The Eden Deception

by Nathan Swain

  Eastgate noticed Karzan and his men spoke the Sorani dialect of the Kurdish language, which was prevalent among Iraqis in Iran and Eastern Iraq. It was a vital piece of information, but he needed to know more.

  “Why are you helping us?” Eastgate asked, looking up from the fire at Karzan.

  Eastgate knew Karzan didn’t have to answer, and he normally wouldn’t ask. Maybe Karzan was being paid by Tadita. Maybe he owed her a favor. But having been betrayed once in Iran already, he was hesitant to trust their fates to another stranger whose highest loyalty was to his pocket book. He needed a reason to trust Karzan.

  “We are helping you because you are helping us,” Karzan said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are American,” Karzan said, looking at Eastgate. “And you are British,” he said turning to Olivia.

  They nodded.

  “Then, you are here to fight Saddam.”

  Olivia shook her head. “Well, I can’t say—” Eastgate placed his hand on Olivia’s leg. His eyes told her: wait.

  “That’s true,” Eastgate said, “I first came into northern Iraq at the beginning of the invasion.”

  “That is why we are helping you. To get rid of Saddam. To give the Kurdish people their country back.”

  This was a common sentiment among Iraq’s Kurds. Eastgate had heard the same from the Peshmerga fighters and their families who aligned with the US Army to fight Ansar al-Islam in the opening battle of the war. Iraq’s dictators seized much of the Kurdish people’s homeland years ago. They wanted it back.

  “This is it,” Karzan continued. “Our final chance of winning what we have been denied for a hundred years. We must not fail.”

  “I hope you succeed,” Eastgate said. He believed that they would, at least in part. Saddam had fled, his Baathist power base destroyed. Eastgate could not imagine a future for Iraq with Saddam back in power. But he did question Karzan’s hope for a Kurdish homeland. Iraq was roiled by sectarian and tribal rivalries. The Kurds may gain greater power and security in the new Iraq, he thought, but it would be forever divided among Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. They would have to live together, or not live at all.

  The bright expression on Karzan’s face darkened. “Do you know that the Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group in the world with no homeland?”

  Olivia nodded. “Yes, it’s horribly wrong.”

  “And do you know the price we have paid because of it? We have no land of our own and are persecuted because of it. We are dependent on others, and so we are treated with cruelty. But unlike the Jews, who also were robbed of their home, we were never granted statehood. In the century of human rights, of the United Nations, the great powers in the world have treated the Kurdish people with indifference—and contempt.”

  “What do you mean?” Olivia asked.

  “The British. In the 1920s we fought for independence under the British protectorate, but we were bombed by your Royal Air Force. And the Russians. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union promised to help our people establish a state. They abandoned us less than a year later in exchange for Iranian oil. And the Americans—”

  Karzan’s voice trailed off, his face contorted in anguish.

  Eastgate continued for him. “When the Kurds aligned themselves with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, we—the Americans—supplied military assistance to Iraq.”

  “Hence, the photo of Rummy shaking hands with Saddam,” Olivia said.

  Eastgate nodded. “And because of the Kurds’ stance, Saddam began a campaign of depopulation and destruction of Kurdish homes and communities, and gassed his own people with chemical weapons.”

  “You will forgive me please if I am emotional,” Karzan said, his eyes welling with tears, “but I was very personally affected by your country’s indifference during your first war with Saddam. Your President George H. W. Bush had invaded Iraq. He encouraged the Kurdish people: ‘Go, go to Baghdad. Overthrow Saddam. Seize your country.’ And do you know what happened Professor?”

  “Sadly, I do,” Olivia said. “Bush decided getting rid of Saddam wasn’t worth the trouble of upsetting his allies in the Middle East.”

  “Or the American public,” Eastgate interjected. “They wanted a quick exit from Iraq.”

  “Not only that,” Karzan said, growing animated. “In making peace with Saddam, Bush returned to the dictator his Russian-made helicopters, and stepped aside as Saddam butchered the Kurdish people who were doing nothing more than what your President had exhorted us to do.”

  “I’m sorry,” Olivia said.

  “So, we fled to the mountains to avoid being slaughtered. More than one-and-a-half million of us. We lived in tents and plastic tarps in the freezing cold. And our children,” Karzan said, curling the rugged fingers of his right hand into a fist, “our children died of dysentery and typhoid fever. Not from Saddam, but from the US military, which had destroyed our sewage and sanitation systems.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Olivia said.

  “And yes, my children died too,” Karzan continued, weeping. “My son and my daughter, who I buried in the mountains. There were no mourners to honor them. Only myself and their mother.”

  Olivia looked away. Tears pooled in her eyes. She was overcome with shame. Karzan’s story reminded her of Dashni’s childhood and the murder of his family at the hands of Iraq’s dictator. She was half Kurdish and had an education and resources. Why had she done nothing to help these people? It’s daddy’s thing, she always told herself. But the excuse now rang hollow. She could no longer be indifferent.

  “That is how I came to live in Iran.”

  “Have you tried to return?” Eastgate asked.

  “Return to what? Saddam destroyed my village and land-mined the whole region. There is nothing to return to.”

  Karzan dried his eyes on his shirt sleeves.

  “That is why my hope lies with you, Mr. Eastgate, and you, Professor Nazarian. This time the US and Great Britain will not abandon us. They will make right these years of struggle and sorrow. I know this.”

  Olivia cleared her throat. “About our mission, Karzan.”

  “I don’t know what your mission is and I don’t need to know,” Karzan interrupted, raising his hands in the air. “But I believe in my heart it is of great consequence to my people. We will bring you to your destination safely. You have my word.”

  “Thank you,” Olivia said. “Thank you so much.”

  “The rest will be up to you.”

  Chapter 64

  Karzan showed Eastgate and Olivia their room. It was the only bedroom in the cabin, with a single, full-size bed. The men would sleep outside.

  “Oh no, we’re not together,” Olivia said.

  Eastgate said something in Kurdish and the men frowned.

  “I can only assume you told them we’re not sleeping together,” Olivia said.

  “Something to that effect. But we have a problem.”

  “Other than the obvious problem of only one bed?”

  “I think it would offend them if we didn’t share the bed,” Eastgate said. “They would be embarrassed if one of their guests slept on the floor.”

  Olivia rolled her eyes. “Of all the lame moves. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Trust me. No hidden agenda here.”

  Olivia put her rucksack down by a table in the kitchen and sat down. “That’s OK. I wasn’t tired anyway. We have work to do.”

  Olivia began massaging her temples, as if to coax ideas from her memory bank. “Genesis 2:10 says ‘a river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.’ And the tablet says it’s next to a great water spring. But we have a problem. Rich says nothing about a great spring.”

  Eastgate sat down in the chair beside her. “Doesn’t he? He writes that the man took him to ‘a very large lake.’ What’s a lake if not a great spring?”

  Olivia rotated her eyes towards Eastgate, cupping her chin in her right hand. “That
’s bloody brilliant. A lake. I love it.”

  “But what lake?” Eastgate asked.

  “The tablet doesn’t say, of course. And Rich doesn’t say. He only says that the peasant, ‘took me to a canyon with a very large lake.’ He would have made this a lot easier if he just identified the name of the bloody lake.”

  “Or at least the name of the city.”

  “Yes, he should have done that.”

  Olivia interrupted her temple massage. “Wait a minute. He did do that. He told us exactly where he was,” Olivia said. She removed the notebook with her transcription of Rich’s journal entry from her rucksack and flipped it open. “How could I be so daft? At the beginning of each entry Rich includes a dateline—the date and place of his journal entry.”

  She ran her fingertip along the margin of her transcription, stopping at the top. “Oh, my God. Here it is.”

  “Harput,” Eastgate said, squinting at Olivia’s scrawl.

  “I’ve been all over the backroads of the Middle East, but I’ve never heard of Harput.” He raised his index finger in the air. “Wait a minute.”

  Eastgate opened the door of the cabin and shouted in Kurdish: “Karzan, do you know Harput? Where is Harput?”

  Karzan walked into the room. “Harput? That is ancient city. Today it is Elazığ, in Turkey.”

  “Elazığ? Is there a lake in Elazığ? A big lake?”

  Karzan thought for minute, looking at his hand as if it were a map. “Lake Hazar.”

  Olivia’s pulse quickened. Lake Hazar. Could that be it? The spring identified in the tablet? “We need a map.”

  Eastgate and Karzan stood staring at her.

  “Now!” she shouted.

  With a start, Karzan scoured the book shelves and dresser drawers in the cabin. Finding nothing, he left for a moment and returned with a stack of maps spiral bound together

  “Our road atlas from the car,” Karzan said.

  The maps were badly faded, and Eastgate could barely make out the boundaries of Turkey let alone locate Lake Hazar.

  Olivia looked at the maps and groaned audibly, as if she was reviewing a shoddy term paper. “This won’t do.”

  Then Eastgate remembered. He rummaged through his rucksack and withdrew a plastic portfolio case. “This should do the trick. This one happens to be from the mapmakers at the Central Intelligence Agency, courtesy of our friend Pearl.”

  Eastgate unfolded the map, square by square. Six feet in width and four feet in height, it was the most detailed map Olivia had ever seen.

  “Does the CIA normally use Russian Cyrillic on its maps?” Olivia asked.

  Eastgate looked closer. She was right. It must have been drafted by a Red Army cartographer back in the 1970s or 80s. “OK, I guess this is courtesy of the mapmakers of the Soviet Union. Probably for its occupation of Afghanistan.”

  “What would we do without you Mr. Pearl?” Olivia commented dryly.

  “For our purposes, it shouldn’t matter. These rivers are ancient, and I happen to read—”

  “Let me guess,” interrupted Olivia. “You happen to read Russian.”

  “Six months chasing nuclear material on the black market in Kazakhstan—it came in handy.”

  Eastgate paused and shook his head. “I never thought I’d be using it to chase the ghosts of Adam and Eve.”

  Chapter 65

  One of Karzan’s men brought into the cabin a kettle of water that had been heating up on a stone around the campfire. He opened a jar on the counter and pulled out two little bags with strings. “Chai,” he said, tossing them to Eastgate.

  “The tablet says Eden is adjacent to a great spring,” Eastgate said, as Olivia poured the steaming water into ceramic cups. “Let’s assume that Lake Hazar is the spring.”

  Eastgate removed a yellow highlighter from the portfolio case and made a neon blotch on Lake Hazar. “Genesis says, ‘A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.’ So, if Rich really found the garden at Lake Hazar, we must be able to connect four rivers to it, right?”

  “Correct,” Olivia responded, looking over Eastgate’s shoulder. “Assuming Genesis 2 is accurate.”

  “This is interesting. The Tigris originates from… you guessed it, Lake Hazar.” Eastgate outlined the Tigris from the lake south to the Persian Gulf.

  Olivia put down her tea. “You’re kidding.”

  “And the Euphrates flows directly to the north of Elazığ.” Eastgate drew a second line connecting the Lake to the Euphrates, and highlighting the river’s circuit south to where it intersected the Tigris.

  “Blimey.”

  “OK, are you convinced?”

  “We should at least have a plausible theory identifying the other two rivers—the Pishon and Gihon.”

  Eastgate scrutinized the light blue lines on the map for evidence of the other two rivers, whose identity had bedeviled Eden scholars for hundreds of years.

  “I don’t suppose you have any satellite imagery of Turkey handy?” Eastgate asked.

  Olivia scanned her memory banks for a connection. She had been saturated with Eden lore for so long that just about every theory of its location was stored somewhere in the recesses of her brain. Many scholars had accepted the argument that placed Eden in southern Iraq near Nasiriyah. Some of them even agreed with Olivia’s theory that Tell Eatiq just outside of Nasiriyah was the remains of Eden itself.

  The next most popular theory placed Eden in the Armenian Highlands region in Northeast Turkey. This was the approximate location of Mt. Ararat, which had been regarded by many since the Eleventh Century as the resting spot of Noah’s Ark. For believers in the second theory, it made sense that the location of Eden and the Ark were relatively close. After Adam and Eve and their notorious first children—Cane and Able—Noah becomes the focus of the story in Genesis. In the Bible, 950 years passed between them, but it made more sense than not that the historical Noah and the first inhabitants of Eden wouldn’t have lived far apart.

  Olivia scrutinized the map while nervously fidgeting with her amethyst ring. “As we discussed in London, isn’t it fair to posit that the other two rivers are tributaries?” Eastgate didn’t respond. He recognized by now Olivia’s rhetorical questions. They were verbal roadmaps for her deductive problem solving, not an invitation to speak.

  “Many scholars place Eden”—Olivia paused over the map, trying to navigate the Cyrillic—“here, in the Armenian Highlands where two rivers, the Murat and the Karasu, originate and join together to form the Euphrates at—”

  “At Elazığ,” Eastgate interjected excitedly.

  “Yes,” Olivia responded slowly, as if amazed by the viability of her own theory.

  “What if these two rivers are what Genesis 2 refers to as the Pishon and Gihon?” Olivia asked.

  “And the Euphrates is the third river, which continues south to the Persian Gulf.”

  “And the Tigris is the fourth river, which also continues south into the Gulf.”

  “It all makes sense,” Eastgate said. “At the very least, it’s a plausible theory.”

  “Hold on,” Olivia said, pointing at the map. “The tablet says that the water spring is surrounded by mountains. The Bible also places Eden in the mountains. Ezekiel 28 speaks of Eden both as the garden of God and the mountain of God.”

  “Look here,” Eastgate said. “Lake Hazar is in the Taurus Mountains.”

  Eastgate tapped the yellow highlighter against his tea cup.

  An eerie silence filled the cabin, broken only by the tinkling of wind chimes outside.

  Lake Hazar. Was this the answer? Eastgate wondered. The answer to the greatest riddle of human history.

  “We need to leave now. We need to get to Elazığ.”

  “That won’t make the Flaming Sword very happy.”

  “No, and they’re likely to become more resourceful the closer we get,” Olivia responded, appearing distracted. “And more deadly.”

  Eastgate could t
ell Olivia was holding something back. “What is it?”

  “His pain is your path; his path is your pain. The ox, the eagle, the lion are unbroken. That’s their motto. According to Sandwith, it means man is destined to follow the same path of exile as Adam, and the Flaming Sword are united against anyone who would attempt to return to the Garden.”

  Eastgate turned to Karzan. “We must go to Elazığ immediately. No one can know. Do you understand?”

  Chapter 66

  Eastgate’s insistence that they travel to Elazığ immediately changed Karzan’s plans. He had intended to take Eastgate and Olivia there directly from Tehran, but not until several weeks had passed and his clients fell off the list of the ayatollah’s most wanted. Their path was to follow Iran’s treacherous Route 22, where they would face a gauntlet of military check points. If the Ministry of Intelligence was still looking for them, their pictures would be with every police officer and security guard from Tehran to Tabriz, Iran’s second largest city in the Northwest. Instead, Karzan decided to push north to Chalus—the final terminus on route 59, which cut through the Alborz Mountains and linked Tehran with the coast of the Caspian Sea.

  In the morning, Karzan covered Eastgate and Olivia under a mound of juniper fronds in the bed of his truck. It was a cover the men normally used to hide stolen guns or smuggled CDs and clothes, but it worked well enough on humans.

  Despite the bumpy ride and the threat of capture, for the first time in months Eastgate slept peacefully. Terrified of being discovered, Olivia slept not at all. Every time the truck stopped she felt the walls of Evin prison closing in. The cold cell. The threat of torture. I can’t go back there.

  After they crossed the mountains, Karzan pushed aside a branch of juniper and pulled on Olivia’s shoe to wake her. “The coast is clear my friend.”

  Olivia peaked out from under the fronds. Instead of frigid and clammy, the air was humid and heavy. Having crossed the apex of the mountains, they were now in a tropical climate—a lush rain forest created by the trapping of the warm air from the Caspian against the mountains.

  It was a far cry from Tehran. While the capital was cold and doctrinal, Chalus felt like a yoga commune for rich yuppies—Iran’s version of Big Sur. It had a resort feel and a secular vibe. The women weren’t covered head to toe in black garments. Some even ran on the beach in what looked like shorts and t-shirts. It wasn’t what Eastgate had expected. The rumor in US intelligence was that Chalus had become a sanctuary for members of al-Qaeda, and that some of bin Laden’s own family had relocated there.