Deker could recognize that condescending laugh anywhere.
Elezar.
Deker knew that he was never going to leave these walls now, never going to see Rahab again. Not if he was to save Israel. He had to entertain Elezar long enough for the Israelites to turn the tunnels into a furnace worthy of Molech and burn them all alive before anyone could escape.
There was a doorway at the end of the section, leading to another beyond. Guarding the doorway were two ghastly-looking Reahn guards who kept the civilian sick at bay. But they didn’t block him from entering the next compartment. It was as if he had been expected.
As soon as he stepped through the door, he felt a blow to his gut and doubled over as Elezar withdrew a bloody dagger from his stomach. Deker began to cough up blood.
“Welcome back, Deker,” said Elezar’s voice from the shadows.
Deker noticed the white salt all over the floor where his drops of blood had begun to splatter. The salt might have been stored there and cleared out, he thought, but something about it felt familiar and threw him off. He slid some of it aside with his boot and saw the flash of color. There was some kind of mosaic in the floor.
A sense of vertigo hit him and the walls seemed to bend before his eyes. As he regained his balance, he saw Elezar emerge from the shadows, laughing louder than ever.
“You did it, Deker!” he said in mock congratulation. “You finally broke.”
Any other day Deker could have taken Elezar. But with the cheap stab, Elezar now had the upper hand. Overwhelmed and losing blood, Deker pulled out his Molotov incendiary.
“Your plan has failed, Elezar. Bin-Nun is going to torch the city. And I’m going to burn us all inside this furnace of death. Jericho is doomed, the future of Israel secured.”
“It’s Israel you have doomed, Deker, and the future of Palestine you have secured once and for all. You’ve just blown the Israeli fail-safe, the secret of the Tehown, the tunnel of chaos the Jews hoped to use to kill us Arabs and save themselves.”
Bits of brick began to fall from the ceiling, and inside, the walls were heating up like an oven as the Israelites began to burn the city to the ground.
But Elezar beamed in triumph.
“You think you are with me in the walls of ancient Jericho 3,500 years ago, Deker. But we’re not really here. We’re back in a safe house in Jericho. You’re strapped to a chair with a fiber-optic line sewn into your skull, and I’m pumping light waves into your brain as I interrogate you.”
Deker felt the sweat coming down his face in the heat. “You’re crazy! You were the one who spent days convincing me that we were in 1400 BC. You’re the one who lost his mind.”
“You’re a fool, Deker,” Elezar said. “This was all a simulation designed to break you, the bad Jew, into revealing the secret fail-safe. It has been such a simple task to guide you to this point, using your brain’s own imagery to reconstruct everything about ancient Jericho along the lines of the Temple Mount to help us find the city’s fail-safe and lead us to what you already knew deep inside your head.”
“And what is that, Elezar?”
“Clearly, Israel’s fail-safe is biological in nature. Most likely a virus created from some ancient bone fragment infected with a disease that doesn’t exist in the twenty-first century. By creating a vaccine from the beginning, the Jews can release the virus and kill as many Arabs as they like and save their own people. But now that we know the threat, we can find a way to neutralize it. Now it’s the Jews who will die, all because of you. Not only have you lost the Promised Land in this reality, Deker, you’ve lost the promised war in ours.”
Deker stared at the Byzantine mosaic on the floor: it was just like the one in the holding house in Madaba—if they had ever been in Madaba. His torture could have taken place anywhere, his delusion beginning with his alleged escape from his captors.
“You’re wrong, Elezar. I didn’t dream this up. I never wanted to be here, so how could I be open to your suggestions?”
“All it took was the ghost of your dear Rachel in the form of Rahab to make you pant like a dog and return to your vomit.”
Deker yelled and swung his torch at Elezar, who ducked. “Was that real enough for you?”
“In your mind, yes,” Elezar said calmly. “In reality, no. In reality I’m about to kill you. But before I do, I thought I’d let you in on a little secret you don’t know.”
Deker brought his torch over Elezar’s head. “It will be the last thing you say.”
“Remember that little explosive you prepared for the assassination of the Black Dove? The ceremonial bowl that your beloved Rachel accidentally blew herself up with?”
“You did it,” Deker accused. “I know now.”
“But it wasn’t me, Deker,” Elezar hissed in pure hatred. “I was under orders from the IDF. The IDF was worried about your impartiality with regard to all sides of the Temple Mount. They wanted to ensure that, if push came to shove, you’d ultimately come down on the side of the Jews, and your guilt over her death was just the thing to do it.”
“That’s a lie!” Deker shouted.
“Is it?” Elezar said calmly. “You know it’s just the sort of dirty trick the Jews have been subjecting their people to for over three thousand years.”
“I’ve got another one here for you,” Deker said, and smashed his Molotov cocktail on the floor, igniting the grains and stores around them.
As fire began to engulf them, Elezar simply looked at Deker and said, “You know what you call an Israel without Jews? Palestine!”
“We are the Jewish people!” Deker screamed, his clothing bursting into flames. “We came to this land by a miracle! God brought us back to this land! We fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land!”
Just then the ground shook like a great quake. Dust came down between the bricks above, and the walls began to collapse on top of them, burying them alive. And still Elezar shouted in the dark void, his words echoing in Deker’s ears.
“From the river to the sea, Deker! A Palestine without Jews!”
The curtain of dust parted, and Deker stared as an unflinching Elezar stood brazenly before him even as his clothing caught fire. His mouth widened into a macabre smile as his hair burst into flames and he was completely engulfed by the inferno.
“From the river to the sea!”
A rock from above struck Deker in the head and he collapsed into the flames. Deker felt his own life seeping from his smashed body under the relentless avalanche of stone.
Dust in his eyes, he blinked at a shaft of light through the rubble. He felt a hot wind and watched it lift the ash to reveal a flash of metal hovering over him. For a second he thought it was the face of Molech come to drag him to hell.
But it was an unmanned RQ-1 Predator drone hovering over him like a modern Angel of Death. A single Hellfire missile remained beneath its right wing. Now the remote-controlled lens of the camera in its nose cone closed in on him and then opened again.
Then the metallic Predator flew away, leaving Deker to fall into the darkness and die.
51
HADASSAH MEDICAL CENTER
Deker looked out the window from his hospital bed. The modern Abbell Synagogue in the plaza below with its famous stained-glass Chagall Windows depicting the twelve tribes of Israel told him that he was back in the present day at the Ein Kerem campus of the Hadassah Medical Center in southwest Jerusalem. Any further doubts were eliminated by the dozens of IVs, needle tracks and pangs of excruciating pain shooting up and down his battered body.
“You seem disappointed to be alive, Deker.”
Deker turned to see a short, barrel-chested American in a suit standing by his bedside. It was the former U.S. secretary of defense, Marshall Packard, who more than anybody else was responsible for his transfer from the U.S. armed forces to the Israel Defense Forces several years ago. Deker now suspected the IDF had decided to return its defective merchandise to the Americans.
“The Temple Mount—” Deker said, but Packard cut him off.
“All is well,” Packard assured him, then backtracked. “As well as anything concerning the Temple Mount and Jerusalem can be these days.”
“And Elezar?”
“Died in the rubble by the time you were pulled out of that Palestinian house in Jericho.” Packard showed Deker the display of his BlackBerry phone and played a video clip from the nose cone of the Predator drone. “The Hellfire missiles blew them back to the Stone Age.”
Deker nodded. “So Elezar was the Black Dove?”
“Whatever his code name or real name might have been, Uri Elezar was definitely a PLO mole, placed inside the IDF decades ago, probably as soon as he hit puberty. Since the PLO went legit a few years back and other, more militant splinter groups began advancing the Palestinian cause through violence, we can only guess whom he really worked for when he died. We suspect it was a Jordanian cell group within an organization we call the Alignment. We could use your help fighting it when you feel better.”
But Deker was still grappling with the reality that history had indeed changed. He had not made the mistake that had killed Rachel. It was Elezar who killed her. Elezar or, unthinkably, the IDF. Whatever the reality, his guilt now turned to anger. That an innocent like Rachel should suffer like that. That he should suffer still. Now the IDF was going to deny him the opportunity to confront them. They wanted him to go away, to no longer remind them of their own lapse with Elezar—or their own sin.
“When I feel better?” Deker asked. “I can barely feel anything. What did they inject me with?”
“A combination of isoniazid, rifampin, pyrazinamide, streptomycin and ethambutol,” Packard told him. “You picked up extrapulmonary tuberculosis in that hellhole. We had to burn it to kill anything that could breathe from getting out and spreading it.”
“TB?” Deker felt around his neck for his IDF tag and knew it was missing. “No. I’m not talking about all these IVs in my arms. I want to know what those Jordanian bastards did to me.”
“They weren’t Jordanians, officially, but some radical Palestinian Waqf faction,” Packard said. “Somehow they had gotten ahold of a new U.S. interrogation protocol that the Jordanian GID has been testing for us on rendered terrorist suspects. What they did was inject you with a genetically engineered protein from a type of pond algae that’s attracted to light. This virus infected certain neurons in your brain.”
Deker touched his finger to his forehead. “I felt a splinter of light.”
“That’s the fiber-optic cable they threaded through your skull,” Packard said. “It’s what enabled them to send flashes of light directly into your brain. From there they could precisely target certain neurons with light and cause them to fire. They basically took control of your nervous system.”
“To probe my memories?”
“That’s right. Make you talk in your sleep and extract what you knew about the fail-safe under the Temple Mount.”
Deker felt empty, hollowed out, spiritless. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Fortunately, they didn’t accidentally blind you, and you seem to have escaped permanent brain damage,” Packard told him. “But we really don’t know what the long-term effects are of infecting someone’s brain with a virus that makes it susceptible to light.”
Deker was quiet, thinking. “Last night I thought I woke up for a few seconds and saw my dead driver, Stern, by my bedside.”
“Hmm, that’s interesting,” Packard said. “Like I said, we really don’t know the long-term impact of your torture.”
Deker asked, “So, what happens to me now?”
“You broke under torture and gave up the fail-safe. Now your superiors have come to realize that Jerusalem’s only real fail-safe is the good ol’ U.S.A.”
“More than a few in the IDF would beg to differ,” Deker said. “Israel has God on her side.”
“God can’t help you now, Deker. Because the IDF wants you out, one way or another. You know too much and are an embarrassment in the current political climate. So you’ve been dishonorably discharged to our care.”
“To do what with my life?”
“That’s up to you,” Packard said. “When you figure it out, let me know, because we could use a man like you back home in the States.”
Home.
“I have no home anymore.”
“Then you’ll fit right in,” Packard said, and left the room.
52
THE WEST BANK
The official maps that Deker had obtained after his hospital discharge a week earlier proved worthless as he drove out in the heat from Jericho. All he had to show after three fruitless days of sifting through the sands of time were a few chips from the modern city’s Oasis Casino and a hangover from too much drinking. He had already visited several other “Gilgals” around the area, tourist traps all, but none resembling the real Gilgal.
The real Gilgal.
Deker couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t anymore. Did he really take a trip through time? Or did he simply trip out on military-grade hallucinogens and live to remember it?
Still, an archaeological tour of one of those Neolithic sites along the Jordan River with a group called the Friends of the Earth had given him an idea. That site had been dug some twenty years earlier by a team from the Israel Museum and had unearthed thirteen round buildings made of mud and rock, along with agricultural facilities, including grinding stones, pounding stones, axes and sickle blades. Most interesting was a silo containing a sizable amount of wheat and barley—a fleeting image he recalled that one night in the real Gilgal.
He looked at his Landsat thematic map of the area that also included Shuttle Radar Topography Mission topographic data. It was a gift from the chief archaeology officer in the IDF’s civil administration. The officer told him that this same space technology had led to the discovery of the lost city of Ubar in present-day Oman and the ancient desert frankincense trade route in southern Arabia. He only asked that if Deker actually found something, he’d let the IDF know.
The only thing Deker had found so far came from the pages of Jewish history and tradition. From multiple sources he was able to piece together a general picture of what happened to Rahab and the rest he had met back in time or in his mind. He played the scenario over and over like a movie while he searched for Gilgal.
Rahab and her family were indeed spared death and allowed to live outside the Israelite camp at Gilgal. She almost immediately married Salmon, the son of Nahshon. Rahab shortly thereafter gave birth to a son they named Boaz. Deker wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, and for the time being buried it in his heart. When Boaz had grown, he married a woman named Ruth and they had a son, Obed, who had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David.
David became the king of Israel, fulfilling the prophecy of the six-pointed conjunction of stars in the heavens that Rahab had pointed out to Deker that night on her terrace so long ago. Fourteen generations later, from the line of David, came Jesus, whom his Roman executioners called the “King of the Jews” and whose cousin John the Baptist called the “Passover Lamb” who would take away the sins of the world.
Tracing Rahab’s bloodline to Christ made Deker think back to the scarlet cord in Rahab’s window, and to her faith that Yahweh would “pass over” her sins as the Angel of Death had passed over the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Her faith had been rewarded, and so had Salmon’s.
But would his? Deker wondered.
Salmon’s curious friend Achan bin-Zerah wasn’t as fortunate. He apparently had defied General Bin-Nun’s herem,or ban, on keeping any spoils from Jericho by pocketing two hundred shekels of gold and silver during the pillage instead of turning them over to the Treasury of Yahweh. Bin-Nun figured this out days later when he sent a small unit of thirty-six troops drawn from a single division to capture the town of Ai. A small and easy target compared to Jericho, to be sure, but the Israelites were ambushed and killed. Aft
er another face-to-face meeting with Yahweh, Bin-Nun used a mass form of divination—casting lots—to identify Achan as the cause, and had him stoned to death along with his wife, children, sheep and every breathing thing he owned. Then Bin-Nun had them burned and buried under the pile of rocks used to kill them.
From then on, Joshua, the son of Nun, moved from one victory to another in his quest to claim the Promised Land for Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. He split Canaan in two, first taking out the southern kingdoms before turning his attention to the more powerful northern kingdoms. He even gave Phineas a sign to remember forever when, according to the book of Joshua, the sun stood still for an extra day so the Israelites could kill more enemies in a decisive victory. Only Jerusalem remained untaken.
Deker knew that Bin-Nun’s plan to cut the land of Canaan in half was the very strategy that modern Israel’s Arab enemies had long harbored for wiping the Jewish state off the map. To avoid such a fate while he was in charge, Bin-Nun focused on defending Israel’s moral boundaries even more than her natural ones. He was especially concerned about the threat of other religions in Canaan, which ultimately came to roost with King Solomon, who for all his wisdom allowed the influence of his many foreign wives to persuade him to turn the six-pointed Star of David into the official emblem of the state.
“But as for me and my family,” Joshua bin-Nun proudly declared, “we will serve the Lord.”
Finally, before he died, Bin-Nun signed a treaty in which Israel pledged to honor other nationalities in Canaan who honored Yahweh. He signed it at Shechem, the place where God first promised Abraham the land of Canaan.
Surely this must have pleased Rahab.
Reading through these historical documents, Deker had even begun to at least understand the rationale behind Bin-Nun’s strategy of incinerating entire cities and every man, woman, child and animal that breathed inside their walls. Due to the tuberculosis the doctors had discovered in his lungs at Hadassah Medical Center, Deker did some research and learned that archaeologists had also discovered history’s earliest evidence of TB in ancient bones buried under Jericho. Such airborne diseases were rampant in ancient times. Israel, therefore, faced an existential threat any time she came into contact with her enemies. Incineration was the only insurance to counter the threat in that age.
THE PROMISED WAR Page 18
