Maybe. Eric hoped not.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Yoram said. “Stupid includes shooting people on your side—and not shooting the bastards on the other side if they’re shooting at you. We hope the Army has the Temple Mount sealed off. We hope, but we don’t know—and the Army’s been wrong before. People have tunneled here for more than three thousand years. Maybe the Muslims have some burrows the Army doesn’t know about. Let’s find out. Follow me.”
“Wait.” One of the other archaeologists—his name was Shmuel Something-or-other—pointed at the Galil Munir al-Nuwayhi was holding. “What’s he doing armed?”
“Same thing you are.” Yoram’s voice went harsh and flat.
Shmuel didn’t want to listen. “What if he shoots me in the back?”
“Fuck you,” Munir said evenly, in English.
Yoram nodded. “Yeah. Fuck you.” He used English, too. “You don’t like it, you can leave right now. Otherwise, you can shut up and soldier. Are you coming or not?”
Shmuel hesitated, but only for a moment. “Yeah, I’m coming.” The snake from the Tree of Knowledge had bitten him as hard as Munir.
Anybody who went first, showing no fear, could pull other people along by force of will. Force of chutzpah, Eric thought, which didn’t keep him from going into the tunnel under the Temple Mount with everybody else.
He flipped on the LED light in his hard hat. Without lights, they would have been blind as cave salamanders. After the outside world got behind him, he felt more weight on his shoulders than Atlas could have handled. Atlas just had to hold up the heavens. Eric felt the stifling, crushing, overwhelming weight of years and history. Jebusites, Jews, Babylonians, Persians, Alexander, Antigonids, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Jews again, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottoman Turks, British, Jews again…He knew he’d left some peoples out of his mental catalogue, but they pressed on him anyhow.
Jerusalem had been quiet the last couple of days. It didn’t feel like peace to Eric, not even the peace of exhaustion. It felt more like a little girl who was really, really mad at somebody saving up more spit.
The tunnel sloped steeply downward. Eric’s ears popped and hurt a little, the way they had the last time he did this. Maybe the weight wasn’t just the burden of history. Maybe part of it was increasing air pressure.
“Allahu akbar!” The cry almost made him piss his pants. A moment later, automatic-weapons fire broke out.
But the Arabic battle cry and the gunfire weren’t close. Yoram Louvish laughed softly. “Sometimes,” he remarked, “it’s better to send rumors through the souqs than soldiers.”
“What’s that mean?” Eric asked.
“Rumors say we’re going to dig in a different tunnel this time, on the east side of the Mount,” Yoram answered. “People who went in there wore what archaeologists usually wear….”
Eric looked at himself. He had on an old Pete Yorn T-shirt, battered Levi’s, and Nikes. He didn’t stand out a bit. Yoram’s T-shirt asked, in Hebrew, If all men were brothers, would you let one marry your sister? Eric wondered what that meant.
Louvish went on, “No matter what they look like, they’re really top Army people. So the Arabs who went over there to make trouble will find it instead.”
More gunfire erupted. “Those are Galils, all right,” said somebody behind Eric—Shmuel, he thought. He sounded delighted.
“How can we hear all the ruckus?” Orly asked. “The guns, maybe, but people yelling? There aren’t supposed to be any connections between that tunnel and this one.”
“No, there aren’t,” Yoram agreed. “But it’s like I said—nobody knows everything under the Temple Mount. If we already knew everything, we wouldn’t need to dig, would we?”
With the racket of combat echoing in their ears, they came to the wall of stones whose bosses proclaimed them to be more ancient than almost any masonry aboveground on the Temple Mount. All these years, all those peoples, pressed on Eric harder than ever. “How many battles have they fought here?” he wondered, staring at the stonework in the shifting beams of the archaeologists’ headlamps.
“Oh, a few.” Yoram sounded positively gay. “When something’s worth fighting over, people fight. And Jerusalem and the Temple Mount have been worth fighting over for a lonnng time. We didn’t come for that, though. We came to work.” He started chipping at the mortar between two stones with a mineralogist’s hammer.
Eric had one on his belt, too. He’d used it more often and in more ways than he could remember. Maybe the continuing gunfire in the distance was what made him think, Something like that killed Trotsky. An ice axe wasn’t the same critter—but pretty close.
As he reached for his hammer, he asked Yoram, “What do you think we’ll find on the other side of this wall?”
“Wonderful things,” the Israeli answered in deadpan English.
Everybody laughed. “Well, hush my mouth,” Eric said, also in English. Back in the 1920s, that was what Howard Carter replied when somebody asked him what he saw inside Tutankhamen’s tomb. Returning to Hebrew, Eric went on, “We’ll have to go some to beat Howard.”
“Yup,” Yoram agreed, and went back to attacking the wall. A chunk of the mortar he knocked loose clicked on the stone floor.
He doesn’t think small—that’s for sure, Eric thought. To him, that was all to the good. Most of the action in modern archaeology was sifting sand and dust through ever-finer screens to see what got left behind. You learned important things that way, but it was as exciting as Jimmy Carter’s sanctimonious speeches. If you didn’t dream of shining the first light in millennia on gold in an unplundered pharaoh’s tomb, weren’t you in the wrong racket?
If chipping mortar wasn’t the dullest thing this side of working at McDonald’s, Eric didn’t know what was. Two burly Israeli archaeologists attacked the masonry with short-handled sledgehammers. It made a hell of a racket. You couldn’t usually do stuff like this, because people from the Waqf would spit rivets—and bullets.
They were spitting rivets—and bullets—but not here. And after Tel Aviv, would things ever be usual? Eric doubted it.
He was bent into an uncomfortable position, which seemed a universal constant of archaeology. Nothing was ever at a convenient height or angle. You had to bend or stretch or twist, or else reach farther than your arms were designed for.
If they’d brought along a jackhammer, the work would have gone faster. Running a compressed-air line under the Temple Mount might’ve given the Waqf a wee hint about where the archaeologists would dig, though. And it would’ve torn up lots of interesting evidence. But damn! It would have saved work.
“Hold on,” Yoram said presently. “Let’s get some pictures.”
He leaned a meter stick against the wall to give scale. It was a special model available only at archaeologists’ secret supply shops, with alternating centimeters painted white and black. The camera had better optics than a phone and, with a thirty-two-gig memory card, held a slew of photos. Photography had come a long way since Howard Carter’s time.
While the flash brought milliseconds of daylight to the tunnel, Eric twisted, working kinks from his arms and shoulders. He’d feel like an old man tomorrow. Some of the Israelis were doing the same. That made him happier—he didn’t want to look like a flabby American to them.
He shone his headlamp onto the palms of his hands. “Blisters?” Orly asked.
“I’m getting there,” he answered. “How about you?”
“The same,” she said. “If I wanted pick-and-shovel work, I could have joined a road crew. They’re honest about what you’re getting into.”
“Yeah.” Eric swigged from a plastic water bottle. It wasn’t so hot down here as it was in the sunshine, but he’d worked up a sweat.
“That should do it.” Yoram stowed the camera. “Back
to it, khaverim.”
As people started chipping and pounding again, Munir al-Nuwayhi said, “You only call us friends when you want something from us.”
Yoram nodded. “This surprises you because…?” Everybody laughed again, Eric included. When you looked at it that way, it wasn’t man bites dog.
Whack, whack, whack. Sooner or later, they’d pry out a block or two. And then? Somebody would take off his hard hat and use the lamp to peer into whatever the wall had hidden for the past 2,600-odd years. And what would that be? Eric guessed it would be an empty chamber, as exciting as Geraldo’s tour of Al Capone’s cellar.
When he said so, Orly shook her head. “I think you’re wrong. They wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to build a wall to hide nothing.”
“Maybe,” Eric said. “Bet you a shekel, though. Hell, bet you ten.” The extravagant life of an archaeologist. Almost a three-buck bet!
“You’re on.” She stuck out her hand. They shook. The clasp hurt—Eric’s blisters were developing nicely. Orly winced, too, so hers also had to be coming along.
A soldier brought down the Israeli equivalent of MREs. They were kosher, which didn’t keep them from being as bad as the U.S. versions. Eric inhaled his anyhow. Sometimes quantity counted more than quality.
A stone grated when Yoram prodded it. The archaeologists cheered…wearily. Little by little, Yoram wiggled it out. Eric helped grab it and ease it to the ground. The square black hole in the wall reminded him of a missing front tooth.
The two men looked at each other. Eric stepped back and waved at the hole. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s your baby.”
“Thanks.” Yoram stooped so he could look in. He gasped. He stiffened. One hand went up to clutch at his chest as he staggered back. Orly caught him, or he would have fetched up against the tunnel’s far wall. “My God!” he said. “I hoped, but I never really thought, I never really dreamt—”
Half the people down there asked, “Are you okay?” The other half asked, “What?”
“It’s—” Yoram fought for breath, and to get the words out: “It’s—the Ark!”
Pandemonium. In the midst of it, Orly said, “Pay me!”
Eric scarcely heard her. He stood next closest to the hole, which meant he got the second look. As he bent to peer in, he wondered whether Yoram was kidding. Would he start laughing because he’d fooled his colleagues? Would they kill him afterwards?
But no. There it was, dazzling in the headlamp’s beam. It looked a lot like the museum model. Not quite, though: the cherubim weren’t the same. They looked more Mesopotamian, more primitive—and more menacing. There was one other difference, too, though Eric needed a moment to notice it. The Ark floated two or three inches above the floor of the chamber.
From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was thirty-five miles. As the rented car that held Gabriela and Brandon rolled southeast along Israel’s Highway 1, she kept seeing 100 on the speedometer and wondering why they weren’t there yet. Then she remembered those were kilometers an hour, not miles. They were doing 60.
And then they were doing zero. Israel was a little country with big traffic jams. Given the terrifying way everybody drove, it was no wonder there were accidents all the time.
From the Nissan’s cramped back seat, Brandon asked the driver, “Can we get off the highway and use side roads?”
“We could maybe try,” the local said. “But they’re narrow, and plenty of other people will try them, too. Chances are we’ll do just as well sticking with 1.”
“You know best,” Gabriela said, thinking I hope. “Flying here for the red heifer has really worked out well for us.”
“Glad you think so.” He inflated his chest like a puffer fish; modest, he was not. “We’ve been on the spot for two of the biggest stories in years.”
The driver gave Gabriela a look—not come-hither, but disgusted scorn. She would have bet he’d’ve done the same thing at full speed. “You came to Eretz Yisrael for that stupid cow?” the Israeli asked.
“That’s right,” Gabriela said. “Lots of Americans are interested in it.”
“Jerks,” the driver declared.
“You say that even after they found the Ark?” Brandon answered. “Doesn’t it seem like the pieces in Somebody’s plan are fitting together?”
“Who knows what they found?” the driver said. “Most likely, nothing. There are stories about big waddayacallems—finds in archaeology—every week. They all turn out to be shit.”
He was right, but Gabriela cared very little and knew Brandon cared even less. If there was enough to the Ark story to get Gabriela and Brandon a special, she’d be happy. And if the guys with the thick glasses decided later that it wasn’t the Ark from the First Temple, she wouldn’t get upset. Retractions never caught up with stories.
“You gotta know it’s bogus,” the Israeli went on. “All the talk about how it’s floating above the ground. How’s it gonna do that?”
“Beats me.” Brandon Nesbitt sounded positively cheerful. “But I want to check it out. How cool would it be if it was true?”
“I’ve seen Raiders, too,” the driver said. “Doesn’t mean I believe crap like that.”
Gabriela thought he had a point, but Brandon said, “Suppose it does turn out to be true. What would you think then?”
The Israeli jerked a thumb back at him. “Like you said, man, beats me. I’ll worry about it when it happens.”
When Americans thought about Israelis, they thought about pious Jews. But more Israeli Jews were secular like this guy than Orthodox like Chaim Avigad and the others raising and cherishing Rosie the red heifer…till they cut her throat.
“If it is true, will that make you start believing?” Gabriela asked.
“Maybe.” The driver sounded as if he didn’t want to admit it. “I’ve got frum cousins. They’re welcome to all that. If God wants to step in now, why didn’t He do it when the Nazis were shoving people into gas chambers?”
People had been asking that since 1945. To Gabriela, there was no good answer. Well, maybe one: there was no God, which made it a stupid question. She wasn’t a very observant Catholic, but she didn’t want to believe that. If this was the Ark, though, and if it was doing something science couldn’t explain, then the possible good answer wasn’t any more. Which left…?
Nothing Gabriela could think of. Except a God with a sick sense of humor. So odds were the Ark wasn’t doing anything miraculous. If it was…If it is, we’ll get it on TV, she thought.
They finally crawled past the wreck, which was as nasty as anything on the New Jersey Turnpike or the 405 in L.A. As soon as they got by it, the driver put the pedal to the metal.
The Sheraton Plaza in Jerusalem was…a Sheraton. Gabriela knew she could have got the same perfect, calibrated comfort in any of several hundred cities around the world. As the driver extracted luggage from the trunk, Brandon said, “Gotta film the model of old-time Jerusalem and the Temple at the Israel Museum.”
“It’s the wrong Temple, though,” the driver said. “It’s Herod’s, the one where Jesus came. The Ark was in the First Temple, and disappeared before Nebuchadnezzar captured it.” He might be secular, but he knew his onions.
Gabriela knew hers, too. “Nobody who watches American TV will care one bit. It’s a Temple—that’s all they’ll care about.”
“You should get it right.” The driver proved he’d never worked in television.
“Does anybody have a model of the First Temple?” Brandon asked.
“I don’t think there is one,” the driver said. “Herod’s is a lot fancier.”
“Okay. The visuals are what matter in our business.” Brandon looked up and up at the glass front of the high-rise hotel. “I guess this will be good enough.”
“It’ll be fine,” Gabriela said quickly. How could you go seriously wrong at a Sheraton? She
also had the sense to understand when she was well off. She’d slept rolled in a blanket between American and Afghan soldiers. The Yanks worried more about their alleged allies than they did about the mujahidin they were fighting. Mujahidin were enemies all the time, while government troops might open up without warning.
“You’re a trouper, Gabriela,” Brandon said. Sarcasm? She sent him a sharp look, but his expression was too bland to let her read anything from it.
“Thanks. You, too,” she said, remembering her abuela’s advice: always repay one compliment with another, so you left the other person owing you. She went on, “After we check in, I’m going to go straight up to my room and start calling archaeologists.”
* * *
—
Eric had a sleeping bag on the floor of the tunnel leading to the Ark. Orly had another, a couple of feet away. Neither bag was big enough for two, and there was no privacy anyway—they weren’t the only people who wouldn’t leave. Munir was still there, either because he wanted to see the Ark come forth or to give the Muslim world a qualified observer.
Israeli soldiers had brought down a Porta-Potty. The air was getting high, but nobody complained. Eric needed a shower, too. So did everybody else. But they’d all been on digs where showers were scarce. He’d survive. If Orly started holding her nose…he’d worry about it.
No more blocks had come out of the wall since removing the first showed what lay beyond. Yoram was playing it as cool as liquid oxygen. Fair enough, when what lay beyond the wall was as explosive as LOX.
“From now on, we do nothing we don’t photograph or video,” Yoram declared. “Nobody will say we planted the Ark or any of the other bullshit you can expect. We won’t let them or give them any excuse.” He stuck out his chin, looking more like the combat commander he’d been than the scholar he was.
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