Forty-Eight X (32 page)

K
rantz found Fala later that afternoon. Squatting on a berm overlooking the beach, he watched her jog along the shore. From a distance he thought she was shadowed by two soldiers in black camouflage uniforms. As she got closer, he realized she was jogging with two chimpanzees. When she caught sight of him, she ran even faster and leapt into his arms, knocking him down. She kissed him hard and long.

“Holy cow, slow down. Slow down.”

“You found me,” she said ecstatically, breathing rapidly from exhaustion and excitement.

“Yeah, I found you. I don’t know if I would have tried so hard if I knew you’d be cavorting with two guys with their dicks at full staff.”

Fala looked up. Her chimp companions were standing over them with bright red erections.

“Home,” she yelled at them. They lifted their right arms and touched the side of their flattened hands to their brows. Then they ran off.

“Was that a salute?”

“In a fashion.”

“Who taught them to salute?”

“An American colonel. He has two companies of chimpanzees.”

“I’d like to meet him.”

“You will. He’s lovely.”

“Lovely, is he?”

“He’s been nice, I meant. Gracious.”

“A gracious jailer?”

“He’s not my jailer. Colonel McGraw is the man who conceived of having his chimpanzee soldiers use Alexander’s battle scythe. You see, it’s a weapon perfectly suited to be used by his chimps. It allows them to run and climb without bulky equipment to hamper them. It’s lethal but quiet. And the animals, they—they almost worship him. I’ve seen them train together. He’s not just a commander. He’s like a god to them.”

“Like a god?”

“Well, you know what I mean. You’ll never guess who he thinks he is.”

“Who he thinks he is?”

“He believes in reincarnation.”

“Oh? He thinks he’s Alexander the Great,” Krantz quickly concluded.

“No,” Fala smiled. “But close. He believes he was Alexander’s greatest general, Ptolemy, who eventually became one of my forbears, the pharaoh of Egypt.”

“I don’t know if I like you cavorting with reincarnated pharaohs.” Krantz smiled and rolled atop her on the sand.

She pushed him away and stood up. “One other thing, Joshua.”

“What?” he said, somewhat disappointed.

“I have quite a nice hotel room on this island.”

She held out her hand to help him up and hurry him away for some more intimate knowledge.

Moments later, they were in her room. Krantz had taken off his shirt and was slowly undressing her when a key unlocked the door. When it opened, Colonel McGraw stood there awkwardly.

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“You don’t know how to knock?” Fala rebuked.

“I didn’t know I had to knock.”

They were buttoning up when McGraw turned to leave.

“General Ptolemy?” Krantz asked.

McGraw turned back. “Are there no secrets?”

“Probably some still,” Krantz said, eyeing Fala for a moment with jealous suspicion. “So,” he went on, “you’re Ptolemy the First—who began the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egyptian pharaohs and created the great Library of Alexandria?”

“I was. Yes,” McGraw answered.

Krantz smiled.

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Not at all, Colonel,” Krantz replied. “I’ve been reborn, too.”

“You don’t have to be demeaning,” Fala said, berating him.

“No. I’m serious,” Krantz began again.

“Somebody famous, I’m sure,” McGraw said, willing to deal with the teasing he anticipated.

“I didn’t create a dynasty certainly, but—”

Joshua Krantz stood behind Fala, wrapped his arms around her, and nuzzled at her neck a moment. She did not retreat. Krantz was plainly indicating who was in possession of her.

“So, who were you?” McGraw inquired.

Krantz hesitated.

“Yes.” Fala turned to face him. “Who were you?”

“I was once Rabbi Zalman of Liadi,” Krantz replied.

Even Fala was taken aback. “Who?”

He kissed Fala’s forehead and gently buttoned the top of her blouse. “You think you know all about someone. But people are complicated. You never do.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“You don’t believe me?” Krantz pulled out his wallet. In the back, among some worn business cards, was a ratty black-and-white picture, perhaps a page from a magazine. It was an image from an old lithograph of a rabbi in eighteenth-century garb with a long white beard and bushy mustache.” He handed it to Colonel McGraw.

“That’s me. Rabbi Zalman of Liadi.”

“You two are nuts,” Fala said sarcastically.

“So, who was this rabbi?” McGraw asked, roped in.

“Unlike you, I cannot claim to have conquered countries or created dynasties.”

“There was, of course, something great you did in your former life?”

“Of course,” Krantz went on. “I was the first Rebbe of Chabad, a branch of Hasidic Judaism. It was during a time in Eastern Europe when the Jewish people were once again being persecuted. Always in times of persecution, Jews sought answers, or sought refuge perhaps, in the study of Torah. The Chabad Hasidim studied Torah, but they also believed that Jewish life should not just be an academic endeavor but a quest for spirituality and joy, as well. In those times, I was their greatest writer, and a philosopher and a mystic.”

“A mystic? Meaning you dealt in the supernatural?” McGraw posed.

“Anytime you try to know God, you’re delving into the supernatural. Rabbi Zalman’s philosophy was simple, but unusual for his time. He—I believed that the best way to serve God was by serving man better.”

“I believe in that.”

Krantz smiled. “Then perhaps then you were once a follower of mine.”

“Perhaps so.” Link McGraw grinned and held out his hand to shake and put any awkwardness behind them.

Fala said nothing. What she thought was,
I am in love with madmen
.

G
eneral Shell was returning to Diego Garcia the same way he most often did—flying in the rear seat of an F-14 Tomcat. The jet, most famous as Tom Cruise’s
Top Gun
plane, wasn’t as comfortable as the Air Force’s executive passenger jets, fitted out with first-class accommodations for the top brass. The F-14, however, was, after thirty years in service, still a very reliable airplane. It wasn’t a front-line aircraft anymore, but there were plenty of them around the country belonging to Reserve and National Guard units. So, ordering one up was no problem for a three-star general and had the added benefit of giving a lot of pilots the extra flight time they needed. There were newer jets he could have flown, but Mack disliked taking any plane out of service if there was any chance it could be used in combat. The F-14, stripped of everything but extra fuel tanks, was also fast. The flight from Washington, DC, to DG in a C-141 transport took twenty-two hours with a refueling stopover. The F-14 had him there in eight. There were also other advantages.

After nearly forty years in the military, although Shell had sent many men into battle, he himself had never shot at anyone and had never been shot at. He had seen the horrors of war, the up close of death, but his rank always kept him distanced from the risk. He had never confronted his mortality until a near-death experience a dozen years ago. He had a pulmonary embolism, a PE. It began with a deep vein thrombosis, a DVT the doctors called it, a blood clot that formed in his calf, the bizarre consequence of sitting still during an interminably long flight. The blood clot in his calf floated up into his lungs and almost killed him. He was in a coma, on a respirator for weeks before recovering. Flying now aboard an F-14, the duration of his flights were shorter, and he also wore a compression flight suit with air bladders in the legs and abdomen that actually protected him from forming clots in his legs and the life-threatening risks of DVTs and PEs.

It was Shell’s near-death experience that led him on a spiritual quest. He studied the world’s great religions and found substantial similarities in their creation tales. Despite being separated by vast lands and great oceans, the same basic elements existed in the creation stories of African Bushmen, ancient Greeks, Australian Aborigines, American Indians from the Iroquois to the Mayan, the Japanese, and Christians and Jews. In each story, Shell found a supreme being—a god or gods. The god always created an above and a below—a heaven and hell, a sky and earth, land and sea, or a symbol of an above and below. At first humans lived on earth peacefully. Later, the god or gods took away that paradise, usually because of a loss of innocence, sin, or a challenge to the gods. And finally, there was a momentous event, usually a flood, in which man was destroyed and either re-born again or rescued, sometimes in graphic fashion like in Eastern mythology where Vishnu took the form of a tortoise and rescued the world by carrying it on his back above the flood.

Mack Shell didn’t buy into the facts of any of the “creation myths.” He recognized that each religion gave its believers inner peace. There really wasn’t any one “provable” truth. So, almost on a whim, he chose to focus his spiritual quest on Lemuria.

The concept of Lemuria was popularized in the late nineteenth century by a French archaeologist, Augustus le Plongeon. Le Plongeon was the first European to excavate the ruins of Chichen Itza and other sites of pre-Columbian Mayan civilization. Although most scholars say that no one had ever successfully translated Mayan hieroglyphics, Le Plongeon claimed he had. The Mayan writings, he wrote, indicated that they had founded ancient Egypt. And the Mayans, he claimed, originated from an even older civilization that once lived on a great lost continent called Mu, or Lemuria. Later, a friend of Le Plongeon, James Churchward, wrote a series of books describing that antediluvian world. The rest of the scientific world, however, viewed both men as eccentrics with bizarrely vivid imaginations.

Churchward’s story of Lemuria was very much like the Bible. It included a creation story, a flood, and renewal. What was different about Lemuria was that its civilization was not a primitive one, as in the Bible, but rather advanced, even beyond our modern world. The world of the Bible was populated with stories of kingdoms and wars, sins followed by redemptions. Lemuria, on the other hand, had a benevolent government, superb technology, and a flowering culture. Lemurians were free of war and disease and lived in complete harmony with nature. They also had psychic powers. Telepathy, teleportation, and astral travel were all possible in Lemuria. While Mack Shell felt that Churchward’s Lemuria was just as implausible as the biblical stories of the miracles, rewards, and retributions of an unseen deity, he preferred Lemuria’s utopian vision. It was a life on earth more to be sought after than any nebulous afterlife.

Each time the general flew back to his Lemuria, there was one other benefit to flying in an F-14. Wrapped in the silent cocoon of a jet traveling faster than the speed of sound, he meditated and entered a peaceful place where he could project his mind out of his body. It was like a deep relaxing sigh that never ended. And when he landed, he didn’t just feel relaxed; he felt almost reborn.

On their approach, Shell caught sight of the Gulfstream parked just off the main runway. He had already heard about his new guests. Their presence was a nuisance that he was glad he would not have to cope with for very much longer. His adjutant, Major DeVita, anxiously awaited his descent as the plane’s engines wound down. As the general stepped onto the tarmac, the major hurried him to his Jeep.

“We’ve had an accident, sir.”

“One of our scientists?”

“No, sir. It’s the Israeli. They attacked him.”

“Who?”

“Our chimps. They almost pummeled him to death.”

Shell slid into the front seat of the Jeep, and DeVita drove off. The weather was hot and dry, like a sauna. The breeze in the open Jeep was refreshing. The sky was cloudless.

“It’s no accident,” the general muttered.

“What, sir?”

“I said, it’s no accident. A trip and fall is an accident. This is a warning. They know.”

“Who knows what, sir?”

General Shell kept quiet. He felt a sudden brief tingling sensation, like a million ants crawling up from his feet to his scalp. Perhaps the senator from New York was right. They had created a chimera, a new creature. Not chimpanzee, not human, but an unusual melding of instinct and intellect in union with nature. Could his new soldiers sense what he was thinking? He would know soon enough.

C
olonel McGraw had lain awake all night blaming himself for what had happened. These were troops he had trained and disciplined. They had independence in the methods used to carry out a task but they performed no task without his explicit command. Had he sent them an unconscious signal? What was the defect in breeding or training that had caused this?

He had invited Joshua Krantz to watch his troops during one of their usual training sessions. And, for no apparent reason at all, three of his best suddenly broke ranks and began pummeling and biting the Israeli colonel. Fala, who was sitting beside Krantz, began hitting at the chimps to distract them away. The animals, however, were undeterred and never for a moment turned their attention or aggression upon her. McGraw had repeatedly ordered them to “stand down.” His orders had never been disobeyed before. They would have beaten Krantz to death had not one of his sergeants arrived and in quick succession dispatched each of the three renegade chimps with a pistol shot to the head.

There was a long weighty silence after the last shot rang out. Two of the animals were dead. A third still had a flicker of life in his eyes. To Fala the chimpanzees all looked alike. McGraw saw them all as individuals. He had given names to most of them.