Juggernaut (outpost)

by Adam Baker

  ‘Yeah,’ she lied. The spines were buried so deep in Huang’s neck they couldn’t be excised without ripping open veins and arteries.

  She packed fresh dressing round the bubbling wound and taped it down. Huang passed out.

  ‘He’s beyond help,’ said Jabril, watching from the shadows.

  ‘I didn’t ask your fucking opinion.’

  Lucy peeled gloves and tossed them on the fire. They shrivelled and melted.

  She joined Voss and Amanda at the barricade.

  Amanda crouched, sniper rifle resting across the quad saddle. She put her eye to the nightscope and scanned the ruins.

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Voss.

  ‘I doubt he’ll see the dawn.’

  Voss tore open a fresh MRE meal pouch and distributed food. Lucy ate cold Thai chicken with a plastic fork. Voss ate cheese tortellini. Amanda ate crackers.

  ‘Jabril says Huang will turn demented,’ said Lucy. ‘Better find some rope. Tie him up.’

  ‘He couldn’t hurt anyone right now, not even himself,’ said Voss. ‘If he becomes a problem, I’ll deal with it.’

  Voss walked across the cavernous temple hall and stood by the fire. He stripped to the waist. He washed himself with towelettes and applied fresh deodorant. He dressed.

  ‘Want any food?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jabril. ‘Thank you.’

  Voss unwrapped a meat patty and fed it to Jabril.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Pork.’

  Jabril spat meat into the fire.

  Voss checked the pockets of Jabril’s discarded jacket. He found cigarettes. He lit and smoked.

  ‘So how did you do it?’ asked Voss. ‘This desert. How did you make it out alive?’

  Jabril smiled.

  ‘You must have a reason to live. Something beyond yourself.’

  ‘You wanted to save the world, is that right?’

  ‘I’m worse than evil. I supervised unimaginable cruelty, ordered torture and execution, simply because it was my job. This is my chance to do something right.’

  Voss unsheathed his knife and picked his teeth.

  ‘How about you, Mr Voss?’ asked Jabril. ‘How badly do you want to live?’

  Lucy sat on the altar steps beside Toon’s body. He had been wrapped in a poncho shroud and lashed with rope. He looked ready for burial at sea.

  She thumbed through his Eldridge Cleaver book. Some of the passages were underlined.

  ‘The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.’

  She wanted to ask Toon why he liked the book, why he carried it around.

  A photograph pressed between the pages of the paperback. A gang photo taken in the Riv. Lucy, Toon and the team. Grinning, giving the finger, toasting the camera with beers.

  She tucked the photo in her pocket.

  ‘Sorry, dude,’ she murmured. ‘Let you down.’

  Every commander’s nightmare. The Big Fuck Up. Getting her men killed. She led Toon into the desert, promised him gold. Now he was dead, and she couldn’t get his body home. Buried in alien soil a lifetime away from Tennessee.

  Once they gate-crashed a party at the rooftop bar of the al-Rasheed. A pink sunset. She and Toon sipped Michelob and looked out over the city. Minarets and bombed-out ministries. Don McLean battled the call to prayer.

  Conversation turned maudlin.

  ‘If anything happens, don’t leave me here,’ said Toon. ‘Not this shithole country. Get me back to the world.’

  Lucy put her hand on the rope-lashed poncho.

  ‘I’ll miss you, pal.’

  Toon’s body moved. His back arched like he was stretching in his sleep.

  ‘Hey,’ shouted Lucy. ‘Hey, he’s alive.’

  She unsheathed her knife and sawed through rope.

  Amanda and Voss came running.

  Lucy pulled the poncho aside.

  ‘Fuck.’

  She scrambled away from the twitching mess that used to be her friend.

  They could see pulped brain tissue through the jagged hole in Toon’s skull. Silver wires threaded through his brain like fine hair.

  ‘When was he infected?’ asked Voss. ‘Was it Huang? Did Toon touch his neck?’

  Lucy crouched and examined the gently stirring body.

  ‘Don’t get too close,’ said Amanda.

  ‘It’s more than a disease. It’s some kind of parasite. It’s woven through his whole nervous system. I don’t think it’s realised Toon is dead yet.’

  Voss gently pulled Lucy aside. He racked his shotgun slide.

  ‘Sorry, bro.’

  He vaporised Toon’s head. The blast echoed round the vaulted hall, dying like thunder.

  He walked back to the temple entrance, shotgun over his shoulder.

  ‘Are you beginning to understand?’ shouted Jabril, his voice echoing through the vast temple. ‘This thing. This virus. It must be exterminated. It must never leave this valley.’

  Lucy and Amanda pulled on leather gloves and rewrapped Toon’s headless body. They lashed rope.

  ‘Christ,’ muttered Amanda. ‘This shit is going to haunt my dreams.’

  Fine silver tendrils protruded from the vertebrae stump of Toon’s neck. The tendrils slowly flexed and coiled, as if testing the air.

  ‘Some nasty, nasty shit.’

  ‘Never seen anything like it,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Poor fuck,’ said Amanda. ‘He deserved better. Way better. Promise me. If anything happens, if I get infected, finish me off. Do it quick and clean. I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t want to end up like Huang. I don’t want to walk around with weird shit growing out of my body. You’ve got to promise me.’

  ‘Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to it.’

  They folded canvas over the smoking stump of Toon’s neck.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Amanda. ‘I don’t want to spend another hour in this place.’

  ‘We’ll pack our stuff and start walking at first light.’

  They tied rope round Toon’s shrouded feet and hauled him through the temple.

  Huang was conscious. He struggled to sit upright, clumsy like he was drunk.

  ‘Via con Dios, buddy,’ he shouted as he saw Toon’s body hauled across flagstones. ‘Be seeing you soon.’

  Voss unblocked the temple doorway. He rolled the quad bike and trailer aside.

  He watched as Toon was dragged past. He crossed himself.

  Lucy paused. She nodded towards Huang.

  ‘He’s sinking fast. Tie him up, you hear?’

  ‘Yeah,’ sighed Voss. ‘Yeah, I’m on it.’

  Lucy and Amanda dragged Toon from the temple.

  Lucy swung the barrel light of her assault rifle left and right, surveyed the sinister shadows of the citadel precincts. A steady night-wind moaned through the ancient ruins.

  ‘This way.’

  They hauled Toon’s corpse through the moonlit necropolis. They dragged him past a colonnade of broken pillars.

  ‘Here.’

  A rubble-strewn courtyard. They lay Toon’s shrouded body on flagstones.

  Lucy hefted chunks of granite rubble and piled them on top of Toon’s poncho until he was hidden beneath a cairn of jagged rocks.

  Amanda kept watch. She paced the courtyard, kept a three-sixty scan of tumbled walls and dark doorways.

  Lucy clapped stone dust from her hands. She wiped sweat from her face. Her skin steamed in the cold night air.

  She placed Toon’s dog tags on top of the cairn.

  ‘We should go,’ said Amanda.

  Lucy crouched and laid a hand on the pile of stones.

  ‘We’ll come back for you, brother. We won’t leave you out here. One day we’ll come back and take you home.’

  Voss found a coil of rope among the clutter of equipment in the quad trailer. He cut two long lengths.

  He turned round. Huang was standing directly behind him.

  Voss gripped his knife.

  Hu
ang stared at him a long while. His face was slack. Lips parted in a semi-snarl. A blank, dead-eyed stare like a shark.

  He snapped awake.

  ‘Going to tie me up?’ he drawled, thoughts coming slow.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Funny thing,’ mumbled Huang. ‘Sometimes I’m me, sometimes I’m something else.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘This disease. It has its own thoughts, its own agenda.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A lust for flesh. It wants to break out of here. This valley. It wants to reach the world.’

  ‘I wish there was something I could do for you, kid.’

  ‘Leave. You, Lucy, Mandy. Start walking, as soon as the sun breaks the horizon. Get the fuck out of here before it’s too late.’

  Huang unscrewed the cap of his canteen. He took a swig.

  ‘Best if no one else drinks from this.’

  He poured the remaining water onto the flagstone floor. He tossed the metal bottle into shadows.

  Huang reached in his pocket.

  ‘I want you to have this.’

  He gave Voss a big folding knife.

  ‘That’s a damn good knife. Gerber. Strong.’

  He pulled the Glock from his drop holster. He thumbed cartridges from the magazine. He gave Voss a fistful of bullets.

  ‘Think you might need these more than me.’

  Huang kept one round for himself. He held it up.

  ‘True what they say. There’s a bullet out there with your name on it. And here she is. The bullet that is going to kill me.’

  He slotted the cartridge into the magazine. Loaded. Chambered.

  ‘Small-town kid,’ said Huang. ‘Never thought I would find myself this far from home, dying under foreign skies. Fuck it. It’s been a blast.’

  Voss nodded.

  ‘See you around,’ said Huang.

  ‘Take it easy, man.’

  Huang walked out of the temple and was swallowed by night.

  Lucy found Voss sitting by the campfire. The flames were dying. Nothing left to burn.

  ‘Where’s Huang?’

  ‘Taking a long, long walk.’

  Lucy nodded.

  They sat round the fire a while.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ said Jabril.

  ‘He took a gun,’ said Voss.

  ‘He won’t use it. Too far gone. The disease has the upper hand. He’ll be back for you all.’

  ‘You brought us here, you fuck,’ said Voss. ‘Lured us to this damned hell-hole. Toon. Huang. They’d be alive right now. We’d be propping the bar in the Riv, sipping a beer. Ought to slit your belly open.’

  Voss lit a cigarette. He threw the pack to Lucy. She lit. She took a drag. She put the cigarette between Jabril’s lips.

  ‘All right. Tell me more about Spektr.’

  Spektr

  Lucy sat cross-legged. She field-stripped her assault rifle and cleaned the barrel with solvent. She fed a brass bore-punch into the barrel with sharp twists.

  Jabril continued his story.

  We continued to excavate the Spektr craft.

  We tried to hold back the dunes with beams and boards. Two men were almost killed when props broke and they were engulfed by sand. We had to jump in the hole and dig them free with our hands. We dragged them to the surface spitting dirt and whooping for air.

  Our men were farm boys with rifles. I forestalled further desertions by giving the men whisky and a fistful of gold each day. Rings, bracelets. There was nowhere to store their treasure so they wore jewellery as they dug. They looked absurd. They looked like pirates.

  We cleared enough sand to loop heavy canvas slings beneath the craft. One at the tail, one at the nose. We coordinated both cranes by radio. The vehicle was slowly lifted from its grave, streaming sand.

  The crane-trucks began a two-mile journey across the desert to the railroad line. The wrecked spacecraft hung suspended on a canvas cradle between them.

  It took a day. We tried to steer the trucks towards firm ground, slowly weaved between the dunes. But the trucks sank every few feet. We had to dig with spades and ramp them free with planks. We crawled a few yards every hour.

  We finally reached the railroad track late afternoon. Twin ribbons of steel snaking from the horizon. I powered up the radio. Koell said a locomotive would be with us by nightfall.

  An hour later we glimpsed the gleam of a distant headlamp on the far horizon like an evening star. Faint blast of an air-horn. A locomotive pulling long, flatbed wagons.

  The massive engine eased to a halt beside us with an explosive roar of air-brakes.

  It took us a full hour to lower the spacecraft onto a flatbed wagon. I estimate Spektr weighed fifty or sixty tons. The wagon creaked as it took the load. The rails flexed. Sandstone shingle beneath the sleepers crackled like gunshots as rocks were crushed to powder.

  We lashed nets over the orbiter as quickly as we could. We wanted to shield the craft from satellites and planes.

  I sent men ahead of us in a jeep to make sure railroad switches were set for our journey to the valley.

  I scanned the sky with binoculars. That’s when I saw it. A distant speck to the west. A Predator reconnaissance drone. Ghost grey. Miles out. Circling like a vulture.

  I told everyone to get moving.

  We abandoned the crane trucks. Too heavy to salvage. We left them to sink into the sand.

  Some of us rode an empty flatbed wagon. The rest followed in trucks and jeeps. The convoy kept pace with the locomotive for a while, lurching over dunes, then gradually fell back. They knew our destination. They would catch up.

  The locomotive laboured to pull the heavy load. The five-thousand horse-power motor revved and growled. Drive wheels shrieked each time they lost traction and span.

  The sun set. Rusted brakes and axles sparked beneath us, flickering red as if the infernal locomotive were riding on a wave of flame.

  I sat crossed-legged on the rail truck. I radioed Koell. I told him about the drone. He told me not to worry. From a distance, Spektr looked like a crashed Mig. Just another hulk. The battle for Iraq would be fought down south. No coalition image analyst would worry about handful of troops salvaging a wrecked plane.

  There was nothing I could do. If the Americans dispatched an F15 or Apache Longbow, there would be no warning. We wouldn’t hear engines. My world would wink out mid-breath, mid-thought, as TOW missiles slammed into the train ripping us to offal.

  We reached the hills in the last dying light of day. The cliff carvings, the colossal sentinels, lit blood red. We stood and stared as the locomotive towed us between the two great figures and carried us into the darkness of the tunnel mouth.

  Spektr was swallowed by shadow, ragged wings barely clearing the tunnel walls.

  We were enveloped by a sudden cave-chill. Dancing flashlight beams illuminated the vaulted concrete of the tunnel roof as it passed overhead.

  A brief mutiny. Three of our number, spooked by the tunnel darkness, became convinced we were travelling to our deaths. They wanted to head back to Baghdad. Uncouple Spektr at the first opportunity.

  One of the men seized my lapels and screamed in my face. Called me a madman. I pushed him away and drew my side arm. I was sick with fear. For the first time in my life, I would have to kill a man face to face. Look him in the eye as I extinguished his life.

  There was a gunshot. Muzzle-flare, like a camera flash. The man fell dead, shot through the heart.

  Captain Hassim, my second in command, holstered his smoking pistol.

  Blood trickled between wagon planks. We edged away from the body.

  After a while, amplified engine noise felt like someone drilling into my head. I tore some paper and plugged my ears.

  We emerged from the tunnel and saw the citadel for the first time. I’m not an imaginative man. I’m not prone to fancies. But the jagged ramparts of this dead city made my skin crawl. It felt like someone was watching our approach. A sardonic, mocking intelligence old as hu
manity itself.

  I radioed the driver. I told him not to stop until we reached the mine.

  The train slowly crossed the valley floor. We stood in silence and contemplated the ancient citadel as it passed by.

  The valley narrowed, and we found ourselves travelling slowly down a high ravine. Walls so tight and sheer the floor of the canyon would receive a few minutes of sunlight each day then lapse into twilight.

  I looked up. A narrow strip of evening stars overhead.

  The locomotive slowed to a stop. The engine cut off. Sudden silence.

  ‘This is it,’ radioed the driver. ‘This is the mine.’

  I jumped from the wagon and walked alongside the track.

  At first it seemed we had a reached a dead end. The tight ravine terminated in a sheer cliff wall. But when I reached the front of the locomotive I saw a wide tunnel mouth arched by a concrete buttress. No mine buildings, no machinery. Just a tunnel bored in bedrock.

  The railroad forked at the tunnel entrance. Multiple lengths of track headed into shadow.

  I told the men to remain on board the train. I took a torch and explored the mine tunnel.

  My flashlight beam played over ore wagons, box cars and carriages gathering dust. Abandoned rolling stock.

  I followed the tracks into darkness.

  The tunnel was two hundred yards long. It opened into a wide cavern. Archways led into darkness.

  An object like a thick tree-trunk draped in heavy canvas lay on the cavern floor. I dragged the tarpaulin aside. A Scud-B missile. The service panels had been removed. It had been gutted for parts. The guidance system was gone. The fuel tanks and turbopumps were crusted with leaked oxidiser and kerosene.

  I wasn’t remotely surprised to discover a neglected weapon. Iraq was a militarised state. Everything had a dual purpose. Every aspect of life, on some level, served Saddam’s imperial ambition. Universities churned out intelligence officers. Car plants serviced tanks and milled bombs. I already knew that the mining industry had been structured to manufacture chemical weapons. The discovery that the rail network had been used to hide missile batteries in crude silos during Desert Storm was entirely unremarkable.

  I gave orders. Check the Scud. Make sure the tanks were dry. Detach the warhead. Remove the impact and proximity fuses. Drag the payload out of the cavern. Roll the body of the missile aside.