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  The general nodded to his adjutant, who handed him an envelope. He opened it and pushed a photograph toward Krantz. It was a poor quality photo, clearly something taken surreptiously in the field, possibly at great risk to the photographer. It was a photo of an unusual weapon—a small leather glove with leather laces at the wrist and, for fingers, four sharpened and curved finger scythes. Krantz perused the photo carefully. He had never seen the complete weapon before, only rusted remnants of the hammered iron finger scythes and hypothetical sketches of what it must have looked like intact. It was a remarkable find and apparently in perfect condition.

  “You recognize this?” the general asked, clearly anxious for the answer.

  “Yes. It’s a hand scythe, a weapon believed to be used in the third century BC.”

  “BC? Before the Second Temple was destroyed?”

  Joshua Krantz smiled. “A few hundred years before.” He passed the photo to Fala, who also seemed excited to see the weapon.

  “You found this in Israel?” she asked.

  The general said nothing.

  “This was a weapon of Iskander,” she commented to Krantz, who nodded affirmatively.

  “And who is Iskander?” General Echod asked.

  “Iskander,” Krantz explained, “is what the Arabs called Alexander—Alexander the Great. He inherited the kingdom of Macedonia when he was twenty years old,” Krantz went on, giving the general a little history lesson. “With his talent for military tactics and strategy, he nearly conquered the known world in his time. But he was schooled in the arts of war by a master, a Greek teacher… a name you’ll recognize—Aristotle. And legend has it that Aristotle designed many of the weapons Alexander used in his battles. This ‘hand scythe’ was one of them.”

  “How was it used?” the general asked.

  “We can only guess.”

  Fala unhesitantly added her opinion. “Alexander developed the phalanx, a box formation of soldiers—a formidable military innovation at the time. The men in front carried heavy eighteen-foot spears. When they held them vertically, the wall of spears hid what was happening in the rear of the formation. When they held them forward, enemy soldiers could be killed well before they reached the body of the formation. But the spears were too heavy for the frontline soldiers to hold any other weapon. If the spear broke or was dropped, well, those soldiers were defenseless.”

  “Except for this,” Krantz added, tapping on the photograph. “They could still fight with this hand weapon, slashing it with great effect into the bodies of their enemies.”

  The general sighed. He had some answers, but he had a lot more questions.

  “I need to know more about this weapon, about how it was and can be used. Will you take the job?”

  Krantz was still unsure he wanted to be in bed with Aman. He turned to Fala to tip his scales.

  “It’s not the Dead Sea Scrolls,” she volunteered her opinion. “But, for a military historian and archaeologist, the battle scythe of Iskander comes close.”

  “I’ll take the job,” Krantz announced abruptly, and quickly got down to business. “Is the site secured? Because I would want to get right to this dig.”

  The general was now the quiet one.

  “Is it in Israeli territory?” Krantz asked.

  Still no answer.

  “Occupied territories?” Fala asked.

  Danny Echod bristled a bit. Palestinians and Arabs referred to any territory that Jews had settled as “occupied territories.” He wondered what her meaning was. But he had already had this woman thoroughly screened. Of course she was an Arab and a Muslim but so were many loyal Israeli citizens. But, most importantly, he knew she was not a zealot and that satisfied him.

  Almost as soon as she said it—“occupied territories”—Fala knew she had misspoke. Especially here. Surprisingly, the general patted the top of her hand reassuringly. Both she and Krantz noticed then, for the first time, that General Echod was missing two fingers on each hand. While it was just surprising to Fala, it jogged Krantz’s memory.

  Danny Echod—this was the man who had been captured by Hezbollah, tortured and mutilated. He was famous, not for that fact, but because he had escaped. Although the Israelis always balked at making prisoner exchanges with Arab terrorist organizations, they’d made several such trades. It was always an uneven one—hundreds of living Arab prisoners for one or two dead Israeli soldiers. The enemy had never returned an Israeli soldier alive. In fact, the only one who had ever returned alive from Hezbollah captivity was Danny Echod, and only because of a miraculous escape.

  General Echod then passed several other photographs to his archaeologists. These were photos of a bloody massacre with dozens of men lying sprawled about what appeared to be a poor village. Their clothing looked Indian or Pakistani. Scattered on the ground were Kalishnakov rifles and curved swords. In the background there was a target range, with dummies dressed as American soldiers, some draped with images of the American president. This was clearly a terrorist camp.

  “This weapon and the dead were all found in Peshawar Province, northwestern Pakistan,” the general explained. “It appears to be a modern weapon.”

  “No, it’s not.” Krantz shook his head. “That’s absurd.”

  “Do you have it?” Fala asked.

  “The Pakistanis have it.”

  “It’s ridiculous. Who would remake an antique weapon?” Krantz argued. “People fight with automatic weapons nowadays for godssake.”

  “No one here was killed by a gun. The wounds, the deaths, are all consistent with your Alexander weapon.”

  “Who do you suspect, then?” Krantz pressed the general. “The Americans?”

  “No,” Danny Echod was quick to respond. “I don’t think this is their doing. As you say, they use automatic weapons. They use smart bombs. The Taliban, they’re more primitive and brutal. We think this may be Taliban. But we don’t know.”

  “Why would they kill their own?” Krantz asked, shaking his head doubtfully.

  “Well,” Fala ruminated, “Alexander was there. In Afghanistan.

  He got as far as the borders of India. Maybe the Taliban found an archaeological site and—”

  The general interrupted. “I want to know more about this business, about who can fight with such stealth and decisiveness. You and Miss al-Shohada, find me this modern Iksander.” He rose to leave. His business with them was done. “I am very pleased you have chosen to be with us, Colonel.”

  Krantz sneered. The general had called him “Colonel” again. Clearly, he was meant to serve in the army, with a chain of command.

  The general’s aide whispered into his ear.

  “Ah,” the general nodded. “Yes. Five thousand shekels a day for the services of you… both.”

  “Six,” Fala corrected.

  “Yes, of course,” the general smiled. And we will need receipts.”

  Aluf Echod extended his hand to Joshua. “We are agreed?”

  Krantz looked at Fala. She nodded her final assent, and Krantz shook on it. Three fingers were enough to make a firm grip and seal the deal. When the general left, Krantz looked at his palm. It was covered in white powder, perhaps enough to tip the scales.

  The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

  —Rousseau

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  The events that prompted the re-creation of Alexander the Great’s battle scythe and subsequently set in motion the quest of Joshua Krantz and Fala al-Shohada occurred years earlier, in September 2001, just weeks after the infamous 9/11.

  While it seemed that military decisions and final orders came from within mahogany-lined conference rooms at the Pentagon, the most momentous decision of 2001 was perhaps made at a Starbucks on Pentagon Row. Gulping on coffees, munching on muffins, four generals in civilian golf garb had stopped there, on their way to tee off at the Army Navy Country Club.

  General Maximillian “Mack” Shell, one of the foursome, sa
t at an outdoor table at Starbucks and looked up the road. He had a clear, though distant view of the Pentagon. There was a plume of dust over the building. It was not leftover debris from the recent terrorist plane crash. This time it was due to bulldozers in a rush to rebuild—to bury the past and mask a defeat. Shell had brought along the Sunday Washington Post. He had read an editorial in the newspaper that morning that referenced an interesting recent event. It had caught his attention because it wasn’t another rehash of the consequences of terrorism and where blame lay. It was about an African hunter, a bunch of apes, and much, much more.

  The article began by describing the hunter’s quarry. They were Pan troglodytes, the primate species known as chimpanzees. The hunter sought them in the Mahale Mountain Game Preserve, the most remote of Tanzania’s national parks. Mahale and nearby Gombe Stream National Park were the best places in the world to get up close to Pan troglodytes—an estimated three to five thousand chimpanzees roamed there. Although both preserves were declared protected and off-limits to developers and hunters, Mahale was painfully difficult to get to. That made it perfect for the hunter because it was just as difficult to police.

  Deep in the forest, the hunter would listen and follow a whooping call rippling through the air as if pausing at each tree for a different listener. As he came closer, dozens more would holler until the entire forest erupted into a crescendo of shrieks. He did not approach his prey stealthily. He didn’t need to. The males scampered off as he advanced, a blur of black fur disappearing into a labyrinth of green. The females, however, lagged behind with their young, whom they carried or who held fast to their backs. They were easy targets. The hunter shot the adult females, butchered them for bush meat, and grabbed and bagged the orphaned animals that huddled by their mothers’ corpses to sell on the black market as exotic pets. They were endangered and becoming more so because men like him were killing off the female population. But hunting chimpanzees was his job. It was how he fed his family. He lived in a one-room mud brick house with a corrugated metal roof in Ujiji, about ten kilometers south of Kigoma in Tanzania. This was home, too, for his wife, five small children, and a menagerie of guinea pigs and fowl that were a crawling larder.

  In the week after September 11, the Ujiji man went to work again, catching his usual southbound steamer from Kigoma and disembarking at Mugambo. There he rented a small dhow from a fisherman friend and sailed along the shores of Lake Tanganyika four more hours to Mahale. He made his way along a familiar forest trail, an old road once gouged out by a multinational logging company, mostly overgrown now. Then the whooping began—but fiercer than he had ever heard it before. And just as suddenly, the bleating holler of chimpanzees quieted while the forest continued to boil with animal chatter and the skies clouded with flocks of starlings, sun-birds, bulbuls, and fisheagles exploding from the trees. The hunter slowed his trek. He was near his prey but something seemed amiss. He tightened a sweaty grip on his .30-06. He smelled it first, that foul, fecal odor of death. He was ever so familiar with it. When an animal dies and its anal sphincter relaxes, it lets loose its bowels. But this pungent stench embraced him and subsumed every breath he took. And then he saw—a forest floor strewn with the mutilated bodies of dozens of chimps. Standing over them, in rivulets of blood, were four adult male chimps, each about five feet tall. Their black fur glistened. Stained red with blood, they seemed to glow blue in the noonday sun. Remnants of stringy flesh hung from their mouths, stuck in their teeth. The chimps raised their heads to look at him. Their eyes were unblinking and, with lower jaws thrust out, they showed off lots of teeth. The hunter saw a viciousness he had never seen in this animal before. The sight and odor of death and the fear within him made him nauseated. He suppressed the urge to vomit but still erupted with a malodorous belch. Two more bloodied chimps came out of the bush, and they all began moving toward him. He did not raise his rifle. He just ran. But on this day, the hunted were the better hunters.

  No one much mourned the death of a poacher. The local news more or less overlooked him and focused on the unusual slaughter of so many animals by their own. Game wardens had found the jungle floor littered with ears and eyes, toes and testicles. The newspapers in the largest city, Dar es Salaam, grabbed a few quotes from the local news and focused their reporting on the billion-dollar global illegal trade in wildlife, second only to narcotics in dollar value. Then, the wire services picked up the story and an editorial writer at the Washington Post used it to make an entirely different point. His article was entitled “Gender Politics in the Developing World.” The author glanced over the hunter’s death and the violence among male chimps at the African nature preserve and used the event to make a point, not about chimpanzees or animal brutality, but about how gender power would eventually alter world power. It was this commentary that sparked General Mack Shell’s interest.

  Golf was not just a game; it was a setting for negotiations, deal making, and, for generals, laying out a plan of battle. General Shell passed the article around for his golf buddies to read.

  Maximillian Shell was a poster boy of a general—square jawed, broad shouldered, with a bristly crew cut of silver hair and matinee idol good looks, tainted only by a port wine birthmark on his left cheek. As a plebe at West Point, upperclassmen had teased him and named it Sicily because it resembled the triangular-shaped island. While many called him Mack, his oldest and closest friends still incongruously called him Sissy, for Sicily. The nickname was certainly a misnomer, because among his peers, he was held in the highest respect.

  Shell had begun his life as a soldier in the midst of defeat. During one week, from April 23, 1973, when Nixon declared the end of the Vietnam War, until April 30, when the last American was evacuated from the U.S. embassy in Saigon, he was a new second lieutenant in charge of covering the withdrawal. He was the last army officer on the last helicopter.

  On October 23, 1983, suicide bombers exploded trucks into a Beirut high-rise barracks building. Hundreds of mostly American soldiers, members of a multinational peacekeeping force, were killed. Two days later, Lieutenant Colonel Mack Shell arrived, in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war, charged with organizing a quick withdrawal.

  In October 1993, an assault team of Delta Force, SEAL, and Army Rangers was ordered by President Clinton to capture a Somali warlord. In the Battle of Mogadishu, they were cut off and being slaughtered on an urban battlefield. Brigadier General Shell took charge of rescuing those men and safely evacuating all U.S. troops.

  While General Shell had seen his share of victory in battle, he had seen far too many young American soldiers bloodied or maimed or shipped home in body bags, and felt mostly disappointment that the highlights of his career seemed consumed with retreats.

  Shell had a deep Southern drawl and his obvious intelligence demanded respect. He had battlefield experience. He was a former commandant of the U.S. Military Academy and the current CINCPAC, Commander-in-Chief Pacific Command. Among his peers, he was considered the most likely to succeed to chairman of the joint chiefs. When he spoke, presidents, as well as his colleagues, listened.

  “This guy makes some powerful points,” Shell began the discussion. “In the democratic and developed Western world, women are gaining more and more socioeconomic and political power. Women have gone beyond simple equality and now far surpass men in attending and graduating college in this country. More women than men are becoming doctors and lawyers.”

  “They’re running for office and winning, Sissy,” the general sipping the mocha latte added.

  “And they’re becoming a larger, more influential demographic factor in our army,” General Shell went on.

  There was a collective grumble.

  “We’re getting soft,” Shell summed up the mood. “Women in politics are more loath to use military power as a political instrument. And we have to count our women in uniform as part of the whole when we measure the ‘manpower’ of a division. We all know that can make for a thin force.”

  “And t
here’s still machismo on the battlefield,” the double espresso general said. “I’ve seen men, sometimes at the cost of their own lives or the mission, intent on protecting their female partners.”

  The rest nodded their assent.

  “And there are more fags we have to tolerate in the ranks, too,” he added.

  Shell bristled at that remark. He didn’t like been bundled among bigots. While in his speech, no one would ever doubt Mack Shell’s machismo, among his peers, he was perhaps the most tolerant. He had nothing against gays or women and valued their service. The only thing he couldn’t tolerate was failure.

  “The most important thing that’s come about in the last few years,” Mack continued, “is the feminization of our society and the military. This nation can no longer emotionally bear having its soldiers bloodied as in wars past. On the other hand, in the developing world, particularly with this rise of Islamic theocracies, the power of women is retreating. They’re kept behind veils and mostly restrained from achieving economic, social, or political power. Men, either dictators or mullahs, rule those countries with an iron hand.”

  “There are places in this world, Sissy, where parents, when they discover they’re having a girl, abort the fetus or outright commit infanticide,” Mocha Latte injected.

  “I know, I know,” Shell agreed.

  “And you’ve heard about honor killings?” Mocha Latte continued. “I’ve seen it. In Pakistan, I’m coming out of a meeting with my counterpart, General Jilani, and across the street, right in front of their courthouse, two men douse this woman with kerosene and set her on fire. Turns out they’re her father and brother, who try to kill her because she’s shamed them by marrying somebody they didn’t approve of.”

  “In the Middle East, in Pakistan, Somalia, Indonesia, much of the Muslim world, women are viewed like commodities. They’re property,” Double Espresso added. “The women there, they stone them, shoot them, hack them to pieces with axes, or set them on fire, because they’ve brought some perceived shame on the family. A woman gets raped, it shames the family. So they kill her. A woman wants to marry somebody for love. They kill her. Wants a divorce—dead.”