Juggernaut

Lucy put a lit Salem between Jabril’s lips. He smoked a while, then spat the butt into the fire.

‘Okay,’ said Lucy. ‘Start talking.’

I worked for the Office of Special Security under Uday Hussein. Ba’ath Party Intelligence, Directorate Four.

I worked out of Baghdad. We were based in Little Venice, the presidential compound next to the Tigris. The area that is now the Green Zone.

I was part of the weapons acquisition programme. I led a team of senior intelligence officers. Loyal men who spoke English, German, French. Our job, throughout the eighties and nineties, was to fly abroad and source materials for the biological and chemical weapons programme. We were called SEPP. The State Establishment for Pesticide Production. We used intermediaries. We bought precursor chemicals from Egypt, the Netherlands, Singapore. We bought steel fermentation tanks, centrifuges and reactor vessels from Japan and India. We sourced Anthrax, smallpox and yellow fever from labs in Moscow and North Korea. Samples were sent back to Baghdad sealed in a diplomatic pouch. The objective of the procurement programme was to develop chemical and biological weapons to be delivered by adapted SCUD and Badr missiles, and specially milled artillery shells.

Our work came to end during Desert Storm. All the major bio-warfare facilities were blasted flat by the American air force. A relentless barrage. Tomahawks. Incessant B52 strikes. The al-Salman facility south of Baghdad burned to the ground, ending our attempts to weaponise the plague. The al-Kindi bacteriological lab was levelled, destroying our stocks of Anthrax and Botulinum. The vaccine facility at al-Amoriyah was bombed, ending our attempts to refine typhoid, cholera and smallpox.

There was no serious attempt to restart the programme after the war. The country was in ruins, the army had been decimated. My greatest coup, in the latter years of the regime, was circumventing sanctions to procure a custom Lamborghini Uday had glimpsed on TV and decided he must possess at all costs.

The order came down a couple of years ago, days before the American invasion. It was a dark and desperate time. The US army was massed at our borders. We knew aerial bombardment would begin any day and the ministry buildings of Baghdad would be a primary target. Should we run? Should we abandon our posts and flee? Each man faced the same dilemma.

That is why I was astonished when the order came across my desk. Investigate an incident that occurred in the Western Desert near the border with Syria a decade earlier.

A strange craft had fallen to earth. It had not been recovered.

Why, in the dying days of the regime, would anyone consider it a priority to investigate this incident?

You have to understand that Iraq did not have a single state police. Saddam was too cunning to let a single agency become all-powerful. There were a series of rival intelligence agencies, some loyal to Uday, some loyal to Qsay. Everyone involved in the security apparatus understood they were pawns in a grand game of succession. There were no simple orders. A misjudged word or action could easily result in a show-trial and execution. We led a privileged life. But the price was constant fear.

Nevertheless, this order allowed me to flee Baghdad with the full sanction of the state. I was happy to comply.

I scoured records. I brought cart loads of paper from basement storage.

Ten years ago, military air traffic logged an unexplained radar hit over Al Anbar. An object passing from Syrian airspace at high altitude. A steep descent, at unbelievable velocity. Twenty-five times the speed of sound. At first it was assumed that a meteor had fallen to earth but examination of radar records revealed the object appeared to alter course and speed as it fell. There was a significant deceleration ten kilometres from impact, as if the object were trying to perform some kind of controlled landing.

A Mig pilot on night reconnaissance had glimpsed the unidentified object to his north as it crossed his flight-path. It was moving fast, burning bright. He described it as a shooting star. This took place in the early nineties. Our war with Iran had cooled to a stand-off. America and Russia were competing for regional domination. This entire sector was a cold-war buffer zone. Plenty of US Blackbird reconnaissance flights. I assumed some kind of spy plane had been forced to crash-land in the desert.

They sent out choppers the next morning. They were hampered by a fierce dust storm. When the storm cleared, no trace of the mysterious object could be found. Empty desert. No sign of wreckage. No crater.

We could expect little help from the locals.

Iraq is an artificial nation. Disparate tribes ruled by fear. Al-’Anb r governate was hostile territory. We could easily have been prey to Peshmerga guerrillas or Kurdish tribesmen, men with plenty of reason to hate Saddam and his attempts to secularise and unify the nation under his rule.