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.
The fleeing men reached the open valley. They ran for vehicles parked in front of the citadel. The convoy of trucks and cars a mile distant, shrouded in camouflage nets.
Jabril reached the convoy. More gunfire. Door panels shrieked and sparked as a .50 cal tracer punched holes. Jabril hit the ground and played dead. Wounded men screamed and died in the dust around him.
Fuel fires. Cars flipped and burned. Nylon camouflage nets smoked and shrivelled.
Jabril belly-crawled to the convoy. He rolled beneath a bus. The chassis above his head shook as heavy rounds rocked the vehicle. Smashed window glass hit the dirt.
He looked out from beneath the bus. Burning sedans. Burning men.
He glimpsed lab techs through smoke and flickering flame. They were loading the missile case into the rear of the cash truck. They sealed the door. They headed for the cab, and were jumped by figures in red boiler suits. Inhuman strength. An armed ripped off. A face peeled away.
A soldier squirmed beneath the bus and crawled hand over hand towards Jabril.
‘Help me.’
Bite marks. Strips of skin torn from the man’s face.
Jabril tugged the Makarov from his waistband and shot the soldier through the eye.
He rolled from beneath the bus and scrambled to his feet. Burning cars. Streaking tracer rounds.
He ran for the valley wall, screened from the Russian shooters by a curtain of smoke and flame.
He scrambled up the rock slope, hand and hook raking scree.
He hid among boulders. Faint screams and gunshots from the valley below.
He watched Russian goons machine gun terrified Iraqi troops. Republican Guards drew sidearms and fired back. A slow, unfolding bloodbath. The valley quickly turned into a corpse field.
He saw red boiler suits among the crowd. The infected prisoners shrugged off bullet strikes. They gouged and ripped. A flesh-frenzy. Russian gunmen over-powered and pulled apart.
The infected berserkers ran among burning cars and trucks. They punched out windshields and dragged drivers from their vehicles. Throats torn from wounded soldiers as they lay helpless in the sand.
Jabril turned away and climbed the ravine, the clatter of stones merging with faint screams from the valley below.
Gaunt sat in the darkness of a remote side tunnel. He crouched on the floor, back to the wall, head resting against cool stone.
A muffled beep from his pocket. The sat phone. Incoming call.
Koell’s voice:
‘Carnival to Brimstone, over.’
‘Go ahead, Carnival.’
Gaunt wondered, briefly, how a sat-phone signal was able to reach deep within the mine. They must be using the Predator to boost the signal. Dawn had broken. The drone was back in the air, circling the valley. The UAV operators were probably sitting in a van at the edge of the desert, tweaking a joystick, monitoring the data flow, relaying encrypted transmissions via the drone’s EISS telemetry package. A military surveillance crew leased by the hour as part of some inter-departmental exchange. And despite it all, the digitisation, cryptographic algorithm and satellite bounce, Gaunt could hear the intimate acoustic of Koell’s hotel room. The compressed hush. The faint hum of air-con.
‘Authenticate.’
‘Authentication is Oscar, Sierra, Yankee, Bravo.’
‘So what’s the situation?’
‘I have the package.’
‘You have the package? Confirm: you have the package in your possession.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You have the actual cylinder?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Read me the serial number.’
‘Say again?’
‘I need proof. There is a serial number stamped on the steel cap of the cylinder. Read it to me.’
‘I don’t have the cylinder actually in my hand. But I know where it is. It’s secure. I can get it.’
‘You can get it.’
‘Swear to God. I’ll have it within the hour.’
The line went dead.
‘Hello? Carnival? Koell?’