by Adam Baker
There was a gunshot. Muzzle-flare, like a camera flash. The man fell dead, shot through the heart.
Captain Hassim, my second in command, holstered his smoking pistol.
Blood trickled between wagon planks. We edged away from the body.
After a while, amplified engine noise felt like someone drilling into my head. I tore some paper and plugged my ears.
We emerged from the tunnel and saw the citadel for the first time. I’m not an imaginative man. I’m not prone to fancies. But the jagged ramparts of this dead city made my skin crawl. It felt like someone was watching our approach. A sardonic, mocking intelligence old as humanity itself.
I radioed the driver. I told him not to stop until we reached the mine.
The train slowly crossed the valley floor. We stood in silence and contemplated the ancient citadel as it passed by.
The valley narrowed, and we found ourselves travelling slowly down a high ravine. Walls so tight and sheer the floor of the canyon would receive a few minutes of sunlight each day then lapse into twilight.
I looked up. A narrow strip of evening stars overhead.
The locomotive slowed to a stop. The engine cut off. Sudden silence.
‘This is it,’ radioed the driver. ‘This is the mine.’
I jumped from the wagon and walked alongside the track.
At first it seemed we had a reached a dead end. The tight ravine terminated in a sheer cliff wall. But when I reached the front of the locomotive I saw a wide tunnel mouth arched by a concrete buttress. No mine buildings, no machinery. Just a tunnel bored in bedrock.
The railroad forked at the tunnel entrance. Multiple lengths of track headed into shadow.
I told the men to remain on board the train. I took a torch and explored the mine tunnel.
My flashlight beam played over ore wagons, box cars and carriages gathering dust. Abandoned rolling stock.
I followed the tracks into darkness.
The tunnel was two hundred yards long. It opened into a wide cavern. Archways led into darkness.
An object like a thick tree-trunk draped in heavy canvas lay on the cavern floor. I dragged the tarpaulin aside. A Scud-B missile. The service panels had been removed. It had been gutted for parts. The guidance system was gone. The fuel tanks and turbopumps were crusted with leaked oxidiser and kerosene.
I wasn’t remotely surprised to discover a neglected weapon. Iraq was a militarised state. Everything had a dual purpose. Every aspect of life, on some level, served Saddam’s imperial ambition. Universities churned out intelligence officers. Car plants serviced tanks and milled bombs. I already knew that the mining industry had been structured to manufacture chemical weapons. The discovery that the rail network had been used to hide missile batteries in crude silos during Desert Storm was entirely unremarkable.
I gave orders. Check the Scud. Make sure the tanks were dry. Detach the warhead. Remove the impact and proximity fuses. Drag the payload out of the cavern. Roll the body of the missile aside.
I radioed the convoy. I asked for a situation report. They had lost two vehicles during their journey across the desert. A couple of APCs sank into the sand. They had been stripped of equipment and abandoned. The remaining vehicles were approaching the valley entrance.
I walked from the mine tunnel, along the length of the high ravine to the valley. Night had fallen. I flagged my flashlight back and forth as the convoy approached, kicking up a moonlit dust cloud.
The trucks and jeeps came to a halt. I suggested we camp in the citadel ruins. The men refused. Monumental walls, towers and ramparts lit by cold starlight. They declared they would rather die than go near the place. I was secretly relieved. The ruins filled me with an unaccountable dread.
I ordered the men to make camp. They unloaded equipment on a stretch of open ground. They covered their tents and vehicles in camouflage nets.
I returned to the mine tunnel. Four of my men had released lock bolts and removed the Scud nose cone. They improvised a sling from a couple of field jackets. They carried the warhead from the cavern and dumped it in a freight wagon.
The locomotive rumbled to life. It slowly advanced. The Spektr tail fin scraped the tunnel arch, bringing down a shower of rock chips and stone dust.
The driver made use of double track and points to uncouple the locomotive, back up, and shunt Spektr into the cavern.
I had the men set up battery lights against the cavern walls. The orbiter sat at the centre of the wide chamber, ringed by light.
I had the men bring tools. I was anxious to open the scorched space vehicle and find what lay inside.
My first task was to conduct a visual survey of the craft. I climbed a step ladder and examined the tail section. The rudder was broken. The main engine cones were crushed. There was a big gash in the hull. Quartz-fibre heat-tiles ripped away, steel skin peeled back revealing the engine bay and combustion chambers. I powered up a video camera and leant into the compartment. Zoom and pan. Orbital manoeuvre exhausts. Pipe work and clusters of spherical fuel tanks. Plenty of sand. Plenty of heat damage.
I told the men to carefully drill the tanks and purge any liquid propellant that might remain. The craft appeared to be in the same state as the Scud. Broken and depleted. Any volatile rocket fuel, liquid hydrogen or nitrogen-tetroxide, long since leeched away. But I didn’t want to risk an explosion if we had to cut our way inside with oxyacetylene gear.
I knew there would likely be pyrotechnic charges bedded in the frame of the side hatch to enable an occupant to blow the door, but they were not accessible from outside and couldn’t be disarmed.
I propped the ladder against the craft and climbed onto the hull. I walked from tail to cockpit.
I crouched and ran my hands over the heat tiles, tried to find a seam which might indicate some kind of payload bay, but it was sealed tight.
I climbed from the vehicle and filmed the belly of the craft. I filmed the keel in close-up. The ablative tiles that covered the keel like fish scales had been cooked by unimaginable heat. They had melted to a strange, petroleum sheen.
The nose of the orbiter hung over the edge of the wagon. I filmed the hydraulic stump of the nose gear.
Space debris often falls in this part of the world. Most Russian capsules re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere over Egypt, passing over Iraq following a controlled trajectory that will allow them to touch down in the steppes of Kazakhstan. Radar records indicated Spektr followed a steep, ballistic trajectory. It suggested the craft was guided by an automated system struggling to control a vehicle in free-fall. Air-brakes unfolded and were instantly torn away. Ailerons extended to increase drag and shrivelled in fierce re-entry heat. As the craft blazed through the mesosphere any astronaut aboard would have been subjected to lethal G-force. If they were alive when Spektr left orbit, they were certainly dead by the time the vehicle broke the cloud-deck.
Spektr slowed two kilometres from impact. Maybe a drag chute had been released. Maybe braking rockets fired in the nose to decelerate the craft. The undercarriage deployed as part of a pre-programmed landing sequence. Then the super-hot vehicle ploughed into the desert and buried itself in the sand.
A lost Russian spacecraft. It should have been headline news. It should have mobilised armies.
And there was the orbiter itself. The very fact of its existence. The Russians built a couple of shuttle prototypes but didn’t fly a single manned mission. The creation of the Spektr vehicle suggested a shadow space programme of astonishing ambition and sophistication had successfully eluded Western intelligence agencies.
I examined the crew access hatch. It was in the starboard side of the craft behind the cockpit. No obvious door release. Smooth heat tiles. No handle.
The hatch was circular. It was surrounded by a metal ridge. The metal had melted during the heat of re-entry and smeared in rivulets like candle wax. Some kind of docking collar. An umbilicus rim and capture latches. Spektr had not been alone in space. It had been tethered to a companio
n vehicle or high-orbit installation.
More questions than answers. I was anxious to open the hatch and explore the interior of the craft, but I received terse radio instructions that Spektr was to remain sealed until Koell himself was present. I was told to post sentries, make sure none of my men approached the vehicle.
Koell gave me desert coordinates. He ordered me to meet his plane.
The designated landing site was twenty miles from the valley entrance. A stretch of waste ground firm enough to be used as a crude airstrip.
My driver was asleep in a Jeep. I shook him awake.
We rode through the rail tunnel and into the desert. We parked in the middle of vast nothing. We created an improvised landing strip: drove flag-stakes into the ground and kicked aside rocks.
We waited. Dawn was breaking. I scanned the horizon with binoculars.
I was anxious to see the plane. If it was an Iraqi military flight, one of Saddam’s ageing Ilyushins, then it had probably flown from Baghdad and I might still, at some level, be answerable to Saddam’s command apparatus. If the plane was a modern, Western aircraft, then it would likely have originated from one of the Persian Gulf Emirates, south-west of Dubai. Clandestine hubs favoured by NSA and CIA black ops. Proof I had ceased to work for the Iraqi government and had a new paymaster, an intelligence entity that regarded this regional war as a trivial distraction from the pursuit of its own dark purpose.
It came from the east. The plane flew low. A dot that slowly resolved into the bulky silhouette of a turboprop freighter. A Fairchild Provider. Silver, with Red Cross markings. A CIA work-horse. The type of cargo-lift that flew resupply missions and defoliation runs in Vietnam.
The plane circled and swooped to land.
I crouched behind the Jeep alongside my driver and covered my ears. The back-wash of the plane threw out tornadoes of sand and grit.
Engine noise diminished to a drone. I stood and shook sand from my hair, slapped dust from my clothes. The plane taxied and came to a standstill.
A whine of hydraulics as the loading ramp descended, folded down like a castle drawbridge. Aircrew got out and checked tyres.
Two Land Rovers rolled out of the ribbed cargo bay. Brand new, fully equipped, sprayed desert drab.
The Land Rovers drew up to our Jeep. A man got out. I felt a cool wash of air-conditioning as he opened the door. He wore expensive hiking gear. I didn’t recognise brand names but his boots and sunglasses were fresh out of the box.
He shook my hand.
‘Koell.’
‘Jabril.’
Cheerful, but distant. The kind of man that would maintain a pleasant smile as he drove a knife into your belly.
‘Care to lead the way?’
We climbed in our Jeep and retraced our tyre tracks back towards the ravine.
I turned in my seat. Koell’s Land Rover behind us. He smiled. He waved. His driver chewed gum and blanked us with wraparound shades.
Our little convoy kicked up a dust storm as it lurched across the dunes.
We drove into the rail tunnel. Engine roar amplified by tight tunnel walls. Bright lights behind us. Halogens mounted on the Land Rover grille, trained on our backs like searchlights.
We emerged into the valley. We shielded our eyes from sudden sun. We drove past the citadel and parked in front of our camp.
Koell and his men climbed from their Land Rovers. His team lit cigarettes. They talked among themselves. They spoke Russian.
‘Who are these men?’ I asked. ‘I assumed you would bring Americans.’
He grinned.
‘The nation-state is a rather antique concept, don’t you think? These days we outsource our killing.’
Koell paid no attention to the extraordinary ruins on the other side of the valley floor.
‘Show me Spektr.’
I led him through the narrow ravine. We walked beside the railroad. He didn’t talk. He didn’t look around. He strode towards the mine tunnel with unwavering focus.
We entered the mine. We walked the length of the wide passageway, past carriages and wagons, until we reached the cavern.
‘Good God.’
Koell walked a full circuit of the Spektr craft. He was enraptured. He reached up and stroked heat tiles.
‘Pilotitruemyy Korabl-Perekhvatchik,’ he murmured.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘The Manned Interceptor Spacecraft. A crude space fighter. The US had similar plans during the eighties, but they didn’t progress further than a few balsa models.
‘Spektr was just a rumour. A daydream. Brain-child of a few old Soviet hard-liners who want to recapture the glory days of the Sputnik era and restore national pride. Nobody believed the Spektr project progressed further than a blueprint. Certainly never flew. But here she is.’
Koell unzipped his backpack and handed me a file. A heavy document bundle with a classified stamp on the cover. A grave miscalculation on his part. It didn’t matter that I could speak three languages. He looked at a man like me, a bearded Iraqi in ill-fitting fatigues, and saw an ignorant camel-jockey. But I had worked for intelligence agencies my entire life. I knew, the moment he handed me confidential material, that I and my men would be killed once Koell no longer had a use for us. His thugs were outnumbered but they were hardened killers and I suspected they would prevail in a fire-fight.
I would be ready to flee at a moment’s notice.
I spread my jacket, sat cross-legged on the cavern floor and thumbed through the dossier. Koell stood over me.
‘What’s this?’
A blurred monochrome shot. A gargantuan cylindrical object, like a grain silo, on a shrouded rail car.
‘A Proton-K launcher outside the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Back in the nineties, during the construction phase of the Mir space station, Western intelligence agencies monitored a parallel series of rocket launches conducted in great secrecy. Every single member of staff at the cosmodrome, from the most highly skilled technician to the lowliest railroad worker, would quit their post during these launch cycles and be replaced by a shadow team trained elsewhere. Each flight involved heavily encrypted telemetry traffic between the launch vehicle and mission control, Karlingrad. See that Proton booster? The bulge at the top? That’s not a standard design for a Soyuz launch vehicle. There is something else inside, something unusual. Maybe Spektr. Perhaps, as the final stage of the Proton blasted free of the atmosphere, fairings were jettisoned and the orbiter drifted free. Fired into high orbit and completed its ascent.’
The next picture showed a ragged structure floating in deep darkness. Twisted antennae. Torn thermal blankets. Buckled solar panels like ripped sails.
‘What’s this?’
‘Nobody knows. Some kind of deep-space installation parked in a graveyard orbit. The habitation modules are reminiscent of Mir, but the overall configuration is different. A big docking node. Substantial solar array.
‘The installation was detected by NORAD a couple of years back. They were tracking space debris. They picked up something big, tumbling in high orbit. Mass of about three hundred tons. No attitude control, no active guidance, but it seems to retain some residual power. The station transmits a weird radio signal. A strange ticking sound, night and day. It never stops.’
‘It’s a wreck.’
‘It’s totally trashed. There seems to have been some kind of catastrophic event. Explosive decompression. A fire. A meteor strike. Who knows? The station is in free drift, about forty-thousand kilometres out. The habitation modules are little more than a loose aggregate of wreckage, surrounded by a debris field miles wide. Chunks of wreckage re-enter the atmosphere now and again. Most burn up. Some fall in the sea. Some hit land.
‘I’m guessing Spektr was a supply vehicle. It’s one of the few components to make it back to Earth intact. It must have been floating up there for years, drifting in a gradually decaying orbit. It re-entered the atmosphere. The gravity shift must have tripped some kind of inertial con
trol in the cockpit. Tweaked some gyros. A bunch of automated guidance systems booted up. They triggered a retro-burn and tried to engineer a controlled descent.’
‘But what was it for? This space station. Why was it built?’
‘No one knows. Soviet military. Black ops. That much is obvious. Denied and disowned by subsequent Russian governments. I get the impression the construction of this installation was so secret, so compartmentalised, even the current Russian high command don’t know fully understand why it was built. Some kind of microgravity lab, at a guess. Or maybe some kind of weapons platform. All the pieces that have fallen to Earth so far have shown traces of a strange pathogen, some kind of parasite.’
‘Is that what this is about? You’re chasing some kind of bio-weapon? You want to harvest the virus?’
Koell reached up and placed a hand on the airlock hatch.
‘I suspect this spacecraft returned from space carrying a microscopic occupant,’ he said. ‘It’s dormant but alive. And it’s anxious to make our acquaintance.’
Resurrection
The temple entrance. Lucy knelt by the quad bike and watched the sky.
Stars winked out. Darkness spread from the east. The moon eclipsed by scudding cloud.
‘What can you see?’ asked Lucy.
Amanda surveyed the temple ruins through the SIMRAD scope. A rising wind blew dust across avenues and colonnades like drifting smoke.
‘Visibility is dropping by the minute. Big-ass sandstorm heading our way. We better sit tight for the next couple of hours. It’s going to get nasty.’
‘Probably blow over by dawn,’ said Lucy.
‘We should be back in Baghdad right now,’ said Voss. ‘We should be popping champagne.’
‘Yeah. Well. It went bad. Shit happens.’
‘We have Jabril’s virus. Some kind of doomsday weapon. Imagine how much that would fetch on the open market. Tens, hundreds of millions.’
‘If we offered that shit to the Agency all we would get is a bullet in the base of the skull. They don’t like loose ends.’