’s power grid. The security headquarters was quickly overwhelmed after a brief firefight with TransGlobal security forces, but the small cadre of loyal guards were no match for the sheer numbers of infiltrators, most of whom were wearing friendly forces uniforms. Within an hour, the headquarters building was safely in their hands.
Under cover of darkness, Boroshev brought several large delivery trucks filled with explosives into the Kingman Tirsa refinery complex. Squads of riggers began wiring explosives throughout the complex, starting with the entrances and roads responders might use. Most of the explosives were set right in the headquarters building itself. They didn’t even bother to unload the explosives from the trucks—they simply drove the heavily laden trucks right up to vulnerable spots in the building and set the detonators. Crates of explosives were hand-trucked into the building to be set in the complex’s massive computer facility, which controlled all of the valves, pumps, switches, and flow meters controlling 3 million liters of crude oil flowing through TransGlobal’s pipelines daily. Captured refinery workers were sent to the entrances all around the sprawling facility and made to kneel facing outward as a deterrent to any military forces that might try to storm the refinery.
The terrorists didn’t have to wire the entire complex, so within another hour the headquarters building was completely mined and set to blow. Squads of demolition experts fanned out through the complex to set more mines and explosives in key refinery locations to maximize the destruction and reconstruction costs: the pipelines, valves, and manifolds from the sixteen main lines from the Western Desert oil fields were mined, as were the massive oil, refined products, and natural-gas storage containers.
Two hours from start to finish, with very little opposition inside the facility and no response from outside, and the job was finished. “All platoons reporting in, sir,” Boroshev’s second in command reported. “All demolitions set, the firing panel is in the green, full connectivity and continuity verified. Backups ready as well.”
“Looks to me like Kingman wasn’t ready to defend his largest refinery after all,” Boroshev commented. He had the fleeting thought that this job was too easy, but the fact was that it was done—all they had to do was leave. “Order all platoons to evacuate,” he ordered. “Report to briefed rally points, and make sure the head count is accurate.”
“What about the hostages, sir?”
“Last man out, turn out their lights,” Boroshev said. “We don’t want any clever engineers trying to undo all our hard work.” Boroshev took one last look around the main facility control center—this room had almost two hundred kilos of high explosives set in it alone, with another one hundred kilos down below in the computer spaces. “My young guest comes with me.” Boroshev strode quickly out of the headquarters building and headed over to his vehicle…
…when suddenly he saw a bright flash of light just ahead toward the main plant entrance, followed moments later by a loud explosion. “What the hell was that?” Boroshev shouted.
“Patrols can’t see anything yet,” his lieutenant reported. “Apparently one of the platoons heading out the front got hit.”
Boroshev nodded and unslung his Kalashnikov assault rifle. Fun and games were over, he thought. Whoever was out there—undoubtedly the American antiterrorist task force called TALON, according to the data received from the Director—their plan was simple and now obvious: wait until everyone was inside the plant and the explosives set, then trap them inside. That was probably why it was so easy to recruit the extra men from inside the plant, and why opposition was so light: they were all in on the trap.
“Contact, sir,” the lieutenant reported. “Just one small vehicle outside each entrance to the plant. Not an armored vehicle. Looks like a single dismount and single gunner on board.”
Boroshev looked perplexed for a moment, but shook it off. “Continue the evacuation,” he ordered. “Have the outer perimeter units move in and take them from the rear.”
Boroshev or his men couldn’t see them, but high overhead three small Grenade-Launched Unmanned Observation System (GUOS) aircraft orbited the Kingman Tirsa complex at one thousand meters, keeping a careful watch on everything happening below. Their imaging-infrared sensors captured the movement of any object larger than a dog and uplinked the images via satellite to controllers back in the United States and back down to users right at the scene itself.
“TALON Rats, be advised, you’ve got vehicles approaching,” Ariadna Vega reported from a control station flown into Cairo Almaza Airport about twenty-five kilometers away. “TALON Three, there’s four vehicles heading toward you, about three kilometers at your six o’clock.”
“Got ’em,” Sergeant Major Jefferson responded from the southernmost “Rat Patrol” dune buggy. He wore a monocular datalink display on his Kevlar helmet over his left eye that displayed electronic data and downlinked sensor images to him. The gunner swung his Bushmaster automatic grenade launcher south. Jefferson grabbed his M-16 rifle and got out. “Be careful what you’re shooting at, boys,” he said, and ran across the limestone plateau to the east.
“They look like Egyptian Central Security Force vehicles, but I see no transponder—definitely hostile,” Ari reported. Per Task Force TALON’s engagement agreement with the Egyptian government, any friendly vehicles brought into the area would carry a small transmitter that could be remotely activated and instructed to send a coded, invisible radio signal. If it didn’t have such a beacon, it would be considered a bad guy.
Jefferson ran about two hundred meters east, checked his position on his electronic map through his monocular display, then moved two hundred meters south. He found the deepest depression in the hard-baked
