The Kremlin Strike

Seventeen

“This is a complete fucking disaster, Leonov,” Gennadiy Gryzlov said icily. His eyes narrowed. “As far as I can judge, you might as well have just heaped up the two trillion rubles I gave you and then set them on fire.”

Holding his own temper in check with difficulty, Leonov calmly shook his head. “Losing the Mars One reactor on launch is a setback. Nothing more.”

Gryzlov snorted. “Don’t play semantics games with me! Without the energy needed to fire them, your precious Thunderbolt plasma weapon and the station’s Hobnail self-defense lasers are useless.”

“Thunderbolt still has its supercapacitors and the two lasers have their own battery storage systems,” Leonov insisted.

The other man angrily waved that away. “So they can each fire a few shots using stored power. Wonderful. We can start your planned war in space. And then what? Do we hope the Americans panic and yield to all our demands before they tumble to the fact that your vaunted orbital station is virtually defenseless?”

Leonov refrained from reminding him that Mars One’s armament load-out included a number of ground-attack and defensive missiles. Where it counted, Gryzlov wasn’t wrong to see the orbital station’s energy weapons as crucial. Ultimately, to achieve Russia’s strategic and operational objectives, both the longer-range Thunderbolt plasma rail gun and shorter-range Hobnail lasers were essential.

“To recharge Thunderbolt and the lasers, we can divert electricity from the station’s secondary solar arrays as needed,” he argued. “My engineers and Strelkov’s crew are working out the details and procedures now.”

Gryzlov raised an eyebrow. “Tell me, Leonov,” he said with deceptive calmness. “How much electricity will be generated by those solar panels?”

“Seventy-five kilowatts.”

Gryzlov nodded. His eyes were hooded. “And how much power would have been generated by the fusion reactor that’s now scattered in a million twisted pieces all the way from Plesetsk to the Urals?”

Leonov grimaced. The compact fusion reactor destroyed aboard Energia Four had been a technological marvel. Within the reactor, rotating, ring-shaped magnetic fields were used to confine the plasma created by heating deuterium and helium-3 with low-frequency radio waves. Like the Thunderbolt rail gun, it was the product both of daring Russian espionage and years of expensive research and development. A small American company affiliated with Princeton University had researched such reactors in the hopes of building direct-drive fusion-powered rockets for long-duration deep-space missions. While the Americans limped along, hobbled by a lack of sufficient funding, Leonov’s teams of scientists and engineers had taken their stolen data and designs and made them work.

“The Mars One reactor was rated at ten megawatts,” he admitted.

“More than a hundred times greater than the amount produced by those solar arrays,” Gryzlov noted dryly. “That is rather a drastic reduction in the station’s available power supply, is it not?”

“Using solar cells to recharge the batteries and supercapacitors will significantly reduce the rate of fire for our energy weapons,” Leonov acknowledged reluctantly.

“Below the optimum level recommended for effective, full-scale military operations?” Gryzlov pressed.

“I am afraid so.”

Impassively, Gryzlov nodded. “I see.” He looked across his desk at Leonov. “So what course of action do you recommend now, Colonel General?”

“Once the station’s surviving modules are connected and fully operational, Colonel Strelkov and his crew should sit tight,” Leonov suggested. “For the time being, Mars One can appear to be exactly what we say it is, simply a new manned orbital science platform. Our own replacement for the old International Space Station.”

Gryzlov smiled thinly. “And you think the Americans will buy that story?”

Leonov shrugged. “They may be suspicious, but absent proof of our hostile intentions, what can they do?”

Without further warning, Gryzlov’s temper flared. “And so we come full circle, Colonel General,” he snarled. “Without a combat-ready station, your whole damned Mars Project is useless! What do you have to show for all the resources I’ve given you? Nothing. Just a few horrifically expensive pieces of metal aimlessly circling the earth.” He scowled. “I warned you earlier about the consequences of failure. And I assure you, those were not idle threats.”

“I never thought they were,” Leonov said steadily, all too aware that his freedom and his very life now hung by a slender thread. It would do him no good to protest that he’d warned about the hazards involved in relying so heavily on an inadequately tested heavy-lift rocket design. Russia’s leader lived by one overriding principle: Failures were never the consequence of his own mistakes or hasty, ill-considered decisions. They were always the fault of other, lesser men.

“I meant what I said earlier about this being a temporary setback, Gennadiy,” he continued. “We lost one reactor, yes. But it can be replaced.”

Gryzlov eyed him thoughtfully. “With the fusion reactor module being built for Mars Two, you mean?”

Leonov nodded. Full implementation of the Mars Project plan had always called for launching a second station — to increase the reach of Russia’s new space-based weapons. Meeting the rushed tempo Gryzlov demanded had forced him to send the first station’s modules into orbit before those for its planned counterpart were ready. “Our second reactor is nearly finished. According to the TRINITY Institute generator construction unit at Akademgorodok, they are less than a week away from certifying it as flight-ready.”

“Tell them to cut that time in half,” Gryzlov snapped. “I don’t care how they do it — whether it means working around the clock or cutting normal safety procedures.”

Wordlessly, Leonov nodded. Then he warned, “Even when Akademgorodok’s work is finished, it will take more time to transport the reactor to Vostochny and mate it with a new Energia-5VR.”

Gryzlov leaned forward. His hands balled into fists. “Make it happen fast, Mikhail. If you have to liquidate a few of the lazier railway workers to encourage their comrades, don’t hesitate.” His expression was unpleasant. “You’ve already tested the limits of my patience today. So no more screwups, eh?”

“No, Mr. President,” Leonov agreed.

Head down in apparent thought, Leonov strolled along a winding dirt path — heading deeper into the woods around the cosmonaut training center. The late-afternoon sun filtered down through a high canopy of leaves, lighting up some slender, white-trunked birch trees and leaving others in shadow.

Leonov kept on walking as a short, slight figure detached itself from one of those shadows and joined him. “Did you have any trouble?” he asked, with a quick, sidelong glance.

“None,” Major General Arkady Koshkin replied. “My staff knows I had a long-scheduled Mars Project software conference here today. None of them, except Popov, is aware that it ended earlier than originally planned. And I left him waiting back at my staff car. He may suspect I’m meeting someone else privately, but he cannot be sure.”

Leonov remembered the other man’s elegantly tailored bodyguard. “You can trust him not to blab?”

Koshkin smiled thinly. “Young Dmitry may look like an overdressed popinjay, but he is also shrewd enough to calculate the odds. As long as it’s safer for him to keep a few of my secrets than it is to spill them, he will remain loyal.”

“That seems a rather tenuous form of loyalty,” Leonov said wryly.

“When one’s life is at stake, all loyalty is tenuous, is it not?” the head of the FSB’s Q Directorate said with equal irony. He shrugged. “Perhaps more so now than in the recent past.” Leonov let that pass.

They walked on in silence for a few more moments. At last, Leonov stopped and turned to face his smaller companion. “Arkady, I need your guarantee that the fail-safe protocols you’ve planted in various Mars One station operating systems have not been compromised.”

“They remain undetected,” Koshkin told him confidently. “Attempts to pry into those codes would trip a large number of cybersecurity alarms. We would be alerted within seconds.”

Leonov stared at him. “Even with the station modules already in orbit?”

Koshkin nodded. “We’ve buried a secret and highly secure back channel of our own among the routine telemetry feeds from Mars One.” Behind his thick spectacles, his dark brown eyes revealed a small measure of the smug self-satisfaction of a magician astonishing his audience by pulling a rabbit out of an apparently empty hat. “We can monitor the station systems in real time, Mikhail. And communicate with them, as needed.”

“Is there any chance that the fail-safe protocols could be triggered accidentally?”

Koshkin shook his head authoritatively. “None whatsoever. The protocols can only be activated by deliberate command — through encrypted signals from the ground using the codes I’ve already given you.” For a second, he hesitated. “Perhaps I should secretly alert Colonel Strelkov to their existence… as a further precaution. Then, if the Americans successfully attack Mars One, he could input the necessary commands directly.”

“No,” Leonov said flatly. “In such a case, Strelkov and his men would already be either dead or taken prisoner.” He turned his hard-eyed gaze fully on the shorter man. “The knowledge of these hidden safeguards must remain between ourselves, Arkady. Ourselves only. You understand?”

“Yes, of course,” Koshkin said slowly. He cleared his throat nervously. “There are others in Moscow who, I believe, share our concerns about the risks the president is running. If we could just brief them—”

“That would be foolish beyond measure,” Leonov interrupted. His voice was harsh. “You forget, Koshkin. Three men can keep a secret. But only if two of them are dead.”