“Observant as always, Pavel Gregorievich,” Colonel-General Valeriy Zhurbenko replied, with a smile. He reached into a compartment under the desk and withdrew a bottle of Jim Beam and two shot glasses. He poured, gave a glass to the young man, raised his own glass, then said, “To Gregor Mikhailevich, the bravest and finest officer — no, the finest man — I have ever known. My best friend, my confidant, a soldier’s soldier, and a hero to mother Russia.”
“To my father,” Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov said, raising his glass. As the general raised his glass, he quickly added, “Who was killed because of the gutless, cowardly, inept members of the Army of the Russian Federation and the Central Military Committee.”
Colonel-General Zhurbenko, deputy minister of defense and chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, paused with his glass a centimeter from his lips. He considered Kazakov’s words, shrugged, and downed his whiskey.
“At least you have the guts not to argue with me,” Kazakov said bitterly.
“Your words hurt and offend me, Pavel,” Zhurbenko said resignedly, as his aide refilled their glasses. “If they were said by anyone else, regardless of their rank or title, I would have him imprisoned, or executed.”
“My mother as well, General?” Kazakov asked.
Zhurbenko gave no response. He was accustomed to threatening political and military rivals — but Kazakov wasn’t a rival, he was a superior. Even if he didn’t carry the name of Russia’s most famous and beloved soldier, he would quite possibly be the most powerful man in Russia.
Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov had started out wanting nothing more than to be the privileged son of a dedicated, fast-rising officer of the Red Army. Thanks to his parents, he had enrolled in the Russian Military Academy in St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, but found he had no love of the military — only for partying, smoking, drinking, and hell-raising, the wilder the better. To avoid embarrassment, his father had had him quietly transferred to Odessa Polytechnic University in the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, near their winter home. In a place where he was just another one of many spoiled sons of high-ranking Communist Party members attending school in the “Russian Riviera,” he had had to transform himself in order to stand out and start to build a future for himself.
Pavel couldn’t do it. Being comfortable and taking it easy was his style, not doing what others thought he should be doing. Free from the confines of Leningrad and his father’s watchful eye, he’d partied harder than ever. He’d experimented with every imaginable adventure: ice sailing on the Black Sea, parachuting, rock climbing, extreme sports like road luge and boulder biking, and pursuing the most beautiful women, single or married, on the Crimean Peninsula.
Drugs were everywhere, and Pavel tried them all. It was whispered that Pavel had burned all of the hair off his head and face while freebasing cocaine, which was why he kept his head shaved now, to remind him of how low he had once sunk. But before that time, nothing had been out of bounds. He’d quickly gained a reputation as a man’s man, and his fame and notoriety had grown in inverse exponential proportion to his grade point average. One day, Pavel had disappeared from the nightclub scene in Odessa. Most everyone had assumed he was dead, from either an accident during one of his daredevil extreme sports, an overdose, or a shoot-out with rival drug dealers.
When Pavel Kazakov had returned to Odessa years later, he had been a changed man. The head was still bald — he no longer needed to shave it — but everything else was different. He was off drugs, wealthy, and sophisticated. He’d bought one of the nicest homes on the Black Sea, began contributing to many cultural events, and became a respected financier, internationally known market-maker, and venture capitalist long before industrial investment groups and conglomerates were common in Russia. Of course, the rumors surfaced — he had KGB agents in his pocket, he transported thousands of kilos of drugs in diplomatic pouches, and he killed his competitors and adversaries with cold, ruthless detachment.
His biggest and most dramatic acquisition had been a nearly bankrupt oil and gas company in Odessa. The company had gone into a steep tailspin after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the drop in world oil prices, as had many oil companies, and Kazakov had acquired the company weeks before it folded completely. Many had speculated that Pavel Kazakov’s drug connections had led him to develop a legitimate, Soviet-sponsored and Soviet-secured company; some said that it was an attempt by Pavel’s father to use his status and influence to try to get his son cleaned up and into a legitimate line of work, but far enough in the hinterlands of the Soviet empire so that even if he did screw up, he wouldn’t be an embarrassment. In any case, Pavel had dropped out of school in Odessa and become the president and largest individual shareholder, owning just slightly less stock than the company’s largest shareholder, the Russian government itself.
Pavel’s strategy to make the company, which he called Metyorgaz, profitable, despite the downturn in the oil industry had been simple: find oil where no one else would even think or dare to go, and pump and transport it as cheaply as possible. His first choice had been to go to Kazakhstan, the second-largest of the former Soviet republics but one of the most sparsely populated and capitalized. The reason: the former Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic had been and still was the dumping ground of the Soviet Union.
The Communists had begun denuding the republic with the forced collectivization and relocation of millions of Kazakhs in the 1930s. They’d wasted billions of dollars and many years trying to grow wheat, cotton, and rice in one of the harshest climates in the world. Nuclear waste dumped throughout the republic, along with thousands of above-ground nuclear tests and accidents, had killed millions of persons over thirty years. Leaking radiation, pesticides, herbicides, raw sewage, and livestock waste had contaminated well water, livestock, and food, killing or injuring millions more. Spent ballistic missile and orbital rocket stages crashing downrange from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Russia’s main space launch facility, had poisoned and killed thousands more. Local communist authorities, without consulting one expert, had built or enlarged several irrigation canals to plant cotton, completely draining the already heavily polluted Aral Sea, and creating one of the worst ecological disasters of the 1980s. The forty thousand square mile inland sea, the fourth largest in the world, had shrunk to more than sixty percent of its size, scattering contaminated and polluted salt across the once-fertile Kazakh plains.
Pavel Kazakov had continued with the Russian tradition of raping Kazakhstan. He’d chosen the easiest, cheapest, and highest-producing ways to pump oil, no matter how it hurt the land or how badly it polluted the Caspian Sea. Even after the required bribes to Kazak and Russian government officials to bypass what few environmental regulations were enforced, Kazakov had made immense profits. The gamble had paid off big, and Metyorgaz soon became the third-largest oil and gas producer in the Soviet Union, behind government-run Gazprorn and the richest semi-independent Russian oil producer, LUKoil. Metyorgaz became the largest Russian Caspian Sea oil producer by far.
He increased his wealth and prestige by taking another gamble. The Russian government had mandated that Caspian Sea oil flowing into Russia be transported to the huge oil distribution terminal in Samara, about seven hundred miles north along the Ural River near Kujbysev, through which all of the oil flowing from western Siberia passed. The existing pipeline had a capacity of only three hundred thousand barrels, per day, and Kazakov envisioned pumping six to seven times that volume in just a few short years. He had to find a better way.