SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

"God almighty!" the chief master sergeant breathed. The fire which had begun in the gasoline/diesel section of the refinery had been sufficient to alert a strategic early-warning satellite in geosynchronous orbit twenty-four thousand miles above the Indian Ocean. The signal was down linked to a top-security U.S. Air Force post.

The senior watch officer in the Satellite Control Facility was an Air Force colonel. He turned to his senior technician: "Map it."

"Yes, sir." The sergeant typed a command into his console, which told the satellite cameras to alter their sensitivity. With the flaring on the screen reduced, the satellite rapidly pinpointed the source of the thermal energy. A computer-controlled map on the screen adjacent to the visual display gave them an exact location reference. "Sir, that's an oil refinery fire. Jeez, and it looks like a real pisser! Colonel, we got a Big Bird pass in twenty minutes and the course track is within a hundred twenty kilometers."

"Uh-huh," the colonel nodded. He watched the screen closely to make sure that the heat source was not moving, his right hand lifting the Gold Phone to NORAD headquarters, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.

"This is Argus Control. I have Flash Traffic for CINC-NORAD.

"Wait one," said the first voice.

"This is CINC-NORAD," said the second, Commander-in-Chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

"Sir, this is Colonel Burnette at Argus Control. We show a massive thermal energy reading at coordinates sixty degrees fifty minutes north, seventy-six degrees forty minutes east. The site is listed as a POL refinery. The thermal source is not, repeat not moving. We have a KH-11 pass close to the source in two-zero minutes. My preliminary evaluation, General, is that we have a major oil-field fire here."

"They're not doing a laser-flash on your bird?" CINC-NORAD asked. There was always a possibility the Soviets were trying to play games with their satellite.

"Negative. The light source covers infrared and all of the visible spectrum, not, repeat not, monochromatic. We'll know more in a few minutes, sir. So far everything is consistent with a massive ground fire."

Thirty minutes later they were sure. The KH-11 reconnaissance satellite came over the horizon close enough for all of its eight television cameras to catalog the chaos. A side-link transmitted the signal to a geosynchronous communications satellite, and Burnette was able to watch it all "in real time." Live and in color. The fire had already engulfed half of the refinery complex and more than half of the nearby production field, with more burning crude oil spreading from the ruptured pipeline onto the river Ob'. They were able to watch the fire spread, the flames carried rapidly before a forty-knot surface wind. Smoke obscured much of the area on visible light, but infrared sensors penetrated it to show many heat sources that could only be vast pools of oil products burning intensely on the ground. Burnette's sergeant was from east Texas, and had worked as a boy in the oil fields. He keyed up daylight photographs of the site and compared them with the adjacent visual display to determine what parts of the refinery had already ignited.

"Goddamn, Colonel." The sergeant shook his head reverently. He spoke with quiet expertise. "The refinery-well, it's gone, sir. That fire'll spread in front of that wind, and ain't no way in hell they'll stop it. The refinery's gone, total loss, burn maybe three, four days-maybe a week, parts of it. And unless they find a way to stop it, looks like the production field is going to go, too, sir. By next pass, sir, it'll all be burnin', all those wellheads spillin' burnin' o'l... Lordy. I don't even think Red Adair would want any part of this job!"

"Nothing left of the refinery? Hmph." Burnette watched a tape rerun of the Big Bird pass. "It's their newest and biggest, ought to put a dent in their POL production while they rebuild that from scratch. And once they get those field fires put out, they'll have to rearrange their gas and diesel production quite a bit. I'll say one thing for Ivan. When he has an industrial accident, he doesn't screw around. A major inconvenience for our Russian friends, Sergeant."

The analysis was confirmed the next day by the CIA, and the day after that by the British and French security services.

They were all wrong.