Locked On

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.

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 Reventon from Moscow to one of his dachas in the countryside. He brought his vehicle’s speedometer