by Adam Baker
Gaunt looked across the hangar. His desk. The lamp cast a small cone of light. His phone lay on top of a Playboy.
He crept towards the desk. He snatched the phone and ran into shadow. He crouched against crates. The laminate security pass round his neck had the guardhouse number printed on the reverse. He thumbed the keypad.
He held the phone to his ear. Dial tone. Someone jammed a stun baton in the small of his back and shocked him paralytic.
They tied him to folding chair with plastic tuff-ties. Two buzz-cut goons and a young guy in a blazer.
‘Where’s Raphael?’ asked Gaunt.
‘I believe one of my colleagues is keeping him company.’
The guy examined a pallet of boxes. He lifted a cardboard flap. A novelty alarm clock. A white plastic mosque. He pressed a minaret. A squeak of tinny Arabian music. He threw the clock aside without comment.
The guy sat on a crate. Preppy. Slicked hair, polished loafers. Thin, precise, reptilian. He read one of Gaunt’s pamphlets.
‘Falcon Logistics. A leading international logistics corporation with extensive experience assisting government and non-government agencies with the supply of defence matériel. Is this the scope of your ambition? Scratching a living, war zone to war zone, selling bullets by the handful to child soldiers, cartels, Shi’ite death squads?’
‘Building contacts.’
The guy held up Gaunt’s academy ring. Fourteen-carat gold. Fire agate.
‘You must be a little frustrated at your current situation.’
‘I wanted to work for myself.’
‘Fallujah. Operation Vigilante Resolve.’
‘I was innocent.’
‘You were acquitted of the rape charge. The summary court martial found you guilty of maltreatment towards detainees and dereliction of duty. You lost two ranks and four months’ pay. You received an administrative discharge soon after.’
Gaunt didn’t reply.
‘I understand. You dedicated your life to the Corps. You expected some kind of affirmation, some kind of reward. Instead, here you are, orphaned and alone.’
‘I’m doing okay.’
Gaunt’s parents thought he was still in the Marines. They sent letters. They watched for him on TV. Said they were proud of the way he and his boys were confronting America’s enemies overseas.
‘My name is Koell. Have you seen me before?’
‘Once. At the Rasheed.’
‘Then you know who I am.’
Gaunt and Raphael had been sipping umbrella drinks in the Scheherazade Bar.
‘Who’s the kid with the phone?’ asked Gaunt.
Koell was sitting alone by the pool, talking into a sat phone, shielding his mouth in case someone read his lips.
‘Black ops.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’ve seen his kind before. I was out in Liberia. This was years back. Good times. We had a workshop at the edge of Monrovia. Gangs would bring fucked up Landcruisers. We would weld a heavy weapons mount, turn them into battle-wagons. They paid us in uncut diamonds.
‘One day this kid from a missionary station drops by and tells me he has something to sell. Said it came down in a mangrove swamp one night. A falling star. Lit up the sky. Manmade. Some kind of engine pod. A spherical fuel tank with isolator valves. Thing was half melted. I told him I would swing by in a few days.
‘The station was in Grand Bassa. Rainforest. Shitty roads. I was delivering a truckload of .50 cal to some local warlord. You know the type. Mirror shades. Pimp jewellery. All swagger. Fucking idiot.
‘I drove to the missionary station on the way back. I liked the kid. I liked the nuns. I heard a bunch of them had fallen ill. I was going to take them cigarettes from the city. Good currency. They could use them to trade.
‘Call it a sixth sense. I got halfway up the hill road then pulled over. Something not right. Too quiet. No birds.
‘I headed up the road on foot. Watched from the jungle. I don’t know what happened up there but it was major. The station was hidden beneath a geodesic dome. Choppers parked in the compound. There were guys in white biohazard suits.
‘I got the hell out of there and drove back to town. I asked around. Nobody wanted to talk about the mission station. Bad hoodoo. But I found a French consulate official with a taste for liquor and loosened his tongue.
‘There were these guys. White guys. They turned up in bad times. Kenya, during a Marburg outbreak; Burundi, during a bunch of Ebola cases. They spoke pretty good English but Pierre thought they were Russian. They used to show up during the sixties and seventies posing as tourists, journalists, Médecins Sans Frontières. But they were from Vektor. The weapons acquisition arm of Biopreparat, the Soviet biological warfare programme. Anytime there was an outbreak of an emergent disease, something new and lethal gestating in deep jungle, these guys showed up like the horsemen of the apocalypse. Procurement teams masquerading as humanitarian aid. Moving through jungle hospitals like ministering angels, collecting biopsy swabs and spinal fluid samples for delivery to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch.
‘After the collapse of communism half these guys were out of a job. Highly skilled bio-weapon experts. PhDs in pharmacology. Spent their lives developing lethal psychotropic and neurotropic agents. Reduced to driving taxis and selling flowers in the street. These guys were party elite. They lived in the secret cities of the Soviet rustbelt. They were used to luxury dachas and Zil limousines. One by one they disappeared. Showed up in Libya, Syria, trying to sell VX neurotoxin. A gang of them got busted cooking methamphetamine in Mexico. The cream of the crop got picked up by the US. Given new names, a fuck-ton of cash, and sent to work at Fort Detrick.
‘That’s the scary part. They’re still out there. Vektor. The men, the infrastructure. Cut loose. Sometimes freelance. They work for the Agency or private biotech, chasing their own agenda. Heard they showed up in Kosovo looking for body parts. Kidneys for rich fucks on dialysis. Used the POW camps as an organ bank. Hang around any of these shithole countries long enough you’ll see the same planes time and again. Black charters. Antonovs. Ilyushins. They change livery and tail numbers, but it’s always the same crews.
‘I went out to the missionary station a few months later. It was gone. Burned and bulldozed. No sign of the kids, no sign of the nuns. Caterpillar tracks. No top soil. Someone dug a big pit and filled it in.
Later, I heard locals wouldn’t go near the place. They say the jungle grew strange. They said it glowed at night. Said there were genetic abnormalities. Giant insects. Weird flowers.
‘A shitstorm like Iraq? Wouldn’t surprise me if those fuckers turned up on their own little death trip. Blood, gunsmoke. They’d smell opportunity. I wouldn’t mess with them for a single second.’
Koell flicked open a lock knife. The metallic snap echoed through the vaulted hangar. He cut Gaunt free.
‘Gesture of trust.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Work for us. You need a cause. You’re lost. You’re broke. We need good men.’
Gaunt rubbed his wrists.
‘The people you saw today. They want to head into the Western Desert. Take them where they want to go.’
‘Why would I do that?’ asked Gaunt.
Koell took a roll of bills from his pocket. Fresh notes bound by a rubber band. He threw the bills on the desk.
‘Fuck your money.’
‘You want to be part of the shadow world. You need a way in. Well, this is it. Go ahead. Step through the looking-glass.’
‘Just fly the choppers?’
Koell took a folded photograph from his pocket. He smoothed it on his knee and passed it to Gaunt. A satellite shot. Rocky, lunar terrain.
‘The National Reconnaissance Office designate it Valley 403. A limestone canyon. Locals call it The Valley of Tears. The Western Desert, near the Syrian border. Those security contractors believe there is gold hidden in the hills.’
‘Gold?’
‘You’re welcome to whatever you find. Take
your cut. Take it all. I don’t care.’
Koell gave the nod. One of his goons put a MOLLE backpack at Gaunt’s feet.
Gaunt popped the clips.
A chunky Thuraya XT sat phone.
Maps and aerial photographs.
A 9mm Sig Sauer automatic with a screw-thread barrel and a long, black titanium suppressor.
A box of tungsten-nytrilium hollow-points. Each bullet spiked like a molar. Designed to fragment and rip a wound like a shotgun blast.
A tube of caulk explosive and green box of e-cell detonators.
‘There are items hidden in those hills. Items we wish you to find, and return to us.’
‘Don’t you have your own guys for this kind of thing? Agency teams?’
‘I won’t bore you with the politics of covert action. A man in my position must make ingenious use of finite resources. A deniable, back-channel asset is always our preferred means of operation. These mercenaries are entirely expendable. They could vanish from the face of the earth and no one would realise they were gone.’
Gaunt examined the pistol.
‘Nothing more?’
‘You’re an ambitious man. You don’t want to be small-time all your life. Those deadbeat mercs, they want money. But you have bigger ambitions. You want to matter. You want to make things happen. So impress me. Show me what you can do.’
Ambush
They came for Jabril at dawn. They kicked him awake and pulled him from his bunk. Full strip search. They had him bend, spread his ass cheeks and cough. They ran fingers through his hair. They checked his mouth with a flashlight. Then they threw him a fresh jumpsuit and told him to dress.
They returned his prosthetic hook. He twisted the hollow plastic cup on to the stump of his wrist.
They locked him in a wire holding pen with eight other men. Rough guys. Lean. Scarred faces.
Marines stood guard and told them to crouch on the cold concrete floor.
‘Don’t speak. Don’t move.’
One of the prisoners stared Jabril down. He radiated violence and hatred. A big guy with one eye. He had seen the three tattoo dots on the back of Jabril’s hand. Tikriti. Ex-Ba’ath. Marked for death.
Iraqi police showed up. They cross-checked charge sheets and magistrate numbers.
Rapists. Car-jackers. Mahdi militia.
They signed for the prisoners. Marines knew half the police employed by the Interior Ministry moonlighted as Shi’ite death squads. The convicts would be dead in a ditch by sundown.
The prisoners were shackled at the ankle, waist and wrist. Jabril’s good hand was cuffed to his belt chain.
The men stood single-file, hoods over their heads. They were led to a loading bay. A young cop jabbed their legs and shoulders with the barrel of his AK to keep them moving.
They shuffled aboard a minivan. Jabril sat patiently in hooded darkness. Door slam. Engine start. He heard cops light cigarettes, the scratch of four matchbooks struck simultaneously.
The van left Abu Ghraib. It got waved through traffic control points and Hesco blast barriers. It joined the expressway and headed for Baghdad.
The prisoners sat in rows. Two guards at the front, two at the back.
The driver was called Ali. The guy riding shotgun was Najjar. The two kids on the back seat looked barely old enough to shave.
‘There’s a car,’ said Ali, checking the rear-view. ‘A shot-up Suburban. It’s been tailing us since we left the prison.’
Najjar turned in his seat. He could see the Suburban fifty yards back. Bullet holes, scorched paintwork, heavy ram bars. No plates. The 4x4 accelerated and sped past. Tinted windows.
Backstreets. Ali checked his map. Designated route to the Central Station marked in red.
‘Forget the map.’ said Najjar. ‘Head for the dump.’
‘The dump?’
‘The captain wants us to send a message. Leave these scum with the rest of the city garbage.’
Ali took his hands from the wheel and lit a fresh cigarette.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Najjar, sensing his friend’s discomfort. ‘Those boys will pull the trigger. They volunteered. They want their first blood.’
Ali surveyed street traffic. The old quarter. A placid vibe. Kids playing at the kerb. Feral dogs rooting in the gutter. Old guys sat at a table smoking narghile pipes, sipping tea, playing dominoes, watching the world go by.
‘Check the prisoners,’ said Ali.
Najjar climbed into the passenger compartment. He tugged cuffs, tugged ankle chains. The big guy snarled and tugged back. He got an AK butt to the jaw to chill him out.
Ali glanced at the rear-view. ‘It’s back. The Suburban.’
‘How did it get behind us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Speed up.’
They didn’t have time to react. The Suburban revved and roared past them.
The tailgate flipped up. A soldier in a gas mask and Stetson crouched in the rear. Small feet, small hands. A woman.
The soldier raised an assault rifle and fired a grenade launcher. A streak of smoke. Catastrophic detonation as the nose of the van blew out.
The front axle sheered. The van gouged asphalt and came to a shuddering halt.
Ali wiped blood and glass from his face. Ear-whining concussion. He tried to clear his head. The engine block was destroyed. The van was full of smoke. The hooded prisoners were screaming and thrashing in their seats.
Soldiers jumped from the Suburban. Irregulars. Mercenaries. They each wore gas masks. They threw smoke grenades and enveloped the vehicle in purple smog.
Ali shook Najjar. His friend was out cold, head on the dash.
Ali reached for his radio. He fumbled and dropped it into the foot well. He kicked at the side door. It was jammed.
He unholstered his pistol. He climbed into the passenger compartment. He fell into the narrow aisle between the prisoners.
He shouted to the guards at the rear of the van.
‘Are you all right?’
Farm boys with rifles. They were uninjured, but sat stupefied with shock.
A baton round punched through a side window and bounced to the floor, jetting CS. Ali snatched up the canister and threw it back out the window.
A second baton round. Ali threw down his jacket and tried to smother the gas plume. His eyes streamed tears. He drooled snot.
He kicked open the rear doors. They tumbled into the road. More purple smoke.
Ali knelt and squinted through tears. Figures in the smoke. Pig-snout gas masks looming out of purple haze like monstrous, hybrid creatures.
He choked. He vomited. He raised his pistol and fired blind. The weapon was snatched from his hand. A punch to the jaw put him on his back.
He was dragged to the kerb. His hands were cuffed behind his back with plastic tuff-ties.
He spat. He blinked away tears. The street was deserted. The locals had fled inside and locked their doors. He could see the soldiers at work inside the van. They cut the prisoners loose. They bit through ankle chain with bolt cutters. They dragged hooded prisoners from the van.
The big guy made a run for it. He sprinted down the street, hands still chained behind his back.
One of the mercs, a tall man with hair tied in a ponytail, casually shouldered a pump action shotgun. He took aim and blew off the prisoner’s foot. The injured man collapsed and lay screaming.
They lined the prisoners along the kerb and pulled off their hoods. Terrified men blinked at sudden sunlight.
A merc walked the line and checked faces. Short and slight. A woman. Her comrades deferred to her, like she was boss.
Her voice muffled by a gas mask:
‘Him.’
They unshackled Jabril and dragged him to the Suburban. They drove away.
Ali sat by the side of the road, dumb with shock. The street was still fogged with purple vapour. He could hear sirens get closer.
Najjar climbed through the shattered windshield. He fell into the street.
Najjar got up. His head was bleeding. He walked to the kerb, opened a penknife and cut Ali free.
He fetched a discarded AK from the back of the van. He checked it was loaded. He handed it to one of the boys.
‘Finish it, before we have company.’
The kid looked down at the assault rifle in his hand, and the prisoners sat at the kerb. The convicts sobbed and begged for mercy.
‘They are trash,’ advised Najjar. ‘Worse than dogs. You know what has to be done.’
The kid shouldered the rifle, closed his eyes and opened fire.
The Suburban sped down the expressway. They left Baghdad. Lucy and her crew peeled off gas masks. They opened the windows and cranked up Cypress Hill.
Voss drove the 4x4. Lucy sat on the back seat with Jabril, released his shackles with a universal key. She told him to hold his head back while she flushed his eyes with mineral water.
‘Thank you,’ said Jabril. ‘You saved my life.’
Lucy tapped his forehead with the muzzle of her pistol.
‘You’re not free yet, Jabril. Consider this parole.’
Into the Desert
Two choppers flew out of a golden dawn.
Raphael flew Talon. The webbed bench seats had been removed. The cargo compartment was stacked with equipment. The payload was draped with tarp, lashed with rope.
Gaunt flew Bad Moon. Lucy and her team were strapped in the rear.
They watched sunrise over Baghdad. Traders heading to market, skirting acres of airstrike rubble. Horse carts, wheeled fruit stalls, painted trucks. The morning haze would soon burn off and be replaced by a brilliant blue sky.
‘Got to make the journey before the noonday heat,’ said Gaunt. ‘Hotter the air, the lower our lift. We’ll burn a heck of a lot more fuel.’
The metal-planked floor of the Huey was lagged with sandbags. Coalition choppers regularly took AK hits as they flew downtown. Crew listened for the tick of bullets striking the airframe. Sometimes RPGs streaked from rooftops, militia hoping to knock out a tail rotor. Most Blackhawks were reinforced with Kevlar. Pilots knew to fly high, fly fast, vary their route. Gaunt had to improvise.