Adam Baker - Juggernaut

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 control 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.’

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.’

‘I’m going after Gaunt,’ said Amanda. ‘The dumb fuck is out there somewhere. No food, no water. He’s crouched behind a wall right now, pissing his pants. I’m going to bring him in. If he can’t get the chopper in the air, we blow his fucking brains out.’

‘He might have left the valley,’ said Voss. ‘He might be walking home.’

‘I strung a wire between the guard towers this afternoon. Rigged a trip-flare. It hasn’t popped. He’s probably still here.’

Amanda checked her rifle chamber. She checked the magazine. She tied her hair in a ponytail and pulled sand goggles over her head.

‘Wear this.’ Voss handed her Toon’s blue do-rag. She tied it over her face and mouth. She put on her Stetson and pulled the brim low.

Lucy gave her Raphael’s machete. She tucked it in her belt.

‘Sure you don’t want me to come along?’ asked Lucy.

‘I’ve got night-vision. You haven’t.’

Brief embrace.

‘See you later, babe.’

Amanda headed into darkness.

Lucy buttoned her prairie coat to the neck and turned up the collar. She tied a shemagh scarf round her face.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Voss.

‘The choppers. They each had an emergency radio. A UHF beacon. Probably fucked but I have to know for sure.’

‘Be okay on your own?’

‘Sit tight. Someone has to stay with Jabril. Easy on the trigger, okay? Don’t shoot us coming back in.’

‘Catch you later, boss.’

Gaunt stood at the foot of the crypt stairwell. He looked up. Furls of sand blown like squalling rain.

They used to call him Cherry Boy. No combat experience. The squad under his command treated him with contempt.

Sitting on the double bench seats of an oven-hot APC, jolting through the streets of Fallujah. Gaunt reiterated the mission.

‘Ali Hassan. Possible links with Iranian intelligence. Wife. Five daughters. Standard knock and announce. We do not expect resistance.’

Private Larsen, blond, ex-quarterback, leaned forward and grabbed Gaunt by the neck of his ballistic vest.

‘You just hang back and let us do our thing, all right, Lieutenant? You fuck up, you get any of us killed, I will personally frag your fucking ass, understand?’

A humiliating memory.

Gaunt twisted the West Point cadet ring round his finger.

Koell offered him meaning. The man was little more than a distorted, metallic sat-com voice, but he held the promise of world-shaping intrigue. He could lead Gaunt through the looking-glass into a clandestine realm.