Juggernaut (outpost)

by Adam Baker

  ‘Tell me about the Hellfire. Is it intact?’

  Ignatiev’s voice, tired, defeated: ‘It’s still sealed in the case, ready to fly.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What was the target site?’ asked Ignatiev. ‘If we delivered the virus, what would you have done with it?’

  Long pause.

  ‘The target was a UN refugee centre outside Mosul,’ said Koell. ‘Inmates call it “New Medina”. Fifteen thousand displaced families in a tent city. No good to anyone. No good to themselves. Blast dispersal. We would wait for optimum wind conditions. Late evening, as the air settles and cools. The missile would be launched from a drone and tracked via GPS. We would detonate at five hundred feet, directly over the Red Cross inoculation clinic at the centre of the camp. Thirty acres of tents arranged in a rigid street-grid. A perfect environment to test the efficacy of the weapon.’

  ‘You sick motherfuckers.’

  ‘We would have men on site. Have them pose as volunteer doctors from Saudi Red Crescent. They would wear bio-suits and film the outbreak. Take blood samples, track the speed of infection. When they judged the test had run its course, when the pandemic began to threaten their personal safety, they would drive from the camp and steps would be taken to contain the situation.’

  ‘You couldn’t halt the spread of infection,’ said Ignatiev. ‘The virus would quickly pass beyond the camp and out into the world.’

  ‘We would drop a massive fuel bomb. It would erase the entire camp in a moment of cleansing fire.’

  ‘You’re a fool. An absolute fool. I’m happy to die. I mean it. I consider myself blessed. You can’t comprehend the horror you will unleash. You’ll turn the surface of this planet into hell. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be alive when it happens.’

  ‘Is that it? Nothing left to tell?’

  ‘Kill me. Please. I’ve talked long enough. I’ve told you everything I know. Just kill me. Let me sleep.’

  ‘But what about the freezer? How do we release the lock?’

  ‘It is a simple biometric mechanism.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘If you truly want to serve your country, you will destroy every trace of this virus.’

  ‘Fuck America. A single litre is enough to switch off the human race. No one has ever had that kind of power, held it in their hand.’

  ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’

  Koell walked into camera shot. He held a hypodermic gun. He fired the gun into Ignatiev’s bicep.

  ‘Damn you,’ murmured Ignatiev. His eyelids drooped, his head sank to his chest and his breathing slowed to a halt.

  The recording came to an end.

  Koell leant forward and closed the laptop. He refilled Gaunt’s whisky tumbler for the fourth time.

  ‘Are you clear?’ asked Koell. ‘You know what you have to do?’

  ‘Yeah. I got it.’

  Gaunt stood before the virus vault. A steel freezer.

  CAUTION

  LIVE BIOLOGICAL AGENTS

  He typed the entry key. He swiped the card.

  Ocular scan required

  He reached into his backpack. An eyeball floating in a small jar. Pale iris and a tuft of optic nerve.

  He held the eyeball to the L-1 Ident iris scan. A brief wash of red laser-light.

  Thank you, Doctor Ignatiev.

  You are clear to enter.

  Hum and clack. Bolts retracted. Gaunt unlatched the door and hauled it open. Icy exhalation. A torrent of nitrogen fog cascaded from the freezer, washed across the floor and engulfed his boots. Skin-prickle chill.

  The fog slowly cleared.

  An empty shelf. No case. No missile. The warhead was gone.

  The Catacombs

  ‘Let’s find the generator,’ said Voss. ‘Let’s get the lights on.’

  Jabril led him deep into the tunnel. Voss pulled a flare from his pocket. He struck the cap. Splutter and fizz. Crimson fire. Limestone walls lit blood red.

  ‘How does it feel to be back?’ asked Voss.

  ‘I dream about this place every night,’ said Jabril. ‘Awful nightmares. It almost feels like coming home.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain. Some events, some places, are so terrible they become an indelible part of you.’

  The cavern.

  Voss checked the lab units.

  A scorched hatch hung open and crooked.

  ‘Someone blew their way inside,’ said Jabril. ‘Some kind of breaching charge. Very recent. I can still smell the cordite.’

  ‘Gaunt. Better watch our backs.’

  Voss stepped inside the lab.

  He kicked at the Chemturion suit crumpled on the floor.

  He examined the polished zinc of the necropsy slab. Cuff restraints. IV stand. Examination lights. A camera tripod.

  Surgical instruments laid out on a metal table. He picked up stainless steel pliers.

  ‘Bone rongeurs,’ explained Jabril. ‘For splitting skulls.’

  Voss snorted in disgust. He threw the rongeurs onto the necropsy slab. Harsh clatter.

  ‘We should leave,’ said Jabril. ‘We shouldn’t be in here. It’s too dangerous. We have no protective clothing.’

  They left the lab.

  They approached the high, opaque plastic dome of the bio-containment structure.

  ‘Is this Spektr?’ asked Voss.

  ‘It’s safe. The craft itself is not contaminated.’

  Voss slung his shotgun. He unsheathed his knife and slit plastic. He ducked through the polythene curtain, and held the flare above his head.

  The orbital craft rested on a flatbed rail car.

  Voss walked a slow circuit of the vehicle. He ducked beneath the ragged Delta wing. He reached up and stroked thermal tiles discoloured by the unimaginable heat of hypersonic re-entry.

  ‘This thing actually flew through space,’ he murmured. ‘Left the Earth and came back again.’

  Jabril contemplated the shadows of the open airlock.

  ‘Pandora’s box. We should have left this craft in the desert. It would have been buried forever.’

  Lucy climbed the ladder to the locomotive walkway. She entered the cab.

  She rolled the dead engineer with her foot. No signs of infection.

  She checked the pockets of the engineer’s boiler suit. Cigarettes. Prayer beads. A key.

  She dragged the body out onto the walkway. She lifted the desiccated corpse over the guard rails and threw it onto the track.

  She returned to the cab. The engineer’s console. Red brake handle. Big throttle. Key slot.

  She inserted the key and turned the ignition.

  Nothing. No instrumentation lights, no engine noise. She looked around the cab for breakers, any kind of power switch.

  A brief flutter of panic and despair, crushed before it began.

  RSM Miller, her platoon sergeant, laid it out for her, the day she applied for the Fourteen Intelligence Company.

  ‘The difference between regular army and special forces is simply the ability to maintain composure. To think straight in situations of extreme peril. Special recon training is a constant live-fire exercise. Endless boot camp endurance tasks while bullets whizz past your head. I’ve been out to that dummy village they built on Salisbury Plain. So many cartridge cases lying around, they crunch underfoot like gravel. The instructors will teach you to think through a haze of adrenalin and exhaustion. They’ll teach you to survive.’

  Lucy swigged from her canteen. She rubbed her eyes.

  The locomotive wouldn’t fire up. Maybe the ignition battery was dead. Must be some way to check available current.

  She began a methodical survey of the cab.

  Jabril left Voss in the cavern.

  ‘I want to find my old room, collect some of my things.’

  He wandered down a low passageway. His blue cyalume lit chiselled walls, timber props and roof beams.

  A faded door sign.

  Dynamite
Store.

  Jabril pushed open the rough wooden door. A small cell. A windowless cave.

  A canvas cot, a table, a trunk. A wash table and mirror.

  His old room.

  Jabril sat on the bunk. He lay the cyalume on the blanket. The chemical stick lit the room cold blue.

  He dragged the trunk towards the cot. Leather. Louis Vuitton. A relic of his previous life.

  He unbuckled straps and popped latches.

  Books and neatly folded clothes. He searched among his possessions. He found a gold cigarette case and a Ronson lighter.

  He lay on the cot and smoked a Turkish cigarette. He cried a little, then sat up and wiped tears.

  He flicked away the cigarette.

  He took a folded shirt from the trunk. Crisp white. He unrolled a black silk tie. Socks. Silk underwear. Polished brogues.

  He unzipped a suit carrier, and laid a white linen suit on the cot. He smoothed creases. He brushed away lint.

  Voss explored the cavern. He found a 24 KvA trailer generator parked in a wall niche. Power for the cavern floodlights.

  He filled the tank from a jerry can, turned the ignition and set the generator running. Cough and splutter. A puff of diesel smoke. Output needles twitched.

  A ring of light towers flickered and glowed steady. The cavern was lit brilliant white. Spektr floodlit beneath its polythene dome.

  A voice echoed round the cavern.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  Gaunt. Quiet, mocking.

  Voss crouched. He fumbled at a chest pocket. He put on his glasses. He scanned the cavern. No movement. No sign of Gaunt.

  ‘Reckon you can get that locomotive working?’

  Voss pressed himself against the rough sandstone of the cavern wall.

  ‘So, after all this blood and anguish, Lucy wants to send you home empty handed? How do you feel about it? You’ve seen your friends die. All for nothing.’

  Voss gripped the shotgun. Multiple tunnel mouths. Gaunt’s voice reverberated round the cavern.

  ‘That bomb. That warhead. Do you have any idea how much it is worth? Forget the gold. Boxes of watches and rings, pawned for a fraction of their value. You didn’t want a few dollars in your hand. You weren’t looking for another paycheque. You flew out here with bigger dreams in your head. Lucy promised you a fortune. You were going to lie on a beach for the rest of your life, umbrella drink in your hand. Help me get the warhead back to Baghdad. I swear, you will never work another day in your life.’

  ‘Come on out,’ said Voss. ‘Let’s talk it over.’

  ‘Think about it. What’s waiting for you back home? Do you even have a home? Half your life in jail. Zonderwater. Krugersdorp. You’re old. This is your last roll of the dice.’

  ‘Gaan fok jouself.’

  ‘I killed your friend. So what? I won’t apologise for pursuing my self-interest. Neither should you. I want to be rich. I want to matter. I want to prove the world wrong. I’m sure you know what that is like. To always be bottom of the pile, the back of the queue. Well, this is it. Your one and only chance to change your life.’

  Voss circled the cavern. He checked the entrance of each passageway, shotgun at his shoulder. No sign of Gaunt.

  ‘The virus cylinder. It’s small enough to slip in your pocket. Small enough to carry home. And it will buy anything you ever wanted.’

  ‘What would you want in return?’

  ‘Fifty-fifty split.’

  ‘I’d be waiting for a double-cross.’

  ‘That’s why I would play straight.’

  Voss thought it over. He rubbed tired eyes.

  ‘So what do you say?’ prompted Gaunt. ‘Tell me you are interested. That’s all I need to hear. Tell me we have something to talk over.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Voss heard himself say. ‘Yeah, I’m interested.’

  Lucy walked to the mine tunnel entrance. Amanda crouched behind the plank barricade, rifle at her shoulder. Weak dawn light.

  ‘We had our first customer,’ said Amanda.

  Lucy squinted into the gloom. A body on the track.

  ‘When did he show up?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘He came round the corner ten minutes ago.’

  Voss joined them.

  ‘They’ll eat through our ammo, pretty quick if they attack en masse,’ he said. ‘How many did Jabril say were out there?’

  ‘His battalion was under-strength. He reckons about two hundred men.’

  ‘I’ve got a few boxes of .308,’ said Amanda. ‘A good stack of mags for the rifles, a few for the Glocks. But sooner or later we would shoot dry and get overrun.’

  ‘What about the locomotive?’ asked Voss. ‘What’s the deal? Can it roll or what?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lucy. ‘Given time, I reckon she’ll move.’

  ‘We need to set a deadline. If you can’t get it running in the next couple of hours, we walk out of here.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘That guy has a pistol,’ said Amanda.

  She refocused her night scope. The reticules of her optics zeroed on the dead guy two hundred yards distant. An officer sprawled across the track, right quadrant of his head blown open. Amanda focused on the leather holster strapped to his hip. An automatic pistol.

  ‘He’s got mag pouches clipped to his belt.’

  ‘Want to go get them?’ asked Lucy. ‘We could seriously use the ammo.’

  ‘Let’s do it quick.’

  The night scope flashed a battery warning. Amanda unclipped it from her rifle and threw it in the quad trailer.

  She handed the rifle to Voss.

  ‘Get going,’ he told her. ‘Get out there, before any more of those fucks show up. I’ll keep you covered.’

  They climbed over the beams and drums that blocked the track.

  Lucy looked up. Stars fading into a pale blue sky.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get this done.’

  They ran along the railroad track. They crouched and checked the body.

  The corpse bristled with strange malignancies. Face gone, frontal lobes blasted away. Misfiring synapses deep within his shattered cerebral cortex set his foot twitching like he was grooving to a tune only he could hear. Whatever residual spark of life remained with his shattered head would quickly be extinguished when the sun reached its zenith and exposed brain tissue shrivelled dry.

  A Russian Makarov pistol. Amanda tried to pull back the slide. The weapon was corroded solid.

  ‘Fucked up. This baby need a bucket of solvent and a couple of days’ work.’

  ‘Keep the ammo. We might find a good one.’

  Lucy stuffed magazines into her pocket. Old Soviet calibre. Incompatible with Glocks.

  ‘This guy has a full canteen,’ said Amanda.

  ‘No good. He might have drunk from it.’

  Lucy patted pockets.

  ‘Prayer beads and a hipflask. A man of contradictions.’

  ‘I don’t get why they haven’t hit us yet,’ said Amanda, looking towards the canyon entrance. ‘I thought they would be all over us by now.’

  Voss spat tobacco. He crouched by the quad, rifle laid across crooked planks.

  Amanda’s M40. He adjusted his grip, his hand and shoulder too big for her custom-moulded McMillan stock.

  He squinted through the sniper scope and watched the distant figures of Lucy and Amanda search and strip the body.

  He sat back and rubbed his eyes.

  He looked at the quad trailer next to him. The missile case.

  He glanced back down the mine tunnel. The massive locomotive beneath a string of arc lights. Ore wagons and flatbed railcars. Train tracks receding to a distant cavern.

  No sign of Jabril.

  Voss flipped latches and lifted the lid. He gazed down at the virus cylinder, mesmerised by the ethereal blue glow.

  TOP SECRET SPECIAL HANDLING NO FORM

  Central Intelligence Agency

  Directorate of Operations, Near East Division

  Doc ID: 575JJUJF

&n
bsp; Page 01/1

  08/22/05

  MEMORANDUM TO: Project Lead, D.Ops

  SUBJECT: Spektr

  Colonel,

  11th Recon confirm their Predator drone has been launched and has entered the Western Desert. We should resume eyes-on-target surveillance of Valley 403 within the hour.

  We will re-establish contact with our man at the SPEKTR site shortly, and seek confirmation that the virus package has been acquired.

  If our man is unable to provide assurance that the package has been retrieved, if Predator surveillance reveals further evidence of hostile activity within the contamination zone, we may be forced to accept that re-activation of the SPEKTR site will not be possible.

  Our assets at Sharjah continue their preparations. We have received clearance for over-flight from QTAC. The plane has been registered as a shipment of urgent medical supplies. The SUNRAY device is loaded and ready to deploy.

  The aircrew are on standby. They are prepared to initiate CLEANSWEEP on my command.

  R. Koell

  Field Officer

  CA Special Proj, Baghdad

  PE4-A

  Lucy returned to the train.

  She shuffled along the narrow locomotive walkway. She opened service panels with a large hex key.

  The train was a diesel/electric hybrid. A massive turbo-charged V-12 powering an adjacent generator the size of a Volkswagen.

  She shone her flashlight round the tight engine compartment. Cables and pipe-work intact. No obvious signs of damage.

  She vaulted the walkway rail and jumped down to the track. She shone her barrel light beneath the locomotive. Leaf springs. Brake shoes. Traction motors. No leaks, no damage.