Locked On Part 47

"I am sorry, Paul, but my organization needs to limit its exposure in this enterprise. Your side has lost. The developing situation in Kazakhstan is occupying the concerns of everyone in my nation right now. The excitement about bringing down Jack Ryan has pa.s.sed."

Laska fumed. "You cannot just walk away from this, Valentin. The operation is not complete."

"It is for us, Paul."

"Don't be a fool. You are in as deep as I am. Clark gave your name to his contact."

"My name is, unfortunately, a matter of record in the CIA. He can say what he wants."

Now Laska could hide his fury no longer. "Perhaps, but if I make one telephone call to The Guardian, you will be the most recognizable Russian agent in Britain."

"You are threatening to out me as SVR?"

Laska did not hesitate. "You as SVR, and your father as KGB. I'm sure there are still some angry people in the satellites that would love to know who was responsible for the death of their loved ones."

"You are playing a dangerous game, Mr. Laska. I am willing to forget about this conversation. But do not test me. My resources are-"

"Nothing like my resources! I want you to take custody of Clark, then I want you to find out who he is working for, what his present connection to Ryan is, and then you make him disappear so he cannot speak about what he has learned in the past month."

"Or what?"

"Or I make phone calls in the United States and in Europe, revealing what you've been up to."

"That is a poor bluff. You can't reveal your involvement. You have broken laws in your country. I have broken no laws in mine."

"In the past forty years, I've broken laws that you cannot imagine, my young friend. And yet I continue. I will survive this. You will not."

Kovalenko did not reply.

Laska said, "Make him talk. Cut off all the loose ends. Clean this up and we can all move on."

Kovalenko started to say something, to grudgingly agree to look into the matter personally, but to make clear that he would not commit to any particular measure.

But Laska hung up the phone. The old man knew Valentin Kovalenko would follow orders.

Georgi knew from the very beginning that the FSB's Alpha Group would attempt to retake control of the facility. His fertile mind could have guessed as much even if he had not witnessed a mock FSB raid to retake the Soyuz facility from a terrorist organization, just three years prior.

He had no reason to be involved in the Soyuz operation, but he had been in Baikonur at the time on other business, and he was invited by facility officials to witness the exercise. He'd watched it all with incredulous fascination: the helicopters and the overland movement of the camo-clad forces, the concussion grenades and the rappelling from the roof of the building.

He'd talked to some Soyuz engineers after the drill and had learned more about the Russian contingency plan in the unlikely event terrorists ever took control of the complex.

Safronov knew there was also a chance Moscow would simply decide to fight fire with fire, and nuke the entire Cosmodrome in order to save Moscow. Fortunately for his plan, the Dnepr launch site at Baikonur was the original launch site of the R-36, and was therefore built to withstand a nuclear attack. Sites 104, 103, and 109 contained hardened silos from which the missiles launched, and the launch control facility was built with thick reinforced concrete walls and blast-proof steel doors.

At six p.m. on the first day, eight hours after the facility was overtaken by Dagestani terrorists, a pair of Russian FSB Alpha Group Mi-17 helicopters landed on the far side of the Proton rocket facilities, twenty-five kilometers from the Dnepr LCC. Twenty-four operators, three teams of eight, climbed out, each man laden with sixty pounds of gear and covered in white winter camouflage.

Within minutes they were heading east.

Shortly after eight o'clock in the evening, an Antonov An-124 transport aircraft landed at Yubileinaya Airfield northwest of the Baikonur Dnepr facility. The An-124 was the largest cargo aircraft on earth, and the Russian military needed every inch of the cabin s.p.a.ce and cargo hold for the ninety-six Spetsnaz a.s.sault troops and all their gear, including four a.s.sault vehicles.

Four more Mi-17 helicopters arrived an hour later along with a refueling aircraft.

The twenty-four men in the white camo had been traversing the Baikonur steppes throughout the evening, first in heavy four-wheelers handed over by the Kazakhs, but as they got closer they left the vehicles behind and marched through the snow-covered gra.s.sland in the dark.

By two a.m. they were in position, waiting for a go code from their leadership.

Safronov had spent a busy afternoon giving orders to his gunmen, as well as the launch control engineers. After loading the nuclear devices into the s.p.a.ce Head Modules, he'd released the rest of the processing team. This decision, and his decision to have the foreign hostages brought to the LCC, allowed him to consolidate his men.

He had four Jamaat Shariat men at the crossroads bunker, four at silo 109, ten each at silos 103 and 104, and fifteen at the LCC. He ordered his men to sleep in shifts, but he knew even those men sleeping would do so with one eye open.

He expected the attack to come in the middle of the night but did not know if it would be this evening or the next. He knew that, before the attack itself, he would be contacted by the Russians in order to occupy his attention at that critical moment.

So when he was awoken by a ring and a flashing light on the comms control board to which his headset was attached, his heart began to pound. Sitting on the floor against the wall with his AK in his lap, he leapt to his feet.

Before he answered the call he reached for his radio. He broadcast to all of his Dagestani brethren, "They are coming! Be ready!" and then he screamed at all the prisoners in the launch control room, most of whom were sleeping on the floor. "Everyone to your positions! I want 109 ready to launch in five minutes or I start shooting! Onboard telemetry up! Separation systems armed! LV pyro armed!"

"Yes, sir!" replied several of the launch control directors as they executed the commands, their hands trembling.

Bleary-eyed men in rumpled clothing scrambled to their seats as Dagestani gunmen waved rifles at them.

While this was going on, Georgi Safronov grabbed his headset and placed it to his ear. In a sleepy voice that he found hard to fake with the adrenaline in his bloodstream he said, "Yes? What is it?"

The twenty-four men who had spent the last eight hours humping overland hit the LCC on three sides, corresponding to the main entrance, the rear entrance, and an equipment loading bay.

Each entryway was protected by three Dagestani rebels, and they had warning from their leader that the attack was coming. The men at the front entrance started firing into the night as soon as the call came, a mistake that benefited them greatly, as it gave the Alpha Group men, still just at the far edge of the snow-covered parking lot, the false impression that they had been spotted. All eight men took cover behind cars and fired back at the open doorway, effectively pinning down both forces.

The rear door was breached by the second Russian team, they tossed flash-bangs through the doorway before entering, but they found themselves facing a long narrow corridor of reinforced concrete walls. At the far end of the corridor three terrorists, men wholly unaffected by the blasts, fired AKs at the men in the white camo. Even though much of the automatic fire came from Jamaat Shariat men simply reaching around a blind corner with their guns and holding the triggers down, the wayward bullets banged off the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling. The ricochets pulverized the attacking force.

Two men went down within seconds, two more fell when they tried to pull their mates out of the hall. The four remaining Alpha Group men pulled back, outside the building, and began hurling hand grenades up the hall.

By then, however, the three terrorists had pulled back through an inner iron door, where they waited safely while the grenades exploded.

This entrance had turned into a stalemate for both parties, much like the front door.

The Alpha men at the loading dock had better luck. They managed to take out all three of the Dagestanis with the loss of only one of their own. They pushed into the downstairs lobby, but there they triggered a b.o.o.by-trapped door. The projectile from an RPG had been rigged into an improvised exploding device, another lesson from the Haqqani network, and the ensuing devastation killed three Russians and injured three more.

One of the Mi-17 helos from Yubileinaya Airfield arrived over the roof of the LCC, and men fast-roped to the concrete. Then they headed for the door in a tight stack. This door had been rigged to blow as well, but the Russians antic.i.p.ated this, and stood clear of the doorway after the breach.

But while the IED did not kill the men on the roof, it slowed them down, and gave the men on the first and second floors time to respond to the sound of a helicopter above.

The stairwell to the roof exit became a third stalemate area at the LCC. Four Jamaat Shariat men had good cover on the second-floor landing behind an iron doorway and a blast-proof wall, and the eight Alpha Group men had the high ground above. Grenades bounced down the stairs only to explode harmlessly on the landing, and AK rounds sliced the air through the stairwell only to miss their targets tucked around the sides of the doorframe.

Within a minute of the start of the a.s.sault, Russian helos attacked the three launch silos. Sites 103 and 104 each had ten defenders, and they were well spread out and under good hardened cover. Site 109 had only four men guarding it, and it was also the first to be reached by the helos. The Mi-17 fired 12.7-millimeter machine guns, raking the site, but the fire was ineffective because the gunner did not have the thermal optics that would have allowed him to easily pick out his targets at the frozen location.

The helo at site 109 lowered to just above the earth, and twenty operators fast-roped to the concrete pad. These well-trained killers had better luck finding and engaging the enemy throughout the site than the Mi-17 had.

Site 109 was cleared in under a minute, as there were only four Jamaat Shariat mujahideen there. As the chatter of gunfire continued from the other sites, each nearly a mile distant over the steppes, the Alpha Group men at site 109 raced toward the silo, frantic to carry out the next phase of their mission in time.

The soldiers could not disable the nuclear weapon; they wouldn't even be able to get to it inside the s.p.a.ce Head Module without wasting considerable time. But they had been instructed on how to take the Dnepr offline from here at the launch site, to cut its umbilical cord to the LCC, so to speak, so they rushed forward at a breakneck pace.

The men used lights on their helmets and their rifles as they peered into the deep silo, the only part of the 110-foot-long rocket visible was a large green conical fairing with the white letters KSFC. Below this was the s.p.a.ce Head Module, and below this were the three rocket stages. The men used their lights to identify a ma.s.sive iron lid a few feet from the open silo; it looked like a giant manhole cover. They got the hatch open, and two of the men began descending down a metal ladder, racing for the support equipment level, a catwalk just a dozen feet down where they would find a second ladder, which would take them down another level. Here they could gain access to the three-stage launch vehicle itself and disable the communication linkage that wired the launch vehicle to ground control.

As they ran across the catwalk and started down the second ladder, the two men knew they had little time.

Are we ready?" Safronov shouted to the two men at the launch control board. When they did not answer, he screamed at them, "Are we ready?"

The redheaded man on the left just nodded curtly. The blond on the right said, softly, "Yes, Georgi. Launch sequence complete."

"Launch 109!" The two launch keys were already in their locks.

"Georgi, please! I cannot! Please do not-"

Safronov pulled his Makarov and shot the blond man twice in the back. He fell to the floor writhing in pain, screaming in panic.

Georgi turned to the launch engineer seated next to the dying man. "Can you do it, or will I do it myself?"

The Russian man reached over, placed his hand on one of the keys at the top of his control board, and then closed his eyes.

He turned the key. Then, looking up at the pistol in his face, he quickly turned the second key.

Above him, Georgi Safronov said, "Swords into plowshares, and now back into swords."

Safronov pressed the b.u.t.ton.

At site 109, the two Alpha Group operators tasked with decoupling the communications linkage had just left the ladder, and they ran up the small hallway toward the base of the Dnepr-1, frantic to take the LV offline before the madman at launch control blasted the rocket into the stratosphere.

They did not make it.

A loud metallic click below their feet on the catwalk was the last input their brains ever registered.

A power pressure generator below the rocket contained a black powder charge held at pressure, and this ignited below their feet, creating a ma.s.s of gases that expanded instantly, firing the 110-foot-tall rocket out of the silo like the cork from a popgun. The two men were incinerated in the blink of an eye as the missile pushed out of the silo and the hot expanding gases pushed out across the tunnel toward small exhaust vents.

The rocket itself rose quickly, but it slowed as the gases that propelled it out of its silo dissipated. With the bottom of the lowest stage of the launch vehicle just sixty feet above the frozen launch silo, the huge craft hung in midair for a moment.

The eight Spetsnaz operators stood below it, staring at the bottom of a s.p.a.ce rocket that was about to launch just over their heads.

One of the men mumbled, "Der'mo." s.h.i.t.

With a pop like a Champagne cork, explosives pushed the protective cap off the bottom of the first stage, exposing the rocket exhaust system.

Then the first stage ignited, scorching the earth and all those on it below with flaming rocket fuel.

All eight men died within two seconds of one another. The Mi-17 helicopter had been hovering at one hundred feet. The pilot yanked the controls hard, saving the lives of himself and his crew, but the helicopter itself was too low for such a maneuver. He crashed in the snow, a survivable crash, though the copilot broke both of his arms and the men in back suffered various injuries.

The Dnepr-1 rocket rose into the night sky, moving faster with each second, smoke and steam and flame behind it on the launch pad and in the air. A screech filled the air and a thumping vibration shook the ground for miles in all directions.

The 260-ton machine achieved a speed of 560 miles an hour in less than thirty seconds.

As it rose, all Russian forces abandoned their attack on the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Safronov had programmed the flight telemetry himself using data derived from the working group he'd a.s.sembled a few months back. The group had no idea they were working on a nuclear attack, their understanding was that they were to reinvestigate the plan to send rescue boats and other emergency aid via rocket launch. The LV had instructions loaded onto its...o...b..ard software that controlled pitch and yaw and burn time, all to direct it toward its destination.

It was the ultimate "Fire and forget" weapon.

The first stage of the launch vehicle separated and fell back to earth, landing in central Kazakhstan just eight minutes after launch.

Moscow was tracking the trajectory, and everyone in the know realized within a few short minutes that their former R-36 missile was on course to Moscow itself.

But there was no running away. No leaving the city. The weapon would hit in under fifteen minutes.

High above central Russia, the second-stage powered flight ended, and after the second stage separated, it crashed onto a farm road near the town of Shatsk on the Shacha River. The third stage then flipped in flight and began traveling backward, and within minutes the fairing jettisoned back to earth. Soon the third-stage rockets extinguished and a protective shield released and fell. This released the s.p.a.ce Head Module from the upper platform stack where the payload container was attached, and this piece, a green cylinder with a payload container holding the device, began returning to earth, a ten-foot-by-ten-foot object weighing in excess of two tons.

The payload dropped in an arc, the heavier atmosphere affected the trajectory somewhat, but Georgi and his scientists had solved for a great number of variables, and the device pushed through the friction at terminal velocity.

The men and women in Moscow who knew of the launch held their children or prayed or cried or hoped or cursed everything Dagestani. They knew there was nothing else they could do.

At 3:29 a.m., while the vast majority of the huge ice-covered city was asleep, a low boom echoed across the southeastern district of Moscow. Nearby residents were shaken from their beds a second later when a larger explosion erupted, windows blew from buildings, and a rumbling vibration rolled across the entire city like a small earthquake.

Those in the city center could see the glow to the south. It rose higher into the air like a sunrise out of the predawn, reflecting off ice crystals on the rooftops of the metropolis.

At the Kremlin's crisis center they could see the rising fire, a savage inferno just miles away. Men screamed and cried as they braced for what was still to come.

But nothing came.

It took minutes to be certain, but eventually they had reports from the area of the impact. Something had fallen from the sky into the Gazprom Neft Moscow Refinery, a 200,000-barrel-per-day facility southeast of the city center.

It had struck the gas oil vacuum distillation tanks and created a ma.s.sive explosion that killed more than a dozen people at the refinery instantly, and more died during the ensuing fire.

But it clearly was not a nuclear device.

Clark woke to the sound of a low boom in the distance.

He had a crick in his neck from sleeping sitting up. That his sore cervical joints were the most annoying sensation of the moment was telling. After several days of "rough stuff," he would have thought that he would be hurting more from the- Oh, yeah. There it was. The pain in his jaw and his nose and the dull throb in his head. It took a minute for the mind to accept the a.s.saults to the nerves, but his mind was processing everything nicely now, and the pain receptors were working overtime.

After the boom he heard nothing else from outside. He thought that maybe an electrical transformer shorted out somewhere, but he could not be sure.

He spit more blood, and a molar loosened. He'd bit the inside of his cheek somewhere along the way, as well, and his mouth was swollen on both sides.

He was growing tired of this.

The door opened again. He looked up to see which of the Frenchies were coming for a chat, but he did not recognize the two men who entered.

No, the four men, as two more came through the door now.