Juggernaut

The fleeing men reached the open valley. They ran for vehicles parked in front of the citadel. The convoy of trucks and cars a mile distant, shrouded in camouflage nets.

Jabril reached the convoy. More gunfire. Door panels shrieked and sparked as a .50 cal tracer punched holes. Jabril hit the ground and played dead. Wounded men screamed and died in the dust around him.

Fuel fires. Cars flipped and burned. Nylon camouflage nets smoked and shrivelled.

Jabril belly-crawled to the convoy. He rolled beneath a bus. The chassis above his head shook as heavy rounds rocked the vehicle. Smashed window glass hit the dirt.

He looked out from beneath the bus. Burning sedans. Burning men.

He glimpsed lab techs through smoke and flickering flame. They were loading the missile case into the rear of the cash truck. They sealed the door. They headed for the cab, and were jumped by figures in red boiler suits. Inhuman strength. An armed ripped off. A face peeled away.

A soldier squirmed beneath the bus and crawled hand over hand towards Jabril.

‘Help me.’

Bite marks. Strips of skin torn from the man’s face.

Jabril tugged the Makarov from his waistband and shot the soldier through the eye.

He rolled from beneath the bus and scrambled to his feet. Burning cars. Streaking tracer rounds.

He ran for the valley wall, screened from the Russian shooters by a curtain of smoke and flame.

He scrambled up the rock slope, hand and hook raking scree.

He hid among boulders. Faint screams and gunshots from the valley below.

He watched Russian goons machine gun terrified Iraqi troops. Republican Guards drew sidearms and fired back. A slow, unfolding bloodbath. The valley quickly turned into a corpse field.

He saw red boiler suits among the crowd. The infected prisoners shrugged off bullet strikes. They gouged and ripped. A flesh-frenzy. Russian gunmen over-powered and pulled apart.

The infected berserkers ran among burning cars and trucks. They punched out windshields and dragged drivers from their vehicles. Throats torn from wounded soldiers as they lay helpless in the sand.

Jabril turned away and climbed the ravine, the clatter of stones merging with faint screams from the valley below.

Gaunt sat in the darkness of a remote side tunnel. He crouched on the floor, back to the wall, head resting against cool stone.

A muffled beep from his pocket. The sat phone. Incoming call.

Koell’s voice:

‘Carnival to Brimstone, over.’

‘Go ahead, Carnival.’

Gaunt wondered, briefly, how a sat-phone signal was able to reach deep within the mine. They must be using the Predator to boost the signal. Dawn had broken. The drone was back in the air, circling the valley. The UAV operators were probably sitting in a van at the edge of the desert, tweaking a joystick, monitoring the data flow, relaying encrypted transmissions via the drone’s EISS telemetry package. A military surveillance crew leased by the hour as part of some inter-departmental exchange. And despite it all, the digitisation, cryptographic algorithm and satellite bounce, Gaunt could hear the intimate acoustic of Koell’s hotel room. The compressed hush. The faint hum of air-con.

‘Authenticate.’

‘Authentication is Oscar, Sierra, Yankee, Bravo.’

‘So what’s the situation?’

‘I have the package.’

‘You have the package? Confirm: you have the package in your possession.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You have the actual cylinder?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Read me the serial number.’

‘Say again?’

‘I need proof. There is a serial number stamped on the steel cap of the cylinder. Read it to me.’

‘I don’t have the cylinder actually in my hand. But I know where it is. It’s secure. I can get it.’

‘You can get it.’

‘Swear to God. I’ll have it within the hour.’

The line went dead.

‘Hello? Carnival? Koell?’

He checked the sat-phone display.

TRANSMISSION TERMINATED

‘Shit.’

Voss sat at the mine entrance. He leant Amanda’s rifle across planks and checked the narrow ravine ahead. He turned and checked the tunnel behind him. Spooked by shadows on every side.

He folded a fresh wad of tobacco into his mouth.

Gaunt’s voice:

‘Voss? Can you hear me?’

Voss adjusted his earpiece. He’d retuned the selector so he and Gaunt could speak via a closed channel.

‘Voss? Are you there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Ready to do this?’

‘I guess.’

‘We can’t wait around any longer. Soon as they fire up that locomotive, we make our move.’

‘No harm comes to Lucy and Amanda. I mean it. They don’t get hurt. If they won’t play ball, we leave them behind. Alive. Pull any rough stuff, I’ll blow your head clean off your fucking shoulders.’