Yitzhak shouted. He wasn’t the only one. The apartment block rocked with whoops and pounding feet. More gunfire split the night.
Kupferman wasn’t at the headquarters of the Pious Bloc. He was still supervising the excavations. That didn’t stop TV from sending his image around the country. “We’ve been waiting two thousand years to rebuild the Temple,” he said, his eyes flashing. “We won’t wait any more.”
Yitzhak yelled even louder. He jumped up and down. The guy who lived above him was jumping up and down, too, sending dust and acoustic cottage cheese floating onto the sofa and into his hair.
Then the television shifted to Labor headquarters. The mood there was grim. Labor supporters might have been sitting shiva after their hopes died. Labor ran Israel for more than a generation after independence, and still seemed amazed it didn’t any more. The party couldn’t have expected to do well. But what Labor faced was a disaster.
A cruel reporter thrust a microphone in the Labor leader’s face. “What are your plans now?” he asked.
Had things gone differently, the politician would have been Prime Minister. Now he looked like a man whose puppy had just been run over by a Merkava tank. “We have to reevaluate our message,” he said glumly, and added, “And we will be a voice of reason in the new Knesset. Someone has to.”
Yitzhak sent the screen an obscene gesture. “Cus ummak!” he shouted. Arabic had wonderful curses in it. Yelling Your mother’s cunt! at somebody you despised had to make you feel better.
The results show cut to the headquarters of the biggest Israeli Arab party. A plump man with glasses spoke guttural Hebrew: “If anyone interferes with the Haram al-Sharif, there will be trouble. I do not intend to cause trouble. But it will come. This shrine is holy to Muslims. They will let it be profaned.”
“Cus ummak!” Yitzhak yelled again. He wasn’t the only one shouting at the screen. The Arabs had held the Temple Mount more than 1,300 years. Wasn’t it time to let the Jews have another turn, especially since the Ark had shown itself at last?
The reporter asked the Israeli Arab politician that question. The man shrugged sadly. “You will do whatever you do,” he said. “You will, and so will the world’s Muslims. They are many and strong. If you go out of your way to make them hate you, they will avenge. Look what happened when Charlie Hebdo lampooned the Prophet, peace be upon him.”
“Fool!” Yitzhak said, and cursed him again.
* * *
—
Orly sat on a blanket under the Temple Mount. They had a TV there turned to the election results. She looked up every so often and shook her head, as you would when you passed an accident so horrible, it drew your eye whether you wanted it to or not. She followed Labor, and Labor was getting trounced.
Eric put his arm around her. She sat rigid, then slumped against him. She needed whatever comfort she could find. “I knew it would be bad,” she said sotfly, “but not this bad.”
More Israeli archaeologists there belonged to some party on the other side. They were having a fine time. Eric swigged from a bottle of licorice-flavored lightning when it came his way. Orly drank, too, to numb the pain. So did Munir al-Nuwayhi. He might be a secular Muslim, but he knew the triumph of the Israeli religious right wasn’t good news for his people.
“I don’t think I want to live here any more,” Orly said. “This isn’t the country I grew up in.” Democrats in the States said the same thing as the Republicans kept hold of the White House.
“The world doesn’t end. You just wish it could.” Eric spoke from experience.
Orly looked toward the Ark, still shining and still floating. “Are you sure?” she asked.
Suddenly, Eric wasn’t sure. The Ark broke too many rules. “You can always come back to California with me,” he said.
“Live in Los Angeles?” Orly sounded as if he’d asked her for something kinky she didn’t much fancy. Then she sighed. “Maybe. You have some sane people there.”
That had to be one of the few times anybody had leveled such an accusation against L.A. Eric defended his home town: “We do, but we keep them locked up.”
His girlfriend’s smile didn’t last long. “The crazies here are running the asylum. Those people at the mouth of the tunnel…”
“You mean Brandon? He’s pretty bad.”
“Not him. He’s only an…ordinary troublemaker. But the Levites, and those costumes out of the museum…They want to turn Israel into Iran.” She whispered in his ear, which would have been sexy if she hadn’t said, “So does Kupferman.”
The same thought had crossed Eric’s mind. “It won’t be that bad,” he said.
“No. It’ll be worse,” Orly predicted.
Eric would have told her she was crazy, but Yoram Louvish said, “We don’t have to blow up the Dome of the Rock. If we move it someplace, that should keep the Arabs happy.”
“There you go. Better than they deserve, too,” another Israeli archaeologist said. In his journal articles, he was pure scholarly detachment. When detachment bumped into real life…he wasn’t.
“It would not be a good idea,” Munir said—in Hebrew, one of the few times Eric had heard him use the Jews’ language.
“Yeah, you’d say that, wouldn’t you?” the other archaeologist snapped. He got to his feet, hands bunching into fists. So did Munir.
“Knock it off, both of you!” Yoram had the command bark in his voice again. He stepped between the two angry men. “We’re all working here together, and we’re going to keep on doing that. You hear? You have trouble with anybody, come to me. Taking care of trouble is my job, not yours.” The Israeli Jew and Munir both slowly settled back onto their haunches. Whatever leadership took, Yoram had it and then some.
“You see?” Orly said. Eric didn’t answer. He saw trouble ahead, the same way Munir al-Nuwayhi did. But this was the Middle East. When didn’t you?
Yoram didn’t. He went on, “We’ll move the Dome to the Arab quarter or somewhere,” he said. “Once they get used to it, they won’t care.”
“There you go,” the other archaeologist repeated, as if it were that simple.
“No,” Munir said, in English, and not another word.
That was too much for Eric, too. “They’ll care,” he said. “It’s the Temple Mount. When somebody does something up there, everybody cares.”
Yoram looked at him. “It’s not your worry,” he said, perhaps more gently than he felt. “It’s not your country, your land. This is a dig for you. Here’s something you can dig or not—it’s more than a dig for us. This is our life.”
“There you go.” That other Israeli might have had a one-phrase sound chip.
“It’s also my land, my life.” Munir stuck to English, and to holding himself in as best he can. That was what you did when you were a minority working in the majority’s bailiwick—if you wanted to keep working there, anyhow.
Eric’s ears heated. As an American, he could say things Munir couldn’t, and he did: “Maybe I see the big picture better than you—I’m not in the middle of it.”
“He’s right,” Orly said.
Yoram looked through her. He had some Middle Eastern machismo: women were fine for decoration, but not for taking seriously. “Of course you say that,” he told her. “It’s what he says.”
“I belonged to Labor before I met him,” Orly retorted.
“The more fool you,” Yoram said. Orly said something that would have curled Hammurabi’s beard. Yoram laughed. “And I love you, sweetie,” he answered.
“We can’t stop them,” Munir said gloomily.
“I noticed, thanks.” Eric stated the obvious: “They have the bit between their teeth, and they’ll run.”
Orly shook her head. “One thing wrong—you’re mistaking a horse’s ass for the whole horse.” She won the last word, but not, he feared, the argument.
—
“They have—the Ark of the Covenant! They’ll enshrine it in the rebuilt Temple.” Lester Stark wasn’t preaching a sermon. He didn’t have millions hanging on his every word. He was at home in bed, reading for a while before he went to sleep.
“It’s nothing you haven’t talked about for years.” His wife was reading, too: a Tony Hillerman mystery on her Kindle.
“I know.” Lester set the copy of Edersheim in his lap. In the 1870s, the author had put together everything known about the Temple and its services during Christ’s time. Lester had read it before, but now he felt he needed to grasp what was in it. “You can see the day coming closer. I think it may happen in our lifetimes.”
Rhonda also put down her device. She smiled from the other twin bed. “That would be wonderful,” she said. “But even if it doesn’t work that way, we’ll be resurrected, won’t we?”
“Of course,” he answered. “Still, to know the Rapture in the flesh…”
He knew the look she gave him. They’d both known rapture in the flesh many times, as ordinary human beings could if they found a partner they loved and who loved them back. It wasn’t the same. He would have been shocked if she’d suggested it was. She knew better. Nothing could match going to heaven, not even that. But it was also special in its own way.
After a moment, Rhonda asked, “Will you go to Israel, to be there when it happens?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I get tired of secular reporters explaining things they don’t believe in or understand. Gabriela Sandoval and Brandon Nesbitt…” He shook his head. “Anyone would handle it better than they do.”
“Then you should go,” Rhonda said.
“Not yet.” Lester shook his head again. “When the Israelis rebuild the Temple, maybe. If I went now, I might have to stay for years. I don’t want to. I have too many things to tend to here.”
“It may happen faster than you think,” his wife said. “Look what’s already happened.” She picked up the Kindle again, and went back to the Arizona Navajo reservation.
Stark returned to nineteenth-century prose on long-vanished Jerusalem. Nothing in the Middle East disappeared forever. Jerusalem was again the capital of a Jewish state. Hebrew was again the language of the Holy Land, though even in Jesus’ time Aramaic had ousted it there—and pockets of Aramaic-speakers persisted now in Lebanon and Syria. The few hundred Samaritans who survived and clung to their faith still offered sacrifice on Mount Gerezim, near Nablus in Palestinian territory. They still thought they were the true children of Israel, too.
And who could tell them they were wrong? History had passed them by, but maybe their hour would come ’round at last. Stranger things were happening.
Stark shivered, there in the air-conditioned bedroom. The Yeats poem was bad doctrine, but it made the razor-cut hair on his neck stand up whenever he read or thought about it.
What rough beast slouched toward Bethlehem to be born now? This might not be the Second Coming, but the birth of the Antichrist, of the Tribulation, of troubles worse than any the world had known. God had foretold it, but people hadn’t listened. A lot still didn’t.
No one had any guarantee that the Antichrist’s blandishments wouldn’t take him in. That means me, too. I have no guarantee, Stark thought. He shivered again, this time in earnest.
* * *
—
Haji Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Rahman should have despised cell phones. They came from the West, from Kafirstan—the land of disbelief. But they were useful. They could trigger bombs, as U.S. soldiers had learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they could keep a running man in touch with his allies.
“You cannot let them profane the Noble Sanctuary. We cannot let them profane it.” The man he was talking to spoke elegant Arabic with a slight Iranian accent.
“I can’t stop them,” Ibrahim said. “They’re after the Grand Mufti and me. They blame us for the uprising in Jerusalem.” The Israelis had excellent reasons, too. At least the two of them had separated, so Ibrahim didn’t have to listen to the Grand Mufti any more.
“If they tamper with our holy site, they will pay,” the other man said. “We have ways to make them. They need to remember that. Make it plain to them. We shall do the same.”
“Right,” the head of the Waqf said. What did the Shiite expect him to do? Write a warning in fiery letters with his nose? The Islamic Republic could handle warnings…couldn’t it?
“All Muslims, regardless of creed, stand together against Jews,” the ayatollah said. “When we show this solidarity, they’ll retreat like the cowards they are.”
Iran was hundreds of kilometers away. It had never had to deal with the Zionists up close. “They are evil, yes,” Haji Ibrahim said. “But they are not cowards, and don’t retreat unless they see some advantage.”
“Do you want our backing?” the other man asked. “You have to show you deserve it.”
You have to show you are our puppet. Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Rahman had no trouble following. You didn’t get something for nothing from an Iranian. Iran’s armies had fought Islam’s in early days. The Iranians still resented losing. Even after accepting the true faith, they’d changed it.
But they had oil money—more than anyone but the Saudis—and missiles, and maybe bombs bigger and stronger than the one in Tel Aviv. “I will do as you say,” Ibrahim answered. “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.”
“And Ali is the Friend of God,” the Iranian finished. The addition to the shahada, the profession of faith, irked Ibrahim. He couldn’t say anything, not if he wanted this man’s help.
He did say, “I’d better go. The Jews may be tracing this call. Peace be unto you.”
“And to you also peace.” The farewell was so ingrained, neither thought anything of wishing each other peace after a talk full of violence.
Ibrahim turned off the phone. It was a burner, bought in a souq. The Israelis would find it—and him—harder to track…he hoped.
At least Iran cared. Nice somebody did. Everyone else had forgotten Jerusalem and the Palestinian cause. Egypt and Jordan kept relations with the Zionist entity. With Syria in ruins, Lebanon was going mad. Hezbollah was too busy closer to home to strike hard because of the desecration of the Noble Sanctuary.
Up to me, Haji Ibrahim thought. And to the Grand Mufti, he added, grudgingly.
A knock. The code was right—one, three, one. He opened up. “You’ve got to get out!” someone yelled in his face. “Zionist security forces are coming!”
Ibrahim said something foul. He scrambled out the escape door and slammed and barred it behind him. He was sick of running through black tunnels with hounds baying after him. But he didn’t want them catching him, either.
As he ran, thumps turned to thuds behind him. They were breaking down the door. It was stout; that would take a while. If a driver waited at the other end of the tunnel…
If one didn’t, he could scramble through this ancient maze and find another hideout. If the Israelis came after him, they’d have a riot on their hands. But they might not care.
He found the other door by running into it. Recoiling, he threw it open and dashed out. A battered Renault sat in the alley. Ibrahim jumped in. “Away!” he said. “Quick!”
“Okay, okay.” The driver was eighteen or so. He drove like a madman. Haji Ibrahim wondered if the Israelis would have been a better bargain.
They raced up Highway 60, past Bet El. When they passed Bir Zeit, too, he breathed easier. The driver still scared him, but they were the only car on the road. Unless the kid blew a tire or flipped, they should be fine.
The Renault’s engine noise obscured the buzz of a smaller, better-tuned motor high in the sky. A car whizzing out of Ramallah after a raid drew the notice of the people controlling the drone. They didn’t need long to decide it held their man. The d
rone dove.
“Slow down a little,” Ibrahim urged the driver.
“What?” he said around a cigarette.
“Slow down,” Ibrahim repeated. “Don’t drive like that.”
“Don’t you want to get away?” But the driver eased off…a little.
“What’s that noise?” Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Rahman asked.
“What noise?” But the kid heard it, too. “Sounds like it’s—over there?” He pointed up and to the right.
Haji Ibrahim peered from the dirty window. He saw nothing but night. Then he did—a lance of flame in the sky, heading for the car. He shrieked. Fast as he could, he prayed: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is—”
A fireball swallowed the Renault. He never finished his prayer.
* * *
—
Rabbi Kupferman at their head, eight Levites came down the tunnel. They looked like extras from The Passion of the Christ. As they stepped into the TV lights, their faces had the half-orgasmic expressions on other men who knew they were doing something great and true and holy.
Eric Katz had seen such expressions before: on Protestant fighters in Northern Ireland, and on videos suicide bombers made before blowing themselves to heaven. He didn’t like them on Jewish faces. His own faith was Americanized, assimilated, attenuated. These people meant it, and he was a backslider to them. Some of the archaeologists looked just about as exalted as the Levites. By contrast, Munir al-Nuwayhi’s severe frown might have come straight off a relief in an Assyrian palace.
“Don’t touch the Ark itself,” Kupferman said. “Scripture shows it will slay any man who transgresses on its sanctity.”
Yeah, right. Eric had worn a NATIONAL SARCASM SOCIETY—LIKE WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT T-shirt till it fell apart. The Bible said lots of things that ranged from unlikely to impossible.
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