Locked On

70

The Baikonur Cosmodrome, located north of the Syr Darya River in the steppes of the former Soviet satellite state of Kazakhstan, is both the oldest and the largest spaceport on earth. The entire grounds of the facility are roughly a circle some fifty miles in diameter, containing dozens of buildings, launch pads, hardened silos, processing facilities, tracking stations, launch control buildings, roads, an airfield, and a train station. The nearby town of Baikonur has its own airport and another rail station is nearby in Tyuratam.

The first rocket launch pad was built here in the 1950s at the start of the Cold War, and from here in Baikonur, Yuri Gagarin launched to become the first man in space. The commercial space industry would not exist for another thirty years, but today Baikonur is Russia’s main hub of private commercial space operations. They rent the property out from Kazakhstan, paying not in dollars or rubles or euros, but in military equipment.

Georgi Safronov had been walking the halls, standing on the pads, driving trucks across the steppes here for nearly twenty years. He was the face of the new Russia when it came to outer space, not unlike Gagarin himself representing Russia’s space operations a half-century earlier.

On his first day back at Baikonur, the day before the planned launching of the first of three Dnepr rockets in quick succession, forty-five-year-old Georgi Safronov sat in his temporary office in the LCC, the launch control center, situated some five miles west of the three launch silos devoted to Dnepr launches at Baikonur. The Dnepr area, though it encompassed dozens of square miles of territory, was actually quite small when compared with the launch facilities for the Soyuz, Proton, and Rokot systems in other parts of the Cosmodrome.

Georgi looked out his second-floor window at a light snowfall that obscured his view of the launch sites in the distance. Somewhere out there three silos already contained hundred-foot-tall headless rockets, but soon they would have their heads, and those three frozen concrete holes out there would become the most important and most feared place on earth.

A knock on the door to his office pulled his eyes away from the snowy vista.

Aleksandr Verbov, Safronov’s director of launch operations, leaned in the doorway. “Sorry, Georgi, the Americans from Intelsat are here. Since I can’t take them to the control room, I told them I would see if you were busy.”

“I would love to meet my American customers.”

Safronov stood as six Americans entered the small office. He smiled graciously, shaking their hands and speaking to them one at a time. They were here to monitor the launch of their communications satellite, but in fact their payload container containing their equipment would be switched out for a container presently sitting under guard in a train car a few miles from the Cosmodrome.

As he shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, he knew that these five men and one woman would be dead very soon. They were infidels, and their death was inconsequential, but he could not help thinking nevertheless that the woman was quite pretty.

Georgi damned his weakness. He knew his flesh would be rewarded in the afterlife. He told himself this and he smiled into the attractive communications executive’s eyes and moved on to the next American, a short, fat, bearded man with a Ph.D. in something irrelevant.

Soon the Americans were out of his office and he returned to his desk, knowing the process would be repeated by the Japanese customers and the British clients. The LCC was officially off-limits to foreigners, but Safronov had allowed the representatives from his customers’ companies some access to the second-floor offices.

Throughout the day he took full command of the preparations of the rockets. There were other people who could handle this, Georgi was president of the company after all, but Safronov explained away his personal attention by saying this was the first Dnepr multi-launch in history, with a trio of launches during a planned window of only thirty-six hours, and he wanted to make sure everything went according to plan. This could, he argued, help them attract more clients in the future if multiple companies needed their equipment launched in a specific time window. The Dnepr rockets did have the ability to take more than one satellite into space at a time, with all equipment loaded into the same Space Head Module, but this was only helpful if the customers all wanted the same orbit. The three-launch schedule for the next two days would send satellites to the south and to the north.

Or so everyone thought.

No one really raised an eyebrow at Safronov’s hands-on approach, as Georgi was a hands-on leader as well as an expert on the Dnepr system.

But no one knew that his expertise would rely on work he had done over a decade earlier.

When the R-36 ballistic missile left service in the end of the 1980s, 308 missiles remained in the Soviet Union’s inventory.

Safronov’s company began refitting them for space launch operations under contract from the Russian government in the late nineties, but at the time the U.S. Space Shuttle Program was in full gear, and America had plans for more space vehicles on the horizon.

Safronov worried that his company could not make the Dnepr system profitable with commercial space launches alone, so he concocted other plans for their use.

One of the ideas Safronov put forth and explored for years was the idea that a Dnepr-1 rocket could be used as a maritime lifesaving device. He postulated that if, say, a ship was sinking off the coast of Antarctica, a launch of a rocket in Kazakhstan could send a pod carrying three thousand pounds up to twelve thousand miles away in under an hour, with an accuracy of under two kilometers. Other payloads could be sent to other parts of the globe in emergency situations, an admittedly expensive but unparalleled airmail service of sorts.

He knew it sounded fanciful, so he spent months with teams of scientists working out the telemetry physics of his idea, and he had developed computer models.

Ultimately his plans went nowhere, especially after U.S. shuttle launches ceased and then only restarted slowly after the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

But a few months earlier, as soon as he returned from his meeting with General Ijaz, Safronov dusted off his old computer discs and put a team together to rework the mechanics of sending Dnepr vehicles into high atmosphere instead of low orbit, and then dropping them down to a particular location, parachuting a pod to earth.

His team thought it was hypothetical, but they did their job, and Safronov had the computer models and executable commands secretly loaded into the software now in use at the LCC.

He took a quick call from Assembly and Integration: the three satellites were now out of the clean room and had been placed in the payload containers and fitted into the Space Head Modules, the nose of the actual spacecraft that would, as far as the owners of the satellites knew, put their equipment into earth orbit. These spacecraft would now be taken out to the silos in transporter-erectors, large crane-trucks that would mate them to the launch vehicles, the huge three-stage rockets that already waited in their silos. It was a several-hours-long process that would not end until late in the evening, and much of the staff would be out of the LCC to oversee or just spectate at the launch sites.

This would give Georgi time to coordinate with his men down in Baikonur, to prepare for the attack.

Everything was going according to plan so far, but Safronov expected nothing else, since every single action that he had taken was nothing less than Allah’s will.

The Frenchmen working for Fabrice Bertrand-Morel might have been good detectives, good hunters of human prey, but as far as John Clark was concerned they were awful interrogators. For the past two days he’d been punched, kicked, slapped, denied food and water, and even denied a bathroom break.

That was torture?

Yes, the American’s jaw was swollen and sore, and he’d lost two crowns. And yes he’d been forced to piss on himself and he was sure he’d lost enough weight in two days to ensure that, if he ever got up to leave this place, he’d need to make a beeline to a clothing store to get some clothes that would not fall off him. But no, these guys did not have the first idea of how to get someone to talk.

John had gotten no sense from the men that they were under any time constraints from their boss. It had been the same six men he’d been with since the beginning, they’d stuck him in some rented house, likely not far from Moscow, and they thought they could knock him around for a couple of days to get him to reveal his contacts and his affiliations. He was asked about Jack Ryan a lot. Jack Ryan Sr., that is. He was asked about his current job. And he was asked about the Emir. He got the impression that the men asking the questions did not know enough of the context of the information that was being sought to be any good at their questioning. Someone — Laska or FBM or Valentin Kovalenko — had sent them questions to ask, so that’s what they did.

Ask question. Get no answer. Punish. Repeat.

Clark wasn’t having any fun, but he could continue like this for a week or more before they really started to annoy him.

He’d been through worse. Hell, SEAL training was much, much worse than this shit.

One of the Frenchmen, the one John thought of as the nicest of the bunch, stepped into the room. He wore a black track suit now; the men had gone out and bought new clothes for the interrogation after Clark’s sweat and blood and spit had made it onto their suits.

He sat on the bed; Clark was tied in his chair. “Mr. Clark. Time is running out for you. Tell me about zee Emir, Monsieur Yasin. You were working with Jacques Ryan to find him, with some of your old friends from zee CIA, perhaps? Oui? You see, we know much about you and zee organization with whom you work, but we just need a little bit more of zee information. You give us this, it is no big thing to you, and then you go home.”

Clark rolled his eyes.

“I don’t want my friends to hit you again. There is no use in this. You talk, yes?”

“No.” Clark said it through a sore jaw that he was sure was about to get a little more sore.

The Frenchman shrugged. “I call my friends. They will hurt you, Mr. Clark.”

“As long as they don’t talk as much as you.”

Georgi Safronov liked to think that he had thought through every last detail of his plan. On the morning of the realization of his plot, the forty-three remaining Jamaat Shariat forces positioned nearby had already broken off into their small units, using tactics learned training with the very capable Haqqani network in Waziristan.

But there were two sides to any military engagement, and Safronov had not neglected to study his adversary, the site security force.

Security for Baikonur used to be the responsibility of the Russian Army, but they pulled out years earlier and, since that time, the protection of the nearly two-thousand-square-mile area was the job of a private company from Tashkent.

The men drove around in trucks, patrolling the grounds, and they had a couple of men positioned at the front gates, and they had a large barracks building full of men, but the fence line at Baikonur was low and poor in most areas and nonexistent in others.

It was not a secure environment.

And although the land appeared at a distance to be nothing but wide-open range, Safronov knew that the steppes were crisscrossed with dry streams and natural depressions that could be exploited. He also knew that a local Muslim insurgent force, Hizb ut-Tahrir, had tried to enter the spaceport in the past, but they were so weak and poorly trained they had only bolstered the delusion of the hired Kazakh guard force that they were ready for an attack.

An attack was coming, Georgi knew, and he would see how ready they were.

Safronov himself had befriended the leader of the guards. The man made regular visits to the Dnepr LCC when a launch was imminent, and Georgi had called the man the evening before to ask him to come by early because Kosmos Space Flight Corporation, Georgi’s company, had sent a token of appreciation from Moscow for all the fine work he was doing.

The director of security was thrilled, and he said he would arrive at Mr. Safronov’s office at eight-thirty a.m.

It was now seven forty-five, and Safronov paced his office.

He worried his human form would not be able to do what must be done now, and it made him shake. His brain told him what must be done, but he was not certain he could see it through.

His phone rang, and he was glad for the interruption.

“Yes?”

“Hi, Georgi.”

“Hello, Aleksandr.”

“Do you have a moment?”

“I’m a little busy going over the numbers for the second launch. I won’t have much time after the first launch this afternoon.”

“Yes. But I need to speak with you about this afternoon’s launch. I have some concerns.”

Dammit! Not now! thought Georgi. He did not need to spend his morning dealing with a technical matter involving a satellite that would travel no farther than the distance his men dropped it next to the silo when they replaced it with their own Space Head Module.

Still, he needed to appear as if everything was normal for as long as possible.

“Come in.”

“I am at Flight Data Processing. I can be there in fifteen minutes. Twenty if there is too much ice on the road.”

“Well, hurry up, Aleksandr.”

It took Director of Launch Operations Aleksandr Verbov the full twenty minutes to arrive at his president’s office at the LCC. He entered without knocking, stamping his feet and pulling off his heavy coat and hat. “Fucking cold morning, Georgi,” he said with a grin.

“What do you need?” Safronov was running out of time. He had to get his friend out of here in a hurry.

“I’m sorry to say it, but we need to cancel today’s flight.”

“What? Why?”

“Telemetry is having issues with some software. They want to troubleshoot for a while, then power down and reset. Some of our data collection and processing systems will be affected for a few hours. But the next window to launch all three vehicles in quick succession, as we planned, will be in three days’ time. I recommend we cancel the launch sequence, power down the power pressure generators, offload the fuel from all three LVs, and put the SCs in temporary storage configuration. We will have a delay, but will still set the record for a narrow launch window, which ultimately is our goal.”

“No!” Safronov said. “The launch sequence continues. I want 109 ready to go at noon.”

Verbov was completely taken aback. This was a response unlike any he’d ever gotten from Safronov, even when the news was bad. “I do not understand, Georgi Mikhailovich. Did you not just hear me? Without proper telemetry readings European mission control would never allow the spacecraft to continue their flight. They will abort the launch. You know that.”

Safronov looked at his friend for a long moment. “I want it to launch. I want all missiles ready in their silos.”

Verbov smiled as he cocked his head. He chuckled. “Missiles?”

“LVs. You know what I mean. Nothing to worry about, Aleksandr. It will all be clear soon.”

“What is going on?”

Safronov’s hands trembled, he clutched the fabric of his pant legs. Over and over he whispered to himself a mantra given to him by Suleiman Murshidov. “One second of jihad equals one hundred years of prayer. One second of jihad equals one hundred years of prayer. One second of jihad equals one hundred years of prayer.”

“Did you say something?”

“Leave me.”

Aleksandr Verbov turned away slowly, headed out into the hallway. He’d gotten just ten feet or so from his boss’s door when Safronov called to him from his office.

“I’m joking, Alex! Everything is fine. We can delay the launch if telemetry says we must.”

Verbov shook his head with a snorted chuckle, something between confusion and mirth, then he returned to the office. He was through the doorway before he noticed the pistol in Safronov’s hand. He gave an incredulous smile, like he did not believe the weapon was real. “Georgi Mikhailovich … what do you think you are—”

Safronov fired a single round from the suppressed Makarov auto pistol. It entered Aleksandr’s solar plexus, passed through a lung, shattered a rib as it tore out his back. Alex did not fall, he’d winced with the noise of the gunshot, hesitated a moment before looking down at the bloodstain growing on his brown coveralls.

Georgi thought it took Aleksandr a long time to die. Neither man said a word, they only looked at each other with similar stares of bewilderment. Then Alex reached back, found the vinyl chair by the door, and sat down in it roughly.

Another few seconds and his eyes closed, his head sagged to the side, and a long final breath blew from his damaged lung.

It took Georgi several more seconds to control his own breathing. But he did so, and he placed the pistol on the desk next to him.

He pulled the dead man, still in his chair, into the closet in his office. He had made space for one man, the director of security, but now he would need to make more room for the Kazakh when he came in just minutes.

Safronov dumped Verbov’s body out of the chair and onto the floor of the closet, pushed the dead man’s feet inside, and then shut the door. Hurriedly he grabbed a roll of toilet paper in his bathroom and wiped up the drips of blood on the floor of his office.

Ten minutes later the director of security was dead as well, flat on the floor of Safronov’s office. He was a big man, and he still wore his coat and his heavy boots. Georgi stared at the body, the hangdog expression on the dead man’s face, and he wanted to retch. But he did not retch, he focused himself, and he dialed his mobile with a trembling hand.

When the call was answered on the other end, he said, “Allahu Akbar. It is time.”