Afghan War Rug

The photo is of an "Afghanistan War Rug," a 20 inch x 37 inch (plus three inch fringe on each end) prayer rug with a Pakistan export company label, purchased in a Saudi Arabian souk in the early '90's

Symbols familiar to all mujahedeen, warriors of God, are portrayed over a background of shifting sand. The symbols include an AK-47, a stylized armored vehicle - with the indications of side ports implying a personnel carrier, but lacking the distinctive turret on the top normally used to portray the Soviet BMD-2, grenades, exploding mines and numbers with possible supernatural meanings, such as "166," and other number combinations that may have meaning to the maker, or may just be a slip of the weavers loom. First chance, I am going to read my old friend Margaret Starbird's Magdalene's Lost Legacy: Symbolic Numbers and the Sacred Union in Christianity and decipher the many numeral string embedded in the rug. Perhaps there is a mystery as interesting as Brown's Da Vinci Code ...all research for the next Nash Devon thriller. Perhaps Devon will learn more about the family of Christ as he deciphers the meaning of the numbers woven into the rug.

So, of course, a rug similar to the one I brought back from Saudi (made, I believe, in Pakistan) figures prominently in a novel in progress - the sequel to Behind the Green Water - and with a working title of Beside the Dead Sea.

Beside the Dead Sea will follow Nash Devon from Israel to the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) South Camp on the Sinai Peninsular into Afghanistan as he searches for family and tries to stop the shipment of  weapons of mass destruction to the United States, led by the clues hidden in the scrolls discovered in the caves around the Dead Sea.