They moved swiftly, silently, with purpose, under a crystalline, star-filled night in western Siberia. They were Muslims, though one could scarcely have known it from their speech, which was Russian, though inflected with the singsong Azerbaijani accent that wrongly struck the senior members of the engineering staff as entertaining. The three of them had just completed a complex task in the truck and train yards, the opening of hundreds of loading valves. Ibrahim Tolkaze was their leader, though he was not in front. Rasul was in front, the massive former sergeant in the MVD who had already killed six men this cold night-three with a pistol hidden under his coat and three with his hands alone. No one had heard them. An oil refinery is a noisy place. The bodies were left in shadows, and the three men entered Tolkaze's car for the next part of their task.

Central Control was a modern three-story building fittingly in the center of the complex. For at least five kilometers in all directions stretched the cracking towers, storage tanks, catalytic chambers, and above all the thousands of kilometers of large-diameter pipe which made Nizhnevartovsk one of the world's largest refining complexes. The sky was lit at uneven intervals by waste-gas fires, and the air was foul with the stink of petroleum distillates: aviation kerosene, gasoline, diesel fuel, benzine, nitrogen tetroxide for intercontinental missiles, lubricating oils of various grades, and complex petrochemicals identified only by their alphanumeric prefixes.

They approached the brick-walled, windowless building in Tolkaze's personal Zhiguli, and the engineer pulled into his reserved parking place, then walked alone to the door as his comrades crouched in the back seat.

Inside the glass door, Ibrahim greeted the security guard, who smiled back, his hand outstretched for Tolkaze's security pass. The need for security here was quite real, but since it dated back over forty years, no one took it more seriously than any of the pro forma bureaucratic complexities in the Soviet Union. The guard had been drinking, the only form of solace in this harsh, cold land. His eyes were not focusing and his smile was too fixed. Tolkaze fumbled handing over his pass, and the guard lurched down to retrieve it. He never came back up. Tolkaze's pistol was the last thing the man felt, a cold circle at the base of his skull, and he died without knowing why-or even how. Ibrahim went behind the guard's desk to get the weapon the man had been only too happy to display for the engineers he'd protected. He lifted the body and moved it awkwardly to leave it slumped at the desk-just another swing shift worker asleep at his post-then waved his comrades into the building. Rasul and Mohammet raced to the door.

"It is time, my brothers." Tolkaze handed the AK-47 rifle and ammo belt to his taller friend.

Rasul hefted the weapon briefly, checking to see that a round was chambered and the safety off. Then he slung the ammunition belt over his shoulder and snapped the bayonet in place before speaking for the first time that night: "Paradise awaits."

Tolkaze composed himself, smoothed his hair, straightened his tie, and clipped the security pass to his white laboratory coat before leading his comrades up the six flights of stairs.

Ordinary procedure dictated that to enter the master control room, one first had to be recognized by one of the operations staffers. And so it happened. Nikolay Barsov seemed surprised when he saw Tolkaze through the door's tiny window.

"You're not on duty tonight, Isha."

"One of my valves went bad this afternoon and I forgot to check the repair status before I went off duty. You know the one-the auxiliary feed valve on kerosene number eight. If it's still down tomorrow we'll have to reroute, and you know what that means."

Barsov grunted agreement. "True enough, Isha." The middle-aged engineer thought Tolkaze liked the semi-Russian diminutive. He was badly mistaken. "Stand back while I open this damned hatch."

The heavy steel door swung outward. Barsov hadn't been able to see Rasul and Mohammet before, and 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: