Tom Clancy - Locked On

Georgi wondered why neither his father nor his mother had ever mentioned his deployment in Dagestan. A few weeks later, he called some influential friends in the Navy, and they dug into the records to provide the son with his father’s dates of service in the Caspian fleet.

As soon as Safronov went to Makhachkala, he found the orphanage, and got them to reveal that he was, in fact, born to Muslim Dagestani parents.

Georgi Safronov knew then what he would later say he’d always known. That he was not like every other Russian that he’d grown up with.

He was Muslim.

Initially this did not have a great effect on his life. His company was so successful — especially after American space shuttle missions were put on an extended hold because of the Columbia disaster in February 2003—that Safronov’s life was his work. Kosmos Space Flight Corporation was perfectly positioned at the time to take over the American shuttle contracts. At age thirty-six, Georgi had just taken over as president of the company, and his talent, dedication, connections in the Russian Air Force, along with his powerful personality, helped his company take full advantage of this opportunity.

Initially the Russian government had had no financial interest in the company, and it had been successfully privatized. But when Safronov turned it into, literally speaking, a rocket-powered money-making machine, the Russian president and his cronies began initiating governmental measures to take over the company. But Safronov met with his new adversaries in person, and made them a counteroffer. He would give up thirty-eight percent of his business, the men in the meeting could do with it what they wished, and Safronov would retain the rest. And he would continue to work for its success, 365 days a year.

But, Georgi had told the men at the meeting, if the Russian government wanted to make it a state-owned enterprise, just like in the olden days, then they could expect olden-days results. Safronov would sit at his desk and stare at the wall, or they could push him out and replace him with some old apparatchik who could pretend to be a capitalist but who, if a century of history was any basis for evidence, would fuck up the business inside of a year.

The Russian president and his men were flustered. Their attempt at extortion had been parried with some confounding form of… what, reverse extortion? The government blinked, Safronov retained sixty-two percent ownership, and KSFC flourished.

A year later Kosmos was presented with the Order of Lenin on behalf of an appreciative country, and Safronov himself received the Hero of the Russian Federation.

With his personal fortune passing one hundred million dollars he invested in blue-chip Russian companies, and he did so with a shrewd eye toward the connectrd ithions of the owners. He understood the lubricant of success in his adopted country; businessmen who stuck their necks out only kept them if they were friends with the Kremlin. It became very easy for an insider to discern who was held in favor by the ex — KGB men who now ruled in Moscow, and Safronov hedged all his bets so that, as long as the current leader and his men were in power, he would do well.

And this tactic had been working for him. His personal wealth was estimated at more than one billion dollars, which, even though it did not put him on the Forbes list, should have afforded him everything he wanted.

But in truth, his wealth meant nothing to him at all.

Because it was impossible for him to forget that his name was not really Georgi and he was not really Russian.

Everything changed for Georgi Safronov on his forty-second birthday. He had been driving his new 2008 Lamborghini Reventón from Moscow to one of his dachas in the countryside. He brought his vehicle’s speedometer to within twenty kilometers of top speed, hitting roughly two hundred miles per hour on a straight road.

Whether it was oil or water or just a simple drift of his rear tires, Georgi never knew. But for some reason he felt a slight fishtail, he lost control, and he was certain it was over. In the one-half second from his first realization that he was merely a passenger in the runaway vehicle until the Lamborghini’s bright silver hood in front of the windscreen pointed off the road, Georgi’s life did not so much flash in front of his eyes; rather, it was the life he had not lived that he saw replayed before him. It was the cause he’d turned his back on. It was the revolution that he had taken no part in. It was his potential that he had not realized.

The Lamborghini flipped, the neck of the twenty-one-year-old ballerina sitting next to Safronov snapped with the first impact with the snowy field — for years after, Georgi was certain he’d heard the pop amid the cacophony of exploding metal and fiberglass.

The space entrepreneur spent months in the hospital with his Russian Koran; he kept it hidden inside the jackets of technical manuals. His faith deepened, his sense of place in this world and the next solidified, and he told himself that his life would take on a new direction.

He would give it all up to be shahid. To martyr himself for the cause into which he was born and for which he drew each and every breath. He understood that the Lamborghinis and jets and power and women were not paradise, as intoxicating as they were for his admittedly human flesh. He knew that there was no real future in his human form. No, his future, his everlasting future, would be in the afterlife, and he sought this out.

Not that he would sell his body cheaply to his cause. No, Georgi recognized that he had become perhaps the greatest asset in the cause of an Islamic Republic in the Caucasus. He was a mole in the world of the enemy.

When he recovered, he relocated covertly to a simple farmhouse in Dagestan. He lived in complete austerity, a far cry from the life he’d led before his accident. He sought out Suleiman Murshidov, the spiritual leader of Jamaat Shariat, the Dagestani resistance group. Murshidov was suspicious at first, but the old man was surprisingly cunning and intelligent, and in time he began to recognize the tool, the weapon, that was Georgi Safronov.

Georgi offered all of his money to the cause, but the spiritual leader turned down the offer. In fact, he forbade Safronov from any philanthropy toward Dagestan or the Caucasus. The old man f Thhis monrom the mountains somehow had the foresight to see that Georgi was his “inside man” in the Russian corridors of power, and he would not allow anything to threaten that. Not new schools, not new hospitals, not any benefit for his cause whatsoever.

On the contrary, Murshidov instructed Safronov to return to Moscow and support the hard-line stance against the republics. For many years Georgi had been sickened to sit with his adopted father’s friends and discuss the stamping out of insurgencies in the Caucasus. But these were his orders. He lived within the belly of the beast.

Until that day when Murshidov called for his return, his help, and inshallah —God willing — his martyrdom.

Safronov did as he was told. He returned briefly and in secret once each year to meet with Suleiman, and in one of these meetings he’d asked to be introduced to the famous warrior, Israpil Nabiyev. The old spiritual leader forbade this meeting, and this angered Safronov greatly.

But Georgi knew now that his leader had been correct all along. If Nabiyev knew about Safronov, even a hint that there was a man high in the ranks of Russia’s private space service, then Safronov would now be dead or in prison.

Safronov now knew that his own vanity had been in control when he’d insisted that Suleiman introduce him to Nabiyev last year in Makhachkala. And it had been the hand of Allah himself, working through Suleiman, when Suleiman had refused to make the introduction.