Nick Cook
Aggressor
To Ali
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I doubt very much if Aggressor would have been written with the support of Ali, our respective families, and our friends. I know for a fact it would not have been written without much tolerance, patience and help from colleagues at Jane’s and JDW, Bruce Richardson, Mark Lucas, and Bill Scott-Kerr. To everyone… thanks.
BOOK 1
PROLOGUE
The Russian VIP and his Syrian host paused on the metal gangway. To the Russian the centrifugal compressor didn’t look like much — just angular pieces of metal joined by solid Soviet riveting — but the deafening howl of the gas turbines and the energy which shook the platform told him otherwise.
He mopped the sweat from his brow and looked to his host, then towards the door. The Syrian Minister of the Interior seemed to take the hint. The militiaman swung the door and gestured the two men outside with a deep, exaggerated bow.
‘Congratulations, Minister,’ the Syrian said, the noise of the turbines behind them. ‘It is a masterpiece.’
Mikhail Koltsov, Russian Minister of Gas-Petrochemical Industrialization, forced a smile.
He had hoped it would be cooler outside, but it was like an oven. The compressor station lay in a slight depression in the desert. The sun, now at its zenith, reflected off every grain of sand. The temperature had to be rising forty degrees. He wanted nothing more than to board the air-conditioned bus for the return journey to the airport.
‘My government was only too glad to be of assistance,’ Koltsov said stiffly.
The truth was that Russia needed dollars; and the Syrian government, flush with the discovery of vast new natural gas reserves, had plenty of them to spend. But the Al-Hasakah-Latakia pipe-line was a project of which Soviet engineers could be justly proud. It had taken five years to build and there was nothing else like it in the world.
A gleaming steel duct, two metres wide, pumping gas twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, from Al-Hasakah, a barren heatspot in the furnace of the desert, across four hundred and fifty kilometres of the Al-Jazirah to Latakia, a port on the Mediterranean coast. It surpassed even the technology employed on their Urengoy ‘supergiant’ gas field in Western Siberia.
Outside the concrete shell of the pumping station, the whine of the two gas turbines was audible, but only just. The engines, each rated at a staggering two hundred and thirty kilonewtons, were adaptations of jet engines normally employed on giant Soviet transport aircraft. It required two such power plants to pump the gas along the pipe-line to the next booster station, one hundred and fifty kilometres to the east, whence it would receive one last injection of energy for the onward journey to Latakia.
And for once, Moscow had driven a straight cash deal instead of one of those crazy barter arrangements which characterized Soviet export policy in pre-Gorbachev years. This time it was different. Syrian petrodollars, ten thousand million of them, for Soviet engineering expertise. The new capitalism at work.
Farewell handshakes were exchanged between Koltsov’s eight Soviet colleagues and their hosts.
The Syrian turned to him with outstretched arms and Koltsov obliged by kissing him in comradely fashion on both cheeks.
‘A safe trip to Moscow, God willing,’ the Syrian said.
‘Thank you.’
The Russian looked around gratefully for the bus, spotting it a little way off in the shade of a tin shelter just beyond the perimeter fence. He started walking, the Syrian minister at his side. The thirty-strong party, which included a platoon of heavily armed troops, shuffled along in his wake. He thought of the Syrian transport aircraft sitting on the tarmac at Al-Hasakah, sixty kilometres away. A thirty-minute flight to Damascus and he would be reunited with their Aeroflot jet bound for Russia. His mood lightened. He had had enough of the heat, the dirt, and the flies that had plagued his three-day trip. It was time to go home.
The door at the front of the bus opened with a hiss of compressed air. Koltsov stepped inside, relieved to feel the air-conditioning chill the sweat on his brow.
The driver, a headcloth protecting his face from the sun, lolled in his seat with insolent disregard for the VIPs.
Koltsov waved to his host from his seat by the rear window. But the Interior Minister was preoccupied now with his own departure plans, pushing his minions out of the way to reach his air-conditioned limousine. As the bus pulled away into the desert, the Russian was left staring at the concrete heart and steel arteries of the pumping station.
At first, Koltsov thought he imagined it, that the heat shimmer was playing tricks upon his eyes. The concrete roof of the compressor station seemed to lift by as much as a meter, then settle, intact, upon the walls of the blockhouse amidst a light cloud of dust.
He had time only to brace himself against the headrest of his seat for the massive explosion that followed the detonation deep within the bowels of the blockhouse.
The shock wave radiated outwards, engulfing and igniting everything in its path. The pumping station, the perimeter wire, the shelter, the soldiers, the Syrian delegation, and the limousines fused with the inferno, each fuelling the reaction, each adding to its power.
The pumping station disintegrated with the destructive force of a small nuclear weapon.
Shards of glass flew through the bus as the rear window blew in. The minister came up from behind the seat and was knocked backwards by a second shock wave. The bus veered sharply in the grip of a pressure roller, but somehow held the road.
As they slowed to a stop, the minister looked in the dazed faces of his colleagues. He saw terrible cuts, but they would live.
Nobody spoke. Eyes were captivated by the flames that leapt into the sky behind them. The sand around the compressor station had been turned to glass.
Koltsov was aware of noise and movement around the wheels of the bus. He leaned over the edge of the shattered window and saw men armed with assault rifles crawling from the luggage bins. Before he could signal the alarm, the driver was on his feet shouting for them to stay in their seats with a forcefulness out of tune with his earlier lethargy. It was only when the minister saw the automatic pistol in the driver’s hand that he realized why.
One by one, the stowaways stepped on board. Koltsov counted five, not including the driver. They wore combat fatigues topped by T-shirts, strips of cloth tied across their noses and mouths.
The first of them spoke sharply in Arabic to the driver, who proceeded to gun the engine and turn the bus off the road, weaving between the boulders and scrub.
The minister’s curiosity overcame his fear. He fixed his eyes on the one who had barked the commands.
‘Who are you?’
The terrorist swung the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the voice. ‘We are the Angels of Judgement,’ he said.
Ulm had rerun the scene maybe a dozen times in his mind. Shabanov had kicked the door down and rolled through the opening. He had been right behind, covering the Russian’s back. The room was small, perhaps only fifteen by twenty feet, but it was smoky from the stun grenade Shabanov had tossed under the door a few seconds before they’d gone in.
Shabanov had come up, his automatic sweeping the four corners of the room. Ulm braced himself for a string of shots from the Russian’s weapon, but he was greeted only by the single word: clear. There was no time to stop and rest. They had to go on to the next room. It was unrelenting. He’d always hated house clearing, because it took so long. Airliner work was different. That was over in seconds. Either way. Them or you.