‘Call it a sixth sense. I got halfway up the hill road then pulled over. Something not right. Too quiet. No birds.
‘I headed up the road on foot. Watched from the jungle. I don’t know what happened up there but it was major. The station was hidden beneath a geodesic dome. Choppers parked in the compound. There were guys in white biohazard suits.
‘I got the hell out of there and drove back to town. I asked around. Nobody wanted to talk about the mission station. Bad hoodoo. But I found a French consulate official with a taste for liquor and loosened his tongue.
‘There were these guys. White guys. They turned up in bad times. Kenya, during a Marburg outbreak; Burundi, during a bunch of Ebola cases. They spoke pretty good English but Pierre thought they were Russian. They used to show up during the sixties and seventies posing as tourists, journalists, Médecins Sans Frontières. But they were from Vektor. The weapons acquisition arm of Biopreparat, the Soviet biological warfare programme. Anytime there was an outbreak of an emergent disease, something new and lethal gestating in deep jungle, these guys showed up like the horsemen of the apocalypse. Procurement teams masquerading as humanitarian aid. Moving through jungle hospitals like ministering angels, collecting biopsy swabs and spinal fluid samples for delivery to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch.
‘After the collapse of communism half these guys were out of a job. Highly skilled bio-weapon experts. PhDs in pharmacology. Spent their lives developing lethal psychotropic and neurotropic agents. Reduced to driving taxis and selling flowers in the street. These guys were party elite. They lived in the secret cities of the Soviet rustbelt. They were used to luxury dachas and Zil limousines. One by one they disappeared. Showed up in Libya, Syria, trying to sell VX neurotoxin. A gang of them got busted cooking methamphetamine in Mexico. The cream of the crop got picked up by the US. Given new names, a fuck-ton of cash, and sent to work at Fort Detrick.
‘That’s the scary part. They’re still out there. Vektor. The men, the infrastructure. Cut loose. Sometimes freelance. They work for the Agency or private biotech, chasing their own agenda. Heard they showed up in Kosovo looking for body parts. Kidneys for rich fucks on dialysis. Used the POW camps as an organ bank. Hang around any of these shithole countries long enough you’ll see the same planes time and again. Black charters. Antonovs. Ilyushins. They change livery and tail numbers, but it’s always the same crews.
‘I went out to the missionary station a few months later. It was gone. Burned and bulldozed. No sign of the kids, no sign of the nuns. Caterpillar tracks. No top soil. Someone dug a big pit and filled it in.
Later, I heard locals wouldn’t go near the place. They say the jungle grew strange. They said it glowed at night. Said there were genetic abnormalities. Giant insects. Weird flowers.
‘A shitstorm like Iraq? Wouldn’t surprise me if those fuckers turned up on their own little death trip. Blood, gunsmoke. They’d smell opportunity. I wouldn’t mess with them for a single second.’
Koell flicked open a lock knife. The metallic snap echoed through the vaulted hangar. He cut Gaunt free.
‘Gesture of trust.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Work for us. You need a cause. You’re lost. You’re broke. We need good men.’
Gaunt rubbed his wrists.
‘The people you saw today. They want to head into the Western Desert. Take them where they want to go.’
‘Why would I do that?’ asked Gaunt.
Koell took a roll of bills from his pocket. Fresh notes bound by a rubber band. He threw the bills on the desk.
‘Fuck your money.’
‘You want to be part of the shadow world. You need a way in. Well, this is it. Go ahead. Step through the looking-glass.’
‘Just fly the choppers?’
Koell took a folded photograph from his pocket. He smoothed it on his knee and passed it to Gaunt. A satellite shot. Rocky, lunar terrain.
‘The National Reconnaissance Office designate it Valley 403. A limestone canyon. Locals call it The Valley of Tears. The Western Desert, near the Syrian border. Those security contractors believe there is gold hidden in the hills.’
‘Gold?’
‘You’re welcome to whatever you find. Take your cut. Take it all. I don’t care.’
Koell gave the nod. One of his goons put a MOLLE backpack at Gaunt’s feet.
Gaunt popped the clips.
A chunky Thuraya XT sat phone.
Maps and aerial photographs.
A 9mm Sig Sauer automatic with a screw-thread barrel and a long, black titanium suppressor.
A box of tungsten-nytrilium hollow-points. Each bullet spiked like a molar. Designed to fragment and rip a wound like a shotgun blast.
A tube of caulk explosive and green box of e-cell detonators.
‘There are items hidden in those hills. Items we wish you to find, and return to us.’
‘Don’t you have your own guys for this kind of thing? Agency teams?’
‘I won’t bore you with the politics of covert action. A man in my position must make ingenious use of finite resources. A deniable, back-channel asset is always our preferred means of operation. These mercenaries are entirely expendable. They could vanish from the face of the earth and no one would realise they were gone.’
Gaunt examined the pistol.
‘Nothing more?’
‘You’re an ambitious man. You don’t want to be small-time all your life. Those deadbeat mercs, they want money. But you have bigger ambitions. You want to matter. You want to make things happen. So impress me. Show me what you can do.’
Ambush
They came for Jabril at dawn. They kicked him awake and pulled him from his bunk. Full strip search. They had him bend, spread his ass cheeks and cough. They ran fingers through his hair. They checked his mouth with a flashlight. Then they threw him a fresh jumpsuit and told him to dress.
They returned his prosthetic hook. He twisted the hollow plastic cup on to the stump of his wrist.
They locked him in a wire holding pen with eight other men. Rough guys. Lean. Scarred faces.
Marines stood guard and told them to crouch on the cold concrete floor.
‘Don’t speak. Don’t move.’
One of the prisoners stared Jabril down. He radiated violence and hatred. A big guy with one eye. He had seen the three tattoo dots on the back of Jabril’s hand. Tikriti. Ex-Ba’ath. Marked for death.
Iraqi police showed up. They cross-checked charge sheets and magistrate numbers.
Rapists. Car-jackers. Mahdi militia.
They signed for the prisoners. Marines knew half the police employed by the Interior Ministry moonlighted as Shi’ite death squads. The convicts would be dead in a ditch by sundown.
The prisoners were shackled at the ankle, waist and wrist. Jabril’s good hand was cuffed to his belt chain.
The men stood single-file, hoods over their heads. They were led to a loading bay. A young cop jabbed their legs and shoulders with the barrel of his AK to keep them moving.
They shuffled aboard a minivan. Jabril sat patiently in hooded darkness. Door slam. Engine start. He heard cops light cigarettes, the scratch of four matchbooks struck simultaneously.
The van left Abu Ghraib. It got waved through traffic control points and Hesco blast barriers. It joined the expressway and headed for Baghdad.
The prisoners sat in rows. Two guards at the front, two at the back.
The driver was called Ali. The guy riding shotgun was Najjar. The two kids on the back seat looked barely old enough to shave.
‘There’s a car,’ said Ali, checking the rear-view. ‘A shot-up Suburban. It’s been tailing us since we left the prison.’