by Adam Baker
Huang emitted a low, stuttering snarl.
‘Yeah,’ said Voss. ‘Me too.’
He took a last look around at the world.
‘Been a long fucking day.’
He pointed the rifle between his feet and fired into the tanker hull. The world winked out.
The Bomb
Fifty miles from target
The cargo hold. Fuselage reverberating with the steady drone of Pratt and Whitney turboprops.
Tomasz conducted a last visual inspection of the bomb. He stroked riveted metal.
He checked the delivery frame. The massive thermobaric device sat on a scaffold bed. When the moment came to deploy, Jakub would pull back the joystick. The C123 would tilt and lift, Unchained Melody would be carried to the rear cargo door on greased runners and ejected from the plane. A hundred yards of tether would quickly play out and trip the drogue chutes. Jakub would bank the plane hard left and climb. Thirty seconds to fly clear before the primary barometric fuse initiated a Hiroshima-sized detonation wave, an expanding bubble of over-pressure that would smash the plane from the sky.
Tomasz checked the trigger panel.
Isolators to Off.
Master Safety to Off.
He slotted a final key into the primer console and switched from Safe to Enable. Amber indicators winked red. Weapon armed. The bomb began an insistent warning beep.
Tomasz replaced the cover panel and span lock nuts.
He cranked a wall lever. Whine of hydraulics. Typhoon roar as the loading ramp at the rear of the plane began to open. He gripped a wall strap for support. He saw blue sky. He saw desert, thousands of feet below.
He returned to the co-pilot seat.
‘Final confirmation?’ he asked.
‘Koell says green light.’
‘All right, then. Hot to trot, baby.’
He opened his backpack. Thermos flask. Cheetos. Hustler. He took out a video camera. He checked for charge and removed the lens cap.
‘What’s that for?’ asked Jakub.
‘Koell wants pictures. Says he wants to see the valley burn. Says he’s got to see it for himself. Jerk off over it, or something.’
‘What about the drone?’
‘Probably long gone. Landed, defuelled, broken down, trucked back to base. Koell doesn’t want those recon guys sitting in their downlink van, taping the big bang and mailing it to their buddies. Strictly eyes only.’
Tomasz unfolded the map. Blank desert. Empty grid. Rippling contour lines indicated northern hills. A crude red X marked the target site.
‘How far are we from the objective?’
‘About twenty-six miles,’ said Jakub. ‘Making good time.’
Tomasz looked out the cockpit at the hogback ridge of hills slowly emerging from the haze up ahead. A barren, biblical landscape.
‘There she is. Valley four-oh-three.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Jakub. A black smudge rising into the sky. ‘Smoke? There’s a smoke plume rising from the valley. Something is burning.’
‘Be burning for real in a couple of minutes.’
‘I can’t do it, bro,’ said Jakub. ‘There are people down there. Yanks, Brits, whatever. Our guys. White hats. We should give them time to get clear.’
‘Don’t fuck around. This is it. This is the bomb run. Just fly straight and hit the tail release. That’s all you have to do.’
‘I can’t. I can’t do it.’
‘Shit, let me have control. Film, all right? Take the camera and film.’
Tomasz buckled and took the joystick. He checked airspeed and altitude. He pulled back the collective. He reduced thrust. The plane began a steady deceleration, a steady descent.
A woman’s voice from the sat com. She sounded tired and desperate.
‘Angel Flight, do you copy, over? Angel Flight, do you read?…’
Tomasz took the handset from its charge shoe. He hit the off switch and threw it behind him. The unit clattered on the deck.
‘Okay. Here we go. Descending to five thousand. Eighty knots. Love from above, baby. This is going to be a big one. This is going to light up the fucking sky.’
Countdown
‘We’ve got to get to the engine,’ said Lucy.’ This is turning into the fucking Alamo.’
They unchained the door at the head of the carriage. Amanda pulled the door wide. Two Republican Guard tumbled into the coach. Lucy shouldered her rifle and fired. Neat drill holes between the eyes. The back of their heads blew apart. She kicked the bodies aside.
Lucy jumped the knuckle-coupling and landed on the rear platform of the locomotive. Soldiers jostled, reached up for her.
A rotted infantryman gripped the guard rail and began to haul himself up onto the platform. Lucy delivered a vicious kick to his head. He toppled from the train.
More soldiers crowded round the coupling. Lucy delivered headshots.
‘Jump,’ she shouted.
Amanda jumped. She landed, screamed, and clutched her injured leg. Lucy helped Amanda limp along the narrow walkway.
Lucy knelt and capped the fuel tank.
A skeletal revenant sat on the locomotive roof above the slide door, crouched like a vulture. He leaned down. He leered and hissed. Lucy shot him through the mouth. A streak of red tracer. His jaw flew off. The back of his skull blew out in a shower of sparks. He hung dead.
Lucy grabbed the lifeless man by the collar and threw him from the train.
The cab slide door was open. A rotted infantryman inside, lurking in shadow. Amanda split his head with the machete. They dragged him from the cab and toppled him over the walkway guard rail.
Soldiers climbed up onto the walkway. Lucy delivered swift headshots. The rifle clicked dry.
‘I’m out.’
She tossed the weapon.
They sealed themselves inside the cab. More soldiers on the walkway. Lucy struggled to hold the slide door closed. Bloody hands slapped and pawed glass.
Lucy squinted through the blood-spattered window. Black smoke rose from the mangled, smoking chassis of the fuel truck. A distant dot approaching from the south, cresting the valley ridge. Something big. Something silver. An incoming plane. A heavy twin-prop cargo lifter.
She was overcome by a strength-sapping wave of failure. She led her guys into the desert. Promised them gold. They died, one by one, in this god-forsaken shithole. Couldn’t even get her boys home alive.
‘We’re fucked.’
Amanda stood at the engine’s console.
A cadaverous figure crouched on the hood of the locomotive. He stared through the windshield, spat and snarled. He punched plate glass until his hand was a bloody pulp.
Amanda tried to put the sound from her mind. The thump and smear of knuckles mashed against the windshield. The muffled mewing of Republican Guards out on the walkway, clawing at windows, hungry for flesh.
She struggled to clear her head and concentrate on the control panel in front of her. She tried to decipher the ignition sequence.
She checked the breaker panel. Every circuit switch set to On. Rows of green lights.
You’re going to die, said an insidious voice in her head. You are about to be consumed by searing fire. These are your last moments. Watching your hands flick switches and turn dials.
Fuck that shit, said a counter-voice. Don’t give into bullshit fatalism. Fight to live.
She felt drunk with exhaustion. She rubbed her eyes. She checked controls.
Brake released.
Reverser to Forward.
Throttle from Idle to Run 1.
Roar of turbocharged motive power. A jolt. The locomotive began to inch forward.
Throttle to Run 2.
Amp needles jumped. The engine began to accelerate. Gathering speed.
Amanda sagged and fell. She examined her leg. Fresh blood bubbled through the surgical dressing. She dug in her chest pouch for the last morphine syrette.
Lucy struggled to keep the cab door closed. Monstrously malformed soldier
s massed on the walkway outside. She kicked open a tool box and used a wrench to jam the latch.
She looked out the window. She craned to see the sky.
She took the sat phone from her pocket.
‘Angel Flight. Incoming plane, do you copy? There are people on the ground. Do not drop the bomb. Please, do not drop the bomb. There are British and American personnel in need of rescue, do you copy, over?’
Amanda struggled to her feet. She limped across the cab and stood by Lucy’s side. They wiped dust from the glass, and watched the incoming plane reduce speed, reduce altitude. The cargo ramp was extended.
‘Angel Flight, do you copy? Can you hear me? Come on, guys.’
The plane climbed and banked.
‘Thank God,’ said Amanda. ‘They called off the drop.’
Something black fell from the tail of the plane. A cylinder, big as a van. Three candy-stripe drogue chutes unfurled and blossomed.
The bomb began a slow descent into the valley.
Lucy put her arm round Amanda.
‘Sorry, babe. I’m so sorry.’
Detonation
The Fairchild banked hard starboard. Turboprops laboured to carry the plane clear of the blast field.
The thermobaric device drifted for twenty-three seconds. The point of release calculated to bring the device over the citadel complex.
Soldiers lay among the ruins. Too decomposed, too far gone to move. Sprawled among the ancient rubble, struggling to look up at the strange object floating in the clear blue sky.
Nine hundred feet. The bomb directly above the high roof of the temple.
The altimeter fuse sent the detonation impulse.
Airburst.
The high explosive core of the device split the bomb case and triggered the main charge. Ten tons of H6. A potent mix of RDX plastic explosive and aluminium powder.
Blinding light. A cataclysmic sunburst over the temple complex. A radiant shock wave expanding at eight thousand feet per second.
Crushing blast pressure flattened the temple. The roof instantly pulverised. Slabs of granite tumbled into the vast hall. Pillars sheared and fell. The sinister altar-god smashed by a wave of fire.
The temple floor collapsed. Subterranean chambers flooded with flame. Boxes of gold liquefied by ten-thousand-degree heat. Catacombs buried beneath countless tons of rubble.
The temple facade crumbled in a cascade of tumbling blocks. Monstrous hieroglyphs instantly obliterated. Sardonic stone colossi imploding in an avalanche of granite rubble.
The blast spread through the citadel precincts. A tsunami of flame rushed down colonnades and processional avenues. Pillars and arches smashed and scattered like building blocks. Flagstones seared black. Walls and domes shattered to stone chips. Ramparts and gate towers punched flat.
The infernal energy wave washed across open ground. Sand melted to glass by the stellar heat of detonation.
The wrecked vehicles of the convoy tossed like toys, punctured by bullet-velocity rock shards. Tumbling chassis swept in a maelstrom of debris.
A horde of Republican Guard, caught on sun-blasted terrain halfway between the citadel and the locomotive, turned and snarled at the oncoming firestorm. They were enveloped in a supersonic wall of flame. Suppurating flesh seared from their bones in a moment of blow-torch heat.
The nova-blast of detonation sucked air like a hurricane. Gouts of sand drawn upward into the blast cloud. Republican Guard snatched skyward like they were raptured into heaven.
The concussive wave tore across the valley floor in a furious cyclone of fire.
The train entered the rail tunnel, just as the blast wave hit.
Departure
The tunnel. Sudden darkness and screaming engine noise. The cab lit by a single bulb.
An inspection hatch at the back of the cab hung ajar. Lucy and Amanda threw themselves inside the engine bay and slammed the door.
Impact.
Flame rushed down the tunnel like floodwater and engulfed the train. The pressure wave blew out the remaining windows and filled the cab with fire
Lucy and Amanda lay beside the massive generator. Lucy spread her prairie coat over them both as flames jetted through intake fans in the locomotive roof.
The blast was so loud, so overwhelming, it became a strange kind of silence.
Lucy pulled back her smouldering prairie coat. She looked around the tight engine bay. The smoke-filled compartment dimly lit by winking function lights. The power plant hummed with motive power.
‘You all right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Amanda.
They got to their feet and kicked open the engine compartment door.
The interior of the cab was burned black. The foam padding of the engineer’s chair spewed smoke. A melted mineral water bottle lay fused with the deck plate. The sat phone was reduced to scattered circuit boards.
Amanda checked the controls. The console was dusted with broken dial glass.
Wind-roar. Tunnel darkness beyond the windows.
‘Mean old beast. She’s fucked up, but she’ll keep trucking.’
Lucy checked the locomotive controls. A tool box propped on the cut-out brake. The throttle roped to Run 2.
The cab reverberated with a deep turbo rumble.
She checked the map.
‘We should pass out of the tunnel in a few minutes. Then it’s a straight run across the desert.’
Amanda leaned against the cab wall. She slid to the floor and sat, head in her hands. Lucy uncapped her canteen and helped Amanda drain it dry.
The cab slide door was half open. An incinerated Republican Guard wedged in the aperture. Skin and muscle burned with a flickering blue flame. Stink of cooking flesh.
Lucy wrenched the door fully opened and kicked the body from the train.
‘I’ll be back soon.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Amanda.
‘To make sure we aren’t hauling any passengers.’
Lucy inched along the walkway to the rear platform of the locomotive, coat whipped by the fierce airstream.
The carriages behind the locomotive were burning. Flame rippled across the coachwork like liquid. Tunnel concrete lit blood red as it streamed past.
Lucy jumped the knuckle coupling and stumbled through the carriage doorway.
Gaunt was waiting for her. He lolled in a blackened chair, legs stretched out. He was stripped to the waist. He was badly burned. His arms were blistered and weeping. Half his face was red-raw, hair seared away. Deep wounds at his hip, shoulder and neck. Metallic spines bristled through flesh and fabric.
‘Jesus,’ said Lucy. ‘I watched you die.’
Gaunt smiled.
‘Not dead. Transfigured.’
He held up the virus cylinder. The glass had cracked, frosted opaque by a fine web of fissures. The cylinder glowed ethereal blue.
‘Behold, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and of death.’ Flame licked at the window frames. The wreckage of Saddam’s salon lit flickering orange. Thick smoke rose between floorboards. The interior of the carriage seared carbon-black. Delicate marquetry panels destroyed by blow-torch heat.
‘Give me the virus,’ said Lucy. ‘The money is no good to you now.’
‘Been taking it up the ass my whole damn life. Used. Shut out. Maybe I don’t want to be the good guy. Maybe I want some fucking payback.’
‘You’re dying. But you could make a difference. Destroy the virus. Save the entire human race. No one will remember your name. But you could do something heroic. Vindicate your life.’
Gaunt thought it over. He stared into the blue glowing liquid.
‘Yeah. I’m dying. But I’ll live long enough to make it back to Baghdad. All I have to do is make it through the doors of the conference centre. Smuggle the cylinder under my jacket. Delegates of fifty nations carving up reconstruction contracts. Smash the flask on the chamber floor and the virus will spread round the globe in hours.’
‘Scream Allahu A
kbar as you do it?’
‘New York. Moscow. Tokyo. Panic in the streets. The world wiped clean in a matter of weeks. A silent earth. Peaceful. Pure.’
‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’
Gaunt got to his feet. He placed the virus cylinder on the floor.
‘Don’t you want to be part of a new breed?’
Lucy grabbed a broken chair and threw at Gaunt. He snatched it out the air and dashed it against the wall.
Lucy unsheathed her bayonet and lunged. She aimed for his neck. Gaunt deflected the blow. The knife imbedded in the carriage wall.
He punched Lucy in the face.
She reeled. Blood sprayed from her nose.
She drove her fist into Gaunt’s chest, delivered a deathblow that should have stopped his heart. He snarled and kicked her across the carriage. She skidded across the floor and slammed into the wall.
Lucy tried to clear her head. She crouched against the carriage wall. She blinked, struggled to clear her vision. The floor beneath her smouldered, hot to the touch.
Gaunt tugged the knife from the wall. He examined the blade, his blurred reflection. The strange disease had begun to transform his senses. The interior of the carriage danced with weak luminescence from the virus cylinder.
Lucy crouched in the corner of the carriage, panting with fear.
He smiled. He stood over Lucy. He grabbed her by the collar, pulled her upright and pinned her to the wall.
He wondered how best to kill her. He decided to drive the knife through her eye. He positioned the knife tip and braced to strike.
Lucy had a broken chair leg in her hand. She jammed the jagged shaft into his hip wound. He grunted. She twisted the chair leg. Pus and blood bubbled from blackened, infected flesh. He cried in pain and released his grip. He staggered backwards and pulled the wooden shaft from the wound.
Lucy threw all her weight into a throat punch. Her fist slammed into his neck. He staggered backward, clutching his throat, gagging and gulping. He toppled, scattering cartridge cases as he hit the floor.
Gaunt lay in the middle of the carriage. He arched his back as he tried to draw air through a crushed larynx.