Juggernaut

I pulled my blanket round my shoulders and stood at the edge of the crater. I couldn’t sleep. I trained the beam of my flashlight on the strange tail fin.

According to records, the first radar trace of the craft had been detected high above the operating altitude of military or commercial jets. There seemed little doubt this vehicle had fallen from space. There was no insignia, no marking of any kind.

I stood staring up into the night sky for a long while, contemplating the stars.

Next morning, I ordered the men to continue excavating the spacecraft. I drove to the airbase at Samarra. I tried to requisition a heavy crane and a large flatbed truck. The commanding officer initially refused my request. His men had been ordered to the eastern front. But I gave him gold. He was grateful for the gift. The man was also from Saddam’s home town of Tikrit. He had prospered during the long and bloody war with Iran. He had risen to the rank of general. He also ran a construction company and had been given lucrative building contracts. But the regime was about to fall and men like him would have to reinvent themselves. Burn their uniforms. Convince an occupying power they had taken no part in Ba’ath Party oppression. He probably had a strongbox somewhere in his home full of dinar bound with rubber bands. Kickbacks and blood money. Saddam’s smiling face on every note stamped red, blue and green. All of it about to become worthless. A bag of jewellery and Krugerrands striped from the homes of purged party members could be an invaluable asset in the uncertain weeks and months ahead.

We returned back to the crash site. The craft was half exposed. A thick fuselage. Torn batwings. Scorched rocket-vents at the tail.

One of the men showed me a brittle shard of crystal. The craft had been so hot when it came to rest, years ago, that sand surrounding the airframe fused to glass, coating the entire surface like ice.

I radioed Baghdad. I told them what we had found. Then the strangest thing occurred. My immediate superior at the OSS was General Assad. I rarely spoke to anyone but him. But an hour after I contacted Baghdad and told them we had found an unusual vehicle buried in the sand, I received fresh instructions. I didn’t recognise the voice. The man spoke Arabic. But he sounded American.

‘My name is Koell.’

‘What happened to General Assad?’

‘I’m in charge of this project. From now on, you talk to me.’

He asked me to describe the craft in detail.

‘Is the hull intact? Tell me about structural damage. Is the cabin still sealed?’

I told him the wings were badly damaged. The under-carriage was destroyed. The turbojet engine pods were burned out.

‘What about the crew compartment? Boot up your laptop. Send me pictures.’

‘My men are excavating the cockpit as we speak.’

‘I’m going to mail you a schematic of the craft.’

I sat in the back of a truck with our communications gear. The file came through. I clicked print. Multiple views of the vehicle. Top and bottom. Front, side and back. It looked like a mini-shuttle. A sleek space fighter. The text was in Russian.

We continued the excavation. Koell demanded hourly bulletins.

We unearthed the snubbed nose of the vehicle. The side-hatch was still sealed. The cockpit glass was pitted and cracked but intact. We shone flashlights through the scorched glass but couldn’t see inside.

I told Koell the shuttle had sustained considerable damage during re-entry and landing but the crew compartment appeared to be sealed. I asked how many occupants we could expect to find. He said he didn’t know.

I drew up a plan. The vehicle was buried twenty feet beneath the surface. The sand was too unstable to allow a detailed inspection of the craft. Anyone who climbed into the crater risked being buried alive by shifting dunes. We needed to extract the craft and transport it to a sheltered, secure location where it could be examined in more detail.

I consulted our maps, and decided to exploit the rail network spread across the Western Desert like a web.

The railroad was built by European contractors during the nineteen eighties. The main phosphate production facility was in Akashat, linked to a processing plant at Al Qa’im, but there were satellite mining facilities dotted throughout the desert, all linked by rail. Organic phosphate compounds make good fertiliser, but can also act as a major precursor ingredient of chemical weapons such as Sarin and Tabun.

The railroad passed within two miles of the crash site. If we could lift the wrecked vehicle onto a truck, and nurse it across the desert, we could load it onto a rail car.

I decided to bring the shuttle here, to the Valley of Tears.