Adam Baker - Juggernaut

‘Tell me about the Hellfire. Is it intact?’

Ignatiev’s voice, tired, defeated: ‘It’s still sealed in the case, ready to fly.’

‘Good.’

‘What was the target site?’ asked Ignatiev. ‘If we delivered the virus, what would you have done with it?’

Long pause.

‘The target was a UN refugee centre outside Mosul,’ said Koell. ‘Inmates call it “New Medina”. Fifteen thousand displaced families in a tent city. No good to anyone. No good to themselves. Blast dispersal. We would wait for optimum wind conditions. Late evening, as the air settles and cools. The missile would be launched from a drone and tracked via GPS. We would detonate at five hundred feet, directly over the Red Cross inoculation clinic at the centre of the camp. Thirty acres of tents arranged in a rigid street-grid. A perfect environment to test the efficacy of the weapon.’

‘You sick motherfuckers.’

‘We would have men on site. Have them pose as volunteer doctors from Saudi Red Crescent. They would wear bio-suits and film the outbreak. Take blood samples, track the speed of infection. When they judged the test had run its course, when the pandemic began to threaten their personal safety, they would drive from the camp and steps would be taken to contain the situation.’

‘You couldn’t halt the spread of infection,’ said Ignatiev. ‘The virus would quickly pass beyond the camp and out into the world.’

‘We would drop a massive fuel bomb. It would erase the entire camp in a moment of cleansing fire.’

‘You’re a fool. An absolute fool. I’m happy to die. I mean it. I consider myself blessed. You can’t comprehend the horror you will unleash. You’ll turn the surface of this planet into hell. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be alive when it happens.’

‘Is that it? Nothing left to tell?’

‘Kill me. Please. I’ve talked long enough. I’ve told you everything I know. Just kill me. Let me sleep.’

‘But what about the freezer? How do we release the lock?’

‘It is a simple biometric mechanism.’

‘All right.’

‘If you truly want to serve your country, you will destroy every trace of this virus.’

‘Fuck America. A single litre is enough to switch off the human race. No one has ever had that kind of power, held it in their hand.’

‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’

Koell walked into camera shot. He held a hypodermic gun. He fired the gun into Ignatiev’s bicep.

‘Damn you,’ murmured Ignatiev. His eyelids drooped, his head sank to his chest and his breathing slowed to a halt.

The recording came to an end.

Koell leant forward and closed the laptop. He refilled Gaunt’s whisky tumbler for the fourth time.

‘Are you clear?’ asked Koell. ‘You know what you have to do?’

‘Yeah. I got it.’

Gaunt stood before the virus vault. A steel freezer.

He typed the entry key. He swiped the card.

He reached into his backpack. An eyeball floating in a small jar. Pale iris and a tuft of optic nerve.

He held the eyeball to the L-1 Ident iris scan. A brief wash of red laser-light.

Hum and clack. Bolts retracted. Gaunt unlatched the door and hauled it open. Icy exhalation. A torrent of nitrogen fog cascaded from the freezer, washed across the floor and engulfed his boots. Skin-prickle chill.

The fog slowly cleared.

An empty shelf. No case. No missile. The warhead was gone.

‘Let’s find the generator,’ said Voss. ‘Let’s get the lights on.’

Jabril led him deep into the tunnel. Voss pulled a flare from his pocket. He struck the cap. Splutter and fizz. Crimson fire. Limestone walls lit blood red.

‘How does it feel to be back?’ asked Voss.

‘I dream about this place every night,’ said Jabril. ‘Awful nightmares. It almost feels like coming home.’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s difficult to explain. Some events, some places, are so terrible they become an indelible part of you.’

The cavern.

Voss checked the lab units.

A scorched hatch hung open and crooked.

‘Someone blew their way inside,’ said Jabril. ‘Some kind of breaching charge. Very recent. I can still smell the cordite.’

‘Gaunt. Better watch our backs.’

Voss stepped inside the lab.

He kicked at the Chemturion suit crumpled on the floor.

He examined the polished zinc of the necropsy slab. Cuff restraints. IV stand. Examination lights. A camera tripod.

Surgical instruments laid out on a metal table. He picked up stainless steel pliers.

‘Bone rongeurs,’ explained Jabril. ‘For splitting skulls.’

Voss snorted in disgust. He threw the rongeurs onto the necropsy slab. Harsh clatter.

‘We should leave,’ said Jabril. ‘We shouldn’t be in here. It’s too dangerous. We have no protective clothing.’

They left the lab.

They approached the high, opaque plastic dome of the bio-containment structure.

‘Is this Spektr?’ asked Voss.

‘It’s safe. The craft itself is not contaminated.’

Voss slung his shotgun. He unsheathed his knife and slit plastic. He ducked through the polythene curtain, and held the flare above his head.

The orbital craft rested on a flatbed rail car.

Voss walked a slow circuit of the vehicle. He ducked beneath the ragged Delta wing. He reached up and stroked thermal tiles discoloured by the unimaginable heat of hypersonic re-entry.

‘This thing actually flew through space,’ he murmured. ‘Left the Earth and came back again.’

Jabril contemplated the shadows of the open airlock.

‘Pandora’s box. We should have left this craft in the desert. It would have been buried forever.’

Lucy climbed the ladder to the locomotive walkway. She entered the cab.

She rolled the dead engineer with her foot. No signs of infection.

She checked the pockets of the engineer’s boiler suit. Cigarettes. Prayer beads. A key.

She dragged the body out onto the walkway. She lifted the desiccated corpse over the guard rails and threw it onto the track.

She returned to the cab. The engineer’s console. Red brake handle. Big throttle. Key slot.

She inserted the key and turned the ignition.

Nothing. No instrumentation lights, no engine noise. She looked around the cab for breakers, any kind of power switch.

A brief flutter of panic and despair, crushed before it began.

RSM Miller, her platoon sergeant, laid it out for her, the day she applied for the Fourteen Intelligence Company.

‘ The difference between regular army and special forces is simply the ability to maintain composure. To think straight in situations of extreme peril. Special recon training is a constant live-fire exercise. Endless boot camp endurance tasks while bullets whizz past your head. I’ve been out to that dummy village they built on Salisbury Plain. So many cartridge cases lying around, they crunch underfoot like gravel. The instructors will teach you to think through a haze of adrenalin and exhaustion. They’ll teach you to survive. ’

Lucy swigged from her canteen. She rubbed her eyes.

The locomotive wouldn’t fire up. Maybe the ignition battery was dead. Must be some way to check available current.

She began a methodical survey of the cab.

Jabril left Voss in the cavern.

‘I want to find my old room, collect some of my things.’

He wandered down a low passageway. His blue cyalume lit chiselled walls, timber props and roof beams.

A faded door sign.