Tom Clancy - Locked On

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.”