Tom Clancy - Locked On

“That is all very true. I am more a figurehead. But nevertheless, I have this information.”

“You know that I can’t do a damn thing about this, Paul. I can’t walk into my office tomorrow morning and start asking questions about what happened to Clark and Dominguez without people wanting to know why. You and I both could get in a lot of trouble passing around this information because of the nature of the source. You have implicated me in a felony.”

With that, Alden picked his snifter off the table and drained it into his mouth. Laska took the old bottle and poured him a hefty refill.

Laska then smiled. “You don’t need to tell anyone about this. But this information needs to come out somo c.

“What do you mean?”

“Can you get me more information on Clark’s career with CIA? I’m not talking about this. The Emir incident. I’m talking about everything he’s done that’s in the record.”

Alden nodded. “I remember that Admiral James Greer had a dossier on him. That goes way back; I could dig a little more on my own to see if there are details since then. I know that he ran Rainbow in the UK for several years.”

“Men in Black,” Laska said with disdain, using the nickname for the secret NATO anti-terror outfit.

“Yeah. But why do you want this information?”

“I think it could help Ed.”

Alden looked at Laska for a long time. He knew there wasn’t a damn thing that could help Ed Kealty, and he knew Paul Laska was smart enough to know that, too. No, there was some game going on in Laska’s head.

Alden didn’t challenge the old Czech. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Just get me what you can, and I’ll take this off your hands, Charles. You have been most helpful, and I will not forget that come January.”

The skyline of a city as large and as developed as Volgograd, Russia, should have been visible for many, many miles in all directions. But as Georgi Safronov raced southeast on the M6 Highway, only a dozen or so miles until he hit the city limits, the view in front of him was low rolling pastureland that disappeared quickly into thick gray fog, and it gave no hint of the huge industrial metropolis that lay just ahead. It was ten in the morning, and he’d been driving all night along the Caspian Highway, but even after eight hours behind the wheel the forty-six-year-old continued to push his BMW Z4 coupe, desperate to arrive at his destination as soon as possible. The man who’d asked him to drive five hundred seventy miles today would not have summoned him to this meeting without good reason, and Georgi fought sleep and hunger so that he would not have to keep the old man waiting.

The wealthy Russian was middle-aged, but other than a tinge of gray in his red hair, he did not look it. Most Russian men drank, and this tended to age their faces prematurely, but Georgi had not touched vodka or wine or beer for years; his only peccadillo of consumption was the sugary sweet tea of which the Russians are fond. He was not athletic at all, but he was thin, and his hair was a bit long for a man his age. A flop of it fell across his forehead, just above his eyes, which is why he positioned his BMW’s heater vents to blow it back while he drove.

He had no instructions to go into Volgograd proper, and that was a shame, because Safronov rather liked the city. Volgograd had once been Stalingrad, and that made it interesting to him. In the Second World War, Stalingrad was the site of perhaps the most incredible resistance against a powerful invading force in the history of warfare.

And Georgi Safronov had personal interest in the phenomenon of resistance, although he kept this interest to himself.

His eyes flashed down to the GPS map on the center console of the well-appointed coupe. The airport was off to his south now; he’d leave the M6 in minutis es, and then follow the preprogrammed route to the safe house just off the airport property.

He knew he had to take care to avoid drawing attention. He’d come alone, having left his bodyguards behind in Moscow, telling them only that he had personal business to attend to. His protection force was not Russian, they were Finns, and they were whoremongers, so Georgi used their imaginations against them by hinting that his secret appointment today involved a woman.

After the meeting, Safronov thought he might continue on into Volgograd proper and find a hotel. He could walk the streets alone and think of the battle of Stalingrad, and it would give him strength.

But he was getting ahead of himself. Maybe the man who had invited him here today, Suleiman Murshidov, would want him to leave the safe house immediately and get on a plane and return with him to Makhachkala.

Murshidov would tell Georgi what to do, and Georgi would listen.

Georgi Safronov was not his real name in the sense that his real parents did not call him Georgi, and they were not called Safronov. But as long as he could remember this had been his name, and as long as he could remember everyone around him told him he was Russian.

But in his heart, he was certain that he had always known his name and his heritage to be lies.

In truth, Georgi Safronov was born Magomed Sagikov in Derben, Dagestan, in 1966, back when it was just a far-flung and obedient mountainous coastal region of the Soviet Union. His birth parents were mountain peasants, but they moved to Makhachkala on the Caspian Sea soon after his birth. There, young Magomed’s mother and father died within a year from disease, and their child was placed in an orphanage. A young Russian Navy captain from Moscow named Mikhail Safronov and his wife, Marina, chose the child out of a roomful of offerings, because Magomed’s mixed Azar-Lezgian heritage made him more attractive to Mrs. Safronova than the other children of his age who were full-blooded Azars.

They named their new baby boy Georgi.

Captain Safronov was stationed in Dagestan with the Caspian flotilla, but he was soon promoted to the Black Sea fleet and sent to Sevastopol, and then to Leningrad to the Marshal Grechko Naval Academy. Over the next fifteen years Georgi grew up in Sevastopol (where his father rejoined the Black Sea fleet) and then Moscow (where his father served in the office of the commander in chief).

Safronov’s mother and father never deceived him about the fact he had been adopted, but they told him he’d come from an orphanage in Moscow. Never did they mention his true roots, nor the fact that his parents had been Muslim.

Young Safronov was a brilliant child, but he was small, weak, and uncoordinated to the extent that he was hopeless in sports. In spite of this, or likely because of this, he excelled in his schoolwork. As a very young boy he developed a fascination with his country’s cosmonauts. This developed into a childhood fascination with missiles, satellites, and aerospace. Upon graduation from school, he was accepted into the Felix Dzerzhinsky Military Rocket Forces Academy.

After graduation he spent five years as an officer in the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, then returned to university at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

At the age of thirty he went into the private sector. He was hired as a project manager by Kosmos Space Flight Corporation, a fledgling rocket motor and space launch company. Georgi was instrumental innstsec his company’s purchase of Soviet-era intercontinental ballistic missiles, and he led a project to reengineer the ICBMs, turning them into space delivery vehicles. His military-like leadership, his bold ideas, his technological know-how, and his political savvy combined to make KSFC, by the late 1990s, the principal contractor of Russian space delivery operations.

In 1999 Mikhail Safronov, Georgi’s father, was visiting his son’s fine home in Moscow. It was shortly after the first Russian invasion of Dagestan, and the retired naval officer made a series of disparaging remarks about the Dagestani Muslims. When Georgi asked his father what he knew of Dagestanis, or Muslims, for that matter, Mikhail inadvertently mentioned that he had once been stationed in Makhachkala.