Juggernaut

The locomotive rumbled to life. It slowly advanced. The Spektr tail fin scraped the tunnel arch, bringing down a shower of rock chips and stone dust.

The driver made use of double track and points to uncouple the locomotive, back up, and shunt Spektr into the cavern.

I had the men set up battery lights against the cavern walls. The orbiter sat at the centre of the wide chamber, ringed by light.

I had the men bring tools. I was anxious to open the scorched space vehicle and find what lay inside.

My first task was to conduct a visual survey of the craft. I climbed a step ladder and examined the tail section. The rudder was broken. The main engine cones were crushed. There was a big gash in the hull. Quartz-fibre heat-tiles ripped away, steel skin peeled back revealing the engine bay and combustion chambers. I powered up a video camera and leant into the compartment. Zoom and pan. Orbital manoeuvre exhausts. Pipe work and clusters of spherical fuel tanks. Plenty of sand. Plenty of heat damage.

I told the men to carefully drill the tanks and purge any liquid propellant that might remain. The craft appeared to be in the same state as the Scud. Broken and depleted. Any volatile rocket fuel, liquid hydrogen or nitrogen-tetroxide, long since leeched away. But I didn’t want to risk an explosion if we had to cut our way inside with oxyacetylene gear.

I knew there would likely be pyrotechnic charges bedded in the frame of the side hatch to enable an occupant to blow the door, but they were not accessible from outside and couldn’t be disarmed.

I propped the ladder against the craft and climbed onto the hull. I walked from tail to cockpit.

I crouched and ran my hands over the heat tiles, tried to find a seam which might indicate some kind of payload bay, but it was sealed tight.

I climbed from the vehicle and filmed the belly of the craft. I filmed the keel in close-up. The ablative tiles that covered the keel like fish scales had been cooked by unimaginable heat. They had melted to a strange, petroleum sheen.

The nose of the orbiter hung over the edge of the wagon. I filmed the hydraulic stump of the nose gear.

Space debris often falls in this part of the world. Most Russian capsules re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere over Egypt, passing over Iraq following a controlled trajectory that will allow them to touch down in the steppes of Kazakhstan. Radar records indicated Spektr followed a steep, ballistic trajectory. It suggested the craft was guided by an automated system struggling to control a vehicle in free-fall. Air-brakes unfolded and were instantly torn away. Ailerons extended to increase drag and shrivelled in fierce re-entry heat. As the craft blazed through the mesosphere any astronaut aboard would have been subjected to lethal G-force. If they were alive when Spektr left orbit, they were certainly dead by the time the vehicle broke the cloud-deck.

Spektr slowed two kilometres from impact. Maybe a drag chute had been released. Maybe braking rockets fired in the nose to decelerate the craft. The undercarriage deployed as part of a pre-programmed landing sequence. Then the super-hot vehicle ploughed into the desert and buried itself in the sand.

A lost Russian spacecraft. It should have been headline news. It should have mobilised armies.

And there was the orbiter itself. The very fact of its existence. The Russians built a couple of shuttle prototypes but didn’t fly a single manned mission. The creation of the Spektr vehicle suggested a shadow space programme of astonishing ambition and sophistication had successfully eluded Western intelligence agencies.

I examined the crew access hatch. It was in the starboard side of the craft behind the cockpit. No obvious door release. Smooth heat tiles. No handle.

The hatch was circular. It was surrounded by a metal ridge. The metal had melted during the heat of re-entry and smeared in rivulets like candle wax. Some kind of docking collar. An umbilicus rim and capture latches. Spektr had not been alone in space. It had been tethered to a companion vehicle or high-orbit installation.

More questions than answers. I was anxious to open the hatch and explore the interior of the craft, but I received terse radio instructions that Spektr was to remain sealed until Koell himself was present. I was told to post sentries, make sure none of my men approached the vehicle.

Koell gave me desert coordinates. He ordered me to meet his plane.

The designated landing site was twenty miles from the valley entrance. A stretch of waste ground firm enough to be used as a crude airstrip.

My driver was asleep in a Jeep. I shook him awake.

We rode through the rail tunnel and into the desert. We parked in the middle of vast nothing. We created an improvised landing strip: drove flag-stakes into the ground and kicked aside rocks.

We waited. Dawn was breaking. I scanned the horizon with binoculars.