Adam Baker - Juggernaut

‘In return for the gold.’

‘We’d treat you fair. You’d get a cut.’

‘How many of you are there?’ asked Jabril.

‘A team of five.’

‘Do you trust them?’

‘With my life.’

‘Wait until your friends lay eyes on a mountain of gold. You will soon see how much their trust is worth.’

Lucy and Amanda rode the expressway towards Baghdad. Suffocating humidity. Rain blattered against the cracked windshield.

Amanda scrunched her Abu Ghraib visitor pass and tossed it from the window. She turned the air-con dial, put her hand over a dash vent until she felt a blast of chill air.

‘Western Desert,’ said Amanda. ‘Tough terrain. Bandit country. Peshmergas. Jihadi guerrillas. Fuckheads of every stripe.’

‘Think it’s all right?’ said Lucy. ‘Taking the gold?’

‘It’s dirty money. It’s not going to build a hospital. It’s going to end up in some asshole’s Swiss bank account. Might as well be ours, right?’

‘Yeah.’

Amanda kicked at bullets rolling in the foot well. The Suburban got shot to hell in the previous day’s ambush. AK rounds had penetrated the Kevlar door panels. Gleaming silver mushrooms littered the carpet and seats.

She took an envelope from the glove box. Two new passports. Big gold crest. Canada. Passport/Passeport.

‘We risk our lives every day,’ said Amanda. ‘Sooner or later, our luck will run dry. You keep saying you’re sick of the life, you want to start over. Well, this is it. This is our shot. We could be home free.’

‘Three tons of gold. Can’t be hauled over sand dunes. We need choppers.’

‘Gaunt has a couple of Hueys.’

‘I don’t want to involve Gaunt,’ said Lucy. ‘The guy is bad news.’

‘Who else can we hire? A job like this has to be off the meter.’

‘I guess.’

‘This is our last war,’ said Amanda. ‘We need a retirement plan. We owe it to the guys. We can’t them send them home broke.’

‘Okay,’ said Lucy. ‘Let’s roll the dice.’

Doc ID:575JD3

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08/21/05

MEMORANDUM TO:Project Lead, D.Ops

SUBJECT:Spektr

Colonel,

JABRIL JAMADI has made contact with a team of security contractors operating under the name VANGUARD RISK CONSULTANTS. We believe they are unaware of the SPEKTR project. They are currently seeking helicopter transport to carry them to the Western Desert. This presents an excellent opportunity to secure our objectives at the SPEKTR site. The region of desert between Al Qa’im and Al Hadr is remote and hostile terrain favoured by foreign Jihadists attempting to establish smuggling routes in-country for mortars and surface-to-air missiles. We have yet to determine the level of risk presented by the contamination zone itself. It would be preferable to utilise a deniable back-channel proxy squad, rather than dispatch an Agency fire team.

I respect your reservations regarding the scope of the SPEKTR project, but I would draw your attention to Presidential Directive 39 which instructs the agency to undertake ‘an aggressive programme of foreign intelligence collection, analysis and covert actions’ in our efforts to combat terrorism. The offensive potential of the SPEKTR battle-strain is incontrovertible, and gives us a firm legal mandate in our steps to secure the virus on behalf of the United States.

Jim Gaunt pulled back the hangar door. Open for business. No different from a neighbourhood grocer hosing down the sidewalk and laying out fruit boxes and flowers.

He sipped from a silver thermal mug with Marine wings.

Dawn. Reveille. A plaintive bugle call crackling from loudspeakers. The rain had cleared. Sky bluer than he’d ever known. Wet asphalt would soon burn dry.

The morning delivery. Raphael drove down the airstrip service road. He pulled up in a five-ton flatbed. Russian RGD-5 grenades under tarp.

Gaunt checked his clipboard. Three hundred crates, twenty-four grenades per case. Surplus ordinance shipped from Johannesburg, via the Emirates.

‘ Como estas , baby?’

Raphael. Gaunt’s partner. Each night he slept on a canvas cot at the back of the hangar, shotgun by his side. Hair tied back into a ponytail. Thick moustache. Leather waistcoat. Torso covered in jailhouse tattoos faded lavender with age. He ripped the cellophane from a king-size Balmoral and lit up.

‘Absolutely fucking peachy,’ said Gaunt.

Raphael kept a Rottweiler chained by the door. Sasha. She sat with her blanket and bowl. He teased her with a hunk of jerky. She slavered. She snapped and lunged, pulled against her heavy neck-chain.

Baghdad International Airport.

Bullet-pocked terminal buildings. 86th Airwing bivouacked in a departure lounge, To Dare Mighty Things shield-banner draped to mask a Bollywood mural of Saddam leading his men into battle on a white stallion.

Thirteen-thousand-foot landing strip cratered by cluster bombs. Steady traffic from massive C141 Starlifters . The planes threw tight corkscrew turns as they descended towards the runway, popping starburst flares and chaff in case a ground-fired SA-7 locked on their heat-trail.

Fuel trucks pumped gas.

Loadmasters supervised forklift crews as they removed pallet cargo from vaulted holds. Generators. Water purification equipment. White goods. DHL de-planed sacks of mail and courier packages.

The planes were reloaded with metal coffins and wounded, and dispatched to Ramstein Airbase, Germany.

Gaunt was exiled to the far end of the runway. A low-rent private carrier. His hangar part-blocked by an abandoned twin-prop Sherpa turning to rust on the slipway, like the ghost of old wars.

Gaunt turned his face to the morning sun and breathed the sweet scent of aviation fuel.

‘They revoked our pass, Ese,’ said Raphael.

‘The chit?’

‘Expired. They won’t renew.’

The Provisional Authority had been superseded by the Interim Governing Council. All private contractors had to renegotiate terms.

‘They want us out, Ese. End of the month. Vacate and give them the keys.’

‘I’ll talk to the main office,’ said Gaunt. ‘Try to buy us more time.’

‘I heard there’s a vacant warehouse near the Central Station. We could rent space. Bid for police contracts.’

‘A few helmets, a few flaks. Pocket change. Go down that route and we’ll end up bartering AKs for cows. No. All the big deals are happening here. This is the hub. This is the action.’

‘Ten months, bro. Been here ten months.’

‘Just got to hold our nerve. Everyone else is making out hand over fist. Why not us?’

‘You said we’d get Agency work. You said they were desperate for guys.’

Gaunt had approached an intel analyst at the Al-Rasheed two months ago. The basement sports bar favoured by Central Intelligence document recovery teams sent to scour bombed-out ministry buildings for paperwork and hard drives. The analyst was sitting alone, sipping scotch. Only guy in a shirt and tie. Gaunt took a stool next to him, begged for work, begged for a way in. The guy drained his glass and walked away without saying a word.

‘Like I say. Just got to hold our nerve.’

Gaunt and Raphael unloaded the truck.

Engine revs. An SUV with a damaged muffler. They watched it approach up the service road. An armoured Suburban with heavy ram bars. Scorched, bubbled paint work. Body pocked with bullet strikes. Cracked windshield.