Forty-Eight X Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  DEDICATION:

  To my wife, Margaret, who has given my tree of life roots (and she’s funny, a good cook, and a GPOA); and my children, Emma, Joshua, and Mischa, the branches of my life that continue to grow and give me joy (but who still haven’t cleaned out their rooms since moving out of the house)

  my father, for teaching me the value of a joke and a smile (and that sometimes you can take kibitzing to extremes) and my mother, who taught me to endure life’s struggles (and made me at once laugh and sigh at her own)

  Published 2009 by Medallion Press, Inc.

  The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO

  is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  Copyright © 2009 by Barry Pollack

  Cover design by Adam Mock

  Book design by James Tampa

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pollack, Barry, 1946-

  Forty-eight X: the Lemuria Project / Barry Pollack.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-934755-02-0

  1. Geneticists–Fiction. 2. Genetic engineering–Fiction. 3. Military bases, American–British Indian Ocean Territory–Diego Garcia–Fiction. 4. Diego Garcia (British Indian Ocean Territory)–Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.O5679F67 2009

  813’.6–dc22

  2009007476

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  Helen Rosberg, for her faith and enthusiasm in a new author; and the artistic efforts of many friends and associates whose own turbulent struggles buoyed my own.

  I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

  —Robert Oppenheimer,

  watching the first atom bomb test, July 16, 1945

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  There are staccato moments that are life changing, sometimes world changing—a single step taken, a yes, a no, a signature, a nod, the swift pull of a trigger. Lawrence McGraw’s life had been full of such moments. Now was to be another.

  His special troops were trained to complete their assignment in eight minutes. Not a minute more. Since beginning his mission, he’d focused on time. Success was a matter of discipline, training, and precision. All had been rehearsed—a hundred, no, a thousand times. Little Boy, the first atom bomb, took less than one minute from “Bombs away” on the Enola Gay to its detonation over Hiroshima. One minute to change the world. Link McGraw was going to do it in eight minutes, but it would be no less momentous.

  Colonel Lawrence “Link” McGraw crouched on a wooded hilltop, careful to remain unseen. Behind him, a purple hue still hung to the tops of the Hindu Kush Mountains as a setting sun buried itself. Below him, only a few flickering kerosene lamps still illuminated a dozen mud huts in a no-man’s-land village along the porous frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Smoke drifting from the chimney of one of the houses creased the black night sky. A few derelict vehicles lay scattered about, mechanical vegetation in a barren terrain. The night was dark, overcast, moonless. He had chosen it that way.

  McGraw wiped sweat from his brow, streaking his camouflage paint. Thirty-six years old, he still fit the image of the steely-eyed, ramrod-straight, invincible soldier the army liked to portray on its recruiting posters. His forehead and cheeks were high, his nose prominent with just a hint of an aquiline bump, and his face was tanned and leathery but creased only at the corners of his eyes, which made his green-eyed gaze seem ever so more piercing. He felt anxious but not fearful, though he knew the next few minutes would be the turning point of his life. Fail here and he would die or, perhaps worse, return to that cold ten-by-ten-foot cage at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he had been imprisoned for nearly a year. Succeed and he would be well on the road to regaining his most prized position, his honor. But there was far more at stake in these moments.

  “We’ve got a chance here to change the nature of war,” his commander, General Mack Shell, had admonished him. “To change the way men have fought for millennia; to put an end to our young men fighting and dying in war after war.”

  Although his troops had come to kill, they had no concept of sin. McGraw’s soldiers sat still, shoulder to shoulder in the dark confines of an M113 armored personnel carrier, gazing vacantly dead ahead. The hot, dank air felt like a steam cooker, but there was no grumbling, not a sound, except for their steady, almost synchronized breathing. McGraw unlocked the rear hatch of the M113, and they quickly, silently deployed, gathering ghostlike around him, their faces swallowed in the darkness, all but the eerie glow of their eyes. He flashed four fingers on one hand and then four fingers on both hands, four and eight. Forty-eight was the signaled command. They obeyed immediately, readying their specially designed weapons just as he had trained them over the past several months. Forty-eight also stood for the unique genetic code that identified the special nature of these extraordinary troops that he was sending into battle for the first time.

  An ancient stone culvert led from his position to the target, a kilometer away. One of his troops kicked at a plastic bag floating in the jetsam of the canal. Several rats scurried past, and the entire platoon gazed after them. Perhaps they just needed to be a little distracted, to feel a little calm before the storm. But McGraw still wondered if they were ready. Forty-eight, he signaled again, reclaiming their attention as they heard the faint snap of his fingers.

  McGraw swept his palm across the head of his platoon leader as a gesture of confidence and reassurance. Then he held up one finger for a moment. With that signal, their very breath seemed to stop. He then simply pointed and his troops were gone in an instant. McGraw followed for about a hundred meters to watch their progress but, like a bomb dropped, he knew he couldn’t recall them and couldn’t join them, so he returned.

  He illuminated his wristwatch and watched the second hand throb like his heartbeat. There was nothing left for him to do but sit and wait. He wasn’t the praying type. He didn’t believe in supernatural intervention, just training and more training,
the right intelligence, and the right weapons. Victory in war, he knew, did not come to gods; it came to flesh-and-blood soldiers.

  “The history of men at war is writ large with stories of heroes,” General Shell had said before sending him off, “stories of young men who fight and often die for noble, sometimes ignoble causes. Their actions sometimes elevate them to superhuman or biblical status. They become the legend of an overmatched David defeating a Goliath; a blind and bound Samson defeating the haughty Philistines. But remember, glory is fleeting and the ends of war for survivors are most often filled with nightmares, with trinkets of ribbons and medals, and uniforms that will soon no longer fit.” The general then paused fitfully. “Put an end to it, Link,” he said, pressing on McGraw the firmest of handshakes.

  That farewell speech reminded McGraw of his own heroes:

  Sidney Coulter, Eagle Scout, valedictorian, age nineteen, died in battle, Amsar, Afghanistan.

  Jaime Garza, Mexican immigrant, father of two, age twenty-four, died by RPG, Ramal.

  Richard Neilson, car salesman, poker player extraordinaire, age twenty, died by IED, Baghdad.

  There were plenty, too many more. Perhaps with this success, he thought, there would soon be no more.

  McGraw had made one adjustment on the eve of battle that he knew his general would have frowned upon. He had given each of his troops a shot of brandy. Not enough to get drunk, but enough to slightly dull the frontal cortex that controls executive functioning, that area of the brain that breeds doubt. A little alcohol, he believed, allowed one to think more simply, to dull the noises on the periphery. He took his own swig of the red from his canteen. He, too, needed to dull his doubts.

  The village he was attacking was a terrorist camp, and the men there were not novices and certainly not innocent. They were well-trained soldiers who had killed many times before. They not only professed that they were unafraid to die, but that they were eager to die for their cause.

  The guard on the observation tower at the edge of the village was vigilant, but he could never have imagined an enemy so furtive. Four razor-sharp blades sliced through the back of his neck like a guillotine, severing his spinal cord just below the second vertebrae. He heard his own body loudly thump to the floor and had only a split second to be astonished at the sight of his executioner before consciousness and then life left him. The guard’s death was one of the more humane that night. Others would die slower, more painful mutilations from a hundred blades. Mustafa, the commander of this camp, a man who had killed dozens of men with his own hand and hundreds more by sending out “martyrs” with bombs strapped to their chests, was the last to die. A dozen of his guards would die before his quarters were breached. He patiently awaited his enemy clutching a Makarov 9mm. When the American soldier leapt into his room, Mustafa put five shots into his torso. None missed. He heard them, the wet thud of bullets impacting flesh, one after the other. His attacker was not wearing body armor, yet he kept coming. The bullets had penetrated both lungs, and blood was pouring into and out of his chest. But even in the throes of death, McGraw’s soldier had more strength than the average man. “They have the strength of ten men,” McGraw had been told more than once, and he was often surprised to discover what feats their endurance and strength could accomplish.

  What kind of enemy is this? Mustafa thought in the moments before the blades sliced through him. His larynx was cut first so he couldn’t scream out the last words he thought, Allah! The children of Jews!

  McGraw heard only a little wailing, the brief rattle of gunfire, and then came the quiet. He eyed his watch again. The last few seconds of his timetable were clicking away. His heart filled, heavy like it was about to explode, and he bowed his head as if ready for the axe to fall. And then, after 480 seconds—eight minutes exactly—they all returned. Just as in practice, their timing was impeccable.

  Like all American soldiers, they were trained to return with their dead and wounded. No man, no one left behind. There was but one casualty. They laid the body at McGraw’s feet and eyed him. Their gaze was difficult to interpret. Did they want praise or consolation? It was not the time for either. McGraw simply pointed and his troops clambered aboard their truck as they had been trained to do. His job now was to withdraw quickly and quietly. Stealth was essential to his mission.

  Of all the primates, the human being is the only one that cries. In fact, only one other land animal cries—the elephant. On this field of battle, there were no elephants around to grieve, and the only tear shed was Link McGraw’s.

  War is the business of barbarians.

  —Napoleon

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Joshua Krantz was fishing, well trolling to be exact, several hundred yards offshore from the picturesque walled city of Akko, the Hebrew name for the port city of Acre. He wasn’t in search offish but of history. He watched the monitors on deck as a metal detector hovered over the seafloor looking for a signal from the past. Just weeks before, he’d retrieved a rusted clump of metal not far from this same spot. Chemically washed free of debris, it had revealed two carved lilies, the crest of Louis VII of France, who had come to Akko in 1148 to save Christendom and battle the Arab hordes.

  “L’at, l’at.” Slow, slow, he yelled, catching a glimpse of some promising shadow on the monitor.

  Krantz’s partner, Fala al-Shohada, who had been steering the forty-foot cabin cruiser slowly in ever-widening circles, surveying the seafloor, throttled back.

  “L’at, l’at. B’sedar.” Slow, slow, all right, he hollered again in a classic undulating Israeli accent and a booming voice. If he had been wearing the nineteenth-century garb of the shtetl, you could imagine him belting out “Tradition! Tradition!” But today, he was shirtless, wearing only a lime-green Speedo and a chain with a gold filigree mezuzah around his neck. If you asked him, he would say the mezuzah was more a fashion statement than a religious one. Krantz considered himself one of Israel’s majority, a secular Jew. It was not that he didn’t believe in God; he just accepted the existence of God as the answer to how so much order had been created out of nothing. Besides, he didn’t believe man was capable of understanding or describing God.

  “Religion is just a man-made answer to the unanswerable,” he often said. “And the Bible, well, that’s just a ‘good book,’ a gift of the Jewish people to the world on how to view God and live a moral life. But divine revelation—no.”

  But inside every mezuzah rested a tiny parchment scroll, written with the words of the shema, the paragraph in the Bible that begins “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is One.” For a mezuzah to be considered “kosher,” and not just jewelry, the words had to be written by a sofrim, a specially trained religious scribe. Krantz had paid extra to have his mezuzah “koshered.” Little contradictions acted out by many secular Jews sometimes spoke more about their faith than their words.

  Krantz kept his hair close cropped, a quarter-inch cut, like a marine’s. He would deny it, but Fala knew it was vanity. He was balding. Nevertheless, he was still a very handsome man. In his early fifties, with chiseled features and a well-toned and tanned physique, he looked ten years younger. Only the gray hair on his chest gave away his real age. His parents had been Czech Holocaust survivors who settled in an agricultural kibbutz in Northern Galilee. He was born there in October 1956, almost seventeen years to the day from the Yom Kippur War and the momentous events that would alter his life.

  His partner, in science and romance, was thirty-three-year-old Fala al-Shohada, an exotically dark and beautiful woman, once runner-up for Miss Egypt in a decade-old Miss Universe contest. She was almost as tall as Krantz, and wearing high heels she stood taller. At formal events, elegantly gowned, she never failed to turn heads. Today, she wore a flowered bikini and a baseball cap. It had a red P—for the Philadelphia Phillies—on the brim, a gift from a former professor at the University of Pennsylvania where she’d studied for her master’s degree in archaeology. That’s where she had met Joshua Kr
antz. Attracted to strong and intelligent men, he suited her perfectly. He was the man she had settled upon, and though they had some obstacles to overcome, she was comfortable that it would only be a matter of time before they would make their relationship a legal one.

  Colonel Joshua Krantz, now Dr. Krantz, had received his doctorate in archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania at the same time Fala had studied there. She was his teaching assistant then, and though she was nearly twenty years his junior, they soon became lovers. In geopolitical terms, the relationship seemed doomed. She was an Egyptian, a Muslim, and a nationalist, proud of her country’s ancient heritage and still on staff at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Krantz, on the other hand, was a sabra, a native-born Israeli and a former colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF. Though they had a chemistry that seemed likely to explode, they never did. They just gave off plenty of heat.

  Once a career officer, now a “scientist,” Krantz had first visited Egypt on October 15, 1973, as a seventeen-year-old during the Yom Kippur War. He followed a young major general named Ariel Sharon in Operation Stouthearted Men, the successful counterattack against the Egyptians. Israel was on the verge of defeat after the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attacks on the Yom Kippur holy day. One day Krantz was carrying a knapsack as a freshman history student at Tel Aviv University, and the next he was carrying an Uzi as part of Sharon’s small force assembled to bridge a gap between the Egyptian Second and Third Armies. They ferried across the Suez Canal in inflatable boats and created a bridgehead on the Egyptian side of the canal until Israel could bring in tanks and ground troops to surround and defeat the Egyptian army. Israel’s written history of the war noted that Joshua Krantz was a hero of the Chinese Farm, the irrigation project east of the canal and just north of the crossing point, where the bitterest fighting took place. In just a few weeks, Krantz went from being a fuzzy-cheeked college boy, to a sergeant in the IDF, to a captain and company commander of a hundred men, to a national hero.