Juggernaut

‘Think you might need these more than me.’

Huang kept one round for himself. He held it up.

‘True what they say. There’s a bullet out there with your name on it. And here she is. The bullet that is going to kill me.’

He slotted the cartridge into the magazine. Loaded. Chambered.

‘Small-town kid,’ said Huang. ‘Never thought I would find myself this far from home, dying under foreign skies. Fuck it. It’s been a blast.’

Voss nodded.

‘See you around,’ said Huang.

‘Take it easy, man.’

Huang walked out of the temple and was swallowed by night.

Lucy found Voss sitting by the campfire. The flames were dying. Nothing left to burn.

‘Where’s Huang?’

‘Taking a long, long walk.’

Lucy nodded.

They sat round the fire a while.

‘He’ll be back,’ said Jabril.

‘He took a gun,’ said Voss.

‘He won’t use it. Too far gone. The disease has the upper hand. He’ll be back for you all.’

‘You brought us here, you fuck,’ said Voss. ‘Lured us to this damned hell-hole. Toon. Huang. They’d be alive right now. We’d be propping the bar in the Riv, sipping a beer. Ought to slit your belly open.’

Voss lit a cigarette. He threw the pack to Lucy. She lit. She took a drag. She put the cigarette between Jabril’s lips.

‘All right. Tell me more about Spektr.’

Spektr

Lucy sat cross-legged. She field-stripped her assault rifle and cleaned the barrel with solvent. She fed a brass bore-punch into the barrel with sharp twists.

Jabril continued his story.

We continued to excavate the Spektr craft.

We tried to hold back the dunes with beams and boards. Two men were almost killed when props broke and they were engulfed by sand. We had to jump in the hole and dig them free with our hands. We dragged them to the surface spitting dirt and whooping for air.

Our men were farm boys with rifles. I forestalled further desertions by giving the men whisky and a fistful of gold each day. Rings, bracelets. There was nowhere to store their treasure so they wore jewellery as they dug. They looked absurd. They looked like pirates.

We cleared enough sand to loop heavy canvas slings beneath the craft. One at the tail, one at the nose. We coordinated both cranes by radio. The vehicle was slowly lifted from its grave, streaming sand.

The crane-trucks began a two-mile journey across the desert to the railroad line. The wrecked spacecraft hung suspended on a canvas cradle between them.

It took a day. We tried to steer the trucks towards firm ground, slowly weaved between the dunes. But the trucks sank every few feet. We had to dig with spades and ramp them free with planks. We crawled a few yards every hour.

We finally reached the railroad track late afternoon. Twin ribbons of steel snaking from the horizon. I powered up the radio. Koell said a locomotive would be with us by nightfall.

An hour later we glimpsed the gleam of a distant headlamp on the far horizon like an evening star. Faint blast of an air-horn. A locomotive pulling long, flatbed wagons.

The massive engine eased to a halt beside us with an explosive roar of air-brakes.

It took us a full hour to lower the spacecraft onto a flatbed wagon. I estimate Spektr weighed fifty or sixty tons. The wagon creaked as it took the load. The rails flexed. Sandstone shingle beneath the sleepers crackled like gunshots as rocks were crushed to powder.

We lashed nets over the orbiter as quickly as we could. We wanted to shield the craft from satellites and planes.

I sent men ahead of us in a jeep to make sure railroad switches were set for our journey to the valley.

I scanned the sky with binoculars. That’s when I saw it. A distant speck to the west. A Predator reconnaissance drone. Ghost grey. Miles out. Circling like a vulture.

I told everyone to get moving.

We abandoned the crane trucks. Too heavy to salvage. We left them to sink into the sand.

Some of us rode an empty flatbed wagon. The rest followed in trucks and jeeps. The convoy kept pace with the locomotive for a while, lurching over dunes, then gradually fell back. They knew our destination. They would catch up.

The locomotive laboured to pull the heavy load. The five-thousand horse-power motor revved and growled. Drive wheels shrieked each time they lost traction and span.

The sun set. Rusted brakes and axles sparked beneath us, flickering red as if the infernal locomotive were riding on a wave of flame.

I sat crossed-legged on the rail truck. I radioed Koell. I told him about the drone. He told me not to worry. From a distance, Spektr looked like a crashed Mig. Just another hulk. The battle for Iraq would be fought down south. No coalition image analyst would worry about handful of troops salvaging a wrecked plane.

There was nothing I could do. If the Americans dispatched an F15 or Apache Longbow, there would be no warning. We wouldn’t hear engines. My world would wink out mid-breath, mid-thought, as TOW missiles slammed into the train ripping us to offal.