by Adam Baker
They entered the ravine. The moon shone high overhead. They walked along the track. Voss rode the quad. Motor noise echoed off high canyon walls.
A glint.
Lucy stooped. A scrap of foil in the sand. She turned it over in gloved fingers. A blister strip of pills. Dexedrine. UCB Pharma: an American brand.
‘Gaunt must be running ahead of us.’
They reached the tunnel entrance. A high arch in a rock face, blocked with a jumble of planks, beams and sacking.
‘The mine,’ said Jabril. ‘This tunnel leads to a central cavern.’
‘And Spektr?’
‘Yes.’
Lucy stepped over planks. She shone her flashlight into the dark.
‘It’s down there,’ said Jabril. ‘The locomotive. It’s parked in the tunnel, about a hundred yards in.’
Lucy turned to Amanda and Voss.
‘You two stay here. Cover our backs.’
A wide, high tunnel. Double rails. A rubble conveyor corroded to scrap.
Lucy inspected the fissured, limestone walls. Steel crossbars and chock-jacks reinforced slabs of rock that threatened to slough from the roof.
She raked her fingers across the wall. She held a limestone shard between her fingers and crumbled it to powder.
‘This shit could collapse any moment. I’m frightened to cough.’
Jabril led her deeper into the tunnel. Boots crunched on ballast. He held a blue cyalume above his head.
‘Cold as a tomb,’ muttered Lucy, buttoning her coat. ‘Hey. Jabril. Let me ask you something. That story you told us in your prison cell. All bullshit, yeah?’
‘Every word.’
‘So how did you lose your arm?’
He ignored the question.
‘Here she is.’
A massive locomotive. Lucy shone her barrel light over the rust-streaked prow.
‘Jesus. Big as a fucking battleship. Looks like it has been to hell and back.’
‘It weighs about two hundred and fifty tons.’
‘What are these passenger cars?’
‘Relics,’ said Jabril. ‘Saddam ordered a replica of the Orient Express. He wanted to travel the country in style. Too afraid to use it, of course. Too frightened of assassination. A couple of carriages must have been dumped in this tunnel years ago. Been here way longer than the engine. Left to rot.’
‘The train. Will it run?’
‘Why not? It’s been sitting in this tunnel gathering dust. It hasn’t been exposed to the weather. It looks undamaged. The batteries might need a charge. Otherwise it is ready to go.’
Lucy clasped grab-rails and hauled herself up the side of the great locomotive to the walkway. She held out a hand and helped Jabril climb the ladder.
She tried the cab door. Locked. She chambered her Glock.
‘Stand back,’ she told Jabril.
She shielded her eyes. She blew out the lock. The gunshot echoed round the tunnel walls.
She drew back the slide door and entered the cab.
A cursory glance at the circuit breaker panel and engineer’s console.
A dead man on the plate floor. Lucy crouched beside him.
‘Syrian rail crew,’ said Jabril.
Desiccated. Mummified. The man wore a boiler suit. The folds of the suit deflated round skeletal limbs.
A neat bullet hole in his temple. Muzzle burn. An old Makarov pistol in his hand.
Lucy ejected the magazine and checked the corroded weapon. The slide was jammed rigid.
‘Locked himself inside and blew his brains out,’ murmured Lucy. ‘Can’t blame the guy. Guess he wanted to stay dead.’
Amanda and Voss stood at the tunnel mouth. Voss hauled planks aside to allow the quad bike to drive into the tunnel.
Amanda raised her rifle. She scanned the high ravine behind them with her nightscope.
‘Contact?’ asked Voss.
‘Nothing yet.’
They pulled planks and beams back in place, barricading themselves inside the mine entrance.
Amanda unfolded the bipod of her rifle and rested it on jumbled planks.
Voss took the SAW from the quad trailer. He clipped a fresh belt into the receiver and laid it on an oil drum.
‘Those fucks from the citadel will be heading our way sooner or later,’ said Amanda. ‘They move slow, but they are on their way. That locomotive better work. If we have to retrace our steps, it will be the fight of our lives.’
Containment Four
Gaunt entered the second containment. Overhead strobes flashed a red contamination warning.
Mirrored steel counters. Toppled swivel chairs. Milling machines. A centrifuge. An electron microscope.
Gaunt pictured men at work. Test tubes and Petri dishes. Technicians in white hazmat suits, arms thrust inside the thick handling gloves of hermetic containment boxes. The intellectual myopia of virologists struggling to solve the practical problems of encapsulation and dispersal, wilfully blind to the monstrous doomsday weapon they were helping to create.
He crouched and checked smashed computer shells. Hard drives ripped out. Ring binders stripped of notes.
Somebody wanted to obliterate all trace of research. They systematically stripped the lab before the contamination alert locked it tight.
Splintered glassware, culture dishes and fermentation vials, crunched underfoot.
He opened a freezer door. Ice smoke. Body parts preserved in storage jars.
He took a jar from a shelf. A section of spine.
Another jar on the shelf. A severed head floating in formaldehyde. A young man, eyes half open, lips parted, quizzical expression.
Eyelids flickered. Jaw twitch.
Gaunt jumped back. He dropped the jar in his hand. Glass smashed. Formaldehyde splashed his boots. The vertebrae lay on the plate floor and slowly curled.
More laptop interrogation footage.
Koell jolted Ignatiev awake with a second shot in the arm.
‘Just kill me.’
‘Earn it.’
‘I’ve told you everything.’
‘Tell me about the refinement process. You brought infected specimens to the necropsy room. You cut them up. What then? How did you amplify the virus?’
‘Naturally, the primary purpose of the human field trials was to assess the pathology of the parasitic illness, to chart speed of infection, latency period, resistance to antibiotics. The usual tests that would be performed on any emerging pathogen. We also wanted to refine the disease. We wanted to capture the strongest, most lethal concentration we could distil. The best way to achieve that goal was to incubate the virus in a living host.’
‘You’ve done this before?’
‘Yes. During my time at Vektor. We were working with Ebola. Our acquisition team had secured samples during a virulent outbreak in the Republic of Congo. They were nominally UNHCO personnel on site to coordinate emergency relief, but in reality they were senior members of Biopreperat.
‘Swabs were sent to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch and we began to culture the virus in our level-four lab in the basement of the Koltsovo Health Institute, Siberia. We conducted exposure trials on guinea pigs and rats.
‘One of our support technicians, a young man named Karpov, was accidentally exposed to the virus while fixing the air-filtration system. He was working on a wall vent in one of the containment labs. He was tired. He was careless. He punctured his glove with a screwdriver as he opened an exhaust filter and cut open his hand. He quickly fell ill. We did what we could. Made every effort to treat the man. We had antiserum flown from the Ministry of Defence in Zagorsk. We dosed him with ribavirin and interferon. But his condition deteriorated.
‘He lasted two weeks. The disease liquefied his internal organs. He bled from his eyes, nipples, anus. We gave him transfusions, tried to keep enough blood in his veins to maintain circulation.
‘Escalating brain damage. A PhD in virology reduced to an imbecile. We kept him in a chemically induced coma, partly for his comf
ort, but mostly to silence his idiot grunts and moans.
‘The moment he was dead, his body was transported to our necropsy room. We harvested as much as we could. The samples of virus we drew from his lungs and liver were far more virulent than the original Congo strain. The process of incubating the disease in a live human host had somehow refined the pathogen and made it more aggressive.
‘Karpov’s body was soaked in chloramine and sealed in a steel box. I attended the funeral. As soon as the priest had finished his oration, a truck reversed to the graveside and smothered the coffin in concrete.’
‘We stopped work on the Congo strain of the virus the next day. We immediately began to study and weaponise the samples taken from Karpov. The new strain was named Ebola-K, in honour of its host. It was one of the most lethal pathogens we had in our vault.
‘The samples should have been destroyed. If Vektor complied with subsequent arms limitation treaties, their vast bank of bio-weapons would have been consigned to the furnace. But somehow I doubt it. I suspect Ebola-K remains in deep storage, frozen in nitrogen, waiting for the day it becomes tactically advantageous to decimate an enemy population.
‘That is the process we set in motion in the Western Desert. Human amplification.
‘We requisitioned twenty prisoners and kept them penned in a couple of freight containers deep within the mine. We planned to infect each man and watch the virus progress to full term. Then, when their blood and internal organs were rich with the viral load, we would dissect their bodies in an attempt to isolate and refine the pathogen.
‘The second containment would act as our factory floor. The virus could be freeze dried and milled to a powder. Then each particle could be electrostatically coated with a polymer shell that would protect it from the degrading effects of sunlight and extreme temperature fluctuation.’
‘Can this parasite sustain life outside a human?’
‘No. It will always seek out a host.’
‘How does our man get inside Lab Three?’ asked Koell.
‘There’s no point trying to shoot your way through the door. It’s inch-thick steel and ballistic glass.’
‘Key code?’
‘Automatically locked out the moment the contamination alert was tripped. Your man will need to bypass the mechanism entirely.’
The third containment. A steel door with a porthole.
Gaunt took a Bosch drill from his backpack. Compact, like an electric toothbrush.
He drilled out the lock panel. He levered the keypad. He stripped wires and shorted the mechanism. Crack. Spark. Magnetic bolts disengaged. He cranked handles and pulled the door open.
Blast of hot, humid air.
Glowing storage vats like fish tanks. Incubators. Gaunt wiped condensation. Arms. A torso. Sections of spine.
Sweat collected inside Gaunt’s gas mask. He shook his head, blinked perspiration from his eyes.
‘Lab Three was our main incubation chamber. There are tanks. Vats. Human body parts suspended in a rich growth medium. Synthetic plasmas. We called them milk shakes.’
‘And the result?’
‘You can’t farm this material. It will not thrive under artificial conditions. It will only exist in symbiosis with a living, thinking host.’
‘How many test subjects did you use for the terminal trials?’
‘All of them. Then we ordered twenty more.’
‘There will be no come-backs for the programme?’
‘We infected every prisoner with this disease. They must be long dead by now. The soldiers that escorted them from southern internment camps were given plates of food, and shot in the back of the head as they ate. Thousands of young men were killed in this war. A generation wiped out. Entire platoons missing in action, shovelled into mass graves in some god-forsaken corner of the desert. The men that died in that valley will never be traced.’
‘It all went as planned?’
‘At first the prisoners were docile. They were kept corralled in freight containers. Bare enclosures with a single shit-bucket. The containers had been carried into the mine by crane truck and dumped at the end of a wide tunnel.
‘We subjected the prisoners to long hours of darkness, then sudden blinding light. We played rock music and white noise. Petty torments to keep them disoriented.
‘We gave them basic food and water. The men assumed they were being kept for some kind of work detail. It was not uncommon for deserters and criminals to be used for hazardous operations such as mine clearance or the deactivation of unstable munitions.
‘Once we were done with Hassim we selected our next test subject.
‘I asked Jabril, the Iraqi intelligence officer running the camp, to make the selection. He made all our selections. He seemed to enjoy the process.
‘We had welded bars at the entrance of each freight container. He would stand in front of these makeshift pens and observe the prisoners, enjoy the power of life and death. It was as if he was visiting a seafood restaurant and choosing a lobster from a tank.
‘Number eight. I don’t know his name. He was the first to be chosen. We escorted him to Lab One. He began to struggle and shout as he entered the lab and saw the necropsy table and surgical instruments laid out. The sound of his screams echoed down nearby tunnels. His companions heard the commotion.
‘It took six men to drag him to the table and strap him down. We introduced the parasite into his bloodstream by subcutaneous injection and monitored the spread of infection.
‘After that, we adopted a different routine each time we removed a test subject from the cells. We discovered, among the clutter of cuffs, chains and other prison equipment Jabril had requested from his contacts in the secret police, that we had been supplied with a tranquilliser pole. A crude spear with a hypodermic at the end. The kind of device zookeepers push through the bars of a cage to sedate a dangerous animal. It enabled us to drug our chosen subject with a Thorazine and Largactil cocktail, and remove him from their freight container cell with very little resistance. The doped prisoner would then be cuffed. We would pull a hood over his head. Our subjects were semi-conscious. Docile, but responsive to commands. Much easier to manage.’
‘The men in the cells. Did they try to break out?’
‘There was a minor rebellion. Jabril had been instructed to select a fresh test subject. The guards sedated his chosen candidate. When they unchained the pen, nine prisoners rushed the guards. The prisoners were beaten back with rifle butts.
‘Jabril later became concerned that the prisoners might begin to whisper between the bars, appeal for help from the younger, more impressionable guards. He assigned older men to watch over the cells, thuggish brutes who regarded the prisoners with boredom and contempt.
‘We checked the empty shipping containers before the second consignment of prisoners arrived. We discovered the previous group had scratched messages warning future inmates that they were condemned men and should seek any means of escape. Jabril ordered the messages be gouged until they were unreadable.
‘I did my best to accommodate Jabril. I let him indulge his sadistic inclinations. I felt a profound distaste for the man but he was useful. He was a senior member of the Iraqi intelligence service. The men followed his orders without question. Even though we heard radio reports that Baghdad had fallen and Saddam had been overthrown, he still commanded fear. And the prisoners were abattoir cattle. They were selected to die. Specimens to be euthanised, then dissected. If we had begun to interact with them, cared for their welfare, it might have proved . . . counter-productive.
‘Jabril fell in love with his role as overseer. Theoretically, he was responsible for the upkeep of the entire camp, for marshalling the troops, mounting patrols, and manning a defensive perimeter. He was tasked with making sure latrine and cooking facilities were maintained. But I always knew where to find him, day or night. He would be standing in front of the prisoner pens, enjoying their fear. He would pace in plain view and sip from a glass of water as they lay par
ched and hungry. He would visit them at night and drag a tin bowl across the bars, to rob them of sleep.
‘Once, I saw him drunk. It was late at night. The men were bivouacked in the tunnels, eating, drinking, playing backgammon. I heard shouts from a remote passageway. Jabril was standing in front of the condemned men. His shirt was off. He was waving an empty bottle, dancing to music only he could hear. I asked what he was doing. He recited those Oppenheimer lines from the Bhagavad Gita. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds . . .”
‘He told the prisoners about the experiments, told them what lay in store once they were selected for treatment. He described the disease. He described the process of dissection. He described the lime pits that would receive their remains, the acid stench of slow-dissolving body fat. I had a couple of my men drag him away. I slapped his face and told him to sober up.’
‘The experiments. Were there any variation in symptoms? Are some men more susceptible than others? Did anyone show signs of natural resistance?’
‘This parasite is a killing machine. It’s not flu. It’s not salmonella. I use terminology like “virus” and “disease” because I don’t know how else to characterise this damn thing. But it is a whole new species. A new and lethal order of life that hasn’t existed on earth before. Antibodies can’t repel this pathogen any more than they can ward off a bullet. None of our test subjects showed the slightest sign of resistance. They all quickly succumbed. Drug treatment had no effect. This disease is a death sentence. There is no reprieve.’
‘Your swipe card. Will it grant access to the fourth containment?’
‘It will get you into the final lab unit. But it won’t open the virus vault.’
Gaunt approached the entrance to Lab Four.
Gaunt took a laminated swipe card from his pocket. Doctor Ignatiev’s Slavic face beneath the plastic glaze.
He entered the key code and swiped the card. He opened the heavy door and stepped through.