by Nathan Swain
Eastgate believed him. “Please understand,” Omid continued, “I could not be more serious.”
Omid placed the tablet back into the casing in the briefcase and handed it to Eastgate. “Now, I could be wrong. I cannot recall where or how I came upon this information. But if you’d like to dig deeper—” Omid’s voice trailed off, as if his mind had been drawn to a distant time and place.
“Yes?” Eastgate queried, seizing Omid’s attention back.
Omid cleared his throat and refocused on Eastgate. “Perhaps you have become aware of the discovery by an archaeologist at Cambridge of what many believe to be the remnants of Eden itself?”
Eastgate had heard of the discovery. Everyone had. But he had not paid much attention to it. From what he had read, there was no hard evidence. It was a media creation, he assumed—a story he might see on NOVA in a few years and never hear about again.
“I didn’t take it seriously.”
“It may be that this archaeologist will have more information for you about your tablet.”
Since when did this become my tablet?
“At Cambridge, they will have the proper equipment to make out the rest of the cuneiform and possibly translate these proto-Sumerian symbols.”
“How did it get in the hands of those people at the checkpoint?” Eastgate asked, looking at the briefcase.
“It may have been stolen from another museum or university. It may have been plundered from a dig with the intent to sell it on the black market. However they found it, they’ll want a piece like this returned as soon as possible.”
“OK, I’ll give it to the museum and they can do the proper research.”
“Mr. Eastgate, I would fear for the safety of the museum. I would fear for the safety of its staff.”
“Here,” Eastgate said, thrusting the briefcase toward Omid. “You take it. This is your field.”
Omid’s jowly cheeks reddened. He hurriedly pushed the wooden leaf from his lap. It fell to the ground with a loud crack, shattering in half and sending splinters of wood flying.
“You misunderstand me, Mr. Eastgate. I fear for the safety of anyone in possession of this tablet. You must keep it.”
Eastgate looked morosely at Hadi. The briefcase felt twice as heavy as it did when they walked in.
Omid put his hand on Eastgate’s shoulder and pulled him close. “You must search out its secrets,” he whispered, pausing before each word like a hand hovering above a chess piece.
Eastgate recoiled. Three weeks ago, he was helping to launch the opening battle of Operation Enduring Freedom. He was geared up for war. Now he was being told he had to search out the secrets of an ancient artifact linked somehow to the Garden of Eden, an artifact too dangerous for anyone else to possess. Even for a veteran Special Forces operator like Eastgate, the contrast was jarring.
Eastgate signaled Hadi with a twitch of his head. Omid turned and walked over to the tea set. “Mr. Eastgate. Please understand, your tablet is potentially of inestimable value to mankind which, of course, means that it is worth quite a lot of money. The men from whom you took this artifact—they will be looking for it. Please be careful.”
Omid stood silently for a moment then leaned over to pour Eastgate another glass of tea. When he looked up, Eastgate was gone.
Chapter 9
Pockets of crimson and blood orange slowly faded from the Baghdad sky, and the last thread of blue disappeared into darkness. A nearby speaker crackled and screeched as a high-pitched male voice intoned the Maghrib, the fourth daily prayer of Islam. Eastgate and Hadi moved quickly past the cafes and shops on Abu Nawas Street. The middle-aged men chatting in doorways called an end to their conversations. Shopkeepers closed their stores.
Hadi looked over at Eastgate. “Do you believe anything that guy just said?”
Eastgate glanced at the foot traffic behind them. Beads of sweat spread like brail across his forehead. “Unfortunately, I do. Which is why I wanted to get the hell out of there. If this tablet is as hot as he says it is, I’m in deeper shit than I thought.”
“What about the pin you found?”
“No time to discuss it with him,” Eastgate said. “Besides, I did a little research in the Army Intelligence database. A sword emanating fire is a symbol used by dozens of groups for centuries—from the Catholic Church to the Freemasons. I doubt there’s a quick explanation.”
At each street corner they passed, Hadi craned his neck in search of a taxi. He called other fixers on his cell phone. No response.
Hadi tapped his foot on the ground nervously. “Sorry, bad timing. Everyone is still at prayer.”
“I didn’t know taxi drivers were so religious,” Eastgate said.
“We can try down about half a kilometer,” Hadi responded, pointing across a small park filled with trash. “They are less devout there.”
Eastgate shook his head. Hadi knew his way around Baghdad, but he didn’t have the best instincts when it came to security. “This is no time for an evening constitutional.”
Hadi looked around. The eyes of passersby late for prayer scanned them with suspicion. “I see what you mean.”
“And, we’re being followed.”
Hadi froze. “What? By who?”
Eastgate grabbed Hadi’s forearm and pulled him forward. “Just keep walking. White guy. Blonde hair. About fifty meters behind us.”
“What do we do?”
Eastgate pushed Hadi into the open doorway of an apartment building to their left and removed a satellite phone from his satchel. An old woman at the top of the stairs inside began shouting at them. Hadi hissed her back inside her apartment. Eastgate handed his M11 to Hadi and picked up the briefcase.
“Wait here. I need to get to the roof and make a call. If blondie comes in here with a gun, shoot him.”
Hadi looked horrified. He couldn’t tell if Eastgate was serious. “Yes, I mean it,” Eastgate said, bounding up the stairs. “Shoot to kill.”
At the top floor of the building Eastgate found the doorway leading to the roof. He needed a clear line of sight to project the signal for his call to one of the geostational satellites orbiting above. A cement wall about four feet high enclosed the perimeter of the roof. Small holes drilled into the wall to the north showed that snipers had already nested up there. By the looks of the crater in the wall to the south, they had been found.
After a minute of crackling from the sat phone, Eastgate gave up on his call. Two women in plain clothes walked out onto the roof and began screaming at him. A terrified middle-aged man, crying from fear, followed them with a cricket bat. Neighbors turned on their lights and people on the street shouted at Eastgate, screaming what he could only assume were the last remaining Arabic vulgarities with which he was unfamiliar.
Eastgate brought his hands together and bowed slightly and then scrambled down the staircase. Near the bottom, he froze. The blonde man who had been following them was standing behind Hadi, his immense forearm wrapped around the fixer’s neck. He held Eastgate’s M11 against Hadi’s temple. Eastgate instantly drew the HK and aimed it at the blonde man’s head.
“Hadi, I thought I told you to shoot this guy.”
The blonde man smiled. “Not everyone is cut out for this work,” he said, betraying a German accent. His eyes were steely blue. His hair was closely-cropped. He was tall and looked to be carrying about 25 lbs. of muscle on his chest. Eastgate pictured him tromping through the Alps in lederhosen, yodeling to the cows.
“You know what I want. Give it to me or he dies.”
“You want my sat phone? You can have it,” Eastgate said, offering over the boxy device. “Just press redial for the fastest pizza delivery in town.”
The man summoned a torpedo of mucous from his nose, and hurled it at Eastgate, nearly grazing his shoulder. “The tablet. It’s in your suit case. Leave it on the floor and walk away.”
“Oh, the tablet. Well, what’s your interest in that? It should probably be in a museum, don’t you think?”
“My interest is irrelevant to you. I’ll count to five and then he dies.”
Eastgate remembered his first hostage-tactics course at Camp Mackall. A burly instructor with a white mustache stood in the same position as the German, his arm around the chest of a volunteer. “Now, if the hostage is scared and stiff like this and remains upright, you won’t be able to get a clear look,” the instructor said. “But if he goes limp, and drops,” the volunteer bent his legs and fell to the floor, “that gives you a clear shot.”
Eastgate thought it was ridiculous that the first tactic in a hostage situation depended on the hostage knowing what tactic to use. Like most hostages, Hadi was literally scared stiff and showed no sign of going limp.
“One, two…”
Eastgate moved to his left and the blonde man rotated Hadi in the same direction.
“Three….”
“What’s your name?” Eastgate asked.
“You can call me Noah.”
Eastgate could sense that the family in the house was watching.
“Four—”
“Tell me about yourself, Noah?”
Noah looked at Eastgate like he was deranged.
“Have it your way.” Noah smiled. “Five.” He pulled the trigger of the M11. The gun didn’t fire. He pulled the trigger again without a response.
Noah looked in bewilderment at the lifeless weapon, like it was a trumpet that refused to play.
“Like you said, not everyone’s cut out for this work.”
With a guttural scream, Noah dropped the gun and slammed Hadi’s face into the door frame. A fountain of bright, newly-oxygenated blood spurt from Hadi’s face.
Noah ran. Eastgate tried to rouse Hadi back to consciousness and get him on his feet.
“I’m OK,” Hadi mumbled, his eyelids fluttering open.
“Your clothes have looked better,” Eastgate responded, nodding at the layer of crimson that had soaked into the top half of Hadi’s t-shirt. Hadi managed a weak smile. “Cleaning it will keep my wife out of trouble.”
A group of locals—looking equal parts frightened and angry—were assembling in the apartment building, scowling at Eastgate and Hadi.
“We have to go,” Eastgate said. “Right now.”
Chapter 10
Eastgate and Hadi thought Noah had disappeared into the cavernous alleys and back-streets of the Abu Nuwas neighborhood. But just before they gave up searching for him, Hadi spotted the toe-headed operative opening the rusted-out door of an old shed in a nearby park. To Eastgate’s amazement, the door led to a spiral staircase. It descended underground into blackness.
At the end of his training for urban warfare, just before his unit deployed to Kurdistan to support the invasion, Eastgate’s commanding officer, Colonel Terry Bedstead, held up his index finger and said: “Remember, when you walk down the street in Baghdad, you never know what you’re going to find.” It was a true enough statement. But Eastgate wondered if Bedstead had any experience walking under the streets of Baghdad.
Eastgate flipped on a small flashlight he carried in one of the pockets of his cargo pants. He handed Hadi an un-activated glow stick and signaled for him to shake it. The staircase spiraled downward about fifty feet. They followed it down. With each step, Hadi wondered if the staircase would give way. He knew Baghdad engineering all too well.
The staircase ended in a ceramic-tiled corridor about twenty feet wide and twenty feet high. The floor was recently washed. The whole place smelled like a mix of saffron, urine and chlorine. The corridor appeared to continue for hundreds of feet ahead of them.
“Saddam’s secret tunnels,” Hadi whispered. “He ordered them built in the 1980s to give Baghdad a subway but stopped the project half-way through because of our war with Iran.”
Yes, even in underground Baghdad, you never know what you’re going to find.
“I remember Rumsfeld and Powell talking about these tunnels. There’s intel showing that Saddam may have used them to conceal biological weapons, WMD.”
“They say there are one hundred kilometers of tunnels that Saddam and his men have used to store weapons and treasure,” Hadi said, “and to use for safe travel between their palaces. I think he is probably down here somewhere, sitting on mountains of gold and jewels.”
Eastgate and Hadi moved quickly down the tunnel away from the staircase following the crescent-shaped glow of the flashlight. “Well, that would be great. I could take Saddam and you could take the jewels, and I think we’d both be pretty happy.”
Hadi shook his head in disagreement. “No, I will take the murderous dictator. “I know many people who would enjoy paying him a visit.”
“OK, you can have Saddam. I’ll settle for the WMD.”
In truth, Eastgate was skeptical the tunnels held anything of value. Caves and tunnels are the source of endless rumors, almost all of them false. He learned that lesson in Tora Bora, the region in Southeast Afghanistan where the US military focused its hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the months after 9/11. The military prepared for a vast complex of allegedly impregnable cave fortresses, replete with sophisticated tunnels, hospitals, power plants, and ventilation systems. It even established a Tunnel Warfare Center in the Mojave Desert in Southern California where special operations groups trained in the intricacies of tunnel and cave warfare.
So much for that. Tora Bora turned out to be what the SF guys called a “total bore-ah”—a network of small, natural caves with hardly any infrastructure and few hard-core terrorists worth the search. Bin Laden escaped before they got there, with a little help from the US’s tribal allies who agreed to a ceasefire just as the al-Qaeda leader was leaving. It didn’t help that the Pentagon refused to send any more troops to cut him off.
The light from Eastgate’s flashlight cast a shadow on the floor, signaling the end of the tunnel. Or just the end of the beginning. A door knob stuck out from the wall, begging to be turned.
Eastgate opened up his rucksack. “Give me your gun,” he said, turning to Hadi. He slung a magazine of ammunition into the M11. “After getting your nose broken, I bet you’re ready to shoot this time.”
Eastgate opened the door. It was another corridor, with the same ceramic-tile floor. Hadi placed his hand on Eastgate’s shoulder. “Why are we chasing this man who nearly killed me and wants to kill both of us?”
“If he slips away, we have no idea who is after the tablet or why. But if we catch him, we can interrogate him. The CIA may already know this guy.”
Ten minutes and three corridors later, the chase ended. Eastgate opened the fifth door. It didn’t lead to another corridor, but a room with a table and two chairs. The room was lit only by a 50-watt light bulb dangling from an overhead fixture in the ceiling. Sitting at the table, his back turned to the door, was Noah. He gripped a gun in his left hand.
Eastgate drew his HK. “Noah, put your hands up.”
Noah didn’t move. Eastgate could have disabled his arm with one round from his handgun, but he was concerned that an errant shot would ricochet off of the walls.
“Noah, drop the gun!” Eastgate shouted.
He withdrew his knife from his jacket and slung it at Noah. It embedded into his left forearm. Noah didn’t make a sound.
Eastgate and Hadi walked up to Noah, guns drawn. Noah’s mouth was bleeding—the blood wasn’t dry—and a small rivulet streamed across his tanned, angular face. The fingers of his right hand wrapped around a glass of water.
Eastgate slammed his fist onto the table.
“What happened?” Hadi asked.
“Poison. Probably cyanide.”
“Why would Noah kill himself?”
Eastgate scanned the room. Four doors on each side of the room appeared to open into separate corridors heading in four different directions. He noticed a scuff of dirt and two sets of footprints in front of the door leading north.
“Noah didn’t kill himself,” Eastgate said, wiping the blood clean from his knife. “He was murdered.”
/> Chapter 11
A year ago, Eastgate would have tried to chase Noah’s killer, but Tora Bora had taught him there isn’t always a big white hare sitting at the bottom of every rabbit hole. He needed to get the tablet back to headquarters and a team over to the tunnel to extract Noah’s body. He had no doubt that hundreds of infantrymen were scoping out the Baghdad underground at that very moment in search of WMD. It should be a short trip for them.
He and Hadi raced back up the spiral staircase and emerged into the park drenched in sweat. The heat of Baghdad was normally suffocating. But it was mild compared to the swelter and stank of the city’s underground.
It was close to 10 p.m., but Hadi was able to flag down a taxi. A white Toyota Corolla, the taxi was literally held together by duct tape. The taxi driver followed the winding path of the Tigris River north toward the outskirts of Baghdad where the Special Forces converted one of Saddam’s old palaces into its headquarters. The cool air off the river cut through the oppressive humidity.
“It feels good, right?” Hadi asked, grinning as he watched his hand outside the passenger window rise and fall with the air current. Eastgate wasn’t sure if he was referring to the cool breeze, or the fact they were getting out of Abu Nawas alive.
“Take this,” Hadi said, handing the M11 to Eastgate in the backseat. “I hope I never need it again.”
The taxi sputtered so badly Eastgate wondered if he would have to get out and push the last quarter mile. At last, the checkpoint in front of the Special Forces headquarters came into view. A guard tower with a crow’s nest loomed over the roadway, and a searchlight rigged to the tower lit up the ground below.
Normally, the checkpoint was armed by a small platoon of Army boys with the First Armored Division and multiple layers of gates and wire fencing separated visitors from the converted palace. But as their destination came into view, Eastgate could see that something was wrong. The gates were up. The checkpoint was unmanned.
Eastgate put a vice grip with his hand on the driver’s right shoulder. “Hold it.”