The Genesis Key

by James Barney

  But whose tomb?

  Sargon centered the flashlight’s beam on the enormous structure in the center of the chamber. As improbable as it seemed, the structure appeared to be a massive sarcophagus. He stared for several seconds before approaching it haltingly.

  The dimensions of the sarcophagus were so large that, for a moment, he felt disoriented. It towered more than four feet over his head and measured approximately ten feet long and five feet wide. It sat atop a massive limestone pedestal, about five feet off the hard dirt floor.

  The sarcophagus itself was constructed of four large alabaster slabs, the corners of which were secured by thick pillars of Turkish marble. Another slab of alabaster covered the top. The joints of the structure were tight, and the stone surfaces incredibly smooth. This was a work of meticulous craftsmanship and engineering for any era—let alone the third millennium BC.

  Slowly and methodically, Sargon began circumnavigating the sarcophagus, inspecting each side carefully for any inscription that might give a clue as to whose tomb this was. He was surprised to find no markings at all on the first side he inspected, which appeared to be either the head or the foot of the sarcophagus. Nor were there any markings on the second and third sides. On the fourth side, facing away from the entrance, he found a marking. There, etched deeply into the limestone base was a large inscription measuring more than a foot high and nearly three feet wide:

  Sargon studied the inscription for some time, mystified as to its meaning. After several minutes, he concluded he must have missed something on his first inspection. So, once again, he circled the sarcophagus slowly, carefully inspecting each visible surface with his flashlight, searching for markings. Again, however, he found no other inscription.

  There must be additional markings on top, Sargon surmised. The top, however, was more than four feet above his head, and there appeared to be no easy way for him to climb up for a better view. He was still thinking about how to solve that problem when he heard a noise. His heart pounded as he tried to locate its source.

  He heard it again. This time there was no mistaking the faint sound of voices somewhere outside the chamber.

  Sargon immediately clicked off his flashlight and stood motionless in the blackness. For a few minutes, the voices continued wafting through the dark in undulating tones, always too faint to decipher. Then one of the voices began to grow louder.

  Whoever it was, was coming into the temple.

  Chapter Twelve

  September 5, 1979. Tell-Fara, Iraq.

  “Hey American! Are you in there?”

  Those words, shouted in Arabic, were the first words Sargon could hear clearly enough to understand. And from the volume and direction of the words, it was clear the shouter was in the excavation pit, not more than thirty or forty feet from where Sargon was now standing.

  In the complete darkness of the burial chamber, Sargon performed a quick mental calculus. First, the only way out of the temple was through a small hole that led into the pit, the very space now occupied by the owner of that voice. Second, it had taken considerable effort to squeeze through that hole to get into the temple, and therefore, it would take at least as much time and effort to get out. In other words, there would be no element of surprise if he tried to escape. Third, he was out of ammunition. Fourth, he was far too weak to fight an able-bodied opponent. Considering those facts, Sargon decided his best option was simply to remain still in the darkness. Perhaps they would go away.

  “Hello, American! Are you in there?” the voice repeated in Arabic.

  Sargon swallowed hard and said nothing.

  Then the voice said, quieter this time, “Ahmed, come on down!” He heard another voice, much farther away, responding to the first with an answer that was indecipherable.

  “Ahmed, be careful!” the first voice yelled a minute later.

  “I’ve got it,” the second voice responded, louder this time.

  Sargon deduced that a second person—presumably Ahmed—was now descending into the pit. Sargon remained motionless in the blackness of the mysterious tomb, once again awaiting his fate.

  “Are they in there?” the second voice asked.

  “I don’t know, they didn’t answer.”

  “You think they’re dead?” the second voice asked after a long pause.

  “I don’t know. Go in and check.”

  “Why don’t you go in and check?”

  Another long pause. “It’s dark in there!” said the first voice squeamishly.

  “So use the flashlight.”

  “I didn’t bring it.”

  “Honestly, Ahmed! Why was I cursed with such a stupid brother?”

  Sargon listened to this conversation with bewilderment. These two voices sounded like . . . teenagers.

  “Hey!” Sargon bellowed in his most authoritative, masculine voice. “Who are you?”

  There was a long pause. Sargon imagined the two brothers miming to each other frantically, deciding how to respond.

  Finally, the first voice said timidly, “We are Ahmed and Jabar, from the village.”

  “Why are you looking for the Americans?” Sargon demanded.

  “We heard an explosion. We came to see if they were okay.”

  “How do you know them?”

  “We work for them sometimes. They pay us . . . you know, to fetch things . . . clean their equipment. Stuff like that.”

  Sargon clicked on his flashlight and made his way quickly toward the anteroom. “Stay right there,” he ordered as he walked.

  As he approached the hole leading into the pit, he could hear scrambling and muffled voices on the other side. Using his flashlight, he peered through the hole and saw two young boys, perhaps twelve and fourteen years old, frantically trying to climb the nylon rope out of the pit.

  “Wait a minute,” Sargon called to the boys, using a milder voice this time. These kids clearly were not a threat. “You’re not in trouble. It’s okay. Stop!”

  The brothers, however, continued their escape from the pit, furiously ascending the rope.

  “Wait, boys, I need your help!”

  The brothers continued climbing.

  “I can pay you!”

  The clambering stopped. The older brother, near the top of the rope, looked down at his younger brother below. “How much?” he asked.

  “A lot.”

  Jabar and Ahmed proved quite cooperative after that. Once Sargon explained who he was—curator of the Iraqi National Museum—and that there had been an accident at the excavation site, the brothers were only too eager to help out, for a fee. They agreed on a flat rate of two Iraqi dinars for the day, equivalent to about six U.S. dollars.

  First, Sargon constructed a crude hoist system using the nylon rope and a large bucket that one of the boys found topside. Jabar, the older brother, was stationed at the top of the pit and was responsible for manning the rope. Twelve-year-old Ahmed was stationed at the bottom of the pit and was responsible for filling the bucket.

  Sargon then spent several hours crawling into the temple, making his way into the burial chamber, and methodically retrieving all the artifacts he found that could be removed. One by one, he brought the five-thousand-year-old artifacts into the pit, where Ahmed carefully placed them in the bucket for Jabar to hoist slowly to the surface.

  “Careful with that! Careful!” Sargon warned at least a dozen times throughout this procedure.

  As best he could, Sargon kept a mental inventory of where each piece had been retrieved and its position relative to other pieces in the tomb, though he knew he’d never be able to keep it all straight. This was haphazard, slash-and-burn archeology of the type he absolutely abhorred. But it couldn’t be helped. Better to recover these precious artifacts than to let them be looted by villagers or, worse, destroyed by religious zealots. There was simply no time to observe proper archeological procedures. No photographs, no sketches, no inventory control numbers—not even notes. What he was doing today was nothing short of sacrilege for
a trained archeologist. But it had to be done.

  The three took a break in the early afternoon, and Sargon sent the boys into the village for some food. “Don’t tell anyone about this,” he warned as the boys were leaving. Then, thinking better of it, he added, “There’s an extra two dinars if you keep this quiet.”

  Ecstatic, the boys ran off to retrieve lunch. When they had gone, Sargon went to the Land Cruiser and searched it thoroughly. He did not find what he was looking for. On his way back, he dragged the first gunman’s body into the brush, so that it could not be seen from the path.

  He then returned to the pit and squeezed himself through the small hole into the temple’s anteroom. There, as he held the flashlight with one hand, he searched Daniel Talbot’s pockets and finally found what he was looking for—the official paperwork granting the Talbots permission to excavate at Tell-Fara. Sargon remembered signing that very paperwork more than two years ago. He flipped through several pages in the bundle and eventually found what he needed. It was a letter of support from Harvard University signed by Dr. Charles Eskridge, dean of the Department of Near East Studies.

  A short time later, the boys returned from the village with lunch, which consisted of flat, unleavened bread and a large pot of khoresht—beef-and-vegetable stew. They ate communal-style on the ground, each of them scooping warm stew from the pot with pieces of flatbread. Sargon had a hunch the boys’ mother had prepared this stew, which, surprisingly, wasn’t half bad.

  By mid-afternoon, Sargon had retrieved 127 artifacts from the Tell-Fara tomb, including more than a dozen funerary statues, jewelry, ornaments, pottery, and a beautiful gold-leafed lyre carved at one end to resemble the head of a ram. The task now was to load these precious artifacts into the Land Cruiser. Sargon had already decided that his brother-in-law’s open-bed pickup truck was not a suitable option.

  It took another hour for Sargon and the boys to load the vehicle. This involved repeated trips up and down the rocky path, which was exhausting for all of them, especially Sargon.

  When they were done, Sargon announced, “I have one more job for you boys.”

  “And then we get paid?” Jabar asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Four dinars total, right?”

  “Help me with this last job, boys, and I’ll make it ten.”

  The brothers smiled at each other and eagerly followed Sargon back to the temple.

  “We need more rope!” Sargon yelled to the boys.

  “We’ve looked everywhere,” Jabar responded, “We can’t find any more rope.” He and Amhed had just completed a thorough search of the entire excavation site.

  “Why can’t we just use this one?” Ahmed asked, pointing to the rope dangling into the pit, which was still tied to a palm tree.

  “Because,” Sargon explained in an exasperated tone, “we need a rope down there.” He pointed down into the pit. “If we untie this rope up here, we won’t be able to get back up.”

  “Oh.”

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” said Sargon. “You—” He pointed to Jabar. “You stay up here and tend the rope.”

  Jabar nodded.

  “Ahmed, you come down with me.”

  One at a time, Sargon and Ahmed descended into the pit. At the bottom, Sargon pulled out a pocketknife. He picked up the slack end of the nylon rope, which lay loosely coiled at the bottom of the pit, and measured off several arm lengths—about twenty feet in all—until he reached a point in the rope that dangled about four feet above the floor. “Can you reach this high?” he asked Ahmed, pointing to a knot just above his hand.

  Ahmed reached up and verified that he could.

  With that, Sargon quickly sliced the nylon rope with his knife, just below the knot. He then gathered up the remaining loose rope on the bottom of the pit and said to Ahmed, “Come with me.”

  “Hey!” Jabar yelled from above, “where are you going?”

  “We’ll be right back,” Sargon responded. “Stay where you are.”

  Sargon went first through the hole into the anteroom and then helped Ahmed through. He carefully trained the flashlight away from Daniel Talbot’s lifeless body to prevent Ahmed from seeing it. “Keep walking . . . not much farther,” he said as the two of them traversed the narrow passageway toward the large room at the end.

  “Wow!” Ahmed said as he entered the burial chamber.

  “Amazing, huh?”

  Ahmed nodded in agreement.

  “Okay, here’s what I need you to do.” Sargon tied a knot at one end of the rope and walked to the far side of the sarcophagus. He threw the knotted end over the giant stone structure, so the rope was now draped across the top. Sargon and Ahmed stood on opposite sides.

  “Grab that knot and put it between your feet.”

  Ahmed complied.

  “Now, hold on tight. You’re going up!” With that, Sargon pulled hard on his end of the rope, using the sarcophagus as a crude pulley. “Can you get on top yet?” he asked, wincing in pain.

  “I’m up!”

  Sargon tossed the boy the flashlight and instructed him to inspect the top of the sarcophagus for markings. “What do you see?”

  Ahmed reported back in a baffled tone, “I see . . . nothing.”

  “Isn’t there writing on the stone? Tell me what it looks like.”

  There was a long pause. “No, there’s no writing.”

  “Are you sure? There must be something—symbols, pictures, markings, anything?”

  “No, mister, there’s nothing. Just a smooth, flat stone, like I said.”

  Sargon was confused. There had to be more markings on this tomb somewhere. The one on the base of the sarcophagus didn’t make any sense. “Okay, jump down,” he said. “We’ll have to think of something else.”

  They returned to the anteroom, where Sargon instructed Ahmed to crawl back through the hole and into the pit. Sargon stayed inside the anteroom and shouted instructions through the hole. “Grab that metal pole,” he yelled, using the flashlight’s beam to direct Ahmed to a long metal pipe sticking out of the smoking debris pile. The pipe had once formed part of the scaffolding. “Can you pry it loose?”

  “Yes, I’ve got it.”

  “Okay, pass it to me.” With some effort, the two of them finessed the twelve-foot metal pole through the access hole and into the anteroom and passageway. “Now, tell Jabar to send down one of those flat metal shovels that are lying around up there.”

  Ahmed nodded.

  “And make sure it has a sturdy handle,” Sargon added.

  After a few minutes, Jabar sent down a suitable shovel to Ahmed, lowering it carefully on the rope.

  “Now pass me the shovel,” Sargon ordered, “and the bucket, too.”

  Ahmed complied.

  Five minutes later, Sargon and Ahmed were back in the burial chamber with the implements they had just retrieved. Sargon went to work quickly as Ahmed held the flashlight. First, Sargon inserted the wooden handle of the shovel into the metal pipe, making sure that the metal sleeve of the shovel head extended fully into it. He pushed several small wedges of wood, which he had cut using his pocketknife, around the metal sleeve to make the connection tight.

  Next, he tied the twenty-foot length of rope tightly to the other end of the pipe, wrapping it around several times to make sure it wouldn’t slip off. Finally, he inspected the sarcophagus carefully with the flashlight, slowly running the beam along the crevice where the top and the sides of the sarcophagus met. He eventually found a spot he liked and placed the bucket upside down on the floor about six feet laterally from that spot.

  “Stay back,” Sargon warned as he picked up the pipe/shovel apparatus and stepped onto the overturned bucket. With a quick spearing motion, he slammed the shovel head into the sarcophagus, aiming for the seam between the lid and walls. The steel shovel head contacted the alabaster slab with a loud, metallic clank, producing a small shower of bright orange sparks. Sargon nearly lost his balance as the pipe vibrated sharply in his hands. Recove
ring his footing, he repeated the blow again. As before, the shovel head hit the sarcophagus and bounced back, producing noise and sparks.

  This process went on for several minutes, with Ahmed watching in bewildered amusement.

  Frustrated, Sargon redoubled his effort. With all his strength, he swung the pipe over his head and slammed it hard into the stone sarcophagus. This time, his aim was true. The flat shovel head aligned perfectly with the horizontal seam in the sarcophagus. He slowly released his grip on the pipe and exhaled with relief when he found that it no longer needed his support. The shovel head was now wedged tightly beneath the lid of the sarcophagus, with the pipe extending outward a distance of nine feet.

  “Grab the rope,” Sargon instructed, “but don’t do anything until I say so.” He repositioned the bucket to get a better view.

  “Now, pull down,” he ordered, nodding at Ahmed.

  Ahmed pulled down on the rope with both hands. Sargon watched the lid carefully. Nothing happened.

  “Pull harder!”

  Ahmed groaned as he pulled down with all the weight his scrawny body could provide. This effort was rewarded with the sounds of metal grinding on stone and creaking wood.

  “Keep pulling!” Sargon barked, reaching up and grasping the pipe over his head. With one hand, he, too, pulled down using the weight of his body. The sound of grinding metal and creaking wood intensified. Something was going to give. He just hoped it wasn’t the shovel.

  Sargon felt a movement and suddenly heard a new grinding noise. Not metal on stone, but stone on stone. With his left hand, he reached up, ignoring the throbbing pain in his shoulder, and ran his fingers along the horizontal seam where the shovel head was lodged. He felt a gap. He quickly shoved small wooden wedges into the gap on either side of the shovel head.

  “Ahmed, slacken the rope!” Ahmed complied, and, as he did, the sarcophagus lid gently creaked down onto the wooden wedges. Sargon quickly repositioned the pipe and shovel. This time, the shovel head went a fraction of an inch farther beneath the lid.