“We can put the other two on that tripod if we need it.” She pointed to a mount on the front of the boat.
“What else?”
“Body armor. Radar-absorbent coating on the boat. And we can make smoke if we need to.”
It wouldn’t be much if they ran into the Iranian military but it would help if they encountered anyone else.
“How far in are we going?” Hawker asked.
“Nineteen miles across the swamp, the last eight on the Iranian side. From there it’s five miles over land.”
“You sure it’s deserted?”
“The last satellite pass was three hours ago. Nothing for miles.”
Hawker looked up; it was almost dusk. They would move under cover of darkness.
“This seem too easy to you?”
“Of course,” she said. “Should be a piece of cake. That’s why I doubled my insurance policy before I came out.”
Thirty minutes later Hawker was backing the flatbed into the water at the edge of the Hawizeh Marsh, a wetland that extended on both sides of the Iran-Iraq border.
Danielle climbed aboard and made sure all systems were go, then waved Hawker, Keegan, and Sonia aboard. With the retaining straps disconnected, the airboat floated off the back of the truck once Hawker had backed it far enough in.
“Ready?” she asked.
They nodded and Danielle engaged the secondary motor.
For stealth, the black-clad skiff moved under the power of a quiet electric impeller. The impeller sucked water in through a wide opening in the front, accelerated it, and pushed it out a narrower vent in the rear. It was an almost silent way to travel, but it was slow. They could move no more than seven knots with this motor. That meant a three-hour transit time to the other side.
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.