‘Any other scientists there?’
‘A handful of others on rotation. Some coming, some going. Archaeologists, mostly. But we were kept apart, no consorting or information sharing. Really frustrating way to work. The others had higher clearance than me. I was only allowed in the entry passage - the first leg of what was probably a maze of tunnels. There was a guard stationed where the entry tunnel forked, scanning IDs. Like a checkpoint.’
He needed to fish for a connection to the Arabs who were now holed up in the cave. ‘Any chance it had something to do with Islamic militants?’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
Flaherty shook his head sharply.
‘What I saw in that cave had been there over 4,500 years before Muhammad was even born. Terri
fying
, yes. Terror
ism
, no.’
A few tables away, Flaherty noticed a man, with a thin face and Dumbo ears, sipping coffee. The guy seemed preoccupied with their discussion, but quickly diverted his attention back to a museum map laid flat on the table. Flaherty lowered his voice. ‘Anything else?’
‘I was only there a few days, taking pictures, making rubbings of the walls. Once I cracked the alphabet, I was asked to give all the materials back. Then they put me back on a plane, no pictures, no records, no copies, nada. The most incredible thing I’ve ever seen and all I’ve got to show for it is up here.’ She tapped her temple. ‘But memories don’t offer a high degree of provenance,’ she said with great sarcasm. She watched him scrawling more chicken scratch, his fingers pinching the Bic way too tightly in a crooked grip. ‘I’m not in any trouble, am I?’
Flaherty’s eyes didn’t move from the notepad. ‘I’ll need to report this all back to my boss, see what she has to say. There’ll be some fact checking, of course.’ He finally looked up. ‘I’ll keep you posted. But we’ll probably need to meet again. So try not to skip town,’ he said with a smile.
‘Not even for some sunshine?’
‘Not unless you bring me.’ He said it too fast to catch himself, and he felt the blood rush into his cheeks. ‘You know, because we may need you to answer more questions …’
‘Of course,’ she said, grinning.
Finished with cleaning the carpet, Stokes took a breather next to a metre-high display case shaped like an obelisk. The artifact contained in its pyramidal glass tip captured his attention: a clay tablet, no larger than a hymnal, etched in lines, pictograms and wedge-shaped cuneiform. An amazing work created by the first masters of celestial study - the ancient Mesopotamians.
He’d never divulged to anyone how he’d truly procured this treasure map to the origins of Creation hidden deep within the Zagros Mountains. Even his closest confidants, like Frank Roselli, had clung to the story that he’d recovered the relic from an antiquities smuggler who’d looted it from the vaults beneath the Baghdad Museum after the capital first fell. Amazingly, everyone had accepted the story.
But that explanation - the lie - was far too simple.
This tablet represented Stokes’s pledge to those who’d truly bestowed the artifact, and its secrets, upon him. The pledge that had transformed a warrior into a prophet.
And it all began on a calm day in 2003, when Randall Stokes lost his leg …
*
While US forces bombed Baghdad, Stokes’s Force Recon unit had still been routing out Taliban from the Afghan mountains, just like they’d been doing since October 2001, when Operation Enduring Freedom responded to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. Shortly after Iraq’s capital had been seized, his unit had been redeployed to northern Iraq to pursue Saddam loyalists who were fleeing Mosul and heading north over the mountains for Syria and Turkey.
The Department of Defense had issued a deck of playing cards listing Iraq’s most-wanted men in four suits, plus jokers. In the first two weeks, Stokes and his six-man unit had captured two diamonds, one heart and one club. By the end of the first month, they’d hunted and killed fifty-five insurgents, without one civilian casualty. The worst injury his unit sustained was a non-lethal bite from a Kurdistan mountain viper whose fangs punctured more boot than skin.
Things had gone smoothly.
Perhaps that should have clued Stokes that his luck was sure to turn.
On an uncharacteristically mild Tuesday in late June, Stokes and fellow special operative Corporal Cory Riggins were heading south to Mosul for a weekly briefing with the brigadier general. Their Humvee was forced to a stop in a congested pass where a group of Iraqi boys had turned the dusty roadway into a soccer field. The kids made no effort to move.
‘I should just run over them,’ Riggins said. ‘A few less fanatics in our future.’
‘Never did like kids, did you?’ Stokes said, hopping out from the Humvee. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
Stokes had made it only four paces from the truck when one of the boys scored a goal that sent the soccer ball rolling up to Stokes’s feet. He didn’t think much about the fact that the kid playing goalie didn’t come running after it. The kids simply jumped up and down, waving their arms for Stokes to kick it back. Grinning and shaking his head, Stokes cranked his leg back and planted a swift kick on the ball.
That was the last time he’d seen the lower half of his right leg.
What Stokes didn’t know was that the soccer ball had been packed with C-4 and had been remotely armed the moment it rolled to a stop, waiting for the force of Stokes’s kick to compress its concealed detonator.
The explosion was fierce, lifting Stokes into the air and throwing him back against the Humvee. He dropped to the ground at the same moment a combat boot smacked the window above him, spraying blood. The boot plunked into the sand beside him. He remembered seeing the jagged bone and stringy meat sticking out above its laces. Only when he looked down at what remained of his right leg - nothing but peeled raw flesh just inches below the knee - did he realize that the boot was his own.
There was no pain. Just the woozy haze from shock and an overwhelming urge to vomit.
The boys scattered as the trio of militants broke cover to ambush the Humvee. With their machine guns raised up, they shredded the Humvee’s interior, before Riggins could escape or return fire.
Then they circled around Stokes, jeered him as he spat bile into the sand. Since his eardrums had been blown out, he couldn’t hear what they were saying, and his eyes, coated in blast residue, struggled to focus.
Then came the beating.
The Arabs mercilessly kicked him about the face until he spat out teeth. Next, they simultaneously pummelled his ribs and testicles. When they began stomping on his bloody stump, Stokes passed out.
They’d done everything possible to maim him. Yet for some reason, no doubt wicked, they let him live. Perhaps they’d determined that his mutilation was punishment far greater than death.
Big mistake.
For hours he lay there, bloodied and beaten, cooking in the sun. Onlookers came and went, going about their business, some stopping to spit on him. All he could think was how he’d given his life to save these people -
the great liberator
- and not one came to his aid.
Was this how the freedom fighters were to be repaid? he’d wondered.
Finally, when he’d given up hope, one person did come for him: the man who would for ever change Stokes’s life; the man who would confide in him a divine secret protected since the beginning of recorded history … and who would guide him down the path to ultimate retribution.
As Stokes continued to stare in wonderment at the clay tablet, he recalled a second set of playing cards issued to Iraqi ground troops by the Department of Defense - tips on how to sensitively handle Iraq’s archaeological treasures.
He thought about the omnipotent words on the three-of-spades: ‘To understand the meaning of an artifact, it must be found and studied in its original setting.’
Equally telling was the message from the six-of-diamonds: ‘Thousands of artifacts are disappearing from Iraq and Afghanistan. Report suspicious behavior.’
But the Jack-of-hearts seemed to know his future best: ‘Local elders may be a good source of information about cultural heritage and archaeology.’
Indeed, Randall Stokes’s destiny certainly was ‘in the cards’.
‘Give it some more gas!’ Jason yelled down to the driver.
The MRAP’s 450-horsepower Mack diesel engine rumbled. The winch’s braided steel cable stretched even tighter, straining to pull free a mammoth mountain chunk that easily weighed ten tons. The rock was wedged in tight, anchoring the debris pile that had slid down to block the cave entrance. Even larger boulders had toppled almost twenty metres down the slope before coming to a rest.
Jason’s thinking was simple: pull this Big Mama out from the bottom of the heap, let gravity do the rest.
While the MRAP continued to pull, Jason monitored the two cable loops that Crawford’s marines had managed to lasso around the boulder, hoping they wouldn’t slip or snap under the extreme pressure.
‘Come on, Big Mama …’
Some gritty scratching.
A sharp pop.
The marines retreated further along the slope’s thin ridge.
‘Come on …’ He kept his hand raised and kept his finger spinning in circles so the driver knew not to ease off the gas.
The first steel loop suddenly snapped and whipped out on a wide arc. Jason managed to duck and weave before it lashed his face.
‘Nice move, Ali,’ Camel called over. He was leaning casually against the cliff face, nipping at his canteen.
Jason flipped him the bird.
More shifting and groaning deep in the rock pile.
The second loop was starting to fray along one of the rock’s sharp edges.
‘Forget it, Yaeger!’ Crawford bellowed up at him. From below, the colonel was monitoring the effort through binoculars. ‘We’ll blast it out!’
Jason had already explained to Crawford that another explosion would only exacerbate the problem by shaking free the loose stone that had yet to fall from the cliff face, compromise the tunnel itself. So he pretended to not hear him, kept spinning his finger.
The MRAP’s engine revved harder.
Finally, Big Mama began to pull free. The rock did a drunken lurch then teetered forward.
‘Everybody back!’ Jason screamed. He motioned for Crawford and the dozen or so marines watching at the bottom to clear off to the sides. Then he yelled to the MRAP driver: ‘Move out!’ This could get messy, he thought.
Once Big Mama got going, the huge pile dammed up behind her erupted into a landslide - huge, sharp rocks bouncing and tumbling end over end.
Watching Big Mama curl down along the steel cable like a retracting yoyo, Jason feared she was going to gather enough momentum to vault the boulders that formed a protective wall at the slope’s base and shoot straight for the plodding MRAP. Even the twenty-ton armoured behemoth wouldn’t stand a chance against the huge rock.
Jason cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed, ‘Move it! Go! Go!
Go-o-o-o!
‘ The driver was quick to respond, but Jason could tell that the MRAP wasn’t accelerating fast enough.
Down bottom, Big Mama leapfrogged one of her siblings, connected with another, and did a gravity-defying flip that launched her into a rainbow-shaped arc that crested at five metres. Jason cringed. ‘Oh crap …’
Big Mama came down like a meteor and struck the MRAP’s rear with a huge clang.
When the dust settled, it was apparent that the MRAP had fortunately escaped being flattened. Jason noted, however, a sizable dent in the rear split door and fractures in its small windows too.
Clearly upset, Crawford paced over to the truck with hands on his hips, shaking his head. The driver immediately hopped out, rubbing his neck. He proceeded to the truck’s rear to help Crawford assess the damage.
‘You know Crawford’s probably going to send you a bill for that,’ Camel called over to Jason.
Ignoring him, Jason’s attention went back to the cave. Despite the mishap, what he saw had him grinning. Though some smaller debris would need to be ferried away, once again a wide opening yawned in the cliff face.
To avoid reported mortar fire in northern Kurdistan the Blackhawk maintained a westerly flight path high above the Iraqi plain. On approach to Mosul it curled right, keeping the city comfortably to the west, then headed for its next destination, which lay thirty-five kilometres northeast.
As he gazed out towards the distant city, a great sadness came over Hazo. It had been over thirty years since Saddam Hussein’s regime had forced hundreds of thousands of Kurds - Hazo’s family among them - to relocate from Mosul to camps in the desolate southern deserts. Those who hadn’t cooperated were attacked with Sarin nerve gas. Following the first major waves of ethnic cleansing, the fascist Ba’ath Party then seized the tribal lands in a bold attempt to ‘Arabicize’ the region.
While in the resettlement camp, Hazo’s asthmatic mother had been denied access to critical medicine. She subsequently died from the desert’s oppressive dry heat. His father, once a robust, jovial man, and, prior to the displacement, Mosul’s most industrious carpet retailer, had been executed by a firing squad and tossed into a mass grave. Hazo’s two older brothers had been killed by a suicide bomber while travelling by car together to seek work in Baghdad, shortly after the US invasion. Their wives and children moved in with Hazo’s oldest sibling, his sister Anyah.