Locked On

by Tom Clancy

  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.”

  71

  Without their leader, the Kazakh security force did not stand a chance.

  The Jamaat Shariat terrorists hit the main gate in force at 8:54 a.m. in a driving snow. They killed four guards posted there and destroyed three trucks full of reinforcements with RPGs before the Kazakhs fired a single shot.

  The snowfall slowed as the six Dagestani vehicles—four pickup trucks carrying six men each, and two semi trailers, each one carrying a payload container, one with six men and one with seven—separated at a crossroads near the launch control center. A pickup of six men went to the processing facility, to take control of the sixteen foreigners who worked for the three companies with satellites here at Baikonur. The two semis headed for the three launch pads, along with one of the pickups leading the way. Another six-man unit remained at the turnoff from the main road to the Dnepr. They climbed out of their vehicles and into a low concrete bunker that was once a guard post for Russian military forces but now lay half buried in the snowy grasses of the steppes. Here they positioned RPG launchers and scoped rifles and scanned the roads, ready to take out any vehicle from a distance.

  The remaining two six-man teams both drove to the LCC, and here they did meet stiff resistance. There were a dozen security men present, and they killed five of the twelve attackers before finding themselves overrun. Several guards dropped their guns and raised their hands, but the Dagestanis killed the Kazakhs where they surrendered.

  The Kazakhs’ response to the attack was horribly uncoordinated after the disappearance of their leader. Their nearby barracks did not mount a counterattack for twenty-five minutes, and as soon as they took the first incoming RPG round, missing the first truck as it approached the turnoff, they turned back to rethink their strategy.

  In the LCC, the civilians hunkered down on the second floor while the attack outside raged. When the sound of execution-style killing ceased, when all the huddled Russian space launch engineers sat sobbing and praying and cursing, Georgi Safronov alone walked down the stairs. His friends and employees called out to him, but he ignored them, and he opened the door.

  Jamaat Shariat forces took the LCC without firing another shot.

  Everyone was ordered into the control room, and Georgi made an announcement.

  “Do as I say, and you will live. Refuse an order once and you will die.”

  The men, his men, looked up to him in wide-eyed astonishment. One gunman, one of three posted by the emergency exit, raised his rifle into the air. “Allahu Akbar!”

  The chorus was joined by everyone in the room.

  Georgi Safronov beamed. He was in charge now.

  The first people outside the Cosmodrome to learn of the attack at Baikonur were in Darmstadt, Germany, at the European Space Operations Center, the facility that was set to direct the satellites once in orbit. They were in the middle of a live preflight on-camera linkup with launch control, so they saw the LCC employees run for their lives. They also saw everyone return, with armed terrorists walking in behind them, and then the president of Kosmos Space Flight Corporation, Georgi Safronov, entering last.

  Safronov wore an AK-47 around his neck and was dressed head to toe in winter camouflage.

  The first thing he did upon entering the room was cut the feed to the ESOC.

  The launch control room of the Dnepr launch control center would not impress anyone accustomed to movies and television programs of the U.S. Kennedy Space Center, a massive amphitheater with gargantuan displays on the walls, and dozens of scientists, engineers, and astronauts working at flat-panel displays.

  Dnepr rockets were launched and controlled from a room that looked something like a lecture hall in a community college; there was seating for thirty at long tables of control panels and computers. Everyone faced two large but by no means massive display panels on the front walls, one showing telemetry information and the other a live shot of the closed silo lid at site 109, containing the first of three Dneprs set to lift off in the next forty hours.

  Snow swirled around the site, and eight armed men in rifles and white and gray camo uniforms had taken up positions on the low towers and cranes across the pad, their eyes scanning the snowy steppes.

  Safronov had spent the last hour speaking by phone and walkie-talkie to the technical director of the processing facility, explaining exactly what was to be done at each launch site. When the man protested, when he refused to carry out Safronov’s wishes, Georgi ordered one of the technical director’s staff shot. After the death of his colleague, the technical director had given Georgi no more problems.

  “Cut the feed at 109,” Georgi ordered, and the screen in front of the men at launch control went blank.

  He did not want the men in the room with him knowing which silos had the bombs, and which rocket contained the remaining satellite.

  Now Safronov was about to explain everything to the staff here at the LCC.

  “Where is Aleksandr?” asked Maxim Ezhov, Kosmos’s assistant launch director, the first man brave enough to speak.

  “I killed him, Maxim. I did not want to, but my mission required it.”

  Everyone just stared at him as he explained the situation. “We are putting new payloads into the SHC’s. This will be done at the launch sites. My men are overseeing this now, and the technical director of the processing facility is leading his men. Once he says he is complete, I will go out to the launch silos and check his work. If
he has done what I asked him to do, he and his entire staff will be free to go.”

  The launch team stared at the president of Kosmos Space Flight Corporation.

  “You do not believe me, do you?”

  Some of the men just shook their heads no.

  “I anticipated this. Gentlemen, you have known me for many years. Am I an evil man?”

  “No,” one of them said, a hopeful note in his voice.

  “Of course not. Am I a pragmatic, efficient, intelligent man?”

  Nods all around.

  “Thank you. I want to show you that I will give you what you want, if you give me what I want.” Georgi lifted his radio. “Let everyone Russian and Kazakh remaining at the processing facility go free. They may take their personal vehicles, of course. I am sorry but the busses will have to remain. There are many more people here who will require transport from the facility when this is all over.” He listened to his subordinate acknowledge the order, and then said, “And please, ask them all to call the switchboard here when they are out of the spaceport to tell their friends here at the LCC that it was no trick. I have no desire to hurt anyone else. The men here at the Cosmodrome are my friends.”

  The launch control facility personnel relaxed in front of him. Georgi was feeling magnanimous. “You see? Do what I ask and you will live to see your families.”

  “What will we be doing?” asked Ezhov, now the de facto leader of the hostages in launch control.