Tom Clancy - Locked On

“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.”

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.