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.
CHAPTER 36
Hawker 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.