Juggernaut

Phase Two. Weaponise pathogen.

Phase Three?

Weeks ago, Jabril had seen a heavy impact-proof case locked in the ammunition store. He had a key to the store. He visited the storeroom late one night and opened the trunk.

A Hellfire II missile on a foam bed.

The missile was dove grey. About three feet long, aluminium shell thick as drainpipe. Lockheed Martin batch stamp. Fins at the rear and neck. The nose cone, with its glass laser-optic lens, had been detached. The payload compartment, the copper fragmentation sleeve, was empty.

Koell intended to test his bio-weapon. As soon as Ignatiev delivered the weaponised virus, he would pick a significant population centre and fire the missile from a drone. The missile would arm itself in flight. When it reached a specific GPS coordinate, a preset grid ref and altitude, the ground targeting crew would send the destruct signal and the missile would detonate mid-air, releasing its lethal payload.

‘Imagine a battalion of these infected creatures,’ he once heard Ignatiev say. ‘Imagine the destructive potential. A formid-able fighting force. Men devoid of pity, impervious to pain and fatigue.’

Koell and Ignatiev. A shared insanity.

Jabril played it cool. Business as usual. He ran the camp. He supervised prisoners caged in their pens.

Phase Three of Koell’s programme would take very little manpower. He would have no further use for Iraqi troops. He would wait for word Ignatiev had concluded his research and was ready to break camp. Then he would radio the order to eliminate non-essential personnel.

Friday night. The Iraqi battalion has been promised downtime. Ignatiev’s team secured a stereo, a bunch of CDs and a case of vodka. The deep galleries of the mine were soon filled with of raucous music and laughter.

The Russians stayed sober.

This is it, thought Jabril. Extermination day. At the height of the revelry, when the troops are drunk and euphoric, the Russians will break out heavy machine guns and mow them down.

He hurried to his cell. He stripped out of his white suit, pulled on combat gear and tucked a pistol into his belt.

He emptied clothes from his Louis Vuitton suitcase onto the floor, carried the case to the munitions store and filled it with patties of explosive and detonators.

He stashed the suitcase beneath his bunk and headed for the lab units.

The cavern was still and silent.

Faint music echoed from distant tunnels.

Jabril had memorised the door code. He let himself into Lab One. He filled a garbage bag with paperwork. He smashed open a couple of computers and levered hard drives from their bed.

He moved on to Lab Two. He swept documentation into a bag.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

One of Ignatiev’s techs, wearing a lab coat.

Jabril snatched a flask from a shelf and smashed it over the man’s head. The technician fell to the floor, face peppered with blood and glass. Jabril stamped on the man’s throat and left him to choke. He collected the garbage bags as the technician writhed and turned blue.

Jabril dumped the garbage bags in the munitions store. Hid them in empty document boxes. He planned to wire explosives to the wall timbers and incinerate all trace of the Spektr project.

A klaxon. A rising air-raid wail. Someone had found the dead technician.

Jabril stepped into the corridor. A guard shouted something in Russian. Jabril shot him through the heart and ran.

No time to rig the demolition charges. He headed for the main tunnel.

A quick detour. The prisoner pens. A chance to create additional chaos to aid his escape.

Eight infected men awaiting dissection. Flesh blotched with strange mutations. Red boiler suits matted with blood and pus. Ignatiev preparing to harvest samples on an industrial scale.

Jabril shot padlocks, released chains and threw open the cage doors of the freight containers. He ran down the tunnel. He looked back. He saw infected men emerge from their steel dungeons and sniff the air.

He kept running.

The main tunnel. Milling soldiers, confused and bewildered, half dressed and half drunk. The klaxon echoed round the walls.

Jabril pushed through the crowd. He had minutes to escape the mine and flee the ravine before Ignatiev’s Russian henchmen organised themselves and began their eradication drill.

Screams. A glimpse of red boiler suits. Blood and tearing flesh. Panic swept through the crowd. The soldiers ran for the tunnel entrance.

Jabril ran down the ravine, swept along by fleeing Republican Guards.

Heavy machine gun fire. The man next to Jabril was lifted into the air by the impact of heavy .50 cal rounds, and hit the ground dead.

Jabril kept running. Men cut down around him. He was pelted with rock splinters and stone dust. He was splashed with blood.