Dedication
In loving memory of Little Sonia
Epigraph
Bestiary: Books that had a great vogue between the
eleventh and the fourteenth centuries describing the
supposed habits and peculiarities of animals both
real and fabled, with much legendary lore and moral
symbolism. They ultimately derived from the Greek
Physiologus, compiled by an unknown author before
the middle of the second century.
PROLOGUE
Sand. There was sand in his boots, sand in his clothes, Sand in his armpits, sand in his hair. At night, there was sand in his dreams. Greer swore that if he ever got out of Iraq alive, he was never going to see sand again.
If things went right today, he might get his wish.
Sadowski poked his head under the flap of the tent. “Hasan’s in the Humvee, Captain,” he said. “Cuffed.”
Greer nodded, and finished lacing up his boot. There was sand in his sock, but what would be the point of trying to get rid of it? He’d take off the boot, shake it out thoroughly, then put it back on — and find even more sand inside it than before.
“Load up,” he told Sadowski, glancing at his watch. “We don’t want to lose the light.”
Outside, the sun was beating down so hard it made the ground, if you looked long enough, seem to undulate. Greer adjusted his shades, pulled the brim of his cap down, and walked toward the Humvee, parked in the narrow slice of shade provided by a water-cistern truck.
It was a desert-camo model, tricked out as a communications “rat rig,” with windows tinted almost black, and hillbilly body armor — anything they could scrounge from the salvage depot — covering it from grille to bumper. Greer got into the passenger side of the front seat, without looking back. He knew who was there.
Lopez, cradling his trusty SAW — short for squad automatic weapon. Donlan, with a map, a laptop, and a GPS hookup. And Hasan, right behind him, in plastic cuffs, clutching his pocket-sized Koran.
Sadowski, in the driver’s seat, said, “Captain?”
In reply, Greer simply lifted his chin toward the windshield, a sliver of bulletproof Plexiglas, and the Humvee, its air conditioner roaring, rumbled out of the camp and onto the road past Mosul.
This stretch of road had been officially declared mine-free and under coalition control for three weeks now. But that hadn’t kept a jeep from being blown sky-high by an RPG last Thursday, or mortar fire from leaving fresh pot-holes in what barely passed for a highway to begin with.
No more sand, Greer thought. Ever. Not even on a beach.
“Excuse me? Mr. Greer?” Hasan asked, leaning so far forward that Greer could feel his hot breath on the back of his neck. “Shouldn’t we be having more soldiers, more guns, with us?”
Greer just smiled. What was this guy smoking? Was he under the impression that this was some kind of authorized mission, instead of what it was — a nicely subsidized treasure hunt?
“We’ve got everything we need,” Greer said. “You do what you’re supposed to do, and you’ll be back in time for your next interrogation.”
The soldiers laughed; Hasan didn’t.
For another hour they drove along what had come to be known as the Saddam Expressway, passing not much but bombed-out abandoned villages and the charred hulks of military transports, taxis, and once, improbably enough, a bright yellow school bus. How the hell, Greer had to wonder, did that get here? Lopez, cradling his SAW, zoned out with his eyes closed, while Donlan kept track of their progress.
“We should be approaching the palace,” Donlan finally announced, studying his laptop in the backseat.
“Well, Hasan,” Greer asked. “Anything look familiar?”
Hasan pressed his face to the dark glass and peered out. He’d grown up in this area, he’d owned the best grocery, he’d had a wife and two daughters. Now he had his life — and not much more. “Yes,” he said. “You will come to a… a place in the road that goes two ways.”
“A fork,” Lopez said, from all the way in back.
“Okay, a fork,” Hasan said. He hated them all so much that he was afraid they could hear it in his words, however innocent they might be. “You will turn to the right side. And go ahead for maybe three miles.”
“That road going to be cleared for mines?” Sadowski asked.
Hasan had no idea. None of this was his idea.
And no one else answered, either.
“And then what should we expect?” Greer asked.
“You will see the walls — high walls, maybe ten feet high. And great iron gates.”
“If they haven’t been stolen,” Sadowski said with a knowing smirk.
“They will not have been stolen,” Hasan said with certainty. “People here are too afraid.”
“Of Saddam?” Lopez piped in. “We’ve got him, or haven’t they heard?”
“Not Saddam. They are afraid of the al-Kallis.”
“What’s so scary about these al-Kallis?” Lopez asked.
What could Hasan say to that? How could he explain to these ignorant men, these barbarians, who the al-Kallis were? But he had to tell them. He had to do something to put them on their guard — as they would have to be — or it could cost him his own life, too. “The al-Kallis are the oldest family in Iraq — and the most powerful. This was once their palace. Saddam took it.”
“I guess he took pretty much everything,” Greer observed.
“The al-Kallis will be back. They have been here for over a thousand years.” He glanced down at his hands, where the cuffs were digging into his wrists. “They have been here perhaps forever.”
Sadowski and Greer exchanged a smile. It was just this kind of mumbo-jumbo that made these people such easy pickin’s.
“So what?” Greer asked. “So they’ve been around awhile.”
“There are stories,” Hasan said, knowing full well that they were mocking him. He tried to turn his hands to increase the circulation. “The al-Kallis have… powers. Strange things happen there. You have to be very careful.”
“Who you gonna call?” Lopez sang out, shaking his weapon. “GhostBUSTERS!” The soldiers laughed, though Hasan had no idea why. It crossed his mind, for an instant, that if he could just find a way to kill them all himself — and he wouldn’t hesitate — he could commandeer the car and escape.
But to where?
The Humvee rumbled on, over a road covered with so much windblown sand that at times it was impossible to see. Sadowski leaned toward the windshield and stared through the glare. He couldn’t get the question of land mines out of his head; two of his pals from the 3rd Infantry Division had been in a nineteen-ton Stryker armored combat vehicle that had been hit by a roadside bomb just the week before, and each had left a leg behind.
Far ahead, unless he was imagining it, he thought he saw some whitewashed walls rising like a mirage out of the desert sands. If these were the walls Hasan had been talking about, his estimate was way too low — these walls were more like fifteen or twenty feet high, if he could judge from this distance. And they went on for what looked like a quarter of a mile, on one side alone. Sadowski had already “liberated” two of Saddam’s palaces — they hadn’t really seemed all that much more spectacular than the houses he saw on MTV’s Cribs, and nothing like what he thought of when he heard the word “palace”—but this place looked like something else.
“Should be dead ahead, about a half mile due west,” Donlan reported.