Adam Baker - Juggernaut

‘Gaunt?’

‘He had a good lawyer.’

Gaunt fetched food from the terminal commissary, last in the queue as the canteen closed for the night. Enchiladas boxed in styrofoam. He walked back along the service road. The moonlit airfield was silent and still. Curfew. No flights until sunrise.

He entered the hangar side door. Darkness.

‘Hey. Raph. Chow time.’

His voice echoed through the vaulted storeroom.

He walked to a pool of light. Stacked crates for a table. A bottle of bourbon and a checkers board.

‘Raph?’

One of Raphael’s shitty Balmoral cigars lay smouldering on the concrete floor.

Gaunt put the food on the table, drew his Colt and quickly backed into shadow.

He slid along the hangar wall. He took a Maglite from his pocket.

The guard dog was dead. Sasha. Head on a paw like she had fallen asleep. Right eye blown out. Someone threw jerky and shot her in the face as she chewed.

He slid back along the wall and found the side door. Closed and padlocked. Someone shut him in.

Gaunt crouched. An entire battalion quarter of a mile away in the terminal building. Must be some way to raise the alarm.

He fired four shots at the roof. Metallic roar. Muzzle-flash lit the hangar like lightning.

He stood panting in the dark. Let it be gangsters. Some militia come to rip-off his stock.

His old commanding officer always said: ‘Don’t let religious fucks take you hostage.’ He showed the platoon execution footage. An al-Qaeda video. Shitty jihadi music. Mujahideen council logo. Guys wearing bandoliers and hoods. They stood behind some poor bastard in an orange jumpsuit. He looked drugged, emaciated. ‘ Allahu Akbar .’ One of the captors un-sheathed a knife, gripped the man’s head and sawed through his neck. The dying man squealed like a pig. ‘Fucking Abdul motherfuckers. Fucking savages. Go down fighting, gentlemen. Do not let this happen to you.’

Gaunt looked across the hangar. His desk. The lamp cast a small cone of light. His phone lay on top of a Playboy .

He crept towards the desk. He snatched the phone and ran into shadow. He crouched against crates. The laminate security pass round his neck had the guardhouse number printed on the reverse. He thumbed the keypad.

He held the phone to his ear. Dial tone. Someone jammed a stun baton in the small of his back and shocked him paralytic.

They tied him to folding chair with plastic tuff-ties. Two buzz-cut goons and a young guy in a blazer.

‘Where’s Raphael?’ asked Gaunt.

‘I believe one of my colleagues is keeping him company.’

The guy examined a pallet of boxes. He lifted a cardboard flap. A novelty alarm clock. A white plastic mosque. He pressed a minaret. A squeak of tinny Arabian music. He threw the clock aside without comment.

The guy sat on a crate. Preppy. Slicked hair, polished loafers. Thin, precise, reptilian. He read one of Gaunt’s pamphlets.

‘ Falcon Logistics. A leading international logistics corporation with extensive experience assisting government and non-government agencies with the supply of defence matériel. Is this the scope of your ambition? Scratching a living, war zone to war zone, selling bullets by the handful to child soldiers, cartels, Shi’ite death squads?’

‘Building contacts.’

The guy held up Gaunt’s academy ring. Fourteen-carat gold. Fire agate.

‘You must be a little frustrated at your current situation.’

‘I wanted to work for myself.’

‘Fallujah. Operation Vigilante Resolve.’

‘I was innocent.’

‘You were acquitted of the rape charge. The summary court martial found you guilty of maltreatment towards detainees and dereliction of duty. You lost two ranks and four months’ pay. You received an administrative discharge soon after.’

Gaunt didn’t reply.

‘I understand. You dedicated your life to the Corps. You expected some kind of affirmation, some kind of reward. Instead, here you are, orphaned and alone.’

‘I’m doing okay.’

Gaunt’s parents thought he was still in the Marines. They sent letters. They watched for him on TV. Said they were proud of the way he and his boys were confronting America’s enemies overseas.

‘My name is Koell. Have you seen me before?’

‘Once. At the Rasheed.’

‘Then you know who I am.’

Gaunt and Raphael had been sipping umbrella drinks in the Scheherazade Bar.

‘Who’s the kid with the phone?’ asked Gaunt.

Koell was sitting alone by the pool, talking into a sat phone, shielding his mouth in case someone read his lips.

‘Black ops.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ve seen his kind before. I was out in Liberia. This was years back. Good times. We had a workshop at the edge of Monrovia. Gangs would bring fucked up Landcruisers. We would weld a heavy weapons mount, turn them into battle-wagons. They paid us in uncut diamonds.

‘One day this kid from a missionary station drops by and tells me he has something to sell. Said it came down in a mangrove swamp one night. A falling star. Lit up the sky. Manmade. Some kind of engine pod. A spherical fuel tank with isolator valves. Thing was half melted. I told him I would swing by in a few days.

‘The station was in Grand Bassa. Rainforest. Shitty roads. I was delivering a truckload of .50 cal to some local warlord. You know the type. Mirror shades. Pimp jewellery. All swagger. Fucking idiot.

‘I drove to the missionary station on the way back. I liked the kid. I liked the nuns. I heard a bunch of them had fallen ill. I was going to take them cigarettes from the city. Good currency. They could use them to trade.

‘Call it a sixth sense. I got halfway up the hill road then pulled over. Something not right. Too quiet. No birds.

‘I headed up the road on foot. Watched from the jungle. I don’t know what happened up there but it was major. The station was hidden beneath a geodesic dome. Choppers parked in the compound. There were guys in white biohazard suits.

‘I got the hell out of there and drove back to town. I asked around. Nobody wanted to talk about the mission station. Bad hoodoo. But I found a French consulate official with a taste for liquor and loosened his tongue.

‘There were these guys. White guys. They turned up in bad times. Kenya, during a Marburg outbreak; Burundi, during a bunch of Ebola cases. They spoke pretty good English but Pierre thought they were Russian. They used to show up during the sixties and seventies posing as tourists, journalists, Médecins Sans Frontières. But they were from Vektor. The weapons acquisition arm of Biopreparat, the Soviet biological warfare programme. Anytime there was an outbreak of an emergent disease, something new and lethal gestating in deep jungle, these guys showed up like the horsemen of the apocalypse. Procurement teams masquerading as humanitarian aid. Moving through jungle hospitals like ministering angels, collecting biopsy swabs and spinal fluid samples for delivery to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch.

‘After the collapse of communism half these guys were out of a job. Highly skilled bio-weapon experts. PhDs in pharmacology. Spent their lives developing lethal psychotropic and neurotropic agents. Reduced to driving taxis and selling flowers in the street. These guys were party elite. They lived in the secret cities of the Soviet rustbelt. They were used to luxury dachas and Zil limousines. One by one they disappeared. Showed up in Libya, Syria, trying to sell VX neurotoxin. A gang of them got busted cooking methamphetamine in Mexico. The cream of the crop got picked up by the US. Given new names, a fuck-ton of cash, and sent to work at Fort Detrick.

‘That’s the scary part. They’re still out there. Vektor. The men, the infrastructure. Cut loose. Sometimes freelance. They work for the Agency or private biotech, chasing their own agenda. Heard they showed up in Kosovo looking for body parts. Kidneys for rich fucks on dialysis. Used the POW camps as an organ bank. Hang around any of these shithole countries long enough you’ll see the same planes time and again. Black charters. Antonovs. Ilyushins. They change livery and tail numbers, but it’s always the same crews.