Safronov dumped Verbov’s body out of the chair and onto the floor of the closet, pushed the dead man’s feet inside, and then shut the door. Hurriedly he grabbed a roll of toilet paper in his bathroom and wiped up the drips of blood on the floor of his office.
Ten minutes later the director of security was dead as well, flat on the floor of Safronov’s office. He was a big man, and he still wore his coat and his heavy boots. Georgi stared at the body, the hangdog expression on the dead man’s face, and he wanted to retch. But he did not retch, he focused himself, and he dialed his mobile with a trembling hand.
When the call was answered on the other end, he said, “Allahu Akbar. It is time.”
71
Without their leader, the Kazakh security force did not stand a chance.
The Jamaat Shariat terrorists hit the main gate in force at 8:54 a.m. in a driving snow. They killed four guards posted there and destroyed three trucks full of reinforcements with RPGs before the Kazakhs fired a single shot.
The snowfall slowed as the six Dagestani vehicles — four pickup trucks carrying six men each, and two semi trailers, each one carrying a payload container, one with six men and one with seven — separated at a crossroads near the launch control center. A pickup of six men went to the processing facility, to take control of the sixteen foreigners who worked for the three companies with satellites here at Baikonur. The two semis headed for the three launch pads, along with one of the pickups leading the way. Another six-man unit remained at the turnoff from the main road to the Dnepr. They climbed out of their vehicles and into a low concrete bunker that was once a guard post for Russian military forces but now lay half buried in the snowy grasses of the steppes. Here they positioned RPG launchers and scoped rifles and scanned the roads, ready to take out any vehicle from a distance.
The remaining two six-man teams both drove to the LCC, and here they did meet stiff resistance. There were a dozen security men present, and they killed five of the twelve attackers before finding themselves overrun. Several guards dropped their guns and raised their hands, but the Dagestanis killed the Kazakhs where they surrendered.
The Kazakhs’ response to the attack was horribly uncoordinated after the disappearance of their leader. Their nearby barracks did not mount a counterattack for twenty-five minutes, and as soon as they took the first incoming RPG round, missing the first truck as it approached the turnoff, they turned back to rethink their strategy.
In the LCC, the civilians hunkered down on the second floor while the attack outside raged. When the sound of execution-style killing ceased, when all the huddled Russian space launch engineers sat sobbing and praying and cursing, Georgi Safronov alone walked down the stairs. His friends and employees called out to him, but he ignored them, and he opened the door.
Jamaat Shariat forces took the LCC without firing another shot.
Everyone was ordered into the control room, and Georgi made an announcement.
“Do as I say, and you will live. Refuse an order once and you will die.”
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. “Allahu Akbar!”
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 speak.
“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.