“No? You think the ayatollahs in Teheran and Qom aren’t paying attention? You think Syria’s going to screw with anybody now?”
Ibrahim didn’t answer. The late President was an Alawite, from a sect small even inside Syria. His father and predecessor had been brutal and highly capable. The just-slain ruler was only half the man his father had been—he was only brutal. He’d mostly won his civil war, but he had no obvious successor. All the factions he’d been fighting and all his friends would go mad trying to grab as much as they could and murder one another.
And Iran…Since the President of Iran had called the Holocaust a hoax and said Israel ought to be wiped off the map—and since he’d backed the deceased Syrian leader—he and the religious leaders behind him probably were deepening their bomb shelters now.
“So that’s how things are,” Shragai said. “We aim to excavate under the Temple Mount. Anybody who gives us grief will be sorry, but not for long.”
“You cannot speak to me that way,” Haji Ibrahim cried. “This is the third most holy spot in Islam. Of course we will protect it.”
“I don’t know how often I’ve heard that—the third most holy spot in Islam,” the colonel mused.
“It’s true!” No hesitation in Ibrahim’s voice now.
“Okay, fine. Know what? I don’t care. If you’re a Jew, it’s the most holy spot. You bastards forget about that. Time you remembered.”
“You have the, uh, Western Wall.” Ibrahim almost called it the Wailing Wall, but the Israelis didn’t like the name. They said that, since Jerusalem was theirs again, they didn’t have to wail. They would burn in hell for their effrontery!
“Some people are okay with that. The government has been—it makes less trouble about the top of the Temple Mount,” the colonel replied. “But now we’re thinking, We’ve got plenty of trouble. What’s some more?”
“I cannot decide this myself, and I cannot speak for the young Arabs who will be outraged. The Intifada can begin again, you know.” Haji Ibrahim played for time, and played the highest card he had. The longer he alarmed the Jews into waiting, the more things would have a chance to settle down, and the better the odds the leaders would come to their senses.
Colonel Shragai snorted. “Cut the crap—I already told you that. We’ll smash it—smash it flat, however we have to, however many we kill. I’m letting you know to warn you not to mess around with us. You and your ‘young Arabs’ ”—he laced the words with scorn—“can do whatever you want. If you get in the way, you’ll get run over. Shalom.”
Out he went. Like the Arabic salaam, shalom could mean hello or goodbye or peace. Ibrahim had never heard it used as a threat before, but that was what it was now.
So the Jews thought they could get away with doing as they pleased under the Temple Mount? Plenty of Arabs didn’t fear ascending to Paradise while young.
Ibrahim reached for his phone. Then he stopped. The Americans could tap cell-phone calls. The Israelis surely could, too. He had ways of getting out the word without pointing to himself.
* * *
—
“This is Gabriela Sandoval. I’m speaking from Tel Aviv’s radioactive heart.” Gabriela hadn’t come here for the dirty bomb, but she was making the most of it. “The hazardous conditions are why I look like a carrot with a piggy nose.”
She wore an Israeli hazmat suit. It smelled like dirty socks inside. She’d had to do some pleading to get it, but she had. The local authorities wanted the world to see what the terrorists had done. If that meant putting up with a reporter who didn’t mind dressing up in orange plastic-impregnated coveralls and a respirator, then it did.
Gabriela’s cameraman wore a hazmat suit, too, but he wouldn’t show up on TV. Only the person on the screen was real. Nobody cared about how a shot got made, only that it did.
“With me is Ari Eitan, head of the decontamination effort. Thanks for talking with us, Dr. Eitan,” Gabriela said.
“You’re welcome.” Eitan wore the same gear as Gabriela. On camera, they weren’t even two talking heads—they were two talking gas masks. But Gabriela didn’t feel like inhaling any more plutonium oxide, and the gutted bus station behind them spoke louder than anything she and the Israeli would say.
More people in orange suits and masks scurried over the bus station and the wreckage of nearby buildings. “Will you explain what your crews are doing?” Gabriela passed Eitan the wireless mike.
“Yes, certainly.” The decontamination expert spoke good if stilted English. “When we discovered this was a radiological dispersal device—”
“A what?” Gabriela broke in—that was too stilted for most listeners to get.
“A, uh, dirty bomb.” Eitan grudgingly edited himself. “When we learned it was, we began spraying all the surfaces within a ten-block area with a sticky substance.”
“Why did you do that?” Gabriela asked.
You dummy, Eitan had to be thinking. But Gabriela remembered the people on the other side of the screen. Sighing, the decontamination maven answered, “To keep the radioactive material from spreading with the wind. The smaller the area we deal with, the better. Much radioactive material will adhere to the coating when we remove it, which we are doing now.”
“I see.” Gabriela nodded. Inside the suit, sweat rivered down her back, and she was just standing here holding a mike. “How can your people work in those things without keeling over? They’re really hot.”
“They are, yes,” Eitan agreed. “We work one-hour shifts, then an hour in the shade to cool down. We’ve had only a few heat casualties.”
“That’s good. Now, the coating gets up a lot of the radioactive stuff?” Gabriela kept it as basic as she could. “Not all?”
“No, unfortunately. Our next step, which we will begin soon, is to use water-based gels. These are like the ones in disposable diapers, only with nanoparticles that soak up more contaminants and take them out of circulation.”
“And will you be finished then?” Gabriela asked.
Eitan shook his head. “We have chemicals that also go after the radioactives. We want to capture as many as we can, to keep them from spreading in our country and from entering the Mediterranean, as they would if we simply hosed everything down. People would blame Israel for the contamination, even if those Arab murderers brought the poison here. We’ve already had warnings from France.”
“What’s your opinion of that?” Gabriela tried to sound innocent. She was also glad Forrest Charleston wasn’t within earshot.
“My opinion is not fit to repeat on camera,” Ari Eitan said.
Too bad, Gabriela thought. She wasn’t Charleston, but she also wasn’t allergic to poking France for higher ratings. How many Frenchmen watched Gabriela and Brandon, after all? She asked, “When you’re finished, Tel Aviv will be clean?”
“Absolutely,” the decontamination expert answered.
“You’d live here yourself? Even where the bomb went off?”
“Yes,” the Israeli said firmly.
“Do you think other people here will feel the same?”
“If they have sense, they will.”
“They won’t be anxious there’s still radioactivity around?”
“Why should they, if Geiger counters say there isn’t?”
Gabriela let that hang. She could think of lots of reasons. Ari Eitan might be good with plutonium, but what did he know about human nature? Not so much. In the States, there’d be environmental-impact studies and lawsuits before people moved back. The first time somebody came down with cancer, there’d be more lawsuits, even if the person who got it smoked twelve packs a day. Things worked like that back home. Which brought another question, perhaps partly prompted by memories of the Marathon bombing: “If a dirty bomb went off in, say, Boston, how well would America handle it?”
“Our chemicals come from
the United States,” Eitan replied. “But you don’t stockpile them the way we do. You might have more trouble in an emergency—you aren’t so ready to move fast.”
Thinking of Harvey and Irma and Katrina and the last couple of California earthquakes, Gabriela judged that an understatement. The USA was too mired in bureaucracy to respond quickly to almost anything. That seemed a good place to leave it, so Gabriela did. “Thank you, Dr. Eitan. I’ll let you get back to work.”
“Thanks.” The Israeli walked out of the shot.
“Something to think about,” Gabriela said to her listeners. “If we had to clean up a dirty bomb, how well would we do? That question has to be on officials’ minds from Rio to Riyadh. They’re wondering about their countries—and about us. In the light of what’s happened here, they need to. Gabriela Sandoval, signing off from Tel Aviv.”
“That was awesome, Ms. Sandoval,” the cameraman said.
“Thanks, Danny,” she answered—praise always felt good, especially when she’d earned it. “Wanna do some pans for voiceover later?”
“Sure thing,” Danny said. The red light came on again. He filmed the battered ruins of the bus station—it looked a lot like Oklahoma City a generation earlier. He filmed the decontamination crews taking one kind of goop off and putting another on. He filmed a woman (Gabriela thought) in a hazmat suit eyeing instruments and shaking her head. “Enough?” he asked.
“Should do it,” Gabriela said. “Let’s clean up.”
Even that was complicated. The Israelis had their perimeter up to make sure nobody tracked plutonium outside the area already contaminated. At the edge, they applied their glop to Gabriela’s and Danny’s suits, then cleaned them. After that, the Americans stood under a portable shower. And after that, another Israeli ran a Geiger counter over them. Only then could they peel off the suits and masks and breathe hot, humid, unfiltered Tel Aviv air. It felt wonderful.
“Do you think this city will ever be the same?” Gabriela asked a soldier patrolling the perimeter.
“The same? No,” the young man said in halting English. “Can we live again here? Yes. We do it.” He sounded confident.
“What about the people who did this? What about the people who helped them?”
“We fix.” The guard hefted his Galil.
* * *
—
Yoram Louvish wasn’t kidding when he asked Eric if he knew how to handle an assault rifle. He showed up with one, and a full magazine, a few days later. “When we go, take this along,” he said.
“You gotta be kidding,” Eric blurted.
The Israeli soldier-turned-archaeologist—a surprisingly common combo here—shook his head. “You may need it.” He didn’t sound like somebody who was joking. Eric wished he did.
“I’m liable to be more dangerous to our side,” the American protested.
Yoram barely hid his scorn. “Look at Tel Aviv. These are not nice people. They’ll kill you if they can. One way to make sure they don’t is kill them first if you have to. Nobody will be happier than me if you don’t shoot. But if you need to, you need to, that’s all. And you may.”
“I’ll be happier than you if I don’t use it,” Eric said.
“I doubt it, because I’ve seen combat and you haven’t,” Yoram answered. “I know what you’ll be missing. If you have to use your weapon, know how. Orly will show you.”
“Okay, okay.” Eric knew when to quit arguing. He did ask, “You going to give one to Munir, too?”
Louvish didn’t even blink. “Damn right. I wouldn’t have asked him in on this if I worried about him shooting us in the back or ratting on us.” The American shut up.
Orly trained Eric with a seriousness she seldom gave to less urgent matters. If anything was weirder than learning to shoot from a woman you were thinking about marrying, he hadn’t met it. She walked him through the Galil’s care and feeding. He learned how to attach the clip, how to chamber a round, and how to clean the weapon and strip and reassemble it.
“In the Army, we would do this blindfolded,” Orly said. “If the drill sergeant felt mean, he’d take away a piece and make us figure out what was missing.”
That didn’t sound mean to Eric—it sounded sadistic. “Why?”
“So we knew what we were doing.” She touched the rifle’s metal-and-plastic stock. “You carry this, you go places where you can’t try again. You have to be right the first time. Everything has to work. So you make sure it happens.”
Eric understood that intellectually. And, intellectually, he understood intellectual understanding wouldn’t do him any good if he had to shoot somebody. “I’d almost rather bail out,” he muttered.
“You can,” Orly said. You can bail out on me if you do. She didn’t say it, but it hung in the air between them.
Did he have the courage of his uncourageous convictions? Or did he want to see what lay under the Temple Mount enough to shoot anybody who got in his way? Archaeologists joked about things like that. If it wasn’t a joke…? “I said almost.”
“Okay,” Orly told him. Then she showed him that, to her, it was better than okay. He didn’t like to think that thinking about violence got him hot, but…“Maybe I should give you a gun more often,” Orly purred afterwards.
“Full-metal-jacket Viagra,” Eric said. They both giggled. Eric almost forgot about the Galil.
If he’d had his druthers, he would have. But Orly made sure he didn’t. She borrowed Yoram’s beat-up Nissan and drove Eric to an Army training center twenty minutes southwest of Jerusalem. There, under her watchful eye and the contemptuous glare of an Israeli noncom, he fired a clip’s worth of ammo on a range.
“Maybe you’ll scare them,” the noncom said—a dubious recommendation. “How come you can’t shoot straighter?”
“This is the first time I tried.” Eric’s ears rang, though he wore protective covering. Gunfire was loud. His shoulder ached, but he didn’t rub. The Galil kicked, all right.
The Israeli looked incredulous. Eric spoke Hebrew well enough to pass for a local—and plenty of Israelis had accents, too. “He’s an American,” Orly explained.
“Oh,” the noncom said. Softy. He didn’t say that, but Eric heard it. The Israeli did ask, “What are you doing with a weapon, then?”
“In case there’s trouble under the Temple Mount,” Eric answered. “I’m an archaeologist.”
“Oh, yeah? You sure don’t look like Indy,” the noncom said.
“Uh-huh,” Eric said. “Orly’s an archaeologist, too. She doesn’t look like him, either, thank God.”
“Thank God is right.” The noncom eyed her. Israelis were subtle as a battering ram. “She’s okay with me, though. Can I give you my number, babe?”
“I’ve got plenty of toilet paper.” Orly put up with BS from nobody. The noncom laughed—he came from the If you strike out, keep swinging, ’cause you’ll hit something sooner or later school.
Driving back to Jerusalem, Eric asked, “What would you have done if he got mad?”
“Something.” It hadn’t happened, so she didn’t worry about it. Eric wished he could be like that. He wasn’t Woody Allen, either, but he came closer to angst than to a fedora.
There was a traffic jam up ahead as they neared the city. There shouldn’t have been, not at two P.M. “What’s up?” Eric said. “Looks like the 405 at rush hour.” He’d often wished he carried a rifle when he got stuck on the freeway. Now he had one, but opening up didn’t seem smart.
Orly leaned on the horn. She was a sabra, all right; half the people stuck on the road were honking. Eric’s head, which ached from the gunfire, hurt even more. He couldn’t close the window—the car had no AC. He turned on the radio to find out what was wrong. That proved he was from L.A. Nowhere was the urge to know why you were getting screwed stronger.
“—in Jerusalem,” an announcer said.
“Police hope to control the unrest, but some streets remain closed. Repeat—there is rioting in Jerusalem. Police hope to control the unrest soon.”
“Why now?” Eric didn’t like feeling paranoid, but in the Middle East you often couldn’t help it. Somebody really might be out to get you.
“Probably the Palestinians saying they don’t want Yoram digging,” Orly said.
Eric started to tell her she was more paranoid than he was. Paranoid or not, she was likely to be right. The Arabs were trying this instead of fighting. “They know how to get their message across,” he said.
“Maybe—but maybe not,” Orly answered. “We won’t put up with much nonsense in Jerusalem, not after what they did in Tel Aviv. If we’re looking for an excuse to crack down, they just handed us one.”
Again, that made sense. Eric wanted people to get along. He was an American; when he disagreed with someone, his impulse was to sit down and talk. Here, opening up with an assault rifle was more common. Both sides scoffed at negotiation. Beating each other over the head for a lifetime didn’t seem to have done anybody much good, though. When you wanted everything and couldn’t give up anything for fear of seeming to yield it all…you were screwed. And the Middle East was.
Traffic snailed forward. Eric sneaked glances at the temperature gauge. Several overheated cars made the jam worse, but the Nissan seemed okay.
A cop at a checkpoint looked inside. In the States, he would have had a cow about the Galil. Here, he just made sure Orly was an Israeli and Eric an American. He checked her service discharge papers. “You know what to do if you have to,” he said. “I hope you don’t.”
“How bad is it?” Orly asked.
“Not good,” the cop answered. “They brought extra troublemakers from the West Bank.” The Palestinians would have said from the rest of the West Bank. And they would have talked about holy warriors, not troublemakers. The cop didn’t give a shit. He went on, “We’ll squash ’em. You folks can pass on.” He had no doubts. Eric…did, not that that changed things.
Alpha and Omega Page 9
