Juggernaut

‘One day this kid from a missionary station drops by and tells me he has something to sell. Said it came down in a mangrove swamp one night. A falling star. Lit up the sky. Manmade. Some kind of engine pod. A spherical fuel tank with isolator valves. Thing was half melted. I told him I would swing by in a few days.

‘The station was in Grand Bassa. Rainforest. Shitty roads. I was delivering a truckload of .50 cal to some local warlord. You know the type. Mirror shades. Pimp jewellery. All swagger. Fucking idiot.

‘I drove to the missionary station on the way back. I liked the kid. I liked the nuns. I heard a bunch of them had fallen ill. I was going to take them cigarettes from the city. Good currency. They could use them to trade.

‘Call it a sixth sense. I got halfway up the hill road then pulled over. Something not right. Too quiet. No birds.

‘I headed up the road on foot. Watched from the jungle. I don’t know what happened up there but it was major. The station was hidden beneath a geodesic dome. Choppers parked in the compound. There were guys in white biohazard suits.

‘I got the hell out of there and drove back to town. I asked around. Nobody wanted to talk about the mission station. Bad hoodoo. But I found a French consulate official with a taste for liquor and loosened his tongue.

‘There were these guys. White guys. They turned up in bad times. Kenya, during a Marburg outbreak; Burundi, during a bunch of Ebola cases. They spoke pretty good English but Pierre thought they were Russian. They used to show up during the sixties and seventies posing as tourists, journalists, Médecins Sans Frontières. But they were from Vektor. The weapons acquisition arm of Biopreparat, the Soviet biological warfare programme. Anytime there was an outbreak of an emergent disease, something new and lethal gestating in deep jungle, these guys showed up like the horsemen of the apocalypse. Procurement teams masquerading as humanitarian aid. Moving through jungle hospitals like ministering angels, collecting biopsy swabs and spinal fluid samples for delivery to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch.

‘After the collapse of communism half these guys were out of a job. Highly skilled bio-weapon experts. PhDs in pharmacology. Spent their lives developing lethal psychotropic and neurotropic agents. Reduced to driving taxis and selling flowers in the street. These guys were party elite. They lived in the secret cities of the Soviet rustbelt. They were used to luxury dachas and Zil limousines. One by one they disappeared. Showed up in Libya, Syria, trying to sell VX neurotoxin. A gang of them got busted cooking methamphetamine in Mexico. The cream of the crop got picked up by the US. Given new names, a fuck-ton of cash, and sent to work at Fort Detrick.

‘That’s the scary part. They’re still out there. Vektor. The men, the infrastructure. Cut loose. Sometimes freelance. They work for the Agency or private biotech, chasing their own agenda. Heard they showed up in Kosovo looking for body parts. Kidneys for rich fucks on dialysis. Used the POW camps as an organ bank. Hang around any of these shithole countries long enough you’ll see the same planes time and again. Black charters. Antonovs. Ilyushins. They change livery and tail numbers, but it’s always the same crews.

‘I went out to the missionary station a few months later. It was gone. Burned and bulldozed. No sign of the kids, no sign of the nuns. Caterpillar tracks. No top soil. Someone dug a big pit and filled it in.

Later, I heard locals wouldn’t go near the place. They say the jungle grew strange. They said it glowed at night. Said there were genetic abnormalities. Giant insects. Weird flowers.

‘A shitstorm like Iraq? Wouldn’t surprise me if those fuckers turned up on their own little death trip. Blood, gunsmoke. They’d smell opportunity. I wouldn’t mess with them for a single second.’

Koell flicked open a lock knife. The metallic snap echoed through the vaulted hangar. He cut Gaunt free.

‘Gesture of trust.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Work for us. You need a cause. You’re lost. You’re broke. We need good men.’

Gaunt rubbed his wrists.

‘The people you saw today. They want to head into the Western Desert. Take them where they want to go.’

‘Why would I do that?’ asked Gaunt.

Koell took a roll of bills from his pocket. Fresh notes bound by a rubber band. He threw the bills on the desk.

‘Fuck your money.’

‘You want to be part of the shadow world. You need a way in. Well, this is it. Go ahead. Step through the looking-glass.’

‘Just fly the choppers?’

Koell took a folded photograph from his pocket. He smoothed it on his knee and passed it to Gaunt. A satellite shot. Rocky, lunar terrain.

‘The National Reconnaissance Office designate it Valley 403. A limestone canyon. Locals call it The Valley of Tears. The Western Desert, near the Syrian border. Those security contractors believe there is gold hidden in the hills.’

‘Gold?’

‘You’re welcome to whatever you find. Take your cut. Take it all. I don’t care.’