‘Christ.’
‘I was part of the regime. We all knew. We all heard. We all share responsibility. I’m not proud of the things I’ve seen and done. I’m not a good man. Each night I pray to God to spare me his terrible judgement and hell.’
‘Your battalion spent weeks out there, camped in the contamination zone.’
‘Yes.’
‘And none of them got sick?’
‘None of them got Anthrax.’
Lucy sat back.
‘A fortune in gold, sitting in the desert, waiting to be found. Can you prove any of this story?’
‘What is your instinct?’ asked Jabril. ‘Am I lying?’
‘Yeah. I think you’re lying through your arse. I don’t know what happened out there in the desert, but you know what? I don’t care. Tell me straight. Is there gold? Is that much true?’
‘Yes.’
‘If my crew go searching for the gold, if we travel to Al-Qa’im and find nothing but sand, I think you know what will happen. The boys won’t be in a forgiving mood. It won’t be pretty.’
Jabril nodded and lit another cigarette.
‘Here’s the deal,’ said Lucy. ‘Military Intelligence are done with you. A few days from now you’ll be transferred to local jurisdiction and shipped out. They won’t take you to Ganci right away. They’ll take you for processing at the Central Station. Throw you in a holding cell. You’ll be surrounded by fifty Sunni fucks wanting payback for a lifetime of hurt. You’ll spend every waking moment trying to stay alive. You won’t dare sleep. But there is an alternative. We could arrange your freedom.’
‘In return for the gold.’
‘We’d treat you fair. You’d get a cut.’
‘How many of you are there?’ asked Jabril.
‘A team of five.’
‘Do you trust them?’
‘With my life.’
‘Wait until your friends lay eyes on a mountain of gold. You will soon see how much their trust is worth.’
Lucy and Amanda rode the expressway towards Baghdad. Suffocating humidity. Rain blattered against the cracked windshield.
Amanda scrunched her Abu Ghraib visitor pass and tossed it from the window. She turned the air-con dial, put her hand over a dash vent until she felt a blast of chill air.
‘Western Desert,’ said Amanda. ‘Tough terrain. Bandit country. Peshmergas. Jihadi guerrillas. Fuckheads of every stripe.’
‘Think it’s all right?’ said Lucy. ‘Taking the gold?’
‘It’s dirty money. It’s not going to build a hospital. It’s going to end up in some asshole’s Swiss bank account. Might as well be ours, right?’
‘Yeah.’
Amanda kicked at bullets rolling in the foot well. The Suburban got shot to hell in the previous day’s ambush. AK rounds had penetrated the Kevlar door panels. Gleaming silver mushrooms littered the carpet and seats.
She took an envelope from the glove box. Two new passports. Big gold crest. Canada. Passport/Passeport.
‘We risk our lives every day,’ said Amanda. ‘Sooner or later, our luck will run dry. You keep saying you’re sick of the life, you want to start over. Well, this is it. This is our shot. We could be home free.’
‘Three tons of gold. Can’t be hauled over sand dunes. We need choppers.’
‘Gaunt has a couple of Hueys.’
‘I don’t want to involve Gaunt,’ said Lucy. ‘The guy is bad news.’
‘Who else can we hire? A job like this has to be off the meter.’
‘I guess.’
‘This is our last war,’ said Amanda. ‘We need a retirement plan. We owe it to the guys. We can’t them send them home broke.’
‘Okay,’ said Lucy. ‘Let’s roll the dice.’
Doc ID: 575JD3
Page 01/1
08/21/05
MEMORANDUM TO: Project Lead, D.Ops
SUBJECT: Spektr
Colonel,
JABRIL JAMADI has made contact with a team of security contractors operating under the name VANGUARD RISK CONSULTANTS. We believe they are unaware of the SPEKTR project. They are currently seeking helicopter transport to carry them to the Western Desert. This presents an excellent opportunity to secure our objectives at the SPEKTR site. The region of desert between Al Qa’im and Al Hadr is remote and hostile terrain favoured by foreign Jihadists attempting to establish smuggling routes in-country for mortars and surface-to-air missiles. We have yet to determine the level of risk presented by the contamination zone itself. It would be preferable to utilise a deniable back-channel proxy squad, rather than dispatch an Agency fire team.
I respect your reservations regarding the scope of the SPEKTR project, but I would draw your attention to Presidential Directive 39 which instructs the agency to undertake ‘an aggressive programme of foreign intelligence collection, analysis and covert actions’ in our efforts to combat terrorism. The offensive potential of the SPEKTR battle-strain is incontrovertible, and gives us a firm legal mandate in our steps to secure the virus on behalf of the United States.
Gaunt
Jim Gaunt pulled back the hangar door. Open for business. No different from a neighbourhood grocer hosing down the sidewalk and laying out fruit boxes and flowers.
He sipped from a silver thermal mug with Marine wings.
Dawn. Reveille. A plaintive bugle call crackling from loudspeakers. The rain had cleared. Sky bluer than he’d ever known. Wet asphalt would soon burn dry.
The morning delivery. Raphael drove down the airstrip service road. He pulled up in a five-ton flatbed. Russian RGD-5 grenades under tarp.
Gaunt checked his clipboard. Three hundred crates, twenty-four grenades per case. Surplus ordinance shipped from Johannesburg, via the Emirates.
‘Como estas, baby?’
Raphael. Gaunt’s partner. Each night he slept on a canvas cot at the back of the hangar, shotgun by his side. Hair tied back into a ponytail. Thick moustache. Leather waistcoat. Torso covered in jailhouse tattoos faded lavender with age. He ripped the cellophane from a king-size Balmoral and lit up.
‘Absolutely fucking peachy,’ said Gaunt.
Raphael kept a Rottweiler chained by the door. Sasha. She sat with her blanket and bowl. He teased her with a hunk of jerky. She slavered. She snapped and lunged, pulled against her heavy neck-chain.
Baghdad International Airport.
Bullet-pocked terminal buildings. 86th Airwing bivouacked in a departure lounge, To Dare Mighty Things shield-banner draped to mask a Bollywood mural of Saddam leading his men into battle on a white stallion.
Thirteen-thousand-foot landing strip cratered by cluster bombs. Steady traffic from massive C141 Starlifters. The planes threw tight corkscrew turns as they descended towards the runway, popping starburst flares and chaff in case a ground-fired SA-7 locked on their heat-trail.
Fuel trucks pumped gas.
Loadmasters supervised forklift crews as they removed pallet cargo from vaulted holds. Generators. Water purification equipment. White goods. DHL de-planed sacks of mail and courier packages.
The planes were reloaded with metal coffins and wounded, and dispatched to Ramstein Airbase, Germany.
Gaunt was exiled to the far end of the runway. A low-rent private carrier. His hangar part-blocked by an abandoned twin-prop Sherpa turning to rust on the slipway, like the ghost of old wars.