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.
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.
Safronov had spent the last hour speaking by phone and walkie-talkie to the technical director of the processing facility, explaining exactly what was to be done at each launch site. When the man protested, when he refused to carry out Safronov’s wishes, Georgi ordered one of the technical director’s staff shot. After the death of his colleague, the technical director had given Georgi no more problems.
“Cut the feed at 109,” Georgi ordered, and the screen in front of the men at launch control went blank.
He did not want the men in the room with him knowing which silos had the bombs, and which rocket contained the remaining satellite.
Now Safronov was about to explain everything to the staff here at the LCC.
“Where is Aleksandr?” asked Maxim Ezhov, Kosmos’s assistant launch director, the first man brave enough to Aspeak.
“I killed him, Maxim. I did not want to, but my mission required it.”
Everyone just stared at him as he explained the situation. “We are putting new payloads into the SHC’s. This will be done at the launch sites. My men are overseeing this now, and the technical director of the processing facility is leading his men. Once he says he is complete, I will go out to the launch silos and check his work. If he has done what I asked him to do, he and his entire staff will be free to go.”
The launch team stared at the president of Kosmos Space Flight Corporation.
“You do not believe me, do you?”
Some of the men just shook their heads no.
“I anticipated this. Gentlemen, you have known me for many years. Am I an evil man?”
“No,” one of them said, a hopeful note in his voice.
“Of course not. Am I a pragmatic, efficient, intelligent man?”
Nods all around.
“Thank you. I want to show you that I will give you what you want, if you give me what I want.” Georgi lifted his radio. “Let everyone Russian and Kazakh remaining at the processing facility go free. They may take their personal vehicles, of course. I am sorry but the busses will have to remain. There are many more people here who will require transport from the facility when this is all over.” He listened to his subordinate acknowledge the order, and then said, “And please, ask them all to call the switchboard here when they are out of the spaceport to tell their friends here at the LCC that it was no trick. I have no desire to hurt anyone else. The men here at the Cosmodrome are my friends.”
The launch control facility personnel relaxed in front of him. Georgi was feeling magnanimous. “You see? Do what I ask and you will live to see your families.”
“What will we be doing?” asked Ezhov, now the de facto leader of the hostages in launch control.
“You will do what you came here to do. You will prepare to launch three rockets.”
No one asked what was happening, though some had their suspicions about what was going to be loaded on their space vehicles.
Safronov was just as he said, an efficient and pragmatic man. He allowed the staff at the processing facility to go free because he did not need them any longer, and he needed his troops guarding the staff at processing to move to the launch silos to protect them from Spetsnaz. And he also knew this show of goodwill would make it more likely the launch control personnel would follow orders.
When he did not need the controllers any longer, however, he would have no incentive to let them live. He would kill them all as part of his statement to the infidels in Moscow.
The ESOC in Darmstadt reported the attack to its counterparts in Moscow, among others, and Moscow notified the Kremlin. After an hour of discussions over the phone, a direct link with the Kremlin was established. Safronov found himself standing in launch control with a headset on, conversing with Vladimir Gamov, the director of the Russian Federal Space Agency, who was at the Kremlin in a hastily organized crisis center. The two men had known each other for as long as Safronov could remember.
“What is going on over there, Georgi Mikhailovich?”
Safronov answered, “You can begin by calling me Magomed Dagestani.” Mohammed the Dagestani.
In the background on the other end of the line Safronov heard someone mumble
“Why, Georgi?”
“Are you too stupid to see? To understand?”
“Help me understand.”
“Because I am not Russian. I am a Dagestani.”
“That is not true! I have known your father since we were at Saint Petersburg. Since you were a child!”
“But you met my father after I was adopted from Dagestani parents. Muslims! My life has been a lie. And it is a lie that I will rectify now!”
There was a long pause. Men mumbled in the background. The director went in a different direction with the conversation. “We understand you have seventy hostages.”
“That is not correct. I have released eleven men already, and I will release another fifteen as soon as they return from the silos, which should be within a half-hour at most.”
“At the silos? What are you doing to the rockets?”
“I am threatening to launch them against Russian targets.”
“They are
“Before they were space vehicles they were R-36s. Intercontinental ballistic missiles. I have returned them to their former glory.”
“The R-36 carried nuclear weapons. Not satellites, Safronov.”
