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.