Tarzarov stepped over to Gryzlov, turned his back to the others in the room, and said in a soft voice, “It is perfectly all right to have a rant when I or no one else is in the room, Gennadiy, but when the national security staff arrives you should contain yourself.” Gryzlov’s head snapped over to his chief of staff and his eyes flared, but when his angry visage met Tarzarov’s steady, warning gaze, he relaxed and nodded. “And do not make your comments personal. You need the support of your cabinet, not their resentment.”
“I want answers, Sergei,” Gryzlov said, lowering his voice but only slightly. “I want answers I should have had days ago!” But he turned away from Tarzarov, gave Sokolov a slight bow of his head in apology, then returned to his desk and pretended to look over some dispatches on his tablet computer.
The meeting of Gryzlov’s national security advisers began several minutes later, with Foreign Minister Daria Titeneva joining Gryzlov and the others in the conference room adjoining the president’s office. Chief of the general staff General Mikhail Khristenko was the first to speak, using a tablet computer to wirelessly present photographs and data slides on a large flat-screen computer monitor: “If you will allow me, sir: I double-checked the records, and in fact the American Strategic Command, who oversees all military space operations, did inform our embassy in Washington through the air attaché’s office that they would be launching an S-19 Midnight spaceplane to Armstrong Space Station.”
Gryzlov looked as if he was going to explode again, but Tarzarov spoke first: “Minister Titeneva?”
“I was not informed,” Titeneva, a veteran foreign-affairs officer with dark hair and eyes and a full but attractive body, responded. “Urgent and emergency messages are routed to my office immediately, but routine messages are sent to my staff office in charge of such matters, and they are included in the two summary reports I receive each day. A spaceplane goes to the space stations or into orbit many times a month—such flights are considered routine.”
“Perhaps your office should be notified every time such a flight occurs,” Tarzarov suggested.
“That may be a good idea for the military, Mr. Tarzarov, but I see no reason for the Foreign Ministry to be so advised unless the military or state security thinks the flight might be a threat to the homeland or our allies,” Titeneva said, obviously piqued about being challenged by the chief of staff in a meeting of the full security council. “The main reason we demanded that the United States notify us of the flights at all is because its boost into orbit could resemble an intercontinental-ballistic-missile launch. They are certainly not obligated to give us the passenger list.”
“You will instruct your office to notify you whenever one of those spaceplanes is set to launch, Minister,” Gryzlov said angrily. “Then you will notify me immediately, with details about its departure and return dates and times, destination, and purpose. I will not allow those damned things to just flit about overhead and not know anything about it!” He turned to the minister of state security. “Kazyanov, do you not keep track of the whereabouts of the president of the United States?” he asked. “How in hell can the president of the United States make a television broadcast from space and apparently no one in this entire damned city know anything about it?”
“We do our best to track the president of the United States, major officials, and senior military officers, sir,” Viktor Kazyanov, a tall, bald, and powerful-looking former army colonel, replied. Like the director of national intelligence in the United States, the recently created Ministry of State Security was meant to combine domestic, international, and military intelligence, presidential and embassy protection, and border security activities under one cabinet-level officer who reported directly to the security council.
However, the intelligence services were reluctant in the extreme to share information and lose access to the office of the president. It was well known that the directors of the Federal Security Service (once known as Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnoti, or KGB), the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Presidential Security Service, and the Chief Directorate for Intelligence of the General Staff (Glavnoe Razvedivatel’noe Upravlenie, or GRU) reported directly to the president through the chief of staff: very often Kazyanov was the last to know anything. “But we cannot know precisely where the American president is every minute of every day,” Kazyanov said. “The American press all believed he was on his way to Guam for this press conference, and that was where we were waiting for him. If he is going to leave the capital for any length of time, we know about it.”
“Well, I would say he has left the capital, would you not?” Gryzlov retorted derisively. “Are you not watching the White House and Capitol all the time?”