He backed out the room, running command wire.
The holding pens. Two freight containers sitting at the end of a tunnel. The container doors had been removed and replaced by welded bars. Crude jail cells.
Jabril instinctively covered his mouth and nose with the hooked stump of his arm. The tunnel used to smell of faeces. Most soldiers wouldn’t approach the place unless they were ordered to pull sentry duty. If they were forced to stand guard, they would plug their noses with toilet tissue sprayed with deodorant. Some of the prisoners lost bowel control each time a removal team arrived to extract a fresh victim. The men would huddle in shadows at the back of the container. They would piss and soil themselves.
Jabril would make the selection. The team would drag the semi-conscious man clear while his companions were kept at bay with Taser batons.
The inmate would be marched to the cavern labs, thrashing as he saw the zinc table and nylon restraints waiting to receive him.
‘Cameras running.’
A lab tech would tightened wrist, ankle and chest straps, tug buckles and checked for slack.
‘He’s secure. Go ahead.’
That long, despairing shriek as the prisoner lifted his head, watched a needle prick the skin of his forearm and deliver its lethal load.
Jabril had spent his working life in Baghdad instigating torture and executions. He would work his way through a prisoner list as he sipped his mid-morning coffee. Part of the daily routine, like glancing through the sheaf of anonymous denunciations that arrived by mail each morning.
He leafed through intelligence reports and circled names. His subordinates understood the code. A cross meant arrest and detainment. A circle meant interrogation. A red tick meant death. He didn’t have to give a direct order. The words never passed his lips. He didn’t have to hear the screams. He didn’t have to smell the sweat, piss and blood of the torture cells.
But the Spektr project gave him the direct power of life and death. He stood in front of the prisoner pens every couple of days, surveyed the snivelling men and made his choice. He would point out his chosen victim, watch them cower from his pointed finger like he was aiming a gun. It was intoxicating. God-like potency. A heart-galloping thrill, like illicit sex.
Jabril stood by the bars and stared into the dark cave-mouth of the empty freight containers. He could still hear the ghost-screams, feel the old flutter of excitement.
He set the suitcase down. He popped latches. He slapped explosive against timber wall props and pushed detonators into the putty. He twisted together frayed copper strands and ran cable.
Voss climbed a ladder to the locomotive walkway. He entered the cab.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Wish we could get hold of Gaunt. Break fingers until he showed us how to crank up this fucking thing.’
‘Think he knows how to run it?’ asked Voss.
‘How did he know about the mine? The lab? Someone gave him a detailed brief. They might have told him about the train.’
Voss didn’t reply.
Lucy crouched and pulled a battered ring binder from a shelf beneath the engineer’s console. She flipped pages.
‘This baby is some kind of diesel/electric hybrid. I’ve got juice to the driver’s desk, but I’m getting some kind of power warning.’
‘I checked the track,’ said Voss. ‘The switch-rails are set to put her in a parallel siding.’
‘So fix it.’
Voss jumped from the cab. He walked the track in front of the locomotive. He examined the rail switch. Mechanical operation. No hydraulic actuators, no electrics. A tall lever next to a rail junction. He threw his bodyweight against the lever. It wouldn’t shift.
He headed down the tunnel. He searched for something he could use as a sledgehammer.
A couple of flatbed freight wagons. He pulled bundles of tarpaulin aside. Rotted planks. Chains. Yellowed al-Ba’ath newsprint. A heavy, rusted wrench.
Voss hefted the wrench.
He became aware of a distant figure in the periphery of his vision. A man stood at the end of the tunnel, back-lit by cavern arc lights. Hunched, simian. He was staring at Voss.
Voss stood back from the wagon to get a clear view. He glimpsed a red boiler suit as the figure ducked into shadow.
‘Gaunt? Gaunt, is that you?’ His voice echoed and died.
Voss walked deeper into the tunnel, boots crunching on shingle. He crouched and peered beneath a row of ore hoppers. He glimpsed bloody, bare feet and the legs of a tattered red boiler suit.
An infected soldier.
‘Here I am, you raghead fuck. You want meat, come get it.’
He glimpsed a horribly distorted face watching him from behind a wagon. Flaking flesh. Strange, tumorous eruptions.
‘Come on. What are you waiting for?’
The face ducked out of sight. Sound of clumsy, running feet.
Voss threw down the wrench, drew his sidearm and ran between ore trucks in pursuit.
Jabril entered Lab One. He wriggled his hand into a surgical glove, and tugged at the latex cuff with his teeth.
He took a gas mask from a wall hook and pulled it on.
He unlatched the refrigerator. A cascade of nitrogen fog. Storage jars. Body parts held in sub-zero stasis.
He propped the door open. He wrenched the power cable from the back of the freezer. The temperature read-out blanked. Cooling fans slowed and died.
He dumped the suitcase on the necropsy table.
He stroked the mirrored metal. He contemplated the wrist and ankle straps, the drain hole at the foot of the table to help sluice blood.
He had supervised the murder of forty men. Stood outside the lab units and relished muffled screams as the men were strapped down and forcibly injected.
He was both horrified and aroused by the memory.
The freezer storage jars were already starting to defrost. Water dripped and pooled on the plate floor of the lab.
He slapped explosive against the side of the freezer and wired det cable.
Jabril mashed a nub of explosive onto the roof panel above the table. He pressed a blasting cap into the putty and strung detonator wire.
He stepped through the doorway into Lab Two.
Cultivation equipment laid out on steel counters. A bio-weapon production line. Microscopes. Centrifuges. Fermentation reactors.
Glass crunched beneath the leather soles of his Oxford brogues. Broken flasks. Culture dishes.
The growth chamber. Legs, spines and lungs suspended in frosted vats. Each body part floated in a thick serum of amino acids and bovine placental tissue. Metallic tendrils erupted from flesh and bone as if reaching out, seeking a fresh host to invade.
Jabril slapped explosive against the glass. Submerged body parts shivered and twitched.
He wired detonators.
Lab four.
He crouched, span wing nuts and flipped latches. He opened the steel sarcophagus. Konstantin, laid out like Tutankhamen, arms folded across his chest.
Jabril moulded a fist-sized nub of C4, wired a blasting cab, and wedged the explosive between the dead astronaut’s fingers.
He left the lab units and crossed the cavern.
The bio-dome. Spektr, under arc lights.
A stack of chemical drums. Skull stickers streaked with corrosion. Jabril rolled yellow drums of peptone, ethylene and paraformaldehyde, and stacked them beneath Spektr.
He tore nubs of plastic explosive and mashed them onto each drum lid with the heel of his palm. He took a fresh reel of cable from the case and ran det cord.
A flicker of movement. A figure outside the opaque plastic of the containment dome.
A red boiler suit brushed against polythene. Jabril crouched behind the drums and drew his pistol. He watched the blurred figure stumble the perimeter of the containment dome, hands sliding and squeaking across taut plastic.