Juggernaut

A ragged tunnel blasted through bedrock. Wooden props at twenty-foot intervals. Railroad track receded into shadow.

He walked inside. Wind noise dropped to a low moan. He pulled down his scarf, unzipped his jacket and took off his sand goggles. He shook dust from his ears.

Twin railroad track. His boots crunched on shingle. Footfalls echoed from the high tunnel walls.

The passageway was cold as a meat locker. Skin-prickle chill. His breath fogged the air in front of him.

A glint up ahead. A scintillating, multifaceted jewel, like a giant arachnid eye. The lens glass of a hooded lamp high on the snout of a massive diesel locomotive.

A plough-blade welded to the front of the motor house. Gaunt grabbed handrails and hauled himself up onto the nose platform of the locomotive.

He used a narrow walkway to shuffle the length of the engine. Rust-streaked service panels and intake fans. A wide engine/alternator compartment. He leant over the railing and inspected wheels, pistons and brake shoes. The vehicle seemed to be intact.

He reached the cab. The slide door was locked. He rubbed dust from the glass and shone his flashlight inside. The control panels were undamaged.

A body on the floor of the cab. He could see a boot, a spent cartridge, a mummified hand holding a pistol.

He ran his hand over bodywork. Rock dust. He looked up. A web of cracks in the sandstone roof. Heavy wooden props straining to hold back imminent tunnel collapse.

Gaunt climbed from the cab. He shone his torch further down the passage. The locomotive had been unhitched from wagons and coupled to two ornate Pullman carriages that had clearly been housed in the tunnel for decades. Wood panels. Cream livery. Dust and blistered lacquer.

He climbed a door ladder and shone his flashlight through glass fogged with dust.

An office. Brass light fixtures. Exquisite marquetry panels. A grand desk. High-backed Queen Anne chairs. Furniture centred on a heroic portrait of Saddam in full generalissimo braids.

The second carriage was a dining car.

Gaunt jumped from the coach and walked deeper into the rail tunnel. He walked past box cars, ore wagons, flatbed trucks.

He approached the cavern. The beam of his flashlight was too weak to penetrate the vast space. He could make out the curve of rock walls. The depths of the cavern were lost in shadow.

The grit-crunch of his footfalls echoed round the cave.

He glimpsed the opaque plastic of the containment dome. Something white inside. Something huge.

He kept walking.

His flashlight lit the riveted silver hulls of the lab containers.

Four metal bio-medical units. Gleaming chrome, like old-time Airstream trailers. They were lined in a row, nose to tail. Bolted together to form a single, long hermetic environment.

A mobile bio-weapons lab. Swiss made. Shipped from Europe. Dispatched to the valley the moment Koell stroked the Spektr heat tiles, and saw for himself that the vehicle was solid and real.

The lab docked at Qatar. Each unit loaded onto a flatbed railcar and draped with tarp. The lab was towed across Syria surfing a wave of bribe money. US dollars clearing the route, switching every junction, turning every light green. A tight brick of currency changed hands at a border checkpoint. Guards pulled barriers aside and let the locomotive pass unrecorded into Iraq’s Western Desert.

Gaunt examined the lab door. He stroked metal. A steel hatch, like the bulkhead door of a ship.

One week earlier.

Koell’s hotel suite. Gaunt sipped his third whisky and watched interrogation footage on a laptop.

Ignatiev, tied to an office chair. Raw brickwork. A battery lamp hung from a roof girder. Probably a basement room in one of the bombed-out ministry buildings by the banks of the Tigris.

Koell was off-screen.

‘Do you comprehend the scope of this endeavour?’ asked Koell. ‘The time, the money, I’ve spent chasing Spektr? I had to oversee this entire recovery project in the middle of a fucking war. Can you grasp the scale of the undertaking?’

‘You weren’t there,’ said Ignatiev. ‘You weren’t on site. You were safe in Baghdad. This is the most destructive disease I’ve ever seen. Forget Marburg. Forget Ebola. This isn’t some jungle bug that will make your gums bleed for a couple of days. This thing is lethal and spreads like wildfire. No cure. No vaccine. There were two hundred men in that valley. Once the infection got loose, it took twelve hours to wipe out the entire battalion. You have to believe me. This disease cannot be weaponised. It cannot be effectively contained. Eradication. That’s the only sane course of action.’

‘I’ve dedicated years of my life to this project. I scoured Moscow. I kicked down the doors of shitty apartment buildings and put the thumbscrews on every old communist fuck that worked out of Star City. I’ve bled Special Projects dry chasing this piece of space junk. Called in every favour. I’m out on a limb. I’ve got to produce results.