“We need a new Saladin,” Jamal Ashrawi said, “to sweep them into the sea the way he beat the Crusaders so long ago.”
“We need him, but where is he?” Ibrahim asked. “We had such hopes for Arafat….” He left it there. Jamal Ashrawi had been Arafat’s creature once. But the old PLO warhorse was years dead, Palestine split, and the Jews strong as ever.
“God will find another man, or make one. He is God,” Ashrawi said.
“May you be right. May He hear our prayers,” Haji Ibrahim said. “But I would be easier if you could tell me how the Ark floats.”
“I can,” the Grand Mufti said. “By trick photography, that’s how.”
“May you be right,” Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Rahman repeated. “But I wish Kupferman did not sound so sure.” The rabbi reminded him of a mullah who’d memorized the Qur’an. He asked, “What do we do if…if this turns out not to be true?” He’d said it.
“We had two shahidin, two martyrs, and look what they did to the Jews’ city,” Haji Jamal answered. “If we need more, God will provide them.”
Ibrahim felt better; that was plainly true. Young men who’d martyr themselves for eternity in Paradise were never scarce among the Palestinians. Young women as willing were less scarce than they had been, if rarer than men.
“We should beat them without martyrs,” he said. “Millions of Arabs against a handful of Jews?”
“We can’t all get into the fight,” Jamal Ashrawi replied. “The Israelis have Western weapons, and Satan behind them. Only God’s power is stronger than Satan’s.”
“But surely the Ark isn’t a thing of Satan’s,” Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Rahman said.
Haji Jamal shrugged. “It is what it is. But whatever the Jews touch, nothing good is likely to come from it. This struggle is just beginning!”
“May you be right,” Haji Ibrahim said once more.
Yitzhak Avigad scowled across the desk at Shlomo Kupferman. “You’ve seen it?” Yitzhak demanded.
“Officially, no,” the rabbi answered. “I’m not supposed to go down there. It would provoke the Arabs, God forbid.” He rolled his eyes. “But Sh. Nechshat, the archaeologist, he’s been there. A fairly sound man, Professor Nechshat.”
“Heh.” Yitzhak grudged the laugh. Kupferman’s alias was an open secret to people who wanted the Third Temple to rise. “What does the professor think?”
“That it is the Ark of the Covenant.” Rabbi Kupferman’s voice went soft. “Louvish is a very sound man, but with something like that you have to see for yourself before you believe it’s true. I’ve seen—and I believe.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear.” Yitzhak came to the point: “When do we deal with the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque? When do we start building?”
“If it were up to me, we would’ve done that when we took the Temple Mount in the Six-Day War,” Kupferman answered. “But it’s not. It’s up to the government. They have soldiers and tanks around the Mount to keep the Arabs away—and our people, too.”
“What do those idiots want?” Yitzhak made a fist. “I hate to wait till after the election. After what the Arabs did to Tel Aviv, they’ve got no business pissing and moaning if we do what we need to on the Temple Mount.”
“They will anyway. They’re Arabs.” Kupferman didn’t hide his contempt.
Neither did Yitzhak. “Sure. But we don’t have to pay attention to them any more because of Tel Aviv. And we’ve got the Ark! Twenty-five hundred years gone, and we found it! So what’s the government waiting for with the Temple? An engraved invitation from On High, brought down by an angel?”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Kupferman said in English. Grimly amused, Yitzhak nodded. In Hebrew again, the rabbi went on, “I’ll tell you what. They’re waiting for the votes to get counted. Till they’re sure which way the wind blows, nothing important will happen.”
Yitzhak snorted. “Don’t they know? If they don’t, they have to be blind. From now on, we take care of ourselves, and the hell with the rest of the world…mm, except America.” Israel couldn’t last a year without U.S. backing. Nobody liked to talk or think about it, but everybody knew it.
“America isn’t the problem,” Kupferman said. Yitzhak Avigad nodded. The problem was Israeli pols who couldn’t see how much things had changed the past few weeks. “After the votes get counted, lots of people here will lose their cushy places. Mark my words. And wait till you see what the Pious Bloc does!”
A certain secular gleam lit his features. He couldn’t imagine himself as Prime Minister…could he? If there was a new Cabinet, though, he was bound to have one ministry or another.
“Alevai!” Yitzhak liked that idea. Once the Ark came up from under the Temple Mount, even the most irreligious Israelis would have to think hard about what being a Jew meant.
“Alevai omayn,” Kupferman agreed. “We have to believe in our cause as strongly as the Arabs do, don’t we? If they believe and we don’t, won’t they win in the end? That’s my biggest fear.”
“Yes.” Yitzhak’s mouth tightened. You could call suicide bombers fanatics. But they were brave fanatics, and the other side had an unending supply of them, and of other people who would do anything to defeat Israel.
His thoughts must have shown on his face, for Kupferman said, “Don’t despair. We have believers, too. Would you be talking with me if we didn’t? Would your nephew be a boy raised in ritual purity—and raised to understand why he was—if we didn’t?”
“Well…no.” Looking at it that way made Yitzhak feel better. “Ask you something else, Rabbi?”
“Of course.” Kupferman made you feel he had the answers if anybody did. That was just what Yitzhak was looking for.
“Why does the Ark float?” he blurted.
“I haven’t the faintest idea.” The rabbi’s smile was startlingly sweet. “If you need to know something like that, ask God—I said the same thing to that Gabriela woman. Maybe He’ll tell you. He hasn’t told me yet—but I don’t worry about it. It floats because He wants it to float. But that isn’t what you wanted to hear, is it?”
“I hoped for something a little more, uh, detailed,” Yitzhak admitted. Kupferman spread his hands—he had no more to give.
He knows the answer if anybody does, Yitzhak thought again. What could you do when nobody knew the answers? You could ask God. The rabbi was right. Yitzhak intended to do it. He didn’t know what kind of answer he’d get from the Lord, either.
* * *
—
Eric Katz blinked and wished for the sunglasses he wore aboveground. Television lights turned the tunnel under the Temple Mount brighter than daylight. Looking into a spot was like looking at…
He shook his head. The first thing that sprang to mind was like looking at an atomic bomb. He knew a dirty bomb wasn’t the same as a real nuke. It was bad enough, though.
They were working like madmen to decontaminate downtown Tel Aviv. How long would that take? How much would people trust it after the authorities said it was done? Anyone who’d been within a hundred miles of Tel Aviv and got diagnosed with cancer—or even housemaid’s knee—would blame the dirty bomb for it. How could you expect somebody in a mess like that to do anything different?
A voice floated down the tunnel: “May I please come observe the removal of the Ark?”
“When was the last time Brandon Nesbitt said please?” Orly asked, amusement in her eyes.
“The last time somebody told him no and made it stick,” Eric answered. “Maybe 2009.”
“No,” Yoram Louvish yelled up toward the tunnel mouth. “You’re getting the feed like CNN and Fox and the BBC and Gethsemane and our own TV channels. Nobody has a reporter down here, so you’re staying where you are, too.”
“Gabriela and I came to Israel to talk to the people who’ve got the red heifer,” Brandon said plaintively.
“This ties in so well!”
“No, it doesn’t,” Orly said. “That’s religion. This is archaeology.” But she couldn’t make that sound convincing, even to herself. “This is religious archaeology,” she amended.
“You bet,” Eric agreed. “How many evangelicals are watching the Gethsemane Network now? And how many who aren’t are watching Fox instead? If this were an ordinary dig and we found something spectacular, we’d get one minute on the news and maybe a National Geographic documentary two years from now. But we’re live all over the world.”
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about the First Commandment or about letting it affect how he behaved. If you were only a wall away from the Ark of the Covenant, though, and if the Ark was doing things science couldn’t explain, who could blame you if you reexamined your options?
And what else did Exodus say before the Decalogue? For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
Eric hadn’t killed anybody. He’d—mostly—honored his father and mother. He hadn’t stolen (much) or committed adultery (more than a couple of times). He hadn’t coveted his neighbor’s ass. His neighbor’s wife’s ass…That was how the adultery happened. He was a typical upper-middle-class twenty-first-century guy.
A typical upper-middle-class twenty-first-century guy, suddenly remembering that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of his ancestors in Whom he halfheartedly believed, was Not Amused to a degree that made Queen Victoria seem giddy by comparison.
Not the most reassuring thought he’d had. And that visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation…Not just his own bad karma, but his folks’, too. Brrr!
Yoram Louvish coughed. Everybody’s eyes swung his way. He had that knack. Maybe it came from commanding troops. Maybe he got to command troops because people paid attention to him. The chicken or the egg? Eric didn’t know. He knew he looked toward Yoram, too. So did the camera.
“We’re ready to get down to business now.” Yoram used English. A lot of Israelis understood it. There’d be translators for those who didn’t.
Yoram needed a shave. He hadn’t combed his hair for a few days. The TV lights reflected from his glasses. He looked as much like Indy as a warthog looked like Miss July. He had presence all the same.
“We’re doing things differently here,” he said into the camera. “Most of the time, we’d chip through this wall one stone at a time.” Nobody’d straightened his teeth, which made his grin more disarming. “Because we’ve got something interesting on the other side, we’ll take direct action instead.”
He slipped on goggles that fit over his specs. Another archaeologist lugged up a chainsaw with ’roid rage. Orly said it reminded her of a gasoline-powered sawfish. How does she do that? Eric wondered. It’s my language…isn’t it?
“Thanks to Dov Ben Zakkai of Ben Zakkai Quarrying for lending us the fancy saw,” Yoram said, which might bring Mr. Ben Zakkai extra business. The archaeologist grinned again. “The quarrymen who cut these stones before the Babylonian invasion would be jealous of how easy it makes things.”
“Jealous, my ass,” Orly whispered. “The noise that mamzer makes would scare anybody way back when shitless.”
“It scares me shitless,” Eric said, also quietly. He didn’t like regular chainsaws. This thing? It was made for cutting the golden limestone that helped Jerusalem look so marvelous in the early morning and late afternoon. If an arm or leg got in the way, the saw wouldn’t notice.
Yoram put on a surgical mask, then pushed the red starter button. The stonecutting saw roared to life. Eric longed for ear plugs, the way he would have at a concert. It wouldn’t be anything on TV, though—they’d smooth it out. Not even gunfire was loud on TV.
Fumes made him cough. It was like getting stuck behind a jalopy on the freeway in Friday-afternoon rush hour. He didn’t head for fresh air, though.
The noise redoubled when the blade bit into a stone just below the one Eric and Yoram had removed. It reminded Eric of the noise the Jolly Green Giant’s dentist’s drill would make during a root canal. He set his teeth—carefully—and tried not to think about dentistry or the racket.
Dust and grit spurted. Yoram had to be glad for that mask. The saw had a built-in water dribbler to cool it. Without that, the teeth would have glowed red in nothing flat.
Flying grit stung Eric’s forehead. Even with goggles and mask, he wouldn’t have wanted to be as close to the action as Yoram. But the Israeli had faced worse things flying through the air than little chunks of stone.
He took the cut down to ground level. When he killed the motor, silence slammed down. Looking like a demented doctor, he smiled into the camera. “One down,” he said. “I’m not used to working this fast. None of us are.”
Most of the time, they would have worried about what they might miss. It would have been chip, chip, pick, pick. It would have taken days or weeks. Banging straight ahead had its charms.
Gabriela and Brandon weren’t the only ones waiting at the top of the tunnel. Unlike the broadcasters, Shlomo Kupferman got to come down. Eric didn’t like him for hell. That didn’t mean he’d tell Kupferman to get lost. Why shouldn’t a rabbi come to look at the Ark? And Kupferman, alias Nechshat, was an archaeologist, too.
“Shalom,” Yoram called cheerfully. Several other Israeli archaeologists nodded to the rabbi. The rest—Orly among them—pretended he wasn’t there. Eric followed their lead.
Munir al-Nuwayhi didn’t look or act any different from his colleagues. They’d come to take him for granted. Shlomo Kupferman made a point of ignoring him. Munir didn’t seem to mind.
Eric more than half wished the Ark had stayed undiscovered. It would pour gasoline over a religious situation already inflammable. So many Muslims denied the Temple Mount had ever had anything to do with Jews. How could they keep doing that after the chief artifact of the First Temple came up from under it?
He saw a couple of ways. They could call it a lie and a trick. Preventing that was one reason everything that happened was getting filmed. Or they could try to destroy the Ark once it came up. Anything was possible.
“Hello, all,” Kupferman said, pretending not to see that half the archaeologists wanted nothing to do with him. “I want to say mazel tov! for your work here. What you’ve found confirms the truth of the Holy Scriptures. You will help the Temple rise again. I hope you are proud. I know God is proud of you.”
How do you know? Did you ask Him? Did He send you a text? The fight between pious and secular Jews was coming, too. Eric could see it as plainly as he could see the one between Jews and Muslims. But it would have to wait its turn.
Yoram got a drill. More grit flew as he bored a hole in the wall. He screwed in a stout metal peg with a ring on the unthreaded end. Then he said, “Now back to peace and quiet,” and fired up the stonecutting saw.
The noise was as horrible as it had been before. Maybe it was worse—this time, Yoram didn’t slice straight down. He carved out a gentle curve, so the blade was traveling almost horizontally when it got down to the tunnel floor. It ground through sandstone and ancient mortar toward the cut he’d made before.
A sharp snick! announced that the new cut met the old. Yoram turned off the saw. Into the sudden silence that followed, he said, “Now we’re in business.”
He threaded a nylon rope through the eyebolt, then waved Eric forward. “Me?” Eric said in surprise.
Yoram nodded. “Why not? We got the first block out of the way. Only fair we should bring down the rest. Besides, you’re a big, strong guy.”
“Yeah, right.” Eric was fairly tall. Till now, nobody’d accused him of b
eing strong. There were good reasons for that, too. But he couldn’t resist being part of history.
Yoram shooed the other archaeologists and camera crew away from the space in front of the wall. That made excellent sense. Eric wouldn’t have wanted those blocks crashing down on him. He stood to one side, Yoram to the other.
“Ready?” the Israeli asked.
“I guess,” Eric answered.
“Okay. On three, pull like anything. One…Two…Now!”
It wasn’t three, but Eric pulled anyway. He wondered if the eyebolt would pop out, but Yoram had seated it well. It took the strain they put on it. The chunk of wall Yoram had sliced through stood…swayed a little…swayed more…and crashed forward down onto the floor of the tunnel.
The ground shook under Eric’s New Balances. With the strain off, he staggered. He might have fallen if Orly hadn’t caught him. “Thanks,” he said.
“Any time—you big, strong guy.” She winked. Was that love or mockery or some of each? He feared the best he could hope for was the last.
Coughing from the dust of ages the falling masonry kicked up saved him from needing a snappy comeback. And Yoram hadn’t staggered—unlike Eric, he was braced for the wall to come tumbling down. Him and Joshua, Eric thought.
“Shine your lights in there,” Yoram told the camera crew. “Now the rest of the world can see what we’ve got.”
The rest of the world had to wait. Eric and Orly and the other archaeologists crowded forward for their own looks. They shoved and jostled. Eric hadn’t been in a scrum like that since a pickup football game before his doctoral orals.
“Move it!” yelled the guys handling the lights. “Out of the way!”
Nobody wanted to. Not much light got through between the people, but enough to glint off gold. This was more dramatic than peering through an opening one building stone wide by the light of a single headlamp. Eric stared.
Alpha and Omega Page 13
