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the Ghosts of Baghdad
A Novel
“No one is going to get killed hunting down a bunch of museum trinkets.” That’s the general attitude of the swaggering commander of a squad assigned to recover some of the looted treasures from the museums of Baghdad after the American defeat of Sadaam Hussein in Iraq. He is assigned to work with an enigmatic Iraqi, with questionable loyalties, and mixed enthusiasm about the presence of the Americans, and an antiquities expert not exactly sympathetic to the American efforts in her adopted “Mesopotamia.” But together they find secrets in those treasures that someone is trying to kill them to suppress. The mystery winds all the way back to 1258, with the Mongol siege of Baghdad, when the Caliph of Baghdad was the spiritual leader of Islam, and Baghdad was one of the world’s greatest, most advanced cities in the world. What could possibly emerge from those times that could affect the conflicts of the early 21st Century? The American commander realizes, maybe a little slowly, that he better take the quest for these answers seriously, if he and his unwilling companions want to survive their mission.