scarcely had time now. Three 7.62mm rounds from the Kalashnikov exploded into his chest.
The master control room contained a duty watch crew of twenty, and looked much like the control center for a railroad or power plant. The high walls were crosshatched with pipeline schematics dotted with hundreds of lights to indicate which control valve was doing what. That was only the main display. Individual segments of the system were broken off onto separate status boards, mainly controlled by computer but constantly monitored by half the duty engineers. The staff could not fail to note the sound of the three shots.
But none of them were armed.
With elegant patience, Rasul began to work his way across the room, using his Kalashnikov expertly and firing one round into each watch engineer. At first they tried to run away-until they realized that Rasul was herding them into a corner like cattle, killing as he moved. Two men bravely got on their command phones to summon a fast-response team of KGB security troops. Rasul shot one of them at his post, but the other ducked around the line of command consoles to evade the gunfire and bolted for the door, where Tolkaze stood. It was Boris, Tolkaze saw, the Party favorite, head of the local kollektiv, the man who had 'befriended' him, making him the special pet native of the Russian engineers. Ibrahim could remember every time this godless pig had patronized him, the savage foreigner imported to amuse his Russian masters. Tolkaze raised his pistol.
'Ishaaa!' the man screamed in terror and shock. Tolkaze shot him in the mouth, and hoped Boris didn't die too quickly to hear the contempt in his voice: 'Infidel.' He was pleased that Rasul had not killed this one. His quiet friend could have all the rest.
The other engineers screamed, threw cups, chairs, manuals. There was nowhere left to run, no way around the swarthy, towering killer. Some held up their hands in useless supplication. Some even prayed aloud-but not to Allah, which might have saved them. The noise diminished as Rasul strode up to the bloody corner. He smiled as he shot the very last, knowing that this sweating infidel pig would serve him in paradise. He reloaded his rifle, then went back through the control room. He prodded each body with a bayonet, and again shot the four that showed some small sign of life. His face bore a grim, content expression. At least twenty-five atheist pigs dead. Twenty-five foreign invaders who would no longer stand between his people and their God. Truly he had done Allah's work!
The third man, Mohammet, was already at his own work as Rasul took his station at the top of the staircase. Working in the back of the room, he switched the room systems-control mode from computer-automatic to emergency-manual, bypassing all of the automated safety systems.
A methodical man, Ibrahim had planned and memorized every detail of his task over a period of months, but still he had a checklist in his pocket. He unfolded it now and set it next to his hand on the master supervisory control board. Tolkaze looked around at the status displays to orient himself, then paused.
From his back pocket he took his most treasured personal possession, half of his grandfather's Koran, and opened it to a random page. It was a passage in The Chapter of the Spoils. His grandfather having been killed during the futile rebellions against Moscow, his father shamed by helpless subservience to the infidel state, Tolkaze had been seduced by Russian schoolteachers into joining their godless system. Others had trained him as an oil- field engineer to work at the State's most valuable facility in Azerbaijan. Only then had the God of his fathers saved him, through the words of an uncle, an 'unregistered' imam who had remained faithful to Allah and safeguarded this tattered fragment of the Koran that had accompanied one of Allah's own warriors. Tolkaze read the passage under his hand:
And when the misbelievers plotted to keep thee prisoner, or kill thee, or drive thee forth, they plotted well; but God plotted, too. And God is the best of plotters.
Tolkaze smiled, certain that it was the final Sign in a plan being executed by hands greater than his own. Serene and confident, he began to fulfill his destiny.
First the gasoline. He closed sixteen control valves-the nearest of them three kilometers away-and opened ten, which rerouted eighty million liters of gasoline to gush out from a bank of truck-loading valves. The gasoline did not ignite at once. The three had left no pyrotechnic devices to explode this first of many disasters. Tolkaze reasoned that if he were truly doing the work of Allah, then his God would surely provide.
And so He did. A small truck driving through the loading yard took a turn too fast, skidded on the splashing fuel, and slid broadside into a utility pole. It only took one spark… and already more fuel was spilling out into the train yards.
With the master pipeline switches, Tolkaze had a special plan. He rapidly typed in a computer command, thanking Allah that Rasul was so skillful and had not damaged anything important with his rifle The main pipeline from the nearby production field was two meters across, with many branch lines running to all of the production wells. The oil traveling in those pipes had its own mass and its own momentum supplied by pumping stations in the fields. Ibrahim's commands rapidly opened and closed valves. The pipeline ruptured in a dozen places, and the computer commands left the pumps on. The escaping light crude flowed across the production field, where only one more spark was needed to spread a holocaust before the winter wind, and another break occurred where the oil and gas pipelines crossed together over the river Ob'.
'The greenskins are here!' Rasul shouted a moment before the quick response team of KGB border guards stormed up the staircase. A short burst from the Kalashnikov killed the first two, and the rest of the squad stopped cold behind a turn in the staircase as their young sergeant wondered what the hell they had walked into.
Already, automatic alarms were erupting around him in the control room. The master status board showed four growing fires whose borders were defined by blinking red lights. Tolkaze walked to the master computer and ripped out the tape spool that contained the digital control codes. The spares were in the vault downstairs. and the only men within ten kilometers who knew its combination were in this room-dead. Mohammet was busily ripping out every telephone in the room. The whole building shook with the explosion of a gasoline storage tank two kilometers away.
The crashing sound of a hand grenade announced another move by the KGB troops. Rasul returned fire, and the screams of dying men nearly equaled the earsplitting fire-alarm klaxons. Tolkaze hurried over to the corner. The floor there was slick with blood. He opened the door to the electrical fuse box, flipped the main circuit breaker, then fired his pistol into the box. Whoever tried to set things aright would also have to work in the dark.
He was done. Ibrahim saw that his massive friend had been mortally hit in the chest by grenade fragments. He was wobbling, struggling to stay erect at the door, guarding his Comrades to the last.
' 'I take refuge in the Lord of the worlds,' ' Tolkaze called out defiantly to the security troops, who spoke not a word of Arabic. ' 'The King of men, the God of men, from the evil of the whispering devil-' '
The KGB sergeant leaped around the lower landing and his first burst tore the rifle from Rasul's bloodless hands. Two hand grenades arched through the air as the sergeant disappeared back around the comer.
There was no place-and no reason-to run. Mohammet and Ibrahim stood immobile in the doorway as the grenades bounced and skittered across the tiled floor. Around them the whole world seemed to be catching fire, and because of them, the whole world really would.
'Allahu akhbar!'
'God almighty!' the chief master sergeant breathed. The fire which had begun in the gasoline/diesel section of the refinery had been sufficient to alert a strategic early-warning satellite in geosynchronous orbit twenty-four thousand miles above the Indian Ocean. The signal was down linked to a top-security U.S. Air Force post.
The senior watch officer in the Satellite Control Facility was an Air Force colonel. He turned to his senior technician: 'Map it.'
'Yes, sir.' The sergeant typed a command into his console, which told the satellite cameras to alter their sensitivity. With the flaring on the screen reduced, the satellite rapidly pinpointed the source of the thermal energy. A computer-controlled map on the screen adjacent to the visual display gave them an exact location reference. 'Sir, that's an oil refinery fire. Jeez, and it looks like a real pisser! Colonel, we got a Big Bird pass in twenty minutes and the course track is within a hundred twenty kilometers.'
'Uh-huh,' the colonel nodded. He watched the screen closely to make sure that the heat source was not moving, his right hand lifting the Gold Phone to NORAD headquarters, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
'This is Argus Control. I have Flash Traffic for CINC-NORAD.
'Wait one,' said the first voice.
'This is CINC-NORAD,' said the second, Commander-in-Chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
'Sir, this is Colonel Burnette at Argus Control. We show a massive thermal energy reading at coordinates
