He left the doorway and perched on a corner of her desk. “Show me.”
“All right. But it’s a pretty tangled web.” She leaned back in her chair, clearly considering where she should begin. “I’ll give you the punch line first: the French have significantly upped the amount of foreign aid they’re sending to the Russians. Both on a government-to-government level and on a corporate basis. What I don’t know is why they’re doing it.”
Her voice changed subtly as she started retracing her reasoning, always highlighting the differences between what she knew and what she could only guess at. Banich listened intently, more and more impressed by her abilities.
There were dozens of pieces to the puzzle she’d put together, some so small and so obscure that he was amazed anyone had ever spotted them, let alone recognized their significance. Some were tiny, cryptic notations on copies of shipping manifests. Others were coded transactions buried inside the State Central Bank’s computer data base. Still other clues came from conversations she’d had with friendly Russian officials and business leaders or from radio and wire intercepts passed on by the NSA.
By itself none of the information she’d collected seemed particularly meaningful. It was like looking too closely at an impressionist painting. Until you stepped back far enough all you saw were tiny dots of different-colored paint. But Erin McKenna had a talent for seeing the patterns behind bits of apparently unconnected data.
Banich sat still, waiting until she was finished. Then he leaned forward. “Let me get this straight. What we’re looking at is a massive flow of new French aid to the government and to state-run industries. Things like no-interest loans and outright grants. Massive shipments of high-tech industrial machinery, spare parts, and computer software. A lot of it has both military and civilian uses. And it’s all been showing up over the past several weeks. Right?”
“Right.”
“Any ideas on how much this stuff is worth?”
Erin nodded. “From what I’ve seen so far… at least two billion dollars. That’s just a ballpark guess, but I think it’ll hold up over time.”
Banich whistled softly in astonishment. Two billion dollars’ worth of foreign aid in five or six weeks was an extraordinary effort. The whole U.S. foreign aid budget didn’t amount to more than fifteen or sixteen billion dollars spread out over a whole year. “What the hell are the French up to?”
She shook her head. “That I don’t know. All the money and goods are coming in under the table, so they’re sure as heck not trying to win brownie points with the Russian people.”
“True.” Banich rubbed the sore muscles at the back of his neck. “But nobody throws that kind of funding around on a whim. The Frogs want something from Kaminov and his pals and they want it bad. The only question is, what?”
“Nothing good, I’m sure.”
“Yeah.” He stood up. “I’m going down the hall for a talk with Kutner. If he sees it my way, we’ll send your report off to D.C. by special diplomatic pouch tomorrow morning. I don’t think we should sit on this until we’ve crossed every t and dotted every i.”
Erin nodded wearily and turned back to her keyboard. He knew she’d be working all night and regretted the need for it. Sleep was tough to come by at Moscow Station.
Banich paused by her open door. “Oh, McKenna?”
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.