by Adam Baker
‘Everybody suit up,’ she said. ‘We’ll lay suppressing fire with the SAW, then make a break for it. You too, Jabril. You’re coming with us. No argument. I’m going to get you home.’
She offered Jabril a pistol.
He smiled and shook his head.
‘I’ll make a deal with you all.’
‘Talk later, all right? Your old pals have sniffed out fresh meat. If we stay here much longer we’ll get overrun.’
Jabril pointed to the metal trunk lying in the quad trailer, half hidden by Toon’s flak jacket.
‘Let me have the missile case. The documents. The virus. Give them to me, and I will show you a way home.’
Voss let rip another stream of machine-gun fire.
‘There’s a way out of here?’ shouted Lucy.
‘The freight train. We used it to haul Spektr. It’s still here. Maybe you can get it started. Ride it across the desert.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I’ll show you. In return for the case. Give me the missile, and I will get you home alive.
Containment One
Gaunt tied a scarf round his face. He adjusted sand goggles and turned up the collar of his leather jacket.
He was halfway across the valley floor.
He leant into the storm. Sand particles blurred like torrential rain.
He trained his flashlight on the dial of his compass. He struggled onward, alone in the dark.
He found rails half hidden in dirt. He followed them, stumbling over sand-dusted sleepers.
He entered a narrow ravine. Rough, sandstone walls. He felt the sudden change in air pressure. Wind funnelled through the tight fissure. The cyclone risen to a jet-scream.
His jacket whipped around him. He zipped it closed. He hugged the valley wall for guidance and support.
A split in the rock. A natural declivity. He hid from the storm.
A brief respite. He sat in the sand. He sipped from his canteen. Half empty. About a litre of water left.
He took the sat phone from his backpack. Flickering digits. The unit scanned wavebands, trying to acquire a signal. Nothing. Too deep in the ravine. No line-of-sight.
He packed the comms gear, knocked back Dexedrine, and stepped out into the storm. Sand particles stung his cheeks, his hands.
He followed the rails. He felt like he had walked for miles.
The track abruptly terminated in a jumble of wooden beams and sacking. He surveyed the obstruction by flashlight. A blocked tunnel. High and wide.
He pulled planks aside. He rolled an empty oil drum. He shone his flashlight into the cave mouth and let his eyes adjusted to the dark.
A ragged tunnel blasted through bedrock. Wooden props at twenty-foot intervals. Railroad track receded into shadow.
He walked inside. Wind noise dropped to a low moan. He pulled down his scarf, unzipped his jacket and took off his sand goggles. He shook dust from his ears.
Twin railroad track. His boots crunched on shingle. Footfalls echoed from the high tunnel walls.
The passageway was cold as a meat locker. Skin-prickle chill. His breath fogged the air in front of him.
A glint up ahead. A scintillating, multifaceted jewel, like a giant arachnid eye. The lens glass of a hooded lamp high on the snout of a massive diesel locomotive.
A plough-blade welded to the front of the motor house. Gaunt grabbed handrails and hauled himself up onto the nose platform of the locomotive.
He used a narrow walkway to shuffle the length of the engine. Rust-streaked service panels and intake fans. A wide engine/alternator compartment. He leant over the railing and inspected wheels, pistons and brake shoes. The vehicle seemed to be intact.
He reached the cab. The slide door was locked. He rubbed dust from the glass and shone his flashlight inside. The control panels were undamaged.
A body on the floor of the cab. He could see a boot, a spent cartridge, a mummified hand holding a pistol.
He ran his hand over bodywork. Rock dust. He looked up. A web of cracks in the sandstone roof. Heavy wooden props straining to hold back imminent tunnel collapse.
Gaunt climbed from the cab. He shone his torch further down the passage. The locomotive had been unhitched from wagons and coupled to two ornate Pullman carriages that had clearly been housed in the tunnel for decades. Wood panels. Cream livery. Dust and blistered lacquer.
He climbed a door ladder and shone his flashlight through glass fogged with dust.
An office. Brass light fixtures. Exquisite marquetry panels. A grand desk. High-backed Queen Anne chairs. Furniture centred on a heroic portrait of Saddam in full generalissimo braids.
The second carriage was a dining car.
Gaunt jumped from the coach and walked deeper into the rail tunnel. He walked past box cars, ore wagons, flatbed trucks.
He approached the cavern. The beam of his flashlight was too weak to penetrate the vast space. He could make out the curve of rock walls. The depths of the cavern were lost in shadow.
The grit-crunch of his footfalls echoed round the cave.
He glimpsed the opaque plastic of the containment dome. Something white inside. Something huge.
He kept walking.
His flashlight lit the riveted silver hulls of the lab containers.
Four metal bio-medical units. Gleaming chrome, like old-time Airstream trailers. They were lined in a row, nose to tail. Bolted together to form a single, long hermetic environment.
A mobile bio-weapons lab. Swiss made. Shipped from Europe. Dispatched to the valley the moment Koell stroked the Spektr heat tiles, and saw for himself that the vehicle was solid and real.
The lab docked at Qatar. Each unit loaded onto a flatbed railcar and draped with tarp. The lab was towed across Syria surfing a wave of bribe money. US dollars clearing the route, switching every junction, turning every light green. A tight brick of currency changed hands at a border checkpoint. Guards pulled barriers aside and let the locomotive pass unrecorded into Iraq’s Western Desert.
Gaunt examined the lab door. He stroked metal. A steel hatch, like the bulkhead door of a ship.
One week earlier.
Koell’s hotel suite. Gaunt sipped his third whisky and watched interrogation footage on a laptop.
Ignatiev, tied to an office chair. Raw brickwork. A battery lamp hung from a roof girder. Probably a basement room in one of the bombed-out ministry buildings by the banks of the Tigris.
Koell was off-screen.
‘Do you comprehend the scope of this endeavour?’ asked Koell. ‘The time, the money, I’ve spent chasing Spektr? I had to oversee this entire recovery project in the middle of a fucking war. Can you grasp the scale of the undertaking?’
‘You weren’t there,’ said Ignatiev. ‘You weren’t on site. You were safe in Baghdad. This is the most destructive disease I’ve ever seen. Forget Marburg. Forget Ebola. This isn’t some jungle bug that will make your gums bleed for a couple of days. This thing is lethal and spreads like wildfire. No cure. No vaccine. There were two hundred men in that valley. Once the infection got loose, it took twelve hours to wipe out the entire battalion. You have to believe me. This disease cannot be weaponised. It cannot be effectively contained. Eradication. That’s the only sane course of action.’
‘I’ve dedicated years of my life to this project. I scoured Moscow. I kicked down the doors of shitty apartment buildings and put the thumbscrews on every old communist fuck that worked out of Star City. I’ve bled Special Projects dry chasing this piece of space junk. Called in every favour. I’m out on a limb. I’ve got to produce results.
‘I know all about you, Doc. The things you’ve done. I’ve seen pictures. The asylum. You didn’t have a qualm when you sliced up those inmates. Drilled their skulls. Too late in the day to grow a fucking conscience.’
‘You have to listen to me. Try to understand. This virus. This parasite. It’s like nothing on earth. It’s monstrous. I can’t even begin to describe it.
‘The structure is cryst
alline. Almost metallic. Maybe it’s synthetic. A chimera virus, an artificial construct. Nanobots or recombinant DNA manipulation gone horribly wrong. Or maybe it is something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘It’s not a sudden mutation. It’s a complex form of life. Highly evolved. Supremely adaptive.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘It’s not from Earth.’
‘Listen to yourself,’ said Koell. ‘You had a simple job: locate the virus; bring it back. That’s all you had to do.’
‘I don’t care what happens to me. You can go to hell.’
‘Tell me about the lab.’
‘Fuck you.’
Koell stepped into view. Shirtsleeves and a butcher’s apron. He held a pair of pliers. He hunched over Ignatiev, back to the camera.
A long scream.
Koell stepped away. Ignatiev drooled blood. A front incisor missing.
‘The lab. Is it intact?’
Ignatiev coughed and spat. A weird smile. The knowledge he was minutes from death manifest as a strange euphoria.
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘I’m going to send a retrieval team. A bunch of mercenaries. One of my guys will attempt to secure the virus. So tell him what he needs to know. Talk him through it. How do we get into Lab One? How is it secured?’
‘There is a keypad and swipe-slot, but it won’t work. The lab is in lock-down. I triggered a contamination alert. The doors sealed tight. None of the access codes will register. You’ll have to cut your way inside. Each unit is a double steel shell. Might take a while.’
‘The labs,’ asked Koell. ‘What will we find inside?’
Ignatiev spat more blood.
‘The main power will be off. The labs will be in sleep mode. Essential systems only. Chloride storage batteries will provide a trickle of AC power to keep the freezers operational. You will need to restart the grid. It’s easy enough. There’s a fuse box as you enter Lab One. On your left, at head height. One of those lightning bolt high-voltage stickers on the lid. There is a single breaker inside. You will be able to run at full power for about seventy-two hours before you need to fire up the generator to recharge.’
‘Tell me about Lab One.’
‘We used the first unit as a necropsy room. Specimens were brought for dissection and analysis. That was where most of our work took place once the human field tests began.’
Gaunt examined the lab door. A steel hatch, like the bulkhead door of a ship.
He opened his backpack. He loaded a cartridge into a caulking gun. Demex 400. An extrudable demolition charge used by SWAT breach teams. It oozed from the nozzle like toothpaste. He ran a stripe of explosive down the door seal. He coated the keypad and lock mechanism.
He pressed a detonator into the putty and ran firing cable.
He backed out the cavern, walked down the rail tunnel spooling det cord.
He crouched. He stripped insulation with his teeth.
He touched the wires to a nine-volt battery.
White light.
The blast echoed round the tunnel like thunder.
Gaunt walked back to the cavern. His flashlight beam shafted through smoke and swirling dust. He examined the lab. The door hung open, twisted and burned.
He kissed the crucifix hung round his neck. He cranked the handles and pulled the heavy hatch open. Darkness within. Intense cold. Counters and lockers.
The fuse box. Locked. He smashed it open with the butt of his pistol. Breaker to on. Faint hum. Overhead strip lights flickered to life.
Gaunt switched off his flashlight.
He was in some kind of vestibule, sealed from the rest of lab by a glass partition.
A warning stencilled on the glass:
Contamination alert. A roof beacon washed the room in crimson light.
Gaunt unzipped his jacket and released his body armour. He piled them in the corner.
Breathing equipment hung in a locker. He punched out glass, unhooked an M50 gas mask and pulled it over his face. A pig-snout respirator with twin filters. He tightened straps.
He tugged a pair of Nitrile gloves from a wall dispenser and wriggled them on.
He shouldered his backpack, pulled back the glass partition and entered the lab. The air-handling system created a compressed hush, like the pressurised cabin of a transatlantic jet.
He stood over a zinc autopsy slab. Sluice channel. Plug hole.
The gas mask reflected in mirror-metal. Black rubber. Smoked glass, like the empty eye sockets of a skull.
A freezer. The digital read-out said -70.
Gaunt pulled the latch. The door popped with a hiss. A cascade of broiling nitrogen-smoke. Frosted jars.
Gaunt brushed away ice crystals. Body parts preserved in formaldehyde. Fingers. Teeth. An ear. A scrap of scalp.
Ignatiev lolled in the office chair. He was unconscious. Blood and spit drooled from his mouth.
Koell stepped into camera range carrying a hypodermic. He gave Ignatiev a shot in the arm. The man gasped and jerked awake.
Ignatiev looked around. He sobbed. Dragged from oblivion to endure more pain.
‘Tell me about the human trials,’ asked Koell.
‘Hassim was our first test subject. He was kept restrained in the Spektr containment area while we waited for the lab units to arrive. We told him help was on its way. A hospital train. There would be fresh diagnostic equipment to help track the spread of the disease, fresh drugs to treat the infection. I didn’t have the courage to tell him the truth. The locomotive was hauling a pathology lab on wheels. The lab units contained nothing that might conceivably cure his condition. Even as we soothed him, held water to his lips and pressed ice-packs to his forehead, we were planning his dissection.
‘We did our best for him. Dosed him with broad-spectrum antibiotics. Tetracycline, streptomycin, ciprofloxacin. Administered shock-doses of antiserum. Tried to lower his fever, clear the pneumonia fogging his lungs. But nothing halted his slow slide into psychotic dementia. He asked me the time of day, kept asking over and over like his mind got jammed in some weird repetitive cycle.
‘Sometimes he was lucid. He was calm. He prayed. But then his prayers would dissolve to gibberish and obscenity. He spat and swore as we injected him with morphine.
‘He slowly began to choke. His throat became obstructed by fine hairs that seemed to grow deep within his lungs. We gave him a tracheotomy.
‘He languished in a coma. Intracellular breakdown. Clots forming in his liver and kidneys. Gastrointestinal bleeding. His breathing was laboured and shallow. His mouth slowly filled with metal spines, slowly forcing his jaws apart.
‘Strange needles bristled from his flesh. His skin was mottled by blotches and ulcerated lesions. The virus attacked his ocular cavities. Burst blood vessels turned his eyes near black. Liquid metal leaked from his tear ducts.
‘He lay comatose for several hours. We took blood and saliva. We took liver biopsies and lung cell cultures. We drained spinal fluid. We drilled his skull and took brain tissue.
‘He woke. He roared, and snarled and tore at his restraints. Hassim had gone, and a monster had taken his place. I made the decision to end his suffering. I administered Demerol. It should have been a lethal dose. It should have paralysed his heart and lungs. But he arched his back and continued to fight.
‘I powered up the surgical drill, slotted it through the hole in his forehead and bored deep into his brain. He convulsed and died. Perhaps I should have preserved his brain intact. But I wanted to end his torment. Besides, subsequent human trials would allow us to study the precise manner this strange disease attacked the spine and brain stem.
‘The train arrived. It slid into the valley like a silver snake. Four lab units resting on flatbed wagons. I had the lab cars shunted into the tunnel. Jabril paid the Syrian crew with fistfuls of gold.
‘We used a crane truck to swing the lab units from the rail cars and set them down in the cavern beside the bio-dome.
&n
bsp; ‘The labs were well equipped, but I decided it would be inappropriate to perform a full autopsy of the dead cosmonaut. He needed to be shipped back to a proper research facility for extensive examination. I ordered Konstantin sealed in his triple-lined steel coffin and stored in Lab Four, the virus vault, ready for transport to a more appropriate site.
‘Hassim was a popular soldier. Jabril explained his absence to the men. He told them Hassim had died of septicaemia as a result of a cut sustained while exploring Spektr. It was a plausibly mundane account of his death.
‘We held a funeral. Buried a body bag full of rocks. Said solemn prayers over an empty grave. Gave him a soldier’s headstone: a rifle staked in the ground, helmet balanced on top. Later that night, when the men were singing and drinking, we began the dissection. Hassim would indeed get a funeral. When the autopsy was complete, when his body had been stripped of useful tissue. He would be little more than a jumble of bones, cartilage and hair. His eviscerated remains would be dumped in a deep pit and smothered in lime.’
‘Tell me about the dissection.’
‘We examined tissue removed from his cerebral cortex and spine. The structure and molecular composition of this pathogen is unlike anything I have ever seen. Forget the usual viral proteins. I’m not even sure it would class as a virus at all. This is a complex organism. The structure is almost crystalline. An ordered lattice. High-tensile strength yet it maintains a constant viscosity. It is a lethally efficient parasite. Swift dendritic growth. It commandeers flesh and bone for its own sinister purpose. Once the fibrous viral strands have penetrated the nervous system, fused with the cytoplasm of host cells, they immediately begin to interfere with neurotransmission.’
‘What are you saying? The brain is damaged? Victims can’t think straight? Or are you saying the mind is actually rewired?’
‘I’m saying Hassim died long before his heart stopped beating. He was eaten from within. The insect intelligence that looked out from behind his eyes as he spat, snarled and pulled at his restraints — it wasn’t him. Some other creature inhabited his body. I don’t understand this organism. I don’t know where it is from. I don’t know what it wants. But it is implacably hostile.’