Dust of Eden Read online

  DUST OF EDEN

  Author's Expanded Edition

  By Thomas Sullivan

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / Thomas Sullivan

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  From his first introduction by the Chicago Tribune as "…a John Barth or a John Irving, with a touch of William Gaddis and maybe a dash of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.," Thomas Sullivan has been eclectic. His over ninety publishing credits across the spectrum of fiction categories include short stories and novels translated into more than a dozen languages. The novels include BORN BURNING (optioned for a major Hollywood film), THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON (a Pulitzer Prize nominee), THE MARTYRING (a World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Novel), and DUST OF EDEN (a Borders national selection). Numerous short story honors are as diverse as inclusion in Best of Omni #2 to a Hemingway Literary Days Festival cash award to a Catholic Press Association award.

  His personal history is also broadly based. A former All-American athlete in two sports, he has lived in a dozen countries and been a gambler, a "Rube Goldberg" innovator, a coach, a teacher and a city commissioner. Currently he writes full-time in Minnesota and speaks internationally in venues as diverse as the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway, and American schools and universities. His inspirational monthly newsletter (Sullygram) is available free on request.

  Website: www.thomassullivanauthor.com

  Contact him at: [email protected]

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  Born Burning

  Dust of Eden

  Second Soul

  The Martyring

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  The Martyring

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  For Flamingo Frank

  Thanks to Karen Wydra, whose paintings are worth infinitely more than a thousand words and whose advice helped form mine, and to Molly Thiesse, Alyssa Stafne and Nathalie duRivage, who helped me construct Amber. Also, my gratitude to savvy Denny Solberg, Ginny Malikowski, my indispensable lad Sean Sullivan and the men of tomorrow: Chris Wilson, Richie Guillaume, Andrew Blair, Eric Barth and Spence Lewis.

  "For he who lives more lives than one

  More deaths than one must die."

  —Oscar Wilde

  THE SITE

  1960

  He saw them for the first time from the air, east of Baghdad, west of Basra. Like three dragonflies spread flat on the sand, they lay almost invisible in their dusky robes. Their symmetry was what caught his eye and made him aware of the faint ochre circle around which they were positioned like hours on a clock: four, eight, twelve. Facedown, they could have been worshipping. But worshipping what? The circle was about twenty meters across and utterly barren against the surrounding wasteland. No camel's thorn, no fists of vegetation. That was all he registered before the helicopter he was piloting beat off toward the marshes and Basra, where a tourist fare awaited him. But the three prone bodies went with him in his thoughts, connected to something he couldn't quite identify from his past. Or was it his future? A Ma'dan woman had told him he would soon recognize his destiny when he came upon it.

  At age fifty-three, he thought he knew who he was: a slightly dissolute soldier of fortune freed by the death of his second wife to battle middle-age crisis. After World War II, Clayton Kenyon had hunkered down into a scavenger's existence selling military surplus in the Mideast, but now he co-owned a tour copter, if you could call the retrofitted Sikorsky S-55 a tour copter. Most of the time he or Bailey, his partner, ferried equipment and crews to the oil fields in Kirkuk or scrounged for odd jobs and parts to keep the helicopter in the air.

  But if he had managed to keep the chopper aloft, Kenyon knew he was going down within himself. His dreams were bigger than his life would ever be. Failure, too, had exceeded the causes outside himself. It wasn't just the military coup of two years ago or the steady anti-Western diatribe over Radio Cairo that you heard in every village square; it was a feeling of failed personal destiny. Instead of freeing the warrior inside himself, each impulsive step here in Iraq had left him more desperate and lost. Like a gambler playing through a dwindling stash, his bets got bigger and wilder.

  The fare this day was staying at the Saint George Hotel overlooking the Shatt al Arab—a deepwater connector that drained the Euphrates and the Tigris into the Persian Gulf. Kenyon resented the rich tourists almost as much as the younger Arabs did. They came in gaggles, snapping pictures of "quaint" things, as if the struggling nation were a mere museum. But this tourist was different. He came alone. Pug and plain, a geologist, he said he was. Demetrius Booth. He wanted to see Basra and the Tigris from the air and visit the traditional site of the Garden of Eden at Al Quma.

  So they overflew the canals crowded with dhows and the round reed boats called gufas, and then to the Shatt al Arab where freighters and a British destroyer rode at anchor. Sinbad the sailor had sailed from here. Kenyon turned the control stick in his right hand, and they glided off to the north over groves of date palms and up the Tigris a little ways to put down at Al Quma and the Garden of Eden.

  Here Demetrius Booth seemed duly reverent. Kenyon didn't tell him that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that stood behind a palisade had fallen down a couple years ago, or that local enterprise had replanted it. He simply smoked and glanced at his watch as the little Greek took rapid notes on a yellow pad. But when they were back in the air, Kenyon had a sudden impulse.

  "Want to see another site?" he shouted above the roar and vibration.

  "Eh? What is it?"

  "Don't know. Funny-looking terrain just the other side of the marshes."

  The red circle, he was thinking. Prostrated worshippers. Maybe it was valuable. Some mineral fluke with strange properties there in the desert. A geologist might know. Whatever Demetrius Booth replied beneath the din, Clay Kenyon was already banking off toward the west.

  Below them passed the marshes of the Ma'dan, gerrymandered with waterways and floating villages of reed huts all facing southwest toward Mecca and long canoes and water buffalo and—once—a wild boar. Each village had a mudhif, or tunnel-like guest hall, built entirely of twenty-foot-long reeds bundled into vaulted ribs as thick as elephant legs.

  Beyond that was the barren emptiness of haze and dust where nothing moved save one last dog who seemed to pantomime barking against the roar of the rotor. They flew northwest until Kenyon knew he had missed the odd red circle with its trio of votaries. He turned back, banking, zigzagging. Three times he traversed the zone. He glanced at his watch again. He had been doing that a lot lately, as if time were running out. Where was it? Usually he flew to the south, carrying tourists to Babylon or Ur near the Euphrates. "You will come upon your destiny like a falcon diving on its prey," the Ma
'dan woman had told him when he was sharing sweet black tea with Dakhil, who occasionally worked for him.

  And so he did.

  Again.

  It was there soon into the fourth pass, a nearly perfect crater of red against gray sand. And there were the three prone figures, nearly invisible in their gray robes. They couldn't have been lying there all this time, he thought. Not unless they were dead, and if they had somehow all died together with such symmetry, then where were the carrion eaters who would have torn their garments and picked their bones? No, the men had fallen on their faces at the chopper's approach. Like desert chameleons, this was their camouflage. Pushing the stick in his left hand, Kenyon dove down and hovered, the rotor changing pitch as it drooped like a shallow parasol. Against the teeth-rattling percussion he merely nodded toward the site for the benefit of Demetrius Booth.

  The geologist leaned forward, causing the cabin to dip slightly. Fluidly, Kenyon nosed the craft forward to dissipate the nod; there were days when he steered just by shifting his body weight. When their wash lapped at the crater, Kenyon brought them up slightly. He didn't want to disturb the site, even though he disliked flying at an in-between altitude. If you lost power under thirty feet, "ground cushion" would mitigate a crash. And if you lost it above three hundred feet, the windmill effect on the rotor from that height could build and act like a parachute. "Autorotation," they called it. Helicopters went down more than planes, but they had fewer fatalities because of these soft crashes and because wreckage tended to spin away from the occupants. But not in between thirty and three hundred feet. That was the death zone.

  Suddenly the dragonfly on the near side of the crater lifted smoothly from the sand and in one clean motion brought a rifle—a Kalashnikov—into line with them. The sound was lost in the hammering beat of the Sikorsky, but the muzzle flashes were vivid and succinct. And by the time the other two figures on the ground had sprung up, each with his own Kalashnikov, they heard the pings off the rotor and felt the lurch. The chopper yawed violently and began to spin.

  Instinctively Kenyon's palms and fingers melded with the two controls. His left hand twisted the grip, feeding fuel while he moved that stick to change the pitch of the blades. Simultaneously he used the right control so that the rotor swept them forward. The copter righted itself. But the ground fire was murderously close. If he banked away, he would make a broader target. Without hesitation, Kenyon turned head-on and dove for the figures on the ground.

  It was a game of chicken. For the figures on the ground the terms were stand and fire versus fall and be saved. But all three stood, apparently willing to die if only they could bring down the chopper. Their gray robes billowed in the wash and the blinding swirls of sand, and still they fired. In the sudden maelstrom it would certainly have taken luck to hit anything. Add to that disorientation the deafening resonance and tattooing of mechanical things. But as low as the Sikorsky swept and as near to the target as the blinded shooters were, no heads rolled and nothing penetrated the skin of the craft. The assailants turned to follow the sound, still firing wildly and perhaps in danger of hitting each other.

  Kenyon glanced across at his passenger and was struck by the grim stoicism on the geologist's pug features. Tough little man. Where had he fought before? They flew straight north, looking back at the curious spot of red already fading to orange and at the figures blending with the sand. The smell of gas was in the cabin, but the gauge was holding steady. Banking in a wide circle, Kenyon headed back toward Basra.

  Despite relief, it nagged at Kenyon’s logic that the ground fire had been so inept. The only hits were those "pings" that had come at maximum distance after the firing began. Why hadn't their accuracy improved just before the ground wash enveloped them? He had flown at them to make them duck, but failing that, they couldn't have missed. Unless they wanted to. Was it because they didn't want him to crash in the red crater? He had a feeling that bringing a helicopter down in the desert would not have been a problem for them—that more of them would have come to remove anything that compromised the site. These were not worshippers—at least not just worshippers—they must have been guards. They would have hauled off the wreckage like ants carrying away leaves, like carrion eaters picking bones. And yet they wouldn't risk having him crash in the red crater. What could be so valuable there? And who the hell were the defenders?

  Servants of the Circle, Red Sentries, Keepers of Silence, Defenders of the Cradle of Dust—these were some of the names Kenyon had never heard of that trailed back fifty centuries into the dawn of social order. Dozens of sects back through Mesopotamia and Babylon had sustained the watch. Some had done so out of fear, some out of love, others merely because of tradition, some simply because of the magnitude of a sacred trust. All had felt awe.

  In the time of the Ottoman Empire there had been outposts in a ring around the crater, and so far removed from it that only a camel could cross from an outpost to the site in a day. But the ring itself had drawn attention, and eventually a traitor and a massacre had caused the strategy to be changed. Now only a trio of servitors stood guard. Three members at a time out of the fifteen permanent initiates. They came on foot at night across the moon-haunted desert, so that no horse droppings marked the way. The first seven of the nineteen kilometers were trekked through a brook; the last twelve along various routes in the shadows of sarsens or where the wind would sweep away traces. They stayed at the red crater for twenty-four hours, until the next sentries arrived. No outsider knew of the site. No outsider could know. The fifteen faithful were celibate, and they would turn ruthlessly on each other if any weakening was suspected.

  They were supported by the elders at the ruins known as Tel el Muhunnad, but only two patriarchs of that small, impenetrable sect actually understood exactly what it was they were guarding. The power in the crater was enormous, staggering, and yet it was a mere residue, beyond the province of man to harness and blasphemous to try. Not gold, not silver, nor precious stones. There was nothing of value here in the commerce of civilization. Nothing at all . . . except red dust.

  "You will come upon your destiny like a falcon diving on its prey."

  So Kenyon had. A robust, manly destiny befitting the hunter in him. The tangible goal of riches; the intangible one of revenge against those who had shot at him. But it wasn't just anger or even greed that drew him back. He needed something to pull his life together and stop the slide. It came out less philosophically when he made his pitch.

  "There's something extremely valuable at that site," he told each of the five men he recruited. "Something they don't want to move."

  This played well in the impoverished harshness of the marshlands for the man named Dakhil. The superstitious Ma'di had always believed in the Hujaidk, a magical island guarded by spirits who could make it invisible and drive visitors mad, and thus the island of red sand and its nearly invisible guardians struck a chord of religious destiny in the breast of stalwart Dakhil.

  And Saladin, the Kurd who ran routes with Kenyon from Mosul to Kirkuk, also found it attractive. His Yazidi sect believed in the ultimate power of God but deferred in the short term to Shaitan—the fallen angel Satan—who after all was in control of the present earth. You could take God's goodness for granted, Saladin had once explained, but Malak Ta'us (the Peacock Angel, symbol of Satan) was unpredictable and required appeasement. If the guardians of this red crater were holding the earth hostage, then maybe there was justice in destroying them. Saladin reasoned this with mounting fervor, but it was Kenyon's speculation about something valuable that made his eyes glint.

  Sadam Salah, from Baghdad's famed River Street row of silversmiths, needed no spiritual justification. Apprenticed to his uncle and feeling trapped in a family craft that smothered his young ambitions, he had always responded favorably to Kenyon's propositions. Either money or adventure alone would have persuaded him. The prospect of both was extravagant.

  A Ma'di from the south, a Kurd from the north, a Shiite Muslim from Baghdad
. Truly strange bedfellows. Kenyon had never worked with all of them together before, nor had his partner, Bailey Burke, a veteran pilot who had flown Shawnees and Chickasaws for the Air Force.

  Bailey had reservations. "These guys know who the enemy is?" he grumbled. That was unusual for Bailey, who never seemed to worry about anything. If Kenyon was forever glancing at his watch, Bailey didn't wear one.

  And then there was Demetrius Booth—always a surprise. The Greek geologist kept everyone at arm's length with his bad breath and Coke-bottle lenses, but he had responded to Kenyon's request that he help them assay what might be there in the red crater by insisting that he wanted to go along for the kill. It provoked an argument between the two partners that was settled only when Demetrius offered to pay for the Kalashnikovs that Saladin was to obtain.

  "Do you know how to use an automatic rifle?" Bailey demanded of Booth.

  "With my eyesight, anything that keeps pumping out bullets is the weapon of choice," the Greek said, and if that wasn't a satisfying answer, the wad of dinars he pulled out of his pocket was.

  It took six days to put it together—the repairs to the rotor, the travel, the bringing of arms through border passes in extreme southeast Turkey near Semdini. Six days. Long enough to create a universe. And though God may have rested the next day, on their seventh morning the little sortie group went in under an ancient sky without a clue as to what they were disturbing.

  As an attack, there was no real element of surprise. The strategy was six against three. Kenyon made a low circle, keeping almost half a mile from ground zero, dropping off Dakhil, Booth, Salah and Burke ninety degrees apart from each other. Then, with the four on the ground closing in and drawing fire, he attacked from the air, roaring nose-on toward the red crater while Saladin hung out of the retrofitted port on the Sikorsky, firing his Kalashnikov.