"Brown, Dale - Warrior Class" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Dale)

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, Sovietsponsored 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 secondlargest 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 ten-ninal 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.
The answer was clear: build his own pipeline. Neither the Russian Federation nor the newly independent Republic of Kazakhstan had money for this, so Kazakov took it upon himself to beg, borrow, and enlist the help of dozens of financiers around the world. He raised more than two and a half billion dollars and started the largest oil and gas pipeline project in the world, a nine-hundred-and-thirty-mile behemoth line from Tengiz, Kazakhstan, to Novorossiysk, Russia, on the Black Sea. Capable of transporting almost a million and a half barrels of oil a day, with expansion possibilities to almost two million barrels per day, the pipeline had opened up previously abandoned terminals and pipelines on the Black Sea in Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Although Kazakov had to pay huge sums in fees, taxes, leases, and bribes to the Russian and Kazakh governments, he still became one of the wealthiest individuals in Europe.
He used his newfound wealth and started investing in su-
pertankers and refineries, shifting from the oil-producing and -pumping business to the shipment and refining business. The refineries in Ukraine, Bulgaria,
and Turkey were happy to have him oversee operations, and they made Kazakov even wealthier. He modernized a half-dozen facilities in those three countries, making them far more efficient and cleaner than any yet developed in Eastern Europe.
But his core problem still remained: his main customer was still Russia or Russian client-states of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and their oil refining industry was one of the worst in the world, hopelessly outdated and inefficient. Kazakov could pump it profitably, but he lost money every time he sold product to the CIS, because they could not afford to pay very much for it and payments sometimes took a long time. The real money lay in shipping oil to Western European refineries, and that meant shipping oil through the Bosporus Straits into the Mediterranean. The problem was, the number of tankers transiting the Straits was already huge-an average of ten supertankers a day, added to all the other traffic in the Straits, meant wasted time and money, not to mention the tariffs Turkey extracted for each barrel of oil passing through its country. Despite his enormous wealth, Kazakov was a runt among giants when it came to competing with multinational Western oil producers.
Naturally, as Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov's wealth and prestige grew, so did the rumors. Most claimed he was a Russian Mafia boss, with an organization more influential and powerful than the Russian government; others said he was a drug dealer, tapping into Kazakhstan's other major exportheroin-and using his contacts in both the East and West to transport thousands of pounds of heroin per month throughout Europe; others said he was a spy for the Americans, or the Chinese, or the Japanese, or whoever happened to be the scapegoat of the month.
The bottom line for Colonel-General Zhurbenko was this: no one, not even he, with all his access to military and civilian intelligence resources, knew for sure. That made Pavel Kazakov a very, very dangerous man, and an even more dangerous








adversary. Zhurbenko had too many children, grandchildren, dachas, mistresses, and foreign bank accounts to risk stirring up the mud trying to find out-he was sure Kazakov could take all of them for himself if he chose.
Which is why when Kazakov asked that question about his mother, Zhurbenko replied nervously, "Of course not, Pavel," taking a deep sip of whiskey to calm his nerves. When he looked over at Kazakov again, he saw the young entrepreneur's eyes shaded in the interior lights of the back of the limo, hooded-like a snake's, he thought. "You know as well as 1, Pavel: the Army hasn't been the same since our humiliation in Afghanistan. We could not even bring a bunch of ragtag goat herders to heel there. Afterward, we couldn't defeat one rebel army in our own backyard, even if they were just some unemployed factory workers with a few black market guns. Vilnius, Tbilisi, Baku, Dushanbe, Tiraspol, Kiev, Lvov, Grozny twicethe once feared Red Army has become little more than a bump in the road for any two-bit revolutionary."
"You let those Albanian peasants chop up my father like a suckling pig!" Kazakov said hotly. "What are you going to do about it? Nothing! What did I read in Interfax this morning? The Russian government is considering removing its peacekeeping forces from Kosovo? Seventeen soldiers are slaughtered by KLA marauders, and now the government wants to turn tail and run? I thought surely we would send a battalion of shock troops or a helicopter assault brigade into Albania and mow down every last one of the rebel bases!"
"We have only four thousand troops in Kosovo now, Pavel," Zhurbenko argued. "We barely have enough operating funds to keep them minimally operational-"
" IMinimally operational'? For God's sake, General, our troops are having to forage for food! If I were in charge, I'd take one evening, send in an entire brigade to the last man, and blow every known or suspected KLA base to hell, capture their supplies, interrogate the prisoners, bum their homes, and to hell with world opinion! At the very least, it would give our soldiers something to do. At best, it would allow them to avenge the deaths of their brothers in arms."
"I agree fully with your passion and your anger, young
Pavel, but how little you know of politics or how to prosecute a war," Zhurbenko said, trying to keep the tone of his voice lighthearted. Kazakov took an angry gulp of whiskey. Zhurbenko certainly did not want to get on this man's evil side, he thought as he tried to appear as understanding and sympathetic
as he could. "It takes time, planning, and most important, money, to execute an operation such as that."
"My father invaded Pristina with less than twelve hours' notice, with troops that were barely qualified to do the job." "Yes, he did," Zhurbenko had to admit, although it was not
the city of Pristina, just the little regional airport. "Your father was a true leader of men, a risk taker, a born warrior in the tradition of the Slavic kings." That seemed to placate Kazakov.
But in the intervening silence, Zhurbenko turned over the question in his mind. Go into Kosovo with a brigade? It would take months, perhaps half a year, to mobilize twenty thousand troops to do anything, and the entire world would know about it long before the first regiment was loaded up. No. It was silly. Kosovo was a lose-lose situation. The murder of Colonel Kazakov and sixteen other soldiers in Kosovo only reinforced what Zhurbenko already knew-Russia needed to get out of Kosovo. Kazakov was certainly a brilliant businessman and engineer, but he knew nothing of the simplest mechanisms of modern warfare.
But perhaps a smaller force, one or two light armored battalions, even a Spetsnaz airborne regiment. Pavel Kazakov's father had parachuted in an infantry company right onto Pristina Airport, right under NATO's nose, and caught the world off guard. It hadn't been a shock force, just a regular infantry unit-Zhurbenko was sure all its members hadn't even been jump-qualified at the time. A well-trained Spetsnaz unit of similar size, perhaps reinforced by air, would be ten times more effective. Why couldn't they do it again? NATO's presence in Kosovo was only a bit smaller than it was in 1999, but now they were deeply entrenched in their own little sectors, in secure little compounds, not daring to roam around too much. The Kosovo Liberation Army had free rein. But they weren't regulars-they were guerrilla fighters. Dangerous, even deadly