Juggernaut

I requested thirty men. To my surprise I was assigned a full battalion and a truck-load of gold for bribe money.

We loaded excavation equipment and headed west down the Fallujah highway. It was a relief to flee Baghdad. The city was already a ghost town. Anyone who could leave had already gone. Every shop locked and shuttered. Windows were criss-crossed with tape. Sandbags and anti-aircraft guns on each hotel roof. We were running ahead of the storm.

We drove out into the desert. Drove day and night. Miles of sun-baked highway. We had a grid reference, nothing more. A red cross in the middle of blank terrain.

We passed wretched villages. Hovels clustered around a well. It was a depressing sight. We had all risen from poverty. Every Iraqi, no matter how educated or powerful, can trace his recent ancestry to dirt-poor subsistence farmers trying to coax a few ears of corn from barren soil.

We left the road and drove into the dunes. A long, slow journey. Our trucks sank and stalled countless times. Slivers of frost-shattered rock punctured tyres.

We reached the contamination zone. We cut through the fence.

Some of the men did not want to proceed any further. There was no official record of the air-raid that saturated this stretch of desert in poison, but we had all heard rumours of the noxious chemicals that had wiped out the local population.

I urged the men to complete their mission. They had little alternative. Return to Baghdad and cower from bombs? Travel east to the Kuwaiti border and fight a futile war? None of us wished to die for Saddam. We feared him. We didn’t love him.

We drove into the toxic wilderness.

We reached our objective. Map coordinates in the middle of nowhere. Featureless dunes. An ocean of sand. It seemed hopeless. Whatever plunged to earth had been swallowed without trace.

I radioed Baghdad. Heavy encryption. I explained the situation. Very little hope of locating the mysterious aircraft. But they insisted I continue my search.

We made camp. The men smoked and ate from cans. I walked among the dunes as evening fell.

I sat and reviewed radar records. Military traffic control in Baghdad tracked the object’s descent. A long arc. A ballistic trajectory. A steepening dive as the UFO passed through Syrian air-space at hypersonic speed. The vehicle would have been subject to unimaginable G-force. It would have been seared by three-thousand-degree heat. Then, as it approached impact, the craft suddenly banked and levelled out, like a plane struggling to land. A further, sudden deceleration as the craft dropped out of radar coverage in a shallow dive and struck the ground.

I looked across the desert and tried to picture the moment of impact. The craft trailing drogue chutes, ripping through the dunes in an explosion of dust. It must have left a long trench and a trail of wreckage before coming to rest.

It must still be near the surface.

There was a village a few miles distant. Four adobe houses. Two cows. The place didn’t have a name, didn’t warrant a dot on the map.

The villagers were terrified. Soldiers in trucks. Mothers hid their children. Fathers lined up, expecting to beg for their lives.

Despite warnings, despite the terrible risk of disease and death, they had continued to live in the contaminated zone. They would rather watch their children grow sick and die than give up the only life they knew.

I gave them food. I explained we meant no harm. We sat and ate.

I gave them gold from the truck. You see, we had a strongroom in the presidential palace filled with jewellery taken from prisoners prior to torture and execution. Men would be seized from their homes. Stripped of their clothes, stripped of watches and rings. Our interrogation team would pull fingernails, burn genitals, until each prisoner confessed to imaginary crimes. That was my power. As a member of the OSS I could bestow fabulous wealth at whim or have a man executed on the spot.

I asked the villagers to describe the night, ten years ago, when something fell from the sky. One of the farmers said he saw the crash. He had walked a mile from the village in search of a lost goat. The sun had set. He climbed a boulder. He saw something in the sky, falling like a shooting star. The object grew larger. It was a fireball. He fell to his knees. He called on the mercy of God.

The thing passed overhead, so close intense heat scorched his face like sunburn. He glimpsed a strange craft, glowing like a hot coal.

I gave the man my notebook and pen. I asked him to draw what he saw that night. He drew a crude arrow. Some kind of delta-wing craft. He said it looked like a giant bat.

I asked the farmer to lead us to the spot he saw the crash. He refused. He was scared. He said the thing was a monster from hell. We should leave it undisturbed.

I bribed him with gold.

We walked from the village. He led us to a massive sandstone boulder protruding from the dunes. We climbed to the top.

‘There,’ he said, pointing south-west. ‘It passed overhead and crashed in the distance.’