Juggernaut

A deep boom. A tremor ran through the temple floor. Campfire wood crumbled to ash, releasing a last puff of flame. Embers spiralled upward like fireflies.

‘There go the choppers,’ said Voss.

Amanda crouched beneath low vaulted archways. The flare in her hand fizzed and spat red fire. It filled the catacombs with a fine smoke haze and the stink of cordite.

She was deep within the crypt.

She found herself picking her way through a carpet of emaciated bodies.

Republican Guard. Olive uniforms shredded and burned by heavily calibre rounds. They’d been dead a long while. Fractured bones protruded from taut skin. No flies or maggots to consume their flesh. They had dried like jerky.

Broken bodies. Twisted, skeletal limbs. Rictus screams. Death-camp horror.

A tremor ran through the ancient edifice. A deep rumble. The vaulted ceiling shook. She heard the crack and grind of shifting stones. Trickles of dust from the brickwork above her head.

Amanda hit the transmit button on her chest rig.

‘Lucy? What the fuck was that?’

No response.

‘Lucy, can you hear me?’

Dead channel static. The signal from her TASC unit too weak to penetrate thick granite.

She unhooked the earpiece.

She continued her exploration of the vaulted catacombs. She ducked low. She raised the burning flare and squinted into deep shadow.

Clay pots jumbled with bone and funerary offerings.

Row upon row of squat pillars receding into gloom.

She examined the gargantuan cylindrical blocks that propped the roof. A sinister cosmology. Constellations and planetary movements. Celestial calendars plotting every equinox and eclipse.

Hieroglyphs etched into stonework. Serpentine, hybrid creatures. Phantasmagoric ranks of sculpted monsters that had stared into the subterranean dark, faces locked in a blank-eyed snarl, since the dawn of humanity.

Amanda reached out and touched granite cobra fangs. She shivered.

‘Gaunt?’ she shouted. Her voice echoed harsh, metallic. ‘Gaunt, you down here?’

She listened for movement. At first she could hear nothing but the hiss of the burning flare, and the constant whine of battle tinnitus.

She became aware of a rasping, scratching sound. Something dragging itself over the granite slabs of the crypt floor.

A grinning abomination crawled out of the darkness. A wizened, mummified soldier, hauling useless legs.

It reached for her, tongue lolling like a strip of dried leather.

Amanda delivered a vicious kick that tore the creature’s head from its shoulders and sent it bouncing into shadows like a football.

A hand gripped her ankle. She jerked her leg free and turned round. A second leering revenant. Amanda backed away. She drew her Glock and took aim.

Slow-seething movement on every side. Desiccated, crippled soldiers, dozens of them. Awful, mewing spastic things. Jabril’s lost battalion, returning to life, crawling out of the dark.

Konstantin

Lucy sat by the campfire.

She sipped water. She held her canteen to Jabril’s lips.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Finish your story. That spacecraft. Spektr. What did you find inside?’

Koell flew back to Baghdad. His final orders:

‘Doctor Ignatiev has absolute authority. You are to follow his instructions without question.’

Ignatiev’s men erected a bio-containment structure deep within the mine. A well-rehearsed procedure.

They carried equipment to the cavern. They set up lights and erected an aluminium scaffold over Spektr. They unrolled sheets of opaque polythene and pinned them in place. They glued seams with epoxy guns and sealed them with tape.

A geodesic dome.

They entered the tented enclosure dressed in white protective suits and gas masks. We watched them work. Ghost shapes behind plastic. They each had tanks of Clorox bleach strapped to their backs. They sprayed the interior of the bio-containment area. They drenched every surface, soaked the scaffold, the walls, the polythene floor. Then they soaked Spektr. We watched the blurred outline of the craft change colour. Dust washed away to expose white and black heat tiles.

They fired up a generator. We covered our mouths as bleach-mist was sucked from the containment dome by extractor fans and vented down the tunnel.

‘You must pick a man,’ said Ignatiev. ‘Someone you trust.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because you are going in. I want you to open Spektr.’

I summoned Captain Hassim. Hassim was a pleasant young soldier. We worked together in Baghdad. I sponsored his rise through the intelligence hierarchy. He supervised beatings at Abu Ghraib.

We were led to the cavern. We entered a polythene staging room next to the dome.

‘Take off your clothes.’

We stripped. We stood naked in ultraviolet light to kill bacteria.

Ignatiev watched through the plastic sheet.

We stepped into white underwear ripped from sterile bags and zipped ourselves into green Tyvek suits. We pulled on rubber boots and taped the ankle seals. We wore two layers of blue Nitrile gloves beneath heavy rubber gauntlets. We taped the gauntlets at the wrist. I taped my empty sleeve round the stump of my arm.