Forty-Eight X (18 page)

“The Ayatollah says that Al-Iskandar is called Dhu’l-Karnayn in the Qur’an,” Danush interjected. “The two-horned one. He was Muslim, you know. He destroyed the city to cleanse it and prepare it for its holy purposes.”

Krantz smiled. Islam was fond of usurping anyone of historical significance into their history. Moses was Muslim. Jesus was Muslim. Why not Alexander the Great? He would allow them to adopt anyone they wanted to be a Muslim. He would assent to them calling Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Ariel Sharon Muslims if he learned what he wanted to know.

“We found a lot of dead people killed by a modern version of this ancient weapon.” Krantz finally got to the point. “The only survivor said just one word to identify his assailants.”

“And what is this word that brings you here?”

“Maimun,”
Fala spoke up.

The young cleric was thoughtful for a moment.

“Only this word?”

“Yes,” Krantz confirmed. “Do you know what it means?”

“The word literally means ‘fortunate one,’” the young mullah began. “It came to mean ‘right hand,’ because the right hand symbolizes strength and all that is good and fortunate. It was also used in ancient times as a derogatory description. If you called someone a ‘maimun,’ you called them a monkey. A euphemism, since early Islam considered monkeys to be evil because many nonbelievers, the Hindus for instance, worshiped monkeys.”

“We think it means the Right Hand of God,” Fala interrupted.

“Do you know the Right Hand of God?” Krantz pressed. “Is it a Shia guerrilla group?”

“You Jews and the Americans, you just do not understand,” the cleric answered, somewhat perturbed. “Islamic Iran is for peace and stability everywhere. We do not engage in hostile action against any country, any people. Look at our history. Iran has never attacked Israel. Iran has never attacked the United States. We defended ourselves against Iraq. We are maligned, but we are innocent. But if somebody attacks us, we will respond.”

Krantz had no intention of jumping into a political debate—not here anyway. Iran may have never attacked Israel, but they financed most of Israel’s enemies and their rhetoric continued to fuel the hatred.

“So who is responsible for making this weapon of Al-Iskandar?” Fala asked.

“Who? The people who have been killed, they are Shias. Why would we kill our own brethren?”

“A Sunni terror group, then?” Krantz followed up.

Like all clergymen, the Iranian mullah had to give his answer abstractly.

“We all come from different families. We are born and cared for, and few of us want to question what our parents and grandparents have taught us. The Hindus put ash on their foreheads and pray to an elephant-headed stone god. They do this because their parents taught them this. The Christians pray to a cross or an image of Jesus or Mary. You Jews don’t pray to statues, but you rock back and forth in prayer toward an old wall in Jerusalem. And we Muslims, we pray toward a stone building, the Ka’aba in Mecca. What makes us believe? We all believe because we were born and our parents believed. So, if you are looking for the truth, question what your parents have told you. They know.”

“You’re saying Israel already knows?” Krantz asked, bewildered.

“Your parents know,” the young cleric clarified. “Your parents, the Americans.”

E
ven with the first-class accommodations aboard a VIP Air Force C-17, it was an arduous flight from Washington to Diego Garcia—or DC to DG, as Mack Shell described the trip. The general’s job was not only to guide the success of Lemuria but keep those few government officials who were privy to the project, and who held its purse strings, informed. Today, he had two senior senators from the Intelligence Committee along to see the work in progress. He hated this part of his job. He didn’t trust politicians, and he didn’t like being a tour guide.

“Who in the world was Diego Garcia?” one senator asked.

It was the first question everyone seemed to ask, and Mack Shell had his answers down to rote.

“The island,” he explained, “was discovered by Portuguese explorers in the early 1500s. There were two explorers on two separate voyages. One captain was named Diego, the other Garcia. They came upon it at different times, but both arrived back in Lisbon at the same time and both claimed to have discovered it. So, the king named it after both of them.”

After seventeen hours of not much but clouds and blue ocean, they began their descent. Diego Garcia was a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Its stamp from the air didn’t seem much bigger than nearby supertankers. The tropical island was crescent shaped, a lush green narrow reef with forty miles of shoreline that wrapped about a turquoise blue lagoon. It had once been the home of natives called Ilois, but the British had moved them all off the island in the late 1960s, when they turned it into a military base.

“Diego Garcia is British Indian Ocean Territory,” the general went on, “part of an archipelago called the Chagos Islands, also called the Oil Islands. There’s no petroleum here. They’re called the Oil Islands because harvesting coconut oil was their main industry for centuries. The few peaks, like Diego Garcia, that poke above the ocean are part of an undersea mountain chain known as Lemuria. Some say Lemuria was once part of a lost civilization like Atlantis with a culture far more advanced then ours today.”

When Shell spoke of Lemuria, he spoke of it with reverence. He looked for a glimmer of insight or curiosity, but his guests today were interested only in the practical accomplishments of the work on the island, not in any history of lost civilizations. They knew that General Shell’s job was to create a new genetically designed American soldier. They had no inkling of his grander dreams, to begin a revolution in human evolution.

“The Oil Islands,” Shell continued to educate his guests, “were French colonies until they became British with Napoleon’s defeat in 1814. When the British started giving up their colonies and gave Mauritania its independence in 1964, we helped them negotiate a deal. For three million pounds and our agreement to give them a favorable exchange on sugar imports, the Oil Islands were excluded from the deal for independence. They continue under British control with us as their major silent partner. Today, DG is the most secure military base in the world. It’s a thousand miles from anywhere else—India’s north of us, Madagascar west, Indonesia east, and Antarctica south. The only way in or out is by military air or a navy ship. The island is now home to three thousand military personnel and, with work on Lemuria, twice that many civilians. Only fifty of that number are British. Mostly they handle the customs rituals at the airport. So, while Diego Garcia is a British colony, it’s now clearly colonized by Americans.”

His guests peered at the island below, growing ever larger in their windows. It looked a lot like a child’s foot—a small heel to the south with the arch being the lagoon entrance winding into the web space of the big and second toes. There were two heavy-bomber-capable runways, each two and a half miles long, and an assortment of jetties and piers. A dozen navy ships anchored in the harbor. There was a clump of multistory modern buildings in the middle of the island, and on the rest were scattered bungalows, towers, space-tracking domes, fuel dumps, and training areas. As they approached for landing, they could read the writing on one large water tower. It read, “DIEGO GARCIA, The Footprint of Freedom.”

It only took a thirty-minute drive to tour the entire island. Mack made it seem like a resort destination.

“The folks here like to windsurf off the southern shore, and I’ve heard they fish for two-hundred-pound marlin just east of the lagoon. If you snorkel or dive, you can see thousands of amazing tropical fish in shallow waters off the reef. And we’ve got a nine-hole, par-five golf course with ocean views on either side.”

He wanted to encourage the senators to lull about on the beach or ride jet skis rather than bother with investigating his work. But they were not diverted. They wanted to know about the billion-dollar research being conducted in the high-tech military hospital in the center of the island.

Theodore Berger, the senator from Rhode Island, was also a physician. That was another reason his colleagues had chosen him to make the investigative trip to DG. They expected him to have the scientific know-how to ask the right questions. Senator Berger had a puffy face, the moonfaced look common among those on chronic steroid therapy. He was battling lupus. He looked jolly, but he took his senatorial duties seriously. As they walked toward the entrance to the hospital and research facility, he caught sight of half a dozen young male patients sitting on a veranda overlooking the ocean. He turned his gaze to Shell, and the unspoken question hung between them.

“As I told you, Senator, we’re not experimenting on humans. Animal research is what we’re about. Maybe months or years from now, when we know more, there’ll be debate and—”

The senator nodded toward the young patients. “What’s the matter with those men?”

“There are thousands of people on this island. Some of them get sick.”

He didn’t know if that answer satisfied the senator, but it would have to do. What would put the visitors at ease, however, was “show and tell.” Mack found there was one reward for having to be away from DG periodically. Each time he returned, he was elated to discover the great progress being made on the Lemuria Project in these “show and tell” sessions. Researchers, who’d been hobbled for years with meager budgets and had spent more of their energies applying for grants than actually performing research, were incubating ideas faster than anyone could have ever expected.

In a darkened room he listened along with the senators to a computer PowerPoint presentation.

“We’re working on synesthesia here,” Xiang Sun, a researcher from Yale, began. She was a petite Chinese woman with a perfectly smooth complexion and an ageless quality. She looked fifteen, yet she was nearly fifty.

Senator Berger knew when to keep quiet. Sometimes the most intelligent thing to do was to shut up. But what the hell was synesthesia? And why was it costing the U.S. taxpayers twelve billion dollars?

“When young mammals are born, their senses are primitive, unrefined, and undifferentiated. It takes several weeks of development before the brain separates sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch into distinct senses. These senses that are merged at birth can, even after separating, be merged again afterward. That merging of senses is called synesthesia.”

A slide showed a graphic representation of the concept. “A sound can be seen. A touch can be a taste. A sight can be heard,” explained Sun, who saw only bewilderment in her audience members’ eyes.

The lights came up, and two assistants entered the room with two chimpanzees. One chimp wore a red collar, the other blue.

“We have been focusing on the most common forms of synesthesia and have had good success with color hearing and blind sight. It will be easier to understand when you see it,” Xiang Sun went on.

While the general and the senators awaited the demonstration, two quasi-human faces stared back at them, with just as much curiosity. The general couldn’t help but smile. Fish, the chimp with the red collar, grinned back. They called him Fish, Dr. Sun later explained, because he was fond of sardines. His handlers often accommodated his taste, and in return he suffered them with the most foul of breath. They had named the blue-collared chimp Talk, obviously because he talked so much or at least tried to mimic human speech. These two were of the latest generation of genetically engineered chimps to have reached maturity.

The attendants gave some softly worded command, and both chimps pirouetted quickly to face their handlers. Then they started to play catch. Fish and Talk were very adept at catching and tossing back a ball. Then the attendants abruptly stopped and blindfolded both chimps.

“Red has had the gene that separates the sense of hearing and sight blocked. He has blind-sight synesthesia,” Sun explained. “Blue is a normal chimp with normal senses. Both have been trained to play catch, but that is all.”

The attendants then tossed a ball at Talk, the blue-collared chimp.

“The normal one,” Xiang Sun reiterated—although in the world of Pan troglodytes, neither chimpanzee was quite normal.

Blindfolded, Talk couldn’t see it. The ball just hit his torso and fell to the floor. His handler tossed several more balls to him. The result was the same. None were caught by the blindfolded animal. Then they tossed a ball at Fish, the red-collared “genetically altered” chimp and just as he had played before being blindfolded, he caught the ball and tossed it back, each and every time.

“That, gentlemen, is not a trick,” the Chinese-American Yale researcher said proudly. “That is blind-sight synesthesia.”

Later, Shell and the senators walked through an indoor-outdoor jungle arboretum. Living there uncaged was a menagerie of chimpanzees. Most of the animals seemed busy with their own tasks—the usual feeding, play, and mutual preening activities that had always been the entertainment draws for humans gawking at monkey houses in zoos around the world. Others were more social and actually walked alongside their visitors, even reaching out to hold hands, as they walked the meandering path through their home. Suddenly, Senator Berger began laughing.

“What?” Shell asked.

“What did they name this one?” the senator asked grinning and screwing up his nose. The chimp walking alongside him and holding his hand was farting, loudly and frequently.

Dr. Sun, who also accompanied the VIPs, kept her silence. The gas-passing chimp was not called Fart, as the senator probably imaged. He had been affectionately named Senator.

Senator Berger was actually an advocate of Lemuria, but he had a duty, too, to ask questions. He’d seen many a good idea become half-baked into a bad one once seasoned with enough federal dollars.

“And why,” he asked, “have we chosen to use chimpanzees? Why not the bigger, stronger apes, like gorillas?”