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.
18
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.
Now Mosul’s streets were once again filled with Kurds. The tide of discontentment, however, had merely reversed with resettled Kurds staging violent reprisals — restaurant bombings, car bombings, shootings — against resident Arabs. After all that Hazo’s family had endured, how could Karsaz question the fight for a new Iraq? Otherwise how would the cycle of violence ever end? Could it ever end? Hazo wondered. The grim truth, he feared, was that Iraq’s history would continue to be written in blood.
His sombre gaze traced the wide curves of the Tigris to the outskirts of Mosul where mounds and ruins scattered over 1,800 acres marked the site of ancient Nineveh. The Bible said that the prophet Jonah had come here after being spat out from the great fish’s belly to proclaim God’s word to the wicked Ninevites. But long before Jonah’s mission, the city was a religious centre for the goddess Ishtar. Hazo pulled out the pictures from the cave, studied the woman who’d been depicted on the wall. Had she been a living being? Or might this be a tribute to the Assyrio-Babylonian goddess Ishtar, as Karsaz had suggested?
An eight-pointed star was Ishtar’s mythological symbol, and the woman depicted on the cave wall wore a wristband bearing an eight-petalled rosette. Close. But close enough? He tried to remember if Ishtar was ever portrayed carrying a radiating object in her hands. Nothing came to mind.
Like most Iraqis, he could recall bits and pieces of the goddess’s lore: how the cunning seductress would cruelly annihilate her countless lovers; how after failing to bed the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh, she’d persuaded the supreme god Anu to release the Great Bull of Heaven to deliver apocalyptic vengeance upon the Babylonians; how the Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal, had been so infuriated by Ishtar’s antics that she’d imprisoned the harlot and inflicted sixty diseases upon her.
Could this really be Ishtar? he thought
Nineveh faded in the distance and the chopper began tracing a white pipeline that ran north towards the Tawke oil fields. Crude was once again flowing out from Iraq, and making Hazo think that it wasn’t only Ishtar who’d been a prostitute.
Back to the pictures, he flipped to an image that showed a warrior presenting the female’s disembodied head to an elder. He couldn’t recall anything about Ishtar being executed so cruelly. Too many inconsistencies. Though if this wasn’t Ishtar, then who could she be?
The fact that these images came from inside a cave raised even more questions. It was assumed that beneath every earthen mound in Iraq lay remnants of a civilization come and gone. To find such evidence tucked away beneath a mountain, however, seemed highly unusual. Ancient cults were known to practise secret rituals in caves, so maybe the cave was linked to those who worshipped Ishtar.
The chopper dipped and began its descent.
Ahead Hazo spotted Mount Maqloub jutting skywards along the fringe of the Nineveh plain. Only as the chopper closed in over the craggy sandstone mountain did the angular lines of the multi-storey Mar Mattai monastery seem to materialize from the cliff face. Its only architecturally significant features were an Arabian-style loggia running along its top level and an onion dome marking the main entrance. Nestled behind the modern facade, however, was one of the world’s oldest Christian chapels, founded in AD 363.
The Chaldean monks who resided within the monastery’s walls proclaimed to be direct descendants of the Babylonians. They were the earliest Arab Christian converts; the preservers of Aramaic, ‘Christ’s language’. Here they safeguarded the world’s most impressive collection of Syriac Christian manuscripts and ancient codices chronicling Mesopotamia’s lesser-known past.
None knew ancient Iraq better.
And like the Kurds, the Chaldeans had suffered their share of persecution in northern Iraq. The Chaldean community was still reeling from the execution of Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, who’d vehemently dissented against the proposed inclusion of Islamic law into the Iraqi constitution. On February 29, 2008, he’d been kidnapped at gunpoint by Islamic militants. The body turned up two weeks later in a shallow grave outside Mosul.
The pilot manoeuvred over the empty visitors’ parking lot and expertly set the Blackhawk down.