The Eden Prophecy (28 page)

If they needed to take some evasive action or to race back to the Iraqi side of the border, the big air fan could push the boat at fifty knots, while the large air rudder would make it possible to turn on a dime.

For now they glided silently in the darkness, cruising across an area that was once a battleground.

Because the swamp straddled the border, Iranian troops had once been ordered to cross it in en masse. For the most part they were unarmed draftees, acting as human cannon fodder for those who carried weapons behind them.

In response, Saddam Hussein had electrified parts of the swamp, killing the Iranians by the thousands. There was no evidence of that now, but Danielle felt great sorrow around them as they moved through it.

“So tell me what the professor thinks,” Hawker asked. “And how glad he is not to be here with us right now.”

Danielle had to laugh. She explained McCarter’s theory that according to the copper scroll, there were many gardens, and that the river flowing around the land of Havilah, much like that flowing around the land of Kush, was an explanation of how the Garden was arranged, with four canals and a circular moat surrounding an island.

Once the 5.9K event hit and the Middle East began to dry up, the Garden in Eden, fed by canals that diverted water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, survived. As long as the same mixture of waters could be brought to
the Garden, the ancients believed they could keep the Tree of Life producing.

“It makes sense,” Sonia said. “My father found that in each of the cultures he studied, there were trees or plants that had life-extending properties, all of which died from some type of drought or rot.”

“How does this help us?” Hawker asked. “If this place has been abandoned for seven thousand years or so, then how do we expect to find anything?”

Danielle saw him studying the satellite picture. She knew the answer but Sonia spoke first.

“Seeds can survive given the right conditions,” she said. “They can survive fire, they can survive drought. Winters, summers, volcanic eruptions. They can live like dormant programs in a computer, waiting until the right moment wakes them up.”

“What kind of moment?”

“Application of temperature and moisture,” Sonia said. “Given the right mix, a seed senses somehow that it’s time to come to life.”

“After seventy centuries?”

“Possibly,” she said. “Given the right conditions. But we don’t need the seeds to come to life on their own. We only need to find one. The virus should still be on it.”

“How can you be sure?” Danielle asked.

“Viruses are extremely hardy in some ways,” she said. “Because they’re really just packs of chemicals that do nothing until they come into contact with a cell, they can remain dormant for extremely long periods of time—given the right conditions.”

“Don’t they have to eat or anything?” Hawker asked.

“No,” she said. “They don’t ingest food, or break it down or create heat or have any cellular processes.”

“How do they live?”

“Some scientists believe they’re not alive. They’re just
random coding, floating around out in the world. Until they come into contact with a cell of some kind they are as inert as any stone.”

“So given the right conditions,” Danielle said, “the virus you’re talking about could still exist, even if the tree or the fruit doesn’t. As long as it has a place to hide.”

Sonia nodded. “Once we find it, we can extract the DNA and clone it. Viruses are very simple. I can do it in twenty-four hours. And then we can create our own Tree of Life, without the tree I guess, and from that develop the serum I told you about.”

Despite a level of jealousy that surprised her, Danielle found herself admiring the young woman. She appreciated those who tried to do what others said was impossible. Danielle had grown up living that way herself. It had pushed her onward to becoming an operative for the NRI.

“DNA has been extracted from fossilized plants and animals for years. A seed preserved in the right kind of mud might be almost intact,” Danielle said.

Sonia smiled and Danielle guessed the support felt good to her.

“Is that what we’re looking for?” Hawker asked. “Seeds in the mud?”

Sonia gave a wry smile. “In a way, that’s exactly what we’re looking for.”

Before she could elaborate, the military-grade scanner Danielle carried squawked and the sounds of a conversation in Farsi came over the speaker.

She tensed a little bit listening. Their biggest fear was that Iranian defense forces would spot them and attack or capture them. The main danger was helicopters. Though a helicopter or aircraft could be spotted a long way off, it would still be able to close on the airboat quickly. The scanner would help, detecting communications
between the air units long before they were in range.

As Danielle listened, she could make out one voice mention altitude and range, but she wasn’t sure what else was said and she didn’t hear the distinctive background vibration that would tell her it was a helicopter.

“It’s okay,” Hawker said, pointing up and to the left. “It’s just airline traffic and a routing center somewhere.”

Danielle followed his gaze. A few miles off and twenty thousand feet above, the blinking red dot of an airliner’s beacon could be seen heading southeast, crossing the sky in silence.

She glanced at the second device just to be sure. The display on the radar warning receiver, or RWR, remained green. They hadn’t been painted. She guessed Hawker was right. So far no one knew they were there.

Sonia looked at Danielle. “This is why I like to keep him around. He makes me feel safe.”

Oh God, Danielle thought. The respectful feelings vanished. “Somebody shoot me,” she mumbled.

Fortunately no one responded and a moment later they came upon a strange sight. From a distance, it looked as if a Quonset hut had been dropped into the water and now sat there, an island in the marsh. But as they closed in on the structure it became clear that the “hut” was not some prefabricated building: It was a lodge of sorts, constructed of reeds.

Danielle’s briefing had included mention of these huts but also that she was unlikely to see any. They were the creation of groups known as the Marsh Arabs, a Bedouin-like people who lived out on the swamps instead of in the deserts. They were almost extinct.

“It’s
mudhif
,” she said, “a communal meeting place for the people who used to live here.”

“What happened to them?” Hawker asked.

“They fought against Saddam and after he crushed
them they fled back here to the swamps. So Saddam drained most of the wetlands. Diverting the water. The swamps turned to desert and the people had nowhere to hide.”

Danielle looked back at the
mudhif
they were now passing.

A magnificent labor, built on a man-made island of mud and grass, the
mudhif
was the size of a school bus, constructed entirely out of woven reeds. But the structure was dilapidated now, falling apart. It seemed that those who had built it were gone and there was no one left to repair or use it.

“A century ago, there were a hundred thousand people living out here,” she added. “Now … probably a thousand or so, spread over the whole of the marshland.”

“Poor sods,” Keegan said.

“War destroys everything,” Sonia said.

Danielle agreed. “McCarter told me these people were linked to the Sumerians, the civilization that built the cities of Ur and Uruk around 3000 BC. Their word for this whole area is
Edin
—it means the open plains.”

Danielle did not consider herself a sucker for circumstantial evidence, but as she’d listened to McCarter’s theory, she’d thought “why not.” They’d discovered other, perhaps stranger things, working together.

And it wasn’t only the Old Testament that spoke of eternal life from a tree in a garden. McCarter had explained that other cultures had their own stories about immortality. Carved tablets describing the Sumerians as the keepers of the Immortal Garden had been found in Iraq; Egyptian records counted several pharaohs living into their nineties when the average human life span was twenty-seven. Fruit from a tree in the oasis of Ra was said to be responsible. That tree had been a gift from the king of Sumer.

He quoted texts she’d never heard of: Apocryphal Bible
texts, like the book of Enoch, which claimed the Tree of Life was a type of tamarind tree. Syrian texts on Alexander the Great, which held that his reason for conquering much of the world was to find the Garden of Eden; he failed and died in his thirties. The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian story of a god-king who quested for the secret to eternal life after his friend Enkidu was killed. Gilgamesh eventually arrived in a garden filled with jewellike trees. Later Gilgamesh found a plant that granted eternal life at the bottom of a shallow lake. He retrieved the plant, only to have it stolen by a serpent.

Another miracle, another serpent. She hoped their quest would turn out differently.

Three hours later they’d crossed the swamp and beached the airboat at the edge of the mudflat. Hawker unloaded a pair of ATVs while Danielle collected the equipment they would need: two GPS receivers already programmed with the information McCarter had given them. Two sets of night-vision goggles. Flak jackets, helmets, gloves, guns. She had four pistols, one for each of them, and both she and Hawker would carry rifles.

She handed a Beretta to Sonia. “I’m okay. I have my own,” Sonia said.

Danielle paused. She guessed that someone who’d been in danger for years would be a fool not to have their own gun. She put the Beretta back in the locker and turned to Hawker’s friend Keegan. He stood on the airboat.

“Not coming?”

“Lot of hiking where you’re going,” he said.

“Probably.”

“I’ll stay here,” he said. “Make sure no one steals our tires.”

It made sense. From the satellite pictures it was obvious that the site had some difficult terrain. Keegan would struggle out there.

“Here,” she said, handing the second pair of night-vision
goggles to Hawker. “Sorry I don’t have a pair for your girlfriend.”

Hawker chuckled and Danielle wasn’t sure if he was laughing with her or at her.

“I assume she’s going to share your ride,” Danielle said.

“Unless you want her arms wrapped around you?”

She slammed the flak jackets into his chest, purposefully putting extra effort behind the handoff. “Keep dreaming.”

They climbed onto the ATVs. Turning the keys brought up low-level illumination on the instrument panels but produced no sound. The four-wheelers were completely electric.

“Keep your headlight off,” she said. “With the goggles and the starlight we should be fine.”

Danielle took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the glowing green view of the world. Her bearings established, she twisted the throttle and accelerated silently into the night.

Moments later she was racing through the desert in near-total darkness and silence. It was an odd feeling. The acceleration of the vehicle was instant, the speed and agility right there with a top-of-the-line motorized ATV, but apart from the almost inaudible electric whirring, the only sound came from the tires and the wind. It gave her the sensation of literally flying through the night.

Keeping a sharp eye ahead, Danielle glanced at the GPS, adjusted course slightly, and accelerated again. Fifteen minutes later they zoomed out of the mudflats and began racing across dunes of sand that rose and fell like waves on the ocean. Travel here was smoother, if a bit slower.

Beyond the dunes they came to a broad wadi, a dried-up riverbed that was once part of the canal system. She
drove beside it for a mile and then down into it. Three miles to go.

With the scanner and radar warning receiver strapped to the bars of her ATV showing no sign of activity, Danielle felt certain that no parties were aware of their presence. She hoped their luck held and she accelerated a bit more, anxious to get whatever they could find and get the hell out of Dodge.

She curved to the left, weaving around a dead tree. The walls of the wadi were built-up sand for the most part, but in places rubble of stone blocks showed through, remnants of the time when this had been a canal.

She followed the path, came around a turn, and all of a sudden she was there.

H
awker followed Danielle’s lead, chasing her across the mudflats, desert, and scrubland, slightly annoyed at the pace she kept. His aggravation came not because it was nearly impossible to keep up with her—which it was—or because he and Sonia had spent twenty minutes eating sand—which they had—but because separated as they were he had no way to communicate with her. They couldn’t use a radio without facing the same risk of detection as the airliners that had flown overhead during their ride across the swamp. And if anything went wrong Danielle would never know until she stopped and wondered where he and Sonia had gone.

He did his best to keep up, having better luck once they were in the wadi. Five minutes on he saw her race around a half-buried dead tree. He followed, with Sonia holding tight. On the other side he found Danielle stopped—parked at the edge of a deep pit.

He slammed on the brakes and the ATV skidded. The wheels dug into the sand, Sonia’s weight pressed against him, adding to his own, and they almost went over.

The ATV stopped with Hawker hanging over the handlebars and peering down into a five-story drop. A massive void lay before them. It was like standing at the edge of an open-pit mine. The far wall might have been half a mile away.

At the bottom, sand piled up in sloping heaps against three of the four walls. He guessed that showed the direction of the wind. In the center, raised up almost to their level, lay a flattish table perhaps the size of a dozen football fields.

Stone ruins covering one section appeared to be mostly crude structures. On the far edge lay a much larger structure, one that seemed to protrude into the ground.

The ATV slipped a bit. Realizing he was still hanging over the edge, Hawker pushed off the handlebars, straightening up. With his hand on the clutch he walked the ATV back a few steps, flipping up the night-vision goggles as he went.