by Adam Baker
I asked the villagers to describe the night, ten years ago, when something fell from the sky. One of the farmers said he saw the crash. He had walked a mile from the village in search of a lost goat. The sun had set. He climbed a boulder. He saw something in the sky, falling like a shooting star. The object grew larger. It was a fireball. He fell to his knees. He called on the mercy of God.
The thing passed overhead, so close intense heat scorched his face like sunburn. He glimpsed a strange craft, glowing like a hot coal.
I gave the man my notebook and pen. I asked him to draw what he saw that night. He drew a crude arrow. Some kind of delta-wing craft. He said it looked like a giant bat.
I asked the farmer to lead us to the spot he saw the crash. He refused. He was scared. He said the thing was a monster from hell. We should leave it undisturbed.
I bribed him with gold.
We walked from the village. He led us to a massive sandstone boulder protruding from the dunes. We climbed to the top.
‘There,’ he said, pointing south-west. ‘It passed overhead and crashed in the distance.’
‘How far?’ I asked.
‘Two miles, maybe three.’
We walked to the impact site. There was nothing to see. Featureless desert.
‘You are sure this is the spot?’
The farmer refused to answer. The memory of the crash reduced him to whimpering terror. He ran back to the village. No amount of gold would induce him to help us further.
I gave the order to dig.
I immediately faced a near mutiny. The dunes presented a double threat. Not only was sand likely to be contaminated with the residue of chemical warfare but, in his attempts to subdue local guerrillas, Saddam had ordered the region pounded by cluster-bombs and artillery fire. There was every chance we could unearth unexploded munitions.
My men simply wanted to hide from the war. They were Republican Guard, elite troops, chosen for their fanatical loyalty to Saddam. They had taken a solemn oath to lay down their lives at his command. But they were also realistic men concerned for the welfare of their wives and children back home. They had no interest in our Quixotic mission. They were happy to camp in the desert, listen to the war unfold over the BBC World Service, then return to Baghdad when the shooting had stopped. I could sympathise.
Four of the men tore the badges from their uniforms. They climbed in a Jeep, replaced the Iraqi pennant clipped to the radio antenna with a white rag of surrender and headed for their homes in Fallujah. I could have ordered them shot as they drove away but there was little point.
I explained to the remaining troops that American satellites and drones would be watching the highways. If they took to the road in a military convoy they might be targeted and bombed.
I also explained that whatever was taking place elsewhere in the world, I was still their commander and I intended to complete my mission.
They men could have mutinied, simply walked away, but they had lived in fear of Saddam’s intelligence agencies all their lives. They were obedient as dogs.
I organised a grid search. We had brought Vallon mine-clearance metal detectors, sensitive enough to locate a bullet casing buried feet beneath the ground. We drove stakes into the desert to mark our path.
We must have covered acres of dunes. We trudged morning until late afternoon, walking in a line. We swung the mine detectors in sequential, one-eighty arcs.
A detector sang out. A small hit at the edge of the search field. The soldiers gathered round as I crouched and brushed away sand.
A buckled scrap of metal little bigger than my palm. A lightweight alloy. Aluminium, or maybe zinc.
We continued our search. Two hours later we scored a big hit. An object six feet long. The men dug with spades. Then I crouched in the crater and probed the sand with my knife until I struck metal.
I ordered the men to stand at a safe distance. I brushed away sand with my hand, gradually exposing hydraulic rams, ropes of frayed cable, shreds of rubber. Thick tread. Fragments of a steel-ribbed tyre. We had discovered part of the under-carriage of an aircraft. The remains of a large double wheel attached to a hydraulic shock-absorber.
I took pictures. I had a soldier stand next to the wreckage for scale.
Minutes later we found more scraps of metal hidden beneath the dunes. Tubular titanium spars. Scraps of aluminium fairing. Black hexagonal blocks that appeared to be carbon-fibre heat tiles.
It quickly became apparent we had found the debris trench, the trail of wreckage left by this strange vehicle as it fell to earth and gouged into the sand.
The sun began to set. We slowly walked across the dunes in a wide line, sweeping the spade-heads of our metal detectors left and right. Then, in unison, our detectors began to sing. A rising chorus of clicks and whoops like whale song.
We surveyed the ground around us. A strong and constant signal. We had found the body of the craft. Whatever had fallen from the sky, years ago, was directly beneath our feet.
We drove stakes into the sand to chart the dimensions of the object. An aerofoil shaped like a giant arrowhead. Sixty feet long, thirty feet wide.
I summoned the trucks and had them parked in a ring surrounding the crash site. I gave the men shovels and told them to dig.
They threw spadefuls of sand. I paced, and watched their progress. They dug for hours. Then they scraped metal. I jumped into the hole and pushed the soldiers aside.
I scooped with my hand and exposed a metal blade. Scorched hexagonal tiles, like snakeskin. I dug some more. I quickly realised we had exposed the tip of a big tailfin.
Night fell. We ran the truck engines. Head beams gave light while the men continued to excavate the craft.
Two teams. They dug for thirty-minute shifts. Downtime gave them a chance to smoke and rehydrate.
Midnight. The soldiers were exhausted. I ordered them to cease work. We ate, we drank. The night turned cold. We had no wood for fire. The men wrapped themselves in blankets, huddled together in the trucks and slept.
I pulled my blanket round my shoulders and stood at the edge of the crater. I couldn’t sleep. I trained the beam of my flashlight on the strange tail fin.
According to records, the first radar trace of the craft had been detected high above the operating altitude of military or commercial jets. There seemed little doubt this vehicle had fallen from space. There was no insignia, no marking of any kind.
I stood staring up into the night sky for a long while, contemplating the stars.
Next morning, I ordered the men to continue excavating the spacecraft. I drove to the airbase at Samarra. I tried to requisition a heavy crane and a large flatbed truck. The commanding officer initially refused my request. His men had been ordered to the eastern front. But I gave him gold. He was grateful for the gift. The man was also from Saddam’s home town of Tikrit. He had prospered during the long and bloody war with Iran. He had risen to the rank of general. He also ran a construction company and had been given lucrative building contracts. But the regime was about to fall and men like him would have to reinvent themselves. Burn their uniforms. Convince an occupying power they had taken no part in Ba’ath Party oppression. He probably had a strongbox somewhere in his home full of dinar bound with rubber bands. Kickbacks and blood money. Saddam’s smiling face on every note stamped red, blue and green. All of it about to become worthless. A bag of jewellery and Krugerrands striped from the homes of purged party members could be an invaluable asset in the uncertain weeks and months ahead.
We returned back to the crash site. The craft was half exposed. A thick fuselage. Torn batwings. Scorched rocket-vents at the tail.
One of the men showed me a brittle shard of crystal. The craft had been so hot when it came to rest, years ago, that sand surrounding the airframe fused to glass, coating the entire surface like ice.
I radioed Baghdad. I told them what we had found. Then the strangest thing occurred. My immediate superior at the OSS was General Assad. I rarely spoke to anyone
but him. But an hour after I contacted Baghdad and told them we had found an unusual vehicle buried in the sand, I received fresh instructions. I didn’t recognise the voice. The man spoke Arabic. But he sounded American.
‘My name is Koell.’
‘What happened to General Assad?’
‘I’m in charge of this project. From now on, you talk to me.’
He asked me to describe the craft in detail.
‘Is the hull intact? Tell me about structural damage. Is the cabin still sealed?’
I told him the wings were badly damaged. The under-carriage was destroyed. The turbojet engine pods were burned out.
‘What about the crew compartment? Boot up your laptop. Send me pictures.’
‘My men are excavating the cockpit as we speak.’
‘I’m going to mail you a schematic of the craft.’
I sat in the back of a truck with our communications gear. The file came through. I clicked print. Multiple views of the vehicle. Top and bottom. Front, side and back. It looked like a mini-shuttle. A sleek space fighter. The text was in Russian.
We continued the excavation. Koell demanded hourly bulletins.
We unearthed the snubbed nose of the vehicle. The side-hatch was still sealed. The cockpit glass was pitted and cracked but intact. We shone flashlights through the scorched glass but couldn’t see inside.
I told Koell the shuttle had sustained considerable damage during re-entry and landing but the crew compartment appeared to be sealed. I asked how many occupants we could expect to find. He said he didn’t know.
I drew up a plan. The vehicle was buried twenty feet beneath the surface. The sand was too unstable to allow a detailed inspection of the craft. Anyone who climbed into the crater risked being buried alive by shifting dunes. We needed to extract the craft and transport it to a sheltered, secure location where it could be examined in more detail.
I consulted our maps, and decided to exploit the rail network spread across the Western Desert like a web.
The railroad was built by European contractors during the nineteen eighties. The main phosphate production facility was in Akashat, linked to a processing plant at Al Qa’im, but there were satellite mining facilities dotted throughout the desert, all linked by rail. Organic phosphate compounds make good fertiliser, but can also act as a major precursor ingredient of chemical weapons such as Sarin and Tabun.
The railroad passed within two miles of the crash site. If we could lift the wrecked vehicle onto a truck, and nurse it across the desert, we could load it onto a rail car.
I decided to bring the shuttle here, to the Valley of Tears.
There is an abandoned mine to the north of the valley, at the end of a deep ravine. A series of exploratory shafts and galleries. A sheltered, remote location. We could hide the craft in the tunnels. We could drape camouflage nets over any of our vehicles left in the open to mask them from aerial surveillance. The war would rage down south. Young men would squander their lives battling an invader they couldn’t hope to defeat. But we would be safe. History would pass us by. We could work without interruption.
I radioed Samarra. I demanded the loan of winch gear, an additional crane truck and a flatbed rail car. An absurd request. The country was in chaos. Most people couldn’t locate bread, let alone heavy-duty excavation equipment. Nevertheless, Koell told me the equipment would arrive in hours. I suppose, in a time of chaos, a man with briefcase full of US dollars can get anything he wants.
I asked Koell about the spacecraft.
I knew the Russians built their own shuttle. I saw it on television, years ago. It was called Borun Snowstorm. Pretty much identical to the American craft. It made a single, unmanned flight. Then the programme was cancelled. The vehicles were scraped. One of the decommissioned shuttles became a fairground attraction in Gorky Park.
The craft at the bottom of the crater was much smaller than a space shuttle. It was sleek, streamlined, little bigger than jet fighter. The wings were torn and blunted. Ailerons ripped away. Stripped heat tiles. Wing membranes peeled back revealing twisted titanium-alloy spars.
‘What is it?’ I asked Koell. ‘This thing. This spacecraft. Where is it from?’
‘It’s Russian,’ said Koell. ‘A trans-orbital vehicle. Military prototype. They call it Spektr.’
The Body
Lucy sat beside Jabril and fed him mouthfuls of cereal bar.
‘Spektr.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jabril.
‘It’s here, in this valley?’
‘Yes. If you follow the railroad track across the valley floor it brings you to a mine.’
Voss joined them by the fire. He crouched, shook sand from the folds of a map, and spread it on flagstones. He and Lucy examined the terrain by flickering flame light.
‘I’ve been mulling our options,’ said Voss. ‘Plenty of towns closer than Baghdad. If we walk out of here we could head north to Mosul. Or east to Ramadi or Fallujah.’
‘Taliban strongholds. They would happily cut our throats.’
‘We could jack a car soon as we reached habitation.’
‘After a couple of days in the sun? We’d be in no state for a fire-fight. Our best bet is to head south-east for Baghdad. Turn ourselves in at a coalition checkpoint.’
‘Some hard miles of desert.’
‘Got any other ideas?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a survivor,’ said Lucy. ‘A cockroach, just like me. You’ll make it. You’re not the quitting kind.’
‘There has to be some way to summon help. How about we write a big SOS in the sand? Someone will see it. A satellite. A plane.’
‘No guarantee,’ said Lucy. ‘We could sit here for days hoping for rescue, getting thirsty, getting weak, watching Huang die. I prefer to make my own luck. I’ll try to raise Gaunt again on the radio in a while. Maybe I can reason with the guy. If he has any sense, he will cut a deal. He’s marooned out here, just like us. But I reckon he’s too scared to think straight. It’ll be sunrise in a few hours. We should get our shit together. Be ready to head out at first light. We should carry water and basic weapons. Ditch everything else. How many bottles do we have left?’
‘Enough to fill our canteens one more time.’
‘All right.’
‘What about the gold?’ asked Voss.
‘Fuck the gold.’
‘It’s ours. I’m not giving it up.’
‘We hide it. Bury it. You want to come back here with some buddies and retrieve the stuff, be my guest. Me? I don’t want to drive a Cadillac knowing I bought it with some poor bastard’s gold teeth.’
‘And Toon?’
‘Yeah,’ said Lucy. ‘That’s a bitch. The guy wouldn’t want to be left in a godforsaken place like this. But what else can we do? We could load his body onto the quad, but it’s only good for a few miles. What do we do after the fuel tank runs dry? We can’t dump him in the sand. The man deserves a proper grave.’
‘Yeah.’
‘We bring Jabril along for the ride. He’s an old fuck with one arm but he made it out this desert once before. Tougher than he looks.’
‘I don’t trust him,’ said Voss.
‘He’s played out. No more surprises. Obedient as a puppy dog. Huang. That’s the big question. We can’t carry him on our backs. Sure as shit can’t schlep a stretcher across five hundred miles of desert. But I’m not walking out on the guy. I’m not leaving him behind.’
Huang sat the other side of the campfire, staring into the flames. He was listening to his iPod.
Lucy lowered her voice.
‘The guy is fading fast. He looks eighty years old. We’ll stay. We’ll keep him company the next few hours. But I reckon we’ll be digging a second grave soon enough.’
Voss walked round the campfire and sat beside Huang.
‘How you feeling?’ asked Voss.
‘Not so great,’ said Huang. ‘Think I’m running a fever.’ His lips were blue.
Huang reache
d up and peeled the dressing from his neck.
‘How does it look?’
Voss tried to hide his disgust at the rotting wound. Black flesh. Awful stench. Metallic spines protruded from the liquefying skin like needles.
‘Not so great.’
‘You’ve got to cut,’ said Huang.
‘What?’
‘You’ve got to cut this shit out of me. Shoot me up with morphine. There’s a scalpel in the WALK. Slice.’
‘I’m not a surgeon.’
‘You think I don’t recognise the smell of gangrene? I’m dying. This is the only chance I’ve got. You have to cut down to clean tissue and plug the wound.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I’m begging you, brother. I’ll walk you through it.’
Voss walked to the temple entrance and talked it over with Lucy.
‘The blood loss will kill him,’ said Voss.
‘We can’t just stand around and let him rot. If his neck swells up any worse, he’ll need a tracheotomy. I’ll do it. Your eyes are too fucked for this kind of work.’
Lucy sat by Huang. She unzipped the medipac.
‘Couple of scalpels in that plastic box,’ said Huang. ‘Bunch of Kerlix dressings. Pretty much all you’ll need.’
He lay down on the flagstones.
Lucy uncapped a morphine hypo pen. She jabbed the pen into Huang’s bicep and pressed the plunger. She tossed the used hypodermic and checked her watch. Two minutes for the drug to take full effect.
She pulled on Nitrile gloves and tore a scalpel from its sterile pack.
‘Wish we had some bourbon,’ said Lucy, trying to steady her trembling hand. All set?’
Huang gave a woozy thumbs up.
Lucy leant forward, hesitated, then sliced into rotted neck flesh. Pus and blood. Unimaginable stink. She sawed. She trimmed a flap of flesh, did it quick and efficient like she was slicing roast chicken.
‘Can I see it?’ murmured Huang.
‘The skin? No. You don’t want to see it.’
Lucy threw the scrap of black, infected skin onto the fire. It spat, crisped and curled.
‘Did you get it all? Did you dig out the infection?’