Forty-Eight X (10 page)

Suleiman had arranged to meet the general at the Baltit Fort, the home of the ancient Mirs, or kings of Hunza. Until the twentieth century and the coming of the modern nation of Pakistan, the people of this land located astride the Silk Road had maintained their autonomy for six hundred years. Ancient Hunzakuts kept a sword, a shield, and a loaf of bread with them at all times; and upon hearing the drumbeat warning of approaching invaders, they would run to the fort to defend their kingdom. Until the British conquered India and Pakistan in the late nineteenth century, Hunza had been free.

Set atop a peak in the Himalayas, the Baltit Fort had limited tourist hours and little tourist traffic in any case. In the late afternoon, it would be a private and very out-of-the-way place to meet. The Pakistani general was already waiting when Joshua, Fala, and Suleiman arrived. He offered no greeting, no word. He simply ushered them into a room where a canvas bag sat on a solitary table and closed the door. He knew no one would steal this treasure. The room had a single door and one window that opened to a spectacular view of the steep gorge below.

Inside the bag was the weapon that Israeli intelligence had photographed—Alexander the Great’s battle scythe. It was basically a leather glove mounted with four ten-inch razor-sharp scythes, curved finger knives, not unlike the weapon Freddy Krueger used in horror movies. It was still stained with blood.

“This is no ancient weapon,” Fala commented almost immediately. “But it’s a good copy. Other than new leather and stainless steel instead of iron, it’s an exact replica.” She tried to put on the glove. It didn’t fit. “A little small,” she muttered curiously. “Even for me.”

“It’s a perfect size,” Joshua remarked. “Appropriate for the era. Soldiers in Alexander’s army were less than five feet tall. Men have grown in stature nearly a foot in two thousand years. This weapon would have fit the hand of a soldier in Alexander’s army.”

“But we know it’s a modern weapon. Used just a few weeks ago.”

Krantz played with the weapon for a moment and pondered the dilemma.

“Well, who are soldiers nowadays?” he asked rhetorically and continued with what seemed like the obvious conclusion. “Children. Child soldiers are plentiful in lots of war zones. They wield machine guns and machetes. Why not a battle scythe?”

“Yes, but those places have been mostly in Africa, not the Middle East.”

“Oh?” Krantz responded, somewhat condescendingly to his Egyptian and Muslim lover. “Islamic extremists don’t recruit children for their dirty work?”

“The people killed were Al-Queda,” Fala reiterated.

“They were Shiites. This could be sectarian war.”

Someone knocked on the door. It was Suleiman. He motioned for them to put the weapon back in the sack. Then he picked it up and returned it to the general, who abruptly left. Nothing was exchanged. Nothing was said. But the Pakistani general was now in the lifetime employ of Mossad.

“I have bought you one more gift,” Suleiman said. “I have brought you here because there is a clinic in the village below, and there we will meet the only survivor of the massacre at Takhar.”

There was a small clinic in the town with broken-tiled, almost dirt floors, a dozen beds, one doctor, and a few nurses. Unlike the antiseptic odors of most medical facilities, this one reeked of urine and feces. The doctor had little to offer, some basic antibiotics, bandages, and most importantly, the gift of pain relief: intravenous narcotics, in the form of the local homegrown heroin. If you survived the place, you likely left addicted. In a corner bed there was a man, or they assumed he was a man, wrapped like a mummy, head to toe, in bloodied bandages. His body had been serrated, from the top of his head to his feet. Krantz immediately had doubts about his theory. Could a child soldier wielding a battle scythe have done this? The man had been blinded. His lips, tongue, and mouth were shredded. He was fed through a feeding tube in his abdomen and was in great pain, even with the heavy doses of narcotics they were giving him.

“Can he describe who attacked them?” Krantz asked.

Suleiman leaned over and whispered the question into the hole where the man’s ear had been. The man did not move. He did not speak.

“Maybe he speaks Arabic?” Fala asked Suleiman.

“They speak Farsi here in Northern Pakistan. Arabic and Urdu are not native languages.”

“Maybe he’s not a native,” Krantz added. “A lot of foreigners must train in terrorist camps here.”

Suleiman tried the question in Arabic, then Urdu, even English. No response.

“You know,” Krantz suggested, “when you can’t hear by air conduction, when your ears are blocked, or, if you have no ears, you can still hear by bone conduction.”

He looked about the room and found a plastic cup. Taking a penknife from his pocket, he cut out the bottom of the cup, and handed the creation to his Pakistani guide.

Suleiman put the cup to the patient’s skull and repeated the question in Farsi. Still no response.

“Tell him,” Krantz said, “that we will take care of his family.”

Speaking into the “amplifying” cup, Suleiman made the offer. A moment later the survivor spoke a single muffled word, “Maimun.” He repeated it, but they didn’t understand. With a single bloodied finger, the dying man wrote the word on his sheet:
MAIMUN
.

Back in their Islamabad hotel room, Fala and Joshua showered for a long time to wash away the dirt of the road and the horror of what they’d seen. They were staying at the Islamabad Serena Hotel. Surrounded by exotic gardens and a serene lake, the hotel was the most luxurious and most secure in the country because it hosted officials from governments around the world. Sitting outside on their balcony, they cuddled together, naked, on a cushioned chaise lounge, cradled in privacy by stone walls and a latticework of bougainvillea. It was a dark, moonless night with the murmur of distant traffic and the scent of warm jasmine breezes. There were no neighboring high-rises with curious eyes. Only the stars peered down upon them as they caressed each other. Neither had yet discussed the one-word clue they were left with and where it would lead them.

“Maimun,” Fala was first to speak and break their idyll. “That is my sister’s name.”

Krantz sat up in some surprise.

“It’s a popular girl’s name among Muslims because it also means ‘auspicious and good luck.’”

“Not such good luck for our Taliban in Shangri-la,” Krantz added. “And I doubt your sister has anything to do with this?”

“Maimun?
It is also the root of the word for ‘right hand.’”

Krantz took his right hand and gently cupped her breast.

“Right hand,” he said. And after cupping her left breast with his left hand, “Left hand.” He circled her nipples with his index finger until they stood erect.

Fala pulled his hands away and sat up abruptly. “Stop! I’m making a point. I think I know what
Maimun
means.”

“What’s that?” Krantz asked loudly, quieting his libido.

This was exactly Fala al-Shohada’s field of expertise—the military history and archaeology of the Islamic world.

“In the eleventh century,” she began to explain, “the elite troops of Salah al-Din were called the ‘Maimun al-Allah’—the ‘Right Hand of God.’”

“Don’t tell me they butchered the crusaders using Alexander’s battle scythe.”

“No. The Maimun did not butcher the crusaders. That’s another distortion of history. The early Muslims were not butchers. When the Christian crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they were the ones who butchered virtually everyone there and boasted that the city was knee-high in blood. But when Salah al-Din retook the city a hundred years later, he told his Maimun al-Allah to spare those who surrendered and give them safe passage home. The knights of the crusades became famous for their chivalry, but it was the Maimun, not the early crusaders, who were chivalrous warriors. Chivalry, you see, was a custom that the crusaders adopted from their Muslim foes.”

How could a woman so beautiful be so brilliant? Krantz thought. And how could it be that a poor Jewish boy bred in
kibbutz
in the Galilee could have her?

“And so all we need to do now,” Krantz said, as he rolled atop her, “is find out who the new Right Hand of God is.”

And then he snaked his right hand along her inner thigh until it was finally inside her. She sighed as he massaged her and whispered wetly into her ear, “This is the right hand of God.” And then just as quickly, she rolled atop him. He was already erect and she took control, taking his member in hand and putting it inside her. Their lovemaking was fierce, almost vicious—just as you would imagine it would be between Arab and Jew, both relishing the battle, both exhausted from the feat.

S
ecrets are difficult to keep. If a fool knows a secret, he tells it. But even a wise man may tell—for love, for vanity, for money. Professor Julius Wagner had a secret he feared to tell and feared he would tell. Who could guarantee that in the banter of cocktail parties and salons, among the intelligencia and nouveau riche of Palo Alto, Atherton, and Menlo Park, that the mix of bravado and wine wouldn’t loose the secret that would change the method of war forever and, like the A-bomb, the balance of power for generations? Also, the time he was spending away from his offices at Stanford was creating a buzz in the university community and the scientific world. What was this Nobel Laureate now pondering? It was as if Einstein had disappeared from Princeton for weeks at a time without a hint of his activies. What rumors would abound?

It was on his last visit to the high-tech military research facility, obstensibly built just for him halfway around the world, that he agreed to return and stay for the “duration.”

General Shell didn’t believe in creating from scratch a plan that had already been proven. He read about and adapted all the security and scientific essentials that had been the hallmark of the development of the first A-bomb during World War II. That effort was code-named the Manhattan Project, with research being performed at “Site Y,” a secret center built in the hills of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Shell gave his new top-secret project a code name as well. He called it the “Lemuria Project,” with research conducted at another secret site he called “BIOT.” Besides the scientists directly involved in the project, and the military who would secure it and help carry out his vision, no one was privy to the Lemuria Project except the highest officials of the government and military. Just as former General Leslie Groves had set up the resources for the Manhattan Project, General Maximillian Shell had set up the infrastructure for Lemuria. And just as Robert Oppenheimer was the guiding force in bringing the scientists and resources together for the A-bomb project in Los Alamos, Dr. Wagner was the guiding force bringing talent together at BIOT.

The central facility for conducting this experimental work had to be in a secret and isolated area. There had to be a large pool of researchers who could conduct research according to standard scientific protocols with enough freedom of expression to allow for a vigorous exchange of ideas. Dr. Wagner accepted General Shell’s recommendation that the research be conducted at the British-U.S. military base on the Island of Diego Garcia. It already had sufficient infrastructure and was already one of the most secure and secret sites in the world, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Wagner had originally preferred being closer to home and suggested that research could take place at the military’s secret base in a remote area of the Nevada desert. But this base, Area 51, also sometimes called Dreamland, The Farm, The Box, Groom Lake, and Paradise Ranch, was never perfectly free of the prying eyes of the curious who would trek through the desert or overfly the site to try to catch a glimpse of the latest military aircraft or the aliens that some believed were kept there. In the twenty-first century, how could he keep his collection of young researchers imprisoned at such a site without their clamoring for visits to the nearby oasis, Las Vegas? No, Diego Garcia was the perfect site. The most difficult part of the project was convincing top scientists to join his team. In uprooting individuals and sometimes whole families to a remote area with no options for escape, Lemuria, for some, would seem like a scientific Devil’s Island. But Julius Wagner had impressive scientific credentials and great persuasive powers. Just as Oppenheimer had collected the greatest physicists of his time at Los Alamos—Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, and many more—so, too, did Julius Wagner collect his superstars from major universities across the country, from the Universities of California, Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, and every ivory tower that had biotech research projects on genetics, gene manipulation, embyrology, stem cells, neurophysiology, and neuropsychology. He had collected the most remarkable contingent of scientific talent on the remotest outpost in the world since the stars of the Manhattan Project resided in the middle of the New Mexico desert.