The Arab returned it. ‘It is very good to see you… Mike. We have waited a long time for this day. When you come to kill Saddam’ — a spitting sound, echoed by the others as they heard the hated dictator’s name — ‘we will fight beside you. But his soldiers, they have tanks, helicopters. These are no good.’ He held up his dented AK-47. ‘We need more.’
‘You’ll have more.’ Rosemont signalled to the two men in the Toyota. ‘Bring ’em their toys!’
‘You’ve got the intel?’ asked Cross as he got out.
‘Show of good faith. Come on.’
Cross was aggrieved by the change of plan, but he went with Arnold to the truck’s rear. Each took out a crate and crunched through dead reeds to bring it to the group. ‘This fire’ll be visible for miles,’ the Virginian complained. ‘Stupid making it out in the open, real stupid.’
Kerim bristled. Rosemont shot Cross an irritated look, but knew he was right. ‘You should put this out now we’re here,’ he told the Ma’dan leader. Kerim gave an order, and one of his men kicked dirt over the little pyre. ‘Why didn’t you set up in those ruins?’
The suggestion seemed to unsettle his contact. ‘That is… not a good place,’ said Kerim, glancing almost nervously towards the waterlogged structure. ‘If it had been up to us, we would not have chosen to meet you here.’
‘Why not?’ asked Arnold, setting down his case.
‘It is a place of death. Even before the water fell, all the marsh tribes stayed away from it. It is said that…’ He hesitated. ‘That the end of the world will begin there. Allah, praise be unto him, will send out His angels to burn the earth.’
‘You mean God,’ snapped Cross.
Kerim was momentarily confused. ‘Allah is God, yes. But it is a place we fear.’
With the fire extinguished, the ragged ruins were discernible in the moon’s pallid light. They were not large, the outer buildings and walls having crumbled, but it seemed to Rosemont that the squat central structure had remained mostly intact. How long had it been submerged? Centuries, millennia? There was something indefinably ancient about it.
Not that it mattered. His only concerns were of the present. ‘Well, here’s something that’ll make Saddam fear you,’ he said, switching on a flashlight and opening one of the crates.
Its contents produced sounds of awe and excitement from the Ma’dan. Rosemont lifted out an olive-drab tube. ‘This is an M72 LAW rocket — LAW stands for light anti-tank weapon. We’ll show you how to use them, but if you can fire a rifle, you can fire one of these. We’ve also brought a couple thousand rounds of AK ammunition.’
‘That is good. That is very good!’ Kerim beamed at the CIA agent, then translated for the other Ma’dan.
‘I guess they’re happy,’ said Arnold on seeing the enthusiastic response.
‘Guess so,’ Rosemont replied. ‘Okay, Kerim, we need your intel on Saddam’s local troops before—’
A cry of alarm made everyone whirl. The Marsh Arabs whipped up their rifles, scattering into the patches of dried-up reeds. ‘What’s going on?’ Cross demanded, raising his own gun.
‘Down, down!’ Kerim called. ‘The light, turn it off!’
Rosemont snapped off the torch and ducked. ‘What is it?’
‘Listen!’ He pointed across the lake. ‘A helicopter!’
The CIA operatives fell silent. Over the faint sigh of the wind, a new sound became audible: a deep percussive rumble. The chop of heavy-duty rotor blades.
Growing louder.
‘Dammit, it’s a Hind!’ said Arnold, recognising the distinctive thrum of a Soviet-made Mil Mi-24 gunship. ‘What the hell’s it doing here? We’re in the no-fly zone — why haven’t our guys shot it down?’
‘We first saw it two days ago,’ said Kerim. ‘It flies low, very low.’
‘So it gets lost in the ground clutter,’ said Arnold. ‘Clever.’
‘More like lucky,’ Cross corrected. ‘Our AWACS should still pick it up.’
‘We’ve got some new intel, then,’ Rosemont said with a wry smile. ‘They need to point their radar in this direction.’
Arnold tried to locate the approaching gunship. ‘Speaking of direction, is it comin’ in ours?’
‘Can’t tell. Get the NVGs from the truck… Shit!’ A horrible realisation hit Rosemont. ‘The truck, we’ve got to move it! If they see it—’
‘On it!’ cried Arnold, sprinting for the Toyota. ‘I’ll hide it in the ruins.’
‘They might still see its tracks,’ warned Cross.
‘We’ll have to chance it,’ Rosemont told him. ‘Kerim! Get your men into cover over there.’ He pointed towards the remains of the building.
The Ma’dan leader did not take well to being given orders. ‘No! We will not go into that place!’
‘Superstition might get you killed.’
‘The helicopter will not see us if we hide in the reeds,’ Kerim insisted.
‘Let them stay,’ said Cross dismissively. ‘We need to move.’
‘Agreed,’ said Rosemont, putting the LAW back into its case. The Toyota’s engine started, then sand kicked from its tyres as Arnold swung it towards the ruins. ‘Come on.’
Gear jolting on their equipment webbing, they ran after the 4x4, leaving the Marsh Arabs behind. It took almost half a minute over the uneven ground to reach cover, the outer edge of the ruins marked by the jagged base of a pillar sticking up from the sands like a broken tooth. By now, Arnold had stopped the Toyota beside the main structure, its wheels in the water. He jumped out. ‘Where’s the chopper?’
Rosemont looked over a wall. He couldn’t see the helicopter itself, but caught the flash of its navigation lights. A reflection told him that it was less than thirty feet above the water. A couple of seconds later, the lights flared again, revealing that while the Hind wasn’t heading straight at them, it would make landfall a couple of hundred metres beyond Kerim’s position.
‘If it’s got its nav lights on, they don’t know we’re here,’ said Cross. ‘They’d have gone dark if they were on an attack run.’
‘Yeah, but they gotta be using night vision to fly that low without a spotlight,’ Arnold warned. ‘They might still see us.’
The helicopter neared the shore, the roar of its engines getting louder. Tension rose amongst the three men. The Hind was travelling in a straight line; if it suddenly slowed or altered course, they would know they had been spotted.
The gunship’s thunder reached a crescendo…
And passed. It crossed the shore and continued across the barren plain, a gritty whirlwind rising in its wake.
Arnold blew out a relieved whistle. ‘God damn. That was close.’
Rosemont kept watching the retreating strobes. ‘Let’s give it a minute to make sure it’s gone — Cross, what the hell? Turn that light out!’
Cross was shining his flashlight over the ruined structure. ‘I want to see this.’
‘Yeah, and the guys in that chopper might see you!’
‘They won’t. Look, there’s a way in.’ A dark opening was revealed in the dirty stone; an arched entrance, still intact. Cross waded into the lake, the water rising up his shins as he approached the passage. ‘There’s something written above it.’ Characters carved into the stonework stood out in the beam from his flashlight.
‘What does it say?’ asked Arnold, moving to the water’s edge.
Rosemont reluctantly joined him. ‘I don’t know what language that is,’ he said, indicating a line of angular runes running across the top of the opening, ‘but the letters above it? I think they’re Hebrew. No idea what they say, though.’
‘We should find out.’ Cross aimed his light into the entrance, revealing a short tunnel beyond, then stepped deeper into the water.