by Graham Brown
Stepping out of the car at the prearranged location, Hawker spotted a familiar face, David Keegan, wearing desert camouflage and looking like the Royal Marine he’d once been. Turned out Keegan was the only gun-slinger Hawker could find on such short notice.
After a brief reunion, the three of them drove on.
“Just like old times,” Keegan said. “A road trip with nothing but trouble up ahead.”
“Yeah,” Hawker said. “It’s like we’re getting the band back together.”
Five miles down the road, Hawker pulled in beside a flatbed truck with a tarp over some large object in back.
“And who’s that?” Keegan asked, looking at the woman standing beside the front wheel.
“A friend of mine,” Hawker said. “Keep your hands off.”
Keegan chuckled. “It’s not my hands you should be worried about, mate.”
Hawker stepped out and introductions were made.
“I’m Danielle Laidlaw,” she said to Sonia. “I work for the National Research Institute.”
Sonia seemed a little confused. “You’re with the government?” She looked at Hawker as if she’d been betrayed.
“Nothing I could do,” he said. “The French grabbed me in Paris. The only way I could get out and help you is if I brought them along.”
“What do you want?” Sonia asked.
“The same thing as you,” Danielle explained. “To find these seeds and determine if anything can be done with them.”
“So you’ll take them from me,” Sonia said defensively. “After all this.”
“No,” Danielle said. “We’ll work with you. We’ll even fund your experiments. You’ll be allowed to do what you need for your sister and other patients like her, but only once we’ve altered the delivery virus and ended its ability to cause an epidemic.”
Sonia brightened but appeared uncertain. She looked at Hawker, touching his arm as she spoke. “Is this legitimate? Can I trust them?”
“As far as I know,” Hawker said, looking at Danielle. “So far they’ve honored what they promised me.”
Sonia turned back to study Danielle. “Okay,” she said. “If Hawker trusts you, I trust you.”
She squeezed Hawker’s arm again as if excited about the possibilities. And Hawker noticed what appeared to be very mixed emotions on Danielle’s face. He understood, but they had a job to do.
The deal made, Danielle shook hands with Keegan.
He smiled broadly. “Hawk here says you’re single and that you might be available.”
Danielle cut her eyes at Hawker.
He shook his head.
“I’m single for a reason,” she said. “Most people annoy me.”
“Funny,” Keegan said. “I know just what you mean. By the way, how do you feel about sushi?”
“Can’t stand the stuff,” Danielle replied, then turned and headed for the rear of the truck, ending all further conversation.
Keegan grinned. “That one’s a keeper.”
“Get in the truck,” Hawker said, holding the door for his friend.
As Sonia and Keegan settled into the cab of the vehicle, Hawker caught up with Danielle at the rear of the flatbed.
“Friendly little thing you’ve got there,” she said.
“Which one?”
She tilted her head like a puppy and opened her eyes, wide and innocent. “Oh Hawker, is this okay?” she said. “If you think it’s okay, it sounds okay to me. I thought I was going to gag.”
“It’s a good thing she likes me,” he said. “Since the cover you chose is so diabolically tricky. Nothing like telling people exactly who you are.”
He climbed onto the flatbed and looked under the tarp.
“No need for a cover,” she replied. “Truth works better here.”
“A little heads-up next time,” he said. “I don’t think that well on my feet.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Especially when you’ve been off them so recently.”
Hawker looked under the tarp. An airboat that might have been at home in the Everglades sat chained to the bed of the truck. “This looks good. We have weapons?”
She nodded, opening a locker. Four AR-15s sat in a rack, grenade launchers slung under two of them. A well-stocked box of clips sat to the left of the rifles.
“We can put the other two on that tripod if we need it.” She pointed to a mount on the front of the boat.
“What else?”
“Body armor. Radar-absorbent coating on the boat. And we can make smoke if we need to.”
It wouldn’t be much if they ran into the Iranian military but it would help if they encountered anyone else.
“How far in are we going?” Hawker asked.
“Nineteen miles across the swamp, the last eight on the Iranian side. From there it’s five miles over land.”
“You sure it’s deserted?”
“The last satellite pass was three hours ago. Nothing for miles.”
Hawker looked up; it was almost dusk. They would move under cover of darkness.
“This seem too easy to you?”
“Of course,” she said. “Should be a piece of cake. That’s why I doubled my insurance policy before I came out.”
Thirty minutes later Hawker was backing the flatbed into the water at the edge of the Hawizeh Marsh, a wetland that extended on both sides of the Iran-Iraq border.
Danielle climbed aboard and made sure all systems were go, then waved Hawker, Keegan, and Sonia aboard. With the retaining straps disconnected, the airboat floated off the back of the truck once Hawker had backed it far enough in.
“Ready?” she asked.
They nodded and Danielle engaged the secondary motor.
For stealth, the black-clad skiff moved under the power of a quiet electric impeller. The impeller sucked water in through a wide opening in the front, accelerated it, and pushed it out a narrower vent in the rear. It was an almost silent way to travel, but it was slow. They could move no more than seven knots with this motor. That meant a three-hour transit time to the other side.
If they needed to take some evasive action or to race back to the Iraqi side of the border, the big air fan could push the boat at fifty knots, while the large air rudder would make it possible to turn on a dime.
For now they glided silently in the darkness, cruising across an area that was once a battleground.
Because the swamp straddled the border, Iranian troops had once been ordered to cross it in en masse. For the most part they were unarmed draftees, acting as human cannon fodder for those who carried weapons behind them.
In response, Saddam Hussein had electrified parts of the swamp, killing the Iranians by the thousands. There was no evidence of that now, but Danielle felt great sorrow around them as they moved through it.
“So tell me what the professor thinks,” Hawker asked. “And how glad he is not to be here with us right now.”
Danielle had to laugh. She explained McCarter’s theory that according to the copper scroll, there were many gardens, and that the river flowing around the land of Havilah, much like that flowing around the land of Kush, was an explanation of how the Garden was arranged, with four canals and a circular moat surrounding an island.
Once the 5.9K event hit and the Middle East began to dry up, the Garden in Eden, fed by canals that diverted water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, survived. As long as the same mixture of waters could be brought to the Garden, the ancients believed they could keep the Tree of Life producing.
“It makes sense,” Sonia said. “My father found that in each of the cultures he studied, there were trees or plants that had life-extending properties, all of which died from some type of drought or rot.”
“How does this help us?” Hawker asked. “If this place has been abandoned for seven thousand years or so, then how do we expect to find anything?”
Danielle saw him studying the satellite picture. She knew the answer but Sonia spoke first.
“Seeds can survive given
the right conditions,” she said. “They can survive fire, they can survive drought. Winters, summers, volcanic eruptions. They can live like dormant programs in a computer, waiting until the right moment wakes them up.”
“What kind of moment?”
“Application of temperature and moisture,” Sonia said. “Given the right mix, a seed senses somehow that it’s time to come to life.”
“After seventy centuries?”
“Possibly,” she said. “Given the right conditions. But we don’t need the seeds to come to life on their own. We only need to find one. The virus should still be on it.”
“How can you be sure?” Danielle asked.
“Viruses are extremely hardy in some ways,” she said. “Because they’re really just packs of chemicals that do nothing until they come into contact with a cell, they can remain dormant for extremely long periods of time—given the right conditions.”
“Don’t they have to eat or anything?” Hawker asked.
“No,” she said. “They don’t ingest food, or break it down or create heat or have any cellular processes.”
“How do they live?”
“Some scientists believe they’re not alive. They’re just random coding, floating around out in the world. Until they come into contact with a cell of some kind they are as inert as any stone.”
“So given the right conditions,” Danielle said, “the virus you’re talking about could still exist, even if the tree or the fruit doesn’t. As long as it has a place to hide.”
Sonia nodded. “Once we find it, we can extract the DNA and clone it. Viruses are very simple. I can do it in twenty-four hours. And then we can create our own Tree of Life, without the tree I guess, and from that develop the serum I told you about.”
Despite a level of jealousy that surprised her, Danielle found herself admiring the young woman. She appreciated those who tried to do what others said was impossible. Danielle had grown up living that way herself. It had pushed her onward to becoming an operative for the NRI.
“DNA has been extracted from fossilized plants and animals for years. A seed preserved in the right kind of mud might be almost intact,” Danielle said.
Sonia smiled and Danielle guessed the support felt good to her.
“Is that what we’re looking for?” Hawker asked. “Seeds in the mud?”
Sonia gave a wry smile. “In a way, that’s exactly what we’re looking for.”
Before she could elaborate, the military-grade scanner Danielle carried squawked and the sounds of a conversation in Farsi came over the speaker.
She tensed a little bit listening. Their biggest fear was that Iranian defense forces would spot them and attack or capture them. The main danger was helicopters. Though a helicopter or aircraft could be spotted a long way off, it would still be able to close on the airboat quickly. The scanner would help, detecting communications between the air units long before they were in range.
As Danielle listened, she could make out one voice mention altitude and range, but she wasn’t sure what else was said and she didn’t hear the distinctive background vibration that would tell her it was a helicopter.
“It’s okay,” Hawker said, pointing up and to the left. “It’s just airline traffic and a routing center somewhere.”
Danielle followed his gaze. A few miles off and twenty thousand feet above, the blinking red dot of an airliner’s beacon could be seen heading southeast, crossing the sky in silence.
She glanced at the second device just to be sure. The display on the radar warning receiver, or RWR, remained green. They hadn’t been painted. She guessed Hawker was right. So far no one knew they were there.
Sonia looked at Danielle. “This is why I like to keep him around. He makes me feel safe.”
Oh God, Danielle thought. The respectful feelings vanished. “Somebody shoot me,” she mumbled.
Fortunately no one responded and a moment later they came upon a strange sight. From a distance, it looked as if a Quonset hut had been dropped into the water and now sat there, an island in the marsh. But as they closed in on the structure it became clear that the “hut” was not some prefabricated building: It was a lodge of sorts, constructed of reeds.
Danielle’s briefing had included mention of these huts but also that she was unlikely to see any. They were the creation of groups known as the Marsh Arabs, a Bedouin-like people who lived out on the swamps instead of in the deserts. They were almost extinct.
“It’s mudhif,” she said, “a communal meeting place for the people who used to live here.”
“What happened to them?” Hawker asked.
“They fought against Saddam and after he crushed them they fled back here to the swamps. So Saddam drained most of the wetlands. Diverting the water. The swamps turned to desert and the people had nowhere to hide.”
Danielle looked back at the mudhif they were now passing.
A magnificent labor, built on a man-made island of mud and grass, the mudhif was the size of a school bus, constructed entirely out of woven reeds. But the structure was dilapidated now, falling apart. It seemed that those who had built it were gone and there was no one left to repair or use it.
“A century ago, there were a hundred thousand people living out here,” she added. “Now … probably a thousand or so, spread over the whole of the marshland.”
“Poor sods,” Keegan said.
“War destroys everything,” Sonia said.
Danielle agreed. “McCarter told me these people were linked to the Sumerians, the civilization that built the cities of Ur and Uruk around 3000 BC. Their word for this whole area is Edin—it means the open plains.”
Danielle did not consider herself a sucker for circumstantial evidence, but as she’d listened to McCarter’s theory, she’d thought “why not.” They’d discovered other, perhaps stranger things, working together.
And it wasn’t only the Old Testament that spoke of eternal life from a tree in a garden. McCarter had explained that other cultures had their own stories about immortality. Carved tablets describing the Sumerians as the keepers of the Immortal Garden had been found in Iraq; Egyptian records counted several pharaohs living into their nineties when the average human life span was twenty-seven. Fruit from a tree in the oasis of Ra was said to be responsible. That tree had been a gift from the king of Sumer.
He quoted texts she’d never heard of: Apocryphal Bible texts, like the book of Enoch, which claimed the Tree of Life was a type of tamarind tree. Syrian texts on Alexander the Great, which held that his reason for conquering much of the world was to find the Garden of Eden; he failed and died in his thirties. The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian story of a god-king who quested for the secret to eternal life after his friend Enkidu was killed. Gilgamesh eventually arrived in a garden filled with jewellike trees. Later Gilgamesh found a plant that granted eternal life at the bottom of a shallow lake. He retrieved the plant, only to have it stolen by a serpent.
Another miracle, another serpent. She hoped their quest would turn out differently.
Three hours later they’d crossed the swamp and beached the airboat at the edge of the mudflat. Hawker unloaded a pair of ATVs while Danielle collected the equipment they would need: two GPS receivers already programmed with the information McCarter had given them. Two sets of night-vision goggles. Flak jackets, helmets, gloves, guns. She had four pistols, one for each of them, and both she and Hawker would carry rifles.
She handed a Beretta to Sonia. “I’m okay. I have my own,” Sonia said.
Danielle paused. She guessed that someone who’d been in danger for years would be a fool not to have their own gun. She put the Beretta back in the locker and turned to Hawker’s friend Keegan. He stood on the airboat.
“Not coming?”
“Lot of hiking where you’re going,” he said.
“Probably.”
“I’ll stay here,” he said. “Make sure no one steals our tires.”
It made sense. From the satellite pictur
es it was obvious that the site had some difficult terrain. Keegan would struggle out there.
“Here,” she said, handing the second pair of night-vision goggles to Hawker. “Sorry I don’t have a pair for your girlfriend.”
Hawker chuckled and Danielle wasn’t sure if he was laughing with her or at her.
“I assume she’s going to share your ride,” Danielle said.
“Unless you want her arms wrapped around you?”
She slammed the flak jackets into his chest, purposefully putting extra effort behind the handoff. “Keep dreaming.”
They climbed onto the ATVs. Turning the keys brought up low-level illumination on the instrument panels but produced no sound. The four-wheelers were completely electric.
“Keep your headlight off,” she said. “With the goggles and the starlight we should be fine.”
Danielle took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the glowing green view of the world. Her bearings established, she twisted the throttle and accelerated silently into the night.
Moments later she was racing through the desert in near-total darkness and silence. It was an odd feeling. The acceleration of the vehicle was instant, the speed and agility right there with a top-of-the-line motorized ATV, but apart from the almost inaudible electric whirring, the only sound came from the tires and the wind. It gave her the sensation of literally flying through the night.
Keeping a sharp eye ahead, Danielle glanced at the GPS, adjusted course slightly, and accelerated again. Fifteen minutes later they zoomed out of the mudflats and began racing across dunes of sand that rose and fell like waves on the ocean. Travel here was smoother, if a bit slower.
Beyond the dunes they came to a broad wadi, a dried-up riverbed that was once part of the canal system. She drove beside it for a mile and then down into it. Three miles to go.
With the scanner and radar warning receiver strapped to the bars of her ATV showing no sign of activity, Danielle felt certain that no parties were aware of their presence. She hoped their luck held and she accelerated a bit more, anxious to get whatever they could find and get the hell out of Dodge.
She curved to the left, weaving around a dead tree. The walls of the wadi were built-up sand for the most part, but in places rubble of stone blocks showed through, remnants of the time when this had been a canal.
