Forty-Eight X

by Barry Pollack

  Fala opened her eyes as a rumble disturbed the quiet din of engine noise and clinking glasses. She looked over at Krantz as his stomach growled loudly again.

  “Sorry,” he apologized, glancing over at the rest of the passengers in first class who were sipping on California cabernet and carving through Kobe beef filet mignons. An aroma of gustatory delights permeated the air and teased him.

  Fala smiled and kissed him gently on the cheek. The colonel was hungry. It was late afternoon, and their flight from Paris was about to land in Teheran. They had not eaten since five a.m. It was Ramadan, and Fala was fasting. Muslims practiced sawm, or fasting, for the entire month of Ramadan. They ate and drank nothing, not even water, during daylight hours. Fala got up early for suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn. She broke her fast again at sunset with a meal known as iftar. The rest of the day, according to her faith, she fasted.

  Although Krantz was Jewish, he didn’t feel right eating in front of her, tempting her. Go ahead and growl, he spoke to his innards. We’re a couple, and if a billion Muslims can fast for a month, so can one Jew. While Krantz was a secular Jew, he admired the Islamic devotion to Ramadan. The upcoming Christian Christmas and Jewish Hanukkah holidays were religious events that had become excuses for consumerism. Ramadan, on the other hand, remained focused on its theme of self-sacrifice and devotion to Allah. He respected that.

  Joshua Krantz had come to know many Muslims while growing up. He went to school with some, did business with others, but none had ever been his friend. So, he never really learned much about their faith and never cared. He had been stuffed too full of the religious fables of Judaism during his youth to be interested in hearing about the tales and allegories of Islam—until he met Fala. He was receptive to listening to a lot of things while cuddled next to her warm body.

  “Around 610 AD, a caravan trader named Mohammad was heading to Mecca thinking about God,” she explained during one of their pillow talks.

  “There’s not much else to do when you’re wandering in the middle of a desert on a camel,” Krantz had responded.

  She ignored his snide response. “One night a voice called to him. It was the angel Gabriel.”

  “Is this the same Gabriel that appears in the book of Daniel? The one Christians believe foretold the birth of Jesus?”

  “Same one.”

  “He got around,” Krantz joked. He’d always preferred to joke about religion rather than ever talk about it seriously. It was like a third rail. Step on it wrong and it would kill you, or a relationship.

  “Gabriel told Mohammad that he’d been chosen to receive the word of Allah. It was during this month, the month of Ramadan, that Allah revealed those words to Mohammad, which would later be transcribed as the Qur’an.”

  Krantz was thinking about his lessons on Islam as their plane descended into Teheran’s Mehrabad Airport. He remembered other lessons he had learned in school as a child, the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. There the Bible referred to the messenger Gabriel as the “Left Hand of God.” And here he was about to enter a lions’ den to look for the “Right Hand of God.” Is this my reward for loving history, he thought, to risk being eaten alive?

  They both wore traditional Egyptian dress, the gown-like galabiya. His was simple gray; hers, black with some embroidery about the neck. Disembarking, Fala adjusted her head scarf, or hijab. This time they both held Egyptian passports. Krantz’s was an exquisite forgery. A taxi drove them from the airport and through the capital’s mishmash of skyscrapers and mosques. A religious parade snarled traffic in midtown before they broke through to the desert highway on the way to Qom, 130 kilometers to the south.

  Although Fala knew little about modern Iran, she knew Islamic history.

  “Qom is one of many Shiite desert shrine cities that stretch from Najaf in Iraq to Mashhad in eastern Iran,” she explained. “Each is a crumbling old city with narrow alleyways surrounding a holy site. Qom’s sacred site is a ninth-century golden-domed mosque built as the tomb of Fatima, the sister of the Eighth Imam.”

  “And that’s important?”

  “If you’re a Shiite, it is,” Fala went on. “Sunnis have traditionally followed a more secular view of leadership, a caliph-ruled one. Shias, on the other hand, believe that the Prophet designated Ali to be his successor, to be the imam or spiritual and secular leader of all of Islam, and that imams should rule. Ali was the first of twelve imams. Because the caliphs knew they were a threat to their power, they kept them secluded in Medina, a long way from their capitals. But in the eighth century, a Sunni caliph decided to put an end to the conflict between the two sects and asked the Eighth Imam to become his successor.”

  “So then why are the Shias and Sunnis still at odds?” Krantz asked.

  “Somebody poisoned the Eighth Imam.”

  “Islam—I think it would make for a great soap opera,” Krantz remarked, shaking his head. He should have known better.

  “And Judaism wouldn’t?” Fala countered. “What with King David killing off his mistress Bathsheba’s husband; one son raping a sister; another, Absalom, killed trying to usurp his father’s throne.”

  Krantz kept quiet and turned to simply watch the passing scenery, the silver mirror-like reflection of one of the many salt lakes between the Teheran and Qom. Never parry swords over religion, he reminded himself. It would always be a losing battle.

  Qom’s golden dome of Fatima wasn’t the most dramatic landmark that caught the eye of Joshua and Fala as they drove into town. Two grand amusement parks were built on each side of the holy site, and it was surrounded by dozens of tacky neon-lit shops selling Qom’s specialty, sohan—a saffron-flavored candy embedded with pistachio nuts, similar to peanut brittle.

  While Teheran was the capital and home of government bureaucrats, the real power was held in Qom by the Grand Ayatollah. Qom was also the country’s most prominent educational center for Shiite Islam. It had the largest madrasa, or religious university, Howzeh-ye Elmieh. The founder of the Iranian theocracy, Ayatollah Khomeini, had studied there. And so, it attracted Shiites from around the world who wanted to become mullahs, Islamic religious teachers. It would be a mullah who could tell Krantz if this new and ancient weapon, Alexander’s battle scythe, was one of their creations and if the Maimun, the Right Hand of God, was also their doing.

  They checked into a small hotel near the Fatima shrine. The streets were crowded with people shopping for if tar, their break-the-fast celebration. Turbaned clerics meandered among young men in American-style blue jeans, bearded and grimy Afghan migrant laborers, and women in modest but elegant long, embroidered jackets and designer head scarves. Qom, population one million, was a religious but eclectic city.

  Among her peers in the world of Egyptian archaeology, some were religious. Fala had used one of those connections for an introduction to a prominent mullah in Qom. Krantz was confident of the outcome. The mullah would either provide them insight or shout to the crowd “Kill the Jew!” No matter, he was too hungry to worry. The sun was setting and the streets were emptying as people rushed home to be with their families when he and Fala sat down at an outdoor café for their if tar.

  What he wanted was a beer or glass of wine. But he knew that not only were alcoholic beverages not served in restaurants, they were strictly forbidden in the entire country. He could order a nonalcoholic beer or a soft drink, but decided to stick with the national beverage and ordered ckai, a sweet tea sipped through a sugar cube. The menu had the classic Middle East staples—assortments of lamb, eggplant, yogurt, and wheat bread.

  A young cleric, who could barely have been twenty, entered and sat across from them. He was turbaned but so young that his beard was only an irregular curly stubble. He sipped his tea quietly and said nothing as they devoured their meal. Only when they had finished did he speak.

  “You are the friend of Mustafa Khalil?” he asked Fala.

  “Why, yes,” she answered, surprised. They had supposed that their contact would meet the
m later at their hotel.

  “I am Danush,” he introduced himself in Arabic. “You are Fala al-Shohada?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you from?” the young cleric asked, turning to Krantz.

  Krantz spoke a bit of Arabic, poorly. He intended to let Fala talk, and if spoken to, provide single word responses.

  “Al Kahira,” Cairo, he answered in Arabic.

  The cleric simple shook his head no.

  “He’s British,” Fala cut in. “We work together in Cairo.”

  The cleric smiled and again shook his head. He handed each of them his card. He was the Grand Ayatollah’s secretary.

  “You are very young to have such an important job,” Fala commented. “You must be very smart.”

  The young man smiled. “There is perhaps a little nepotism. I am his son-in-law.”

  This young man must, indeed, be very smart, Krantz thought. The Grand Ayatollah would not allow his daughter to marry for love or marry just anyone. This mullah had to have wisdom and potential to perhaps someday become an Ayatollah himself. Krantz realized how exceptionally bright this kid was with his next sentence.

  “M’davar Ivrit?” he asked. “Do you want me to speak in Hebrew?”

  Krantz jumped up from his chair. They knew who he was. He was an Israeli in Iran, and he didn’t plan on be shackled and tortured. While the Israeli government had often bartered for the return of their prisoners, he detested that policy. He didn’t intend on being traded for some bomber who had killed dozens of innocents. He looked frantically about for the best direction to flee.

  “Calm. Calm,” Danush, the young mullah, said in English. “Please sit. I can guarantee you are safe here. Although you have been less then honest with me, I assure you I am being truthful.”

  Krantz sat again, slowly. The mullah poured him another cup of ckai.

  “You will come to no harm—not in this holy city or in my country. The Ayatollah promises it is so.”

  The tension he had felt since arriving in this country passed like a great relaxing sigh. He had no reason to doubt this cleric’s sincerity. He went from one moment feeling like a spy sitting on needles to a tourist pleasantly dining at an outdoor café enjoying the charms of an ancient city.

  The cleric retrieved a small box from a leather satchel by his foot. He set it on the table and opened it. Inside was Alexander’s battle scythe. This one, however, was clearly very old.

  “Where did you get this?” Fala asked.

  “May I?” Krantz asked, reaching toward the weapon.

  The mullah nodded his consent.

  “It is part of our collection of antiquities in the National Museum, from an excavation near Tabriz.”

  Krantz delicately examined the 2,300-year-old artifact. Only fine threads of its original leather remained, and the bladed fingers were broken or pitted with centuries of rust. But clearly the modern weapon and the old were of the same design.

  “I have read your books, Dr. Krantz,” the mullah smiled. “I found them very interesting.”

  They even know my name, Krantz thought. Good intelligence.

  “I know very much about my country from the time of the Hijra—Mohammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina. But I do not know very much about Al-Iskandar.”

  “Then you should ask Miss al-Shohada,” Krantz replied.

  The imam politely nodded to Fala.

  “Alexander the Great conquered Persia in the fourth century BC,” Fala began. “Qom was supposedly a great city even then, the center of the Zoroastrian religion. On his march to India, Alexander destroyed the city, and Qom wasn’t fully restored to its former prominence until the seventh century, when it became a religious center for Shi’ism.”

  “The Ayatollah says that Al-Iskandar is called Dhu’l-Karnayn in the Qur’an,” Danush interjected. “The two-horned one. He was Muslim, you know. He destroyed the city to cleanse it and prepare it for its holy purposes.”

  Krantz smiled. Islam was fond of usurping anyone of historical significance into their history. Moses was Muslim. Jesus was Muslim. Why not Alexander the Great? He would allow them to adopt anyone they wanted to be a Muslim. He would assent to them calling Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Ariel Sharon Muslims if he learned what he wanted to know.

  “We found a lot of dead people killed by a modern version of this ancient weapon.” Krantz finally got to the point. “The only survivor said just one word to identify his assailants.”

  “And what is this word that brings you here?”

  “Maimun,” Fala spoke up.

  The young cleric was thoughtful for a moment.

  “Only this word?”

  “Yes,” Krantz confirmed. “Do you know what it means?”

  “The word literally means ‘fortunate one,’” the young mullah began. “It came to mean ‘right hand,’ because the right hand symbolizes strength and all that is good and fortunate. It was also used in ancient times as a derogatory description. If you called someone a ‘maimun,’ you called them a monkey. A euphemism, since early Islam considered monkeys to be evil because many nonbelievers, the Hindus for instance, worshiped monkeys.”

  “We think it means the Right Hand of God,” Fala interrupted.

  “Do you know the Right Hand of God?” Krantz pressed. “Is it a Shia guerrilla group?”

  “You Jews and the Americans, you just do not understand,” the cleric answered, somewhat perturbed. “Islamic Iran is for peace and stability everywhere. We do not engage in hostile action against any country, any people. Look at our history. Iran has never attacked Israel. Iran has never attacked the United States. We defended ourselves against Iraq. We are maligned, but we are innocent. But if somebody attacks us, we will respond.”

  Krantz had no intention of jumping into a political debate—not here anyway. Iran may have never attacked Israel, but they financed most of Israel’s enemies and their rhetoric continued to fuel the hatred.

  “So who is responsible for making this weapon of Al-Iskandar?” Fala asked.

  “Who? The people who have been killed, they are Shias. Why would we kill our own brethren?”

  “A Sunni terror group, then?” Krantz followed up.

  Like all clergymen, the Iranian mullah had to give his answer abstractly.

  “We all come from different families. We are born and cared for, and few of us want to question what our parents and grandparents have taught us. The Hindus put ash on their foreheads and pray to an elephant-headed stone god. They do this because their parents taught them this. The Christians pray to a cross or an image of Jesus or Mary. You Jews don’t pray to statues, but you rock back and forth in prayer toward an old wall in Jerusalem. And we Muslims, we pray toward a stone building, the Ka’aba in Mecca. What makes us believe? We all believe because we were born and our parents believed. So, if you are looking for the truth, question what your parents have told you. They know.”

  “You’re saying Israel already knows?” Krantz asked, bewildered.

  “Your parents know,” the young cleric clarified. “Your parents, the Americans.”

  There is no gambling like politics.

  —Disraeli

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Even with the first-class accommodations aboard a VIP Air Force C-17, it was an arduous flight from Washington to Diego Garcia—or DC to DG, as Mack Shell described the trip. The general’s job was not only to guide the success of Lemuria but keep those few government officials who were privy to the project, and who held its purse strings, informed. Today, he had two senior senators from the Intelligence Committee along to see the work in progress. He hated this part of his job. He didn’t trust politicians, and he didn’t like being a tour guide.

  “Who in the world was Diego Garcia?” one senator asked.

  It was the first question everyone seemed to ask, and Mack Shell had his answers down to rote.

  “The island,” he explained, “was discovered by Portuguese explorers in the early 1500s. There
were two explorers on two separate voyages. One captain was named Diego, the other Garcia. They came upon it at different times, but both arrived back in Lisbon at the same time and both claimed to have discovered it. So, the king named it after both of them.”

  After seventeen hours of not much but clouds and blue ocean, they began their descent. Diego Garcia was a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Its stamp from the air didn’t seem much bigger than nearby supertankers. The tropical island was crescent shaped, a lush green narrow reef with forty miles of shoreline that wrapped about a turquoise blue lagoon. It had once been the home of natives called Ilois, but the British had moved them all off the island in the late 1960s, when they turned it into a military base.

  “Diego Garcia is British Indian Ocean Territory,” the general went on, “part of an archipelago called the Chagos Islands, also called the Oil Islands. There’s no petroleum here. They’re called the Oil Islands because harvesting coconut oil was their main industry for centuries. The few peaks, like Diego Garcia, that poke above the ocean are part of an undersea mountain chain known as Lemuria. Some say Lemuria was once part of a lost civilization like Atlantis with a culture far more advanced then ours today.”

  When Shell spoke of Lemuria, he spoke of it with reverence. He looked for a glimmer of insight or curiosity, but his guests today were interested only in the practical accomplishments of the work on the island, not in any history of lost civilizations. They knew that General Shell’s job was to create a new genetically designed American soldier. They had no inkling of his grander dreams, to begin a revolution in human evolution.

  “The Oil Islands,” Shell continued to educate his guests, “were French colonies until they became British with Napoleon’s defeat in 1814. When the British started giving up their colonies and gave Mauritania its independence in 1964, we helped them negotiate a deal. For three million pounds and our agreement to give them a favorable exchange on sugar imports, the Oil Islands were excluded from the deal for independence. They continue under British control with us as their major silent partner. Today, DG is the most secure military base in the world. It’s a thousand miles from anywhere else—India’s north of us, Madagascar west, Indonesia east, and Antarctica south. The only way in or out is by military air or a navy ship. The island is now home to three thousand military personnel and, with work on Lemuria, twice that many civilians. Only fifty of that number are British. Mostly they handle the customs rituals at the airport. So, while Diego Garcia is a British colony, it’s now clearly colonized by Americans.”