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
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
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.
So Safronov stayed away from Jamaat Shariat. It was just as well, too, because his company’s fortunes had continued to rise through the years, and he found himself extremely busy in Moscow. KSFC benefited with the sunset of the U.S. Space Shuttle program. KSFC contracts increased even more as it became one of the major players in space delivery. Yes, there were other launch vehicles, run by other companies, launching satellites and supplies and men. The Soyuz, the Proton, the Rokot, to name three. But Safronov and his Dnepr-1 vehicle were expanding operations at a faster pace than the others. In 2011, Safronov’s firm successfully launched more than twenty rockets from their three launch platforms at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the flat grassy steppes of Kazakhstan, and 2012 contracts were on pace to outperform even that.
He was a busy man, to be sure, but he was not too busy to drop everything and head south on the Caspian Highway when the message came from Murshidov, Abu Dagestani — Father of Dagestan.
Georgi Safronov looked down at his Rolex and was happy to find he would arrive at the meeting exactly on time. He was a rocket scientist, after all. He abhorred imprecision.
29
Jamaat Shariat used the farmhouse just west of Volgograd from time to time when they had business north of their area of influence. The property was close to the airport but secluded from the hustle and bustle of the city itself, so they did not need more than a few sentries patrolling the dirt roads and a carload of Dagestani gunmen up near the turnoff to the highway to keep those meeting or overnighting inside the property secure from Russian police or internal security forces.
Georgi Safronov made it through the light cordon of security with a pat-down and a check of his identification, then he was led inside the dimly lit farmhouse. Women in the kitchen averted their eyes when he greeted them, but the sentries brought him into the great room of the house, where he was met by his spiritual leader, Suleiman Murshidov, the oup. whne he called Abu Dagestani.
A low table was adorned with a lace tablecloth. The women placed a bowl of grapes, a bowl of individually wrapped candies, and a two-liter bottle of Fanta orange soda in front of the men, and then they disappeared.
Safronov beamed with pride, just as he always did when in the presence of the spiritual leader of the organization fighting for the rights and the future of Georgi’s own people. He knew he would not have been asked to come here, in this way, if it were not of the utmost importance. The capture of Israpil Nabiyev the previous month — Russian authorities had not said they had taken the man alive, but survivors of the attack on the Dagestani village had seen him carried off in a helicopter — must have something to do with why he was being called here.
The Russian space entrepreneur expected that Suleiman Murshidov was going to ask him for money. Perhaps a large sum to try to effect the release of Israpil. Georgi was excited at the prospect of playing, for the first time, a tangible role in the struggle of his people.
The old man sat on the floor on the other side of the table. Behind him, two of his sons sat on chairs, but they were removed from this conversation by the width of the room. Murshidov had spent the past few minutes asking about Georgi’s journey, about his work, and telling the Russian/ Dagestani about events in the Caucasus. Safronov felt much more love for this old man than he did for his own father, the man who betrayed him, who took him from his people, who tried to turn him into something he was not. Abu Dagestani, in contrast, had given him back his identity.
The old bearded man said, “My son, son of Dagestan, Allah supports our resistance against Moscow.”
“I know this to be true, Abu Dagestani.”
“I have learned of an opportunity that, with your help, can do more for our cause than anything that has ever happened in all the days before. More than the war, more than brother Israpil was able to accomplish with all his troops.”
“Just tell me what you need. You know I have begged you to let me do something, to play some role in our struggle.”
“Do you remember what you told me when you were here last year?”
Safronov thought back. He had said many, many things, all ideas he had that would allow him to aid the cause of Jamaat Shariat. Georgi stayed up nights working on schemes to promote the cause, and during his annual visits to Makhachkala he offered up his best ideas to Murshidov. He did not know which of these plans his leader
