The Eden Deception

by Nathan Swain

  The driver, a middle-aged man in a green John Deere cap, stopped the car about 100 feet short of the checkpoint. Eastgate began to push on the door handle to take a look outside, but an instant later a pickup truck drove up a small rising inside the gates of the base and screeched to a stop just short of the tower.

  It looked like the kind of truck Iraqi insurgents had been using the past few days to raise holy hell for US troops across Baghdad. In the glow of the searchlight from the guard tower, Eastgate could see the truck was armored.

  And then an automatic machine gun on a turret came into view. It bounced and wiggled on the bed of the truck, anxious for a target.

  Holy shit.

  Eastgate triggered his handheld radio. “What the hell is going on at the south checkpoint?”

  A man in a red t-shirt emerged from behind the turret on the truck and sent a flurry of rounds into the taxi. Eastgate reached for his pistol.

  “South checkpoint. Enemy fire. There is a gunman inside the base,” Eastgate shouted into his radio. “This is Captain Eastgate. We are taking fire.”

  A screaming, gold bullet crashed through the front windshield and past the taxi driver’s head, nearly touching Eastgate’s shoulder. The taxi driver put the car in reverse. But when he looked in the rearview mirror he saw a US Army Humvee pull up behind them—about 250 feet down the road. The taxi driver slammed the brakes.

  Eastgate looked behind them. The passenger in the Humvee held a pistol in his left hand. It was pointed at the taxi.

  “Keep driving!” Eastgate shouted in Arabic. “Don’t stop.” But the taxi driver seemed frozen in indecision. The gunman in the Humvee emptied his pistol, taking out the taxi’s front right tire and the side mirror next to Hadi.

  Eastgate flipped the door handle and rolled out of the taxi while the gunman reloaded. He had been trained in counter-ambush measures for a decade. Dismount. Exit the vehicle away from enemy fire. Take cover. Return maximum volume of fire on enemy positions. The movements were internalized now and he sprang into action like an offensive lineman executing a sweep right.

  Pierced by at least ten rounds from the machine gun, the front windshield of the taxi finally gave way. The taxi driver pushed his door open just before the gunman from the truck sent another bullet into his chest, leaving a gaping cavity beneath his throat.

  Eastgate got to his knee. “Hadi,” he shouted. “Get out now!” He quickly looked under the taxi for Hadi’s feet, but there was no sign of him.

  Eastgate knew they weren’t going to last long against the machine gun on the armored truck, which probably could have disabled a Bradley Fighting Vehicle let alone an unarmored soldier. He chose instead to turn and fire at the Humvee, which was now only about sixty feet behind them.

  The Humvee idled. The driver and passenger were probably dead or wounded, Eastgate thought, or at least distracted enough to give him another moment of cover. He charged at the passenger side of the Humvee with his M11 in hand, expecting to kill or be killed. But the vehicle was empty.

  Noticing Eastgate’s charge, the gunman on the armored truck redirected his fire at the Humvee. Eastgate squatted to the ground, seeking cover behind the Humvee’s left flank, but the large rounds from the truck’s machine gun were quickly turning the Humvee into shredded wheat. Where did the Humvee guys go? Eastgate wondered. He scanned behind him but saw only an empty road.

  And then he remembered. The tablet.

  Eastgate stood up and fired a burst of rounds into the armored truck. He sprinted back to the taxi and slid next to the back wheel, throwing his hand onto the back seat where he hoped to find the briefcase. The tip of his finger glanced its handle, but he couldn’t grasp it. One more try. Eastgate vaulted himself further into the taxi with his left foot, and pulled the briefcase from the car.

  Another round of bullets from the truck shot into the ground at his feet, sending chunks of earth flying into his chest.

  The clip in the M11 was drained. Eastgate withdrew the HK from his leg holster and directed a torrent of semi-automatic fire at the truck. The gunman sought cover behind the truck’s steel plates. His firing stopped.

  The front wheels on the truck began to spin and turned up a cloud of dust as the pickup driver cut a path directly at Eastgate.

  The HK was empty. Eastgate held onto it as a decoy, but he prepared for hand-to-hand combat. Half-way to the taxi, however, the pickup driver slammed the brakes and banked left toward the Tigris, leaving a twisting contrail of dust behind it.

  A moment later, Eastgate saw why. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle was lumbering up to the Humvee toward the checkpoint at 40 mph, its 25 mm cannon sizing up the truck.

  Eastgate could hear his radio buzzing. He pointed his empty pistol and walked straight at the Bradley, kicking through a field of brass casings.

  Eastgate shouted into his radio. “Who’s in the Bradley?” There was no answer.

  “Who’s in the Bradley?”

  “Marines, Eastgate. Stand down.”

  Eastgate dropped his spent weapon onto the ground. He ran back to the passenger side of the taxi to confirm what he already knew. Hadi was dead.

  Chapter 12

  Eastgate only had a few minutes to find the last person in Iraq he could trust: Beck Jarrett. Eastgate had sprained his shoulder and he was about to be swallowed up by hours of medical exams and debriefings with Army intelligence. He had to get the tablet to a safe place.

  Eastgate’s mind raced as he struggled to comprehend what had happened. He had never doubted the loyalty of his brothers in arms. But there could be no reasonable explanation for the attack except that someone on the inside had set him up. The entrance to the SF headquarters was never abandoned. Period. The idea that an enemy’s armored truck loaded with an automatic machine gun could get inside the gates of HQ was absurd.

  Someone pulled the guards out and ordered the attack, Eastgate decided. But who in the military would want me dead?

  Eastgate remembered Noah and the chase through Baghdad’s underground. Omid’s words about the tablet played on repeat in his mind: “I fear for the safety of anyone in possession of this tablet.”

  Eastgate promised the medics he would return in five minutes after a quick visit to his quarters. He moved the tablet from the briefcase to his rucksack.

  Where the hell is Beck?

  Then it occurred to him. It was Saturday afternoon back in the States. A fellow Georgian, Eastgate and Jarrett shared a love of many things—biscuits and grits, tubing the Chattahoochee and Atlanta Braves baseball. But Jarrett’s fandom for the Braves was more like a religious practice. As was his custom on weekend nights during spring training, Jarrett was in the mess watching the game on TBS.

  “Hey, Will. Did I ever tell you about that time I beat John Smoltz in a game of horse?”

  “Beck, get over here.”

  Jarrett slowly broke eye contact with the television. Tall and long-limbed, it seemed to take him an eternity to shift his legs off the couch onto the floor. “Will, you look like crap,” he said, finally upright. “Hampton is mowin’ ’em down with that curve ball of his.”

  “Don’t have much time. Just got ambushed at the gate. Fixer was killed. They want the tablet. It’s in my rucksack.” Eastgate extended his pack out to Jarrett. “Here, take it. I’ll get it later tonight. Don’t let anyone know you have it.”

  Jarrett scowled. “Wait a damn second. You were ambushed? By who? Fedayeen?”

  “No. Someone on the inside,” Eastgate said, offering Jarrett his pack again. He pulled Jarrett close. “Take it, please.”

  Jarrett pushed back strands of copper-red hair hanging over his forehead and straightened his hat. He’d never seen Eastgate so worked up. “Give it here.”

  Chapter 13

  Eastgate’s shoulder injury qualified him for medical leave. McQuistad was shocked when Eastgate actually agreed to take it. He wasn’t the kind of soldier who left the battlefield willingly, even if wounded. But the ambush had rattled him, he told
McQuistad. He felt responsible for the deaths of Hadi and the taxi driver, which was true. Eastgate was trained to recognize signals, to see the roots of a problem before it developed. Being hunted by Noah should have been a big enough warning. He should never have risked driving in a civilian vehicle without an escort, no matter what was at stake.

  Internal affairs was investigating the ambush. They told Eastgate that they didn’t suspect foul play, just a scheduling error. A couple of insurgents noticed the gate was unguarded and decided to shoot up the next civilian vehicle that pulled up.

  “Even the Army makes mistakes Eastgate,” the lead investigator told him with an ironic smirk. “Believe it or not.”

  Eastgate didn’t buy it. Scores of Fedayeen and al-Qaeda were pouring into Iraq each day. The hounds of hell were at the gate. There was satellite imagery to prove it. He couldn’t believe the Army would just leave the doors open for them.

  The shooter on the truck also looked suspicious. Eastgate thought he had a shock of blonde hair, like Noah, which didn’t match the profile of the typical Arab insurgent. The casings from his machine gun were .50 caliber—probably from an M2. Insurgents used AK-47 assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades, not weaponry capable of bringing down an airplane.

  “You still think this was an inside job?” Jarrett asked, passing the tablet back to Eastgate later that night in their quarters.

  Eastgate placed the tablet back in the titanium briefcase and slipped it into his Army duffel. “I don’t see any way around it.”

  “Why would the military want that tablet?”

  “I don’t think Donald Rumsfeld was involved. But someone with the juice to make those guards disappear was.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  Eastgate handed his HP tablet computer to Jarrett. “There’s this professor in the UK. Olivia Nazarian. She’s an expert on this sort of thing and she’s discovered—”

  “Whoo-wee!” Jarrett slapped his hat on his knee. “She’s discovered the key to my heart. Holy smokes,” Jarrett said, looking at a photograph of Olivia on the tablet.

  “She’s discovered an ancient city.”

  Jarrett scanned through images of Olivia online. “Well, if she wants any help excavatin’, be sure to let me know.”

  “I’m hoping she can help tell me what this tablet says.”

  “Why her?”

  “Apparently, this ancient city she discovered may have some kind of connection to the tablet.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s the city called?”

  “It’s officially called Tell Eatiq. But unofficially”—Eastgate knew he would catch hell from Jarrett for what he was about to say—“it’s called Eden.”

  Jarrett stared at Eastgate, slack-jawed. “Whoa—whoa. Whoa. Whoa. You mean this here tablet of yours is from Eden? The Holy Bible Eden? Genesis chapter two Garden of Eden? ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.’ That Garden of Eden?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Oh, sheesh. You know I’m crazy, Will. I’ll run point cleaning out a quarter of Baghdad and fill out a book of Sudoku while I’m doin’ it. That stuff doesn’t scare me. But this stuff. This is God stuff. You understand me?”

  “Spoken like a true Bible thumper.”

  “You’re damn straight. And I learned a lot in Sunday school. Do you know what happened in the Garden of Eden? Theee faaalll of maaannn! Maybe you’ve heard of it. There’s some serious bad mojo hangin’ around that place. You know what I mean?”

  “I was raised Episcopalian. I don’t believe in bad mojo.”

  “Look what’s happened since that tablet turned up,” Jarrett said, nodding at Eastgate’s duffel, which now held the tablet. “That old man said great harm would fall upon you. An assassin chased you through the streets of Baghdad. He died and so did two people with you. God kicked us out of there for a reason and I don’t think he wants us back anytime soon—including you!”

  Eastgate wondered how it was that he and Jarrett approached the world through a completely different lens, but often reached the same conclusion about important things. “I recognize the threat.”

  “Good, then stay on the deploy and help us get rid of bad guys.”

  “There’s nothing I’d rather do more.”

  “Then why not just ditch that thing? We’ve got a war to win.”

  Eastgate was tempted to say, “You know what, you’re right,” follow Jarrett’s advice, and leave the tablet on the door steps of the National Museum in Baghdad. But the guilt of not fighting the war with his fellow soldiers was outweighed by a growing feeling that the tablet needed protecting, and contained secrets that were more urgent than McQuistad’s next midnight raid.

  “This tablet,” Eastgate said, feeling its weight in the duffel, “it’s important. I’ve got to protect it. Find out what it says. Find out why three people have died because of it. Until I find out what’s going on with this tablet, I can’t be here. That’s why I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Oh, damn,” Jarrett said. “I was afraid you would say that.”

  “Find out what happened at that checkpoint.”

  “Sure, that should be easy. I’ll just break into the CO’s office and take pictures of his files with one of those little cameras.”

  Eastgate paused. Jarrett made what Eastgate was asking sound silly, but that was pretty much what he needed done. “Thanks, buddy. I knew I could count on you.”

  Jarrett sighed. He was at a disadvantage. Eastgate knew that Jarrett would pretty much do anything for his fellow Georgian. He had already risked his life for him on the battlefield. Snooping on the higher ups in the US Army would be kiddie play compared to that.

  “Where are you headed, anyway?” Jarrett asked.

  Eastgate caught his breath and shook his head in disbelief.

  “Cambridge, England.”

  Chapter 14

  Samir ran a razor blade over his cheek and lifted the last remaining blob of shaving cream and stubble from his jawline.

  He stared into the mirror. He closely resembled his father, which was odd, since Samir had been adopted. They shared thick, coarse hair, angular cheek bones, and scowls that tended to surface no matter their dispositions. But unlike his father, Samir’s eyes were blue. The eye color gave Samir an advantage in life, his father told him. “It makes people trust you more than they should.”

  Despite their similar appearance, Samir was not close to his father. Reso Zana had spent most of his son’s life traveling on business, visiting home only on special occasions or for a few weeks during the summer. Samir spent his days tilling the soil on the family estate. For the first few years after he was adopted, Samir would greet his father when he returned from his trips with a bowl of fruit he had picked from the family’s orchard. Despite Samir’s pleading, Reso would always refuse his son’s offering. This memory always came to mind when Samir disappointed his father, which was often.

  Despite the pain of disappointment, Samir didn’t think badly of Reso. Many of Samir’s friends didn’t even know their fathers. Other fathers were always off in the mountains or in Turkey fighting or preparing to fight. Samir did not understand Reso’s business, but he knew he was an important man. Reso always seemed to have answers, and the money and power to get things done. Samir admired him.

  Now, standing in front of the mirror, looking at the face of his father, Samir’s thoughts were drawn, as they often were these days, to a night nine months ago when his relationship with Reso changed forever.

  Reso was home for the first time in months. He took Samir and his brothers on a hunting trip in the mountains. The last few days of the trip Reso instructed the others to stay at the campsite. He and Samir would hike alone, he told them—to Cheekha Dar, the highest point in the mountains. It was clear Reso had something important to discuss with Samir. Recreation and fun had no place in Reso’s life. He did not even take time with his sons to instill moral values. That was the work of h
is wife and the village. Whenever he took time to be with his sons, it was to pass along rules and orders. But orders normally were handed down in peremptory fashion in Reso’s home office, as Samir sat nodding and promising to obey. This trip was different.

  The last night camping with Reso, Samir recalled, the moon had waned to a sliver, leaving the sky to the stars. The dry kindling and logs of juniper and cedar took the fire easily.

  “Samir, I have never told you the whole truth about our family,” Reso said, tending their campfire with a fallen tree branch. “I kept the truth from you to protect you until you were ready to learn.”

  “I am ready now, I’m sure of it.”

  The corners of Reso’s mouth turned upward slightly.

  “Our people have lived here for not just hundreds of years, but thousands of years. We have stayed because we are guardians of something very important.”

  Samir shifted his seat on a bed of needles next to the fire.

  Reso sat down next to him.

  “You are a scholar of the Quran, correct?”

  “Yes, I study it often.”

  It was a lie, Reso knew, but he appreciated his son’s creative response. Samir had always been blunt, entirely literal. Perhaps he was beginning to learn subtlety. It was a trait he would need for his new mission.

  “You already know some of the story of our people. You know what Allah told the Prophet. That after he created everything that is in the Earth he created the seven Heavens. After that he informed the angels that he intended to create man as his representative on Earth. So, using clay, Allah, glory to him the exalted, designed Adam with his own hands and then breathed life into him. And Allah created Eve to live in paradise with Adam in a place the Quran refers to as the Garden. However, Allah warned them, ‘O Adam, dwell—you and your wife—in the Garden and eat freely of its fruits as you wish, but do not come near this tree lest you become wrongdoers.’ ”

  Reso looked at Samir with such emotion, it felt to Samir like his father was seeing him for the first time.