Adam Baker - Juggernaut

Abdul triggered an anti-personnel mine halfway up the slope and was blown to flesh-scraps and blood-vapour. The blast drew searchlights and soldiers. They found Haq cradling his brother’s leg.

They dragged Haq back to the mine. They shaved his head and dressed him in a boiler suit. They sprayed a big nine on his back and pushed him into a holding pen.

Jabril brought him water.

‘Come to gloat?’ asked Haq.

Jabril passed a bottle of mineral water between the bars. Haq took a sip and threw the bottle to fellow prisoners cowering at the back of the freight container.

‘I’ll talk to Ignatiev. Do what I can.’

‘If you really wanted to help, you would pass me a gun.’

‘They will never let you escape.’

‘I don’t plan to escape.’

‘Just hold on. Let me argue your case.’

‘Listen to yourself. You are a major in the Mukhabarat. You should be the authority here. Not these foreigners.’

‘Our world has changed.’

‘You think it will be any different for you? Sooner or later, you will find yourself behind these bars.’

Jabril held up his hook.

‘They want young men, in good health.’

‘Then you will simply be executed.’

‘You think I don’t know what Ignatiev has in store? None of us will leave this place alive.’

Later that night Jabril visited the lime pit. A trench dug in the valley floor near the citadel. Stacked lime sacks. A mass grave.

The pit held a mound of eviscerated bodies caked in white powder. Strong stench of acid decay.

He shielded his mouth and nose with his sleeve.

Arms. Legs. Exposed ribcages. The eviscerated bodies twitched and stirred as they slowly dissolved into caustic lime slurry.

Lucy hit the pressel switch on her chest plate.

‘Mandy. I need you back here.’

Amanda jogged down the tunnel.

‘Babe?’

‘Over here,’ shouted Lucy.

Amanda climbed onto the rear plate of the freight locomotive.

‘Give me a hand with this thing,’ said Lucy.

They unscrewed terminals and struggled to lift the massive battery from its box compartment. They lowered it down to the track. They pulled on gloves, each grabbed a handle and carried the power cell down the tunnel, muscles straining.

‘Voss says there are infected guys running round the mine,’ said Amanda.

‘No wonder the fucks from the citadel didn’t follow us,’ said Lucy, panting with effort. ‘There’s something else in here. Something worse.’

‘We better find Jabril and warn him. He might get jumped.’

Jabril crept down a passageway lit by bulbs screwed to roof beams.

He stalked the figure in a red boiler suit. The suit had a big fifteen sprayed on the back. The revenant’s bald head was punctured by a crust of metallic tumours, like a rippled steel skull-cap.

The creature stopped. It sniffed the air.

It turned. It saw Jabril and snarled.

Jabril put a bullet between the creature’s eyes. Gun-roar echoed down the passageway.

The prisoner fell against the tunnel wall and slid to the ground.

Another creature watched from shadows at the end of the passageway. Jabril raised his pistol and took aim, hook-arm steadying the gun. A bald, emaciated mutant thing. Number nine sprayed on the breast of the boiler suit.

Haq.

Jabril hesitated, and lowered his pistol. The figure ducked out of sight.

The moment Jabril discovered the full extent of the Spektr project, he decided to destroy every piece of equipment in the valley. Obliterate it all.

Ignatiev often talked about Phase Three. He mentioned it to technician colleagues while Jabril was in earshot, disregarded his presence like he was a pet or a piece of equipment.

Jabril put it together:

Phase One. Locate Spektr and acquire virus.

Phase Two. Weaponise pathogen.

Phase Three?

Weeks ago, Jabril had seen a heavy impact-proof case locked in the ammunition store. He had a key to the store. He visited the storeroom late one night and opened the trunk.

A Hellfire II missile on a foam bed.

The missile was dove grey. About three feet long, aluminium shell thick as drainpipe. Lockheed Martin batch stamp. Fins at the rear and neck. The nose cone, with its glass laser-optic lens, had been detached. The payload compartment, the copper fragmentation sleeve, was empty.

Koell intended to test his bio-weapon. As soon as Ignatiev delivered the weaponised virus, he would pick a significant population centre and fire the missile from a drone. The missile would arm itself in flight. When it reached a specific GPS coordinate, a preset grid ref and altitude, the ground targeting crew would send the destruct signal and the missile would detonate mid-air, releasing its lethal payload.

‘Imagine a battalion of these infected creatures,’ he once heard Ignatiev say. ‘Imagine the destructive potential. A formid-able fighting force. Men devoid of pity, impervious to pain and fatigue.’

Koell and Ignatiev. A shared insanity.

Jabril played it cool. Business as usual. He ran the camp. He supervised prisoners caged in their pens.

Phase Three of Koell’s programme would take very little manpower. He would have no further use for Iraqi troops. He would wait for word Ignatiev had concluded his research and was ready to break camp. Then he would radio the order to eliminate non-essential personnel.

Friday night. The Iraqi battalion has been promised downtime. Ignatiev’s team secured a stereo, a bunch of CDs and a case of vodka. The deep galleries of the mine were soon filled with of raucous music and laughter.

The Russians stayed sober.

This is it , thought Jabril. Extermination day. At the height of the revelry, when the troops are drunk and euphoric, the Russians will break out heavy machine guns and mow them down.

He hurried to his cell. He stripped out of his white suit, pulled on combat gear and tucked a pistol into his belt.

He emptied clothes from his Louis Vuitton suitcase onto the floor, carried the case to the munitions store and filled it with patties of explosive and detonators.

He stashed the suitcase beneath his bunk and headed for the lab units.

The cavern was still and silent.

Faint music echoed from distant tunnels.

Jabril had memorised the door code. He let himself into Lab One. He filled a garbage bag with paperwork. He smashed open a couple of computers and levered hard drives from their bed.

He moved on to Lab Two. He swept documentation into a bag.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

One of Ignatiev’s techs, wearing a lab coat.

Jabril snatched a flask from a shelf and smashed it over the man’s head. The technician fell to the floor, face peppered with blood and glass. Jabril stamped on the man’s throat and left him to choke. He collected the garbage bags as the technician writhed and turned blue.

Jabril dumped the garbage bags in the munitions store. Hid them in empty document boxes. He planned to wire explosives to the wall timbers and incinerate all trace of the Spektr project.

A klaxon. A rising air-raid wail. Someone had found the dead technician.

Jabril stepped into the corridor. A guard shouted something in Russian. Jabril shot him through the heart and ran.

No time to rig the demolition charges. He headed for the main tunnel.

A quick detour. The prisoner pens. A chance to create additional chaos to aid his escape.

Eight infected men awaiting dissection. Flesh blotched with strange mutations. Red boiler suits matted with blood and pus. Ignatiev preparing to harvest samples on an industrial scale.

Jabril shot padlocks, released chains and threw open the cage doors of the freight containers. He ran down the tunnel. He looked back. He saw infected men emerge from their steel dungeons and sniff the air.