Nothing happened. The Grand Mufti hung up. If Kupferman wouldn’t listen, too bad. I tried to warn him, Ashrawi thought. I did my best.
* * *
—
“In other news,” the Israeli broadcaster said, “the Foreign Minister of Iran warned again of severe consequences if Israel rebuilds the Temple. The Israeli Foreign Minister replied that the Iranian should examine his own regime’s treatment of religious minorities before scorning its neighbors.”
“Oy!” Eric said. That could make you lose your appetite—though he kept eating shawarma. Only Israelis, who’d lived with crises since 1948, could make one sound so bland. And only an Israeli could tell the truth and miss the point like the Foreign Minister.
Orly didn’t miss a bite. Nobody else in the café seemed ready to run for a bomb shelter. Eric wondered why not. Iran might be bluffing. But if the Israelis were determined to do what they were doing, the ayatollahs were as determined to stop them.
But when he said so, Orly shook her head. “It’s politics,” she declared. “Iran spent sixty years not caring about the Temple Mount. Why should she get excited now?”
“Muslims ran things there for sixty years,” Eric pointed out. “They were Sunnis, which makes them almost as bad as Jews to the Shiites—”
“But only almost,” Orly said. “Or sometimes worse, depending which way the wind is blowing and on who you need to hate on any particular day. Politics, yeah.”
The TV cut to missiles on launch rails and radar dishes going around. “The alert level for Israeli Patriot batteries has been increased,” the newsman said. “The Ministry of Defense has passed a warning to Iran and all other parties who feel interested in Israeli internal affairs: the country will respond to all aggressive acts. And Israel will respond drastically to any NBC attack.”
“Israel doesn’t like the Peacock?” Eric said.
That confused Orly, and she’d been in the States. She thought he was talking about the Peacock Throne, the name for Iran’s royal seat in the Shah’s day. But she knew what the acronym meant: “Nuclear, biological, or chemical attack.”
“Oh,” Eric said, and it wasn’t amusing any more. Somebody must have used the term often enough to coin the acronym for it. Once the flunky here—or at the Pentagon, or in London, or wherever—did, other people in uniform had to decide it was useful, and to keep on saying it. And if that wasn’t scary…
He’d had too many scary thoughts lately. Perhaps the scariest was that maybe a nuclear war wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. There’s an essay topic, students! Compare and contrast the effects of an all-out nuclear exchange with those of Armageddon and the Apocalypse. Write in blue books, ink only; be sure to organize and present your thoughts clearly. You have three hours. Begin!
The shawarma was good, but Eric lost his appetite. That might not be an either-or question. The world might end up with atomic annihilation and the End of Days, costarring or in sequence. Like Frost’s ice and fire, either could do the job fine.
“We are so screwed,” he muttered.
“What?” Orly said. Reluctantly, Eric set out his latest gloomy train of thought. She shrugged. “And so? If some maniac in Iran presses the wrong button, or if God decides He’ll do what He’ll do, how can we stop it?”
“We can’t,” Eric said. “That’s what bothers me.”
“So don’t let it bother you,” Orly said: advice on the order of, Don’t think about a green bird. She went on, “Why lose sleep over this? I mean, seriously? If you can’t change it, you may as well go on, because worrying won’t matter anyway.”
He thought about that. Then he touched her hand. In the States, he might have kissed her. People here got more uptight about shows of affection. “Either you’re the sanest person I ever met or you’re out of your mind, one,” he told her.
She grinned. “You say the sweetest things.”
* * *
—
Connections. They mattered less in Israel than in her neighbors. In Lebanon or Jordan or Egypt, what you knew hardly mattered. Without a friend who could get the ear of someone who mattered, you’d never get the chance to show it off. But Yitzhak Avigad did know Rabbi Kupferman, so he was on the Temple Mount when deconstruction began.
A crane swung a hard-hatted technician toward the Dome of the Rock’s dome. Another crane swung a cameraman toward him for a close-up of the removal of the first gilded panels from the dome. Yitzhak wondered whether broadcasting this was the smartest thing Israeli TV could do. But what difference did it make? Nobody could keep disassembling the Dome of the Rock a secret.
Up there, the technician detached the panel from the dome. He pulled it free and stuck it in the bucket of the crane behind him. On the ground, Israeli soldiers and civilians, Yitzhak among them, cheered.
“It’s quite a moment, isn’t it?” someone beside him said.
There stood Shlomo Kupferman. “It is,” Yitzhak agreed. “We’ve only waited two thousand years.”
“That building has cluttered up the Temple Mount too long.” Kupferman pointed to the Dome of the Rock.
“I should say so,” Yitzhak replied.
Directed by the technician’s hand signals, the crane swung him to another panel. The man loosened and stowed it. More cheers on the ground, but fewer and quieter. Soon it would all seem routine. The cameraman would go away, and everybody would forget it was happening.
In Israel. In the West. The Muslims wouldn’t.
Kupferman said, “We have a perimeter around the Temple Mount. But if they want to bring in a mortar team or shoot rockets at us, they can. No way to cover everything inside several square kilometers.”
“No, I suppose not.” Yitzhak had done his time in the IDF. He knew you couldn’t neutralize such a big area. If the Arabs wanted to make that kind of trouble, they could. Still…“This site is holy for them, too. Would they shoot at the Dome of the Rock?”
“After Tel Aviv, who knows what those mamzrim will do?” Kupferman said. “Maybe they won’t try anything. Maybe they’ll wait till we start on the Temple. Who knows? Be ready if the alarms go off.”
Be ready for what? Yitzhak wondered. To hit the dirt? What else could you do if mortar rounds landed up here? Not much dirt to hit—mostly the hard walkways atop the Mount. Bursts would kick up nasty fragments.
Another panel came off the Dome of the Rock. The tech stowed it. As he reached for the next one, Kupferman’s phone rang. “I’m here,” he said, and then, “Oh, they do?…Tell them we’re going ahead anyway. If they want to try something, they’ll be sorry.” He stuck the phone back on his belt.
“What’s up?” Yitzhak asked.
“The Iranians.” The way Kupferman said it, he might have been talking about the Hottentots. “They say that if we don’t repair the Dome of the Rock, they’ll consider it an act of war against Islam. If the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister say yes but the Iranians say no, I’ll go with our people.”
“I guess so.” But Yitzhak asked, “What can the Iranians do if they do something?”
“Not my worry. Whatever it is, the Defense Minister thinks we can handle it.”
“He’d better be right,” Yitzhak said. The Iranians had been enriching uranium for years. They insisted it was for peaceful purposes. Hitler had insisted the Sudetenland was his last claim in Europe. People’d believed him, and regretted it. Nobody particularly believed the Iranians, but nobody seemed eager to stop them, either.
Yitzhak peered east. In the 1980s, Iranian missiles had struck Baghdad. With North Korean help, they had better ones now. If they put bombs in them…
Seldom had he had a thought answered so fast—never one he less wanted answered. Alarms wailed, not just on the Temple Mount but throughout Jerusalem—throughout Israel, unless he was wrong. Kupferman’s phone rang again. “I’m here,” he said. “They did? Oy
!”
“Who did what?” Yitzhak hoped against hope.
“Those idiots in Teheran. They’ve launched at us.”
“Now what do we do?”
“We see how good the Patriots are. We should know in five or ten minutes.”
“I have three birds on the screen.” Tension filled the Israeli colonel’s voice. The Iranians weren’t making things easy for the Patriot batteries. Launching three at once, they wanted to overload the antimissiles’ response capability.
They were liable to get what they wanted. The Patriots’ performance in the first Gulf War was grossly overrated. The hardware was better now, the software much better. Still, the new algorithms hadn’t been tested in combat. They would be.
Stakes were higher here, too. Saddam’s Scuds hadn’t carried chemical weapons, let alone nukes. They were just V-2s with different sheet metal. The colonel assumed the Iranians had nuclear weapons and were using them.
He also assumed his head would roll if he didn’t kill all three birds—or go up in radioactive gas. And you wanted to be a professional soldier? he thought. Why didn’t you study the Talmud the way your grandmother wanted?
“That bird from the northeast will get here a little before the other two,” said a captain at one radar screen. The ayatollahs had launched from the northwestern corner of Iran, to shorten the flight time—that area was closest to Israel. Maybe they should have made it land with the other two. The colonel supposed they figured simultaneous launches from different directions would cause more confusion.
Maybe they were right, too.
Nobody here had time to react. Flight time from Iran to Israel was under ten minutes. If a missile dropped nuclear fire on Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, flight time from Israel to Iran was just as short…and the Israelis wouldn’t use only three launches. Israel didn’t turn the other cheek. If it got slapped, it knocked the other guy’s head off.
“Bye-bye, ayatollahs,” he muttered. “Bye-bye, Teheran.” More people in Teheran than in Israel. If the Islamic Republic hadn’t cared about that, too bad.
“Launch parameters are go for the first one,” the captain said. “Optimum is thirty seconds from…now.”
“Count it down,” the colonel said. This would work, or it wouldn’t. Hero or goat. Nothing in between.
He thought so, anyway. Then the radar screens flashed. The officers and noncoms in front of them swore in Arabic, Russian, English. The screens weren’t supposed to do that.
“Fix the fucking glitch!” the colonel shouted. No, the software wasn’t combat-tested. But if it had to pick one moment to go south, why did it have to pick this one?
“Can we launch?” a sergeant asked. That was the question.
“At what?” the captain said. “The birds are…gone.”
“What do you mean?” the colonel demanded. “How can they be?”
“They’re not on the screens,” the captain replied. “I’m picking up aircraft, but the missiles are gone.”
“Did the Iranians jam us? If that was jamming…”
“If it was, it would’ve taken the aircraft off the sets, too,” the captain said. The colonel nodded. That stood to reason. But if reason was wrong, his country would catch a triple whammy.
“What do we do, sir?” the sergeant said.
“We…wait.” The colonel checked his watch again and again, as if distrusting the clocks in the Patriots’ ground-control systems. He did distrust them. After the impossible flash, he distrusted everything about the systems.
At last, he said, “If they were going to hit, they would have by now.” He breathed for the first time in what felt like weeks.
“What happened, sir?” the captain asked.
“Beats me.” The colonel spread his hands. “Ask God. Maybe He knows.”
The captain gave him—and the radar sets—an odd look. “Yes, sir. Maybe He does.”
* * *
—
Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was an old American joke about what to do if the missiles flew. Yitzhak Avigad didn’t remember where he’d heard it. Like most good jokes, it made too much sense. What else could you do if that happened?
So he stood on the Temple Mount, waiting to see if he would live. He also waited for the roar of Patriots. At least two batteries were close to Jerusalem. He knew he was standing on the Iranians’ likeliest target. If they were lousy shots and didn’t use nukes, that was the best place to be.
Too many ifs, he decided, and shivered under the sun.
Kupferman was looking at his phone. He started to frown, as if a boy studying for his bar mitzvah were late. “Something should have happened,” he said. “Either the antimissiles should have launched, or the missiles should have hit, or…something.”
“I’m fine with nothing,” Yitzhak said.
“I want to know what’s going on.” Kupferman peered at the phone again as he poked in a number. “Put me through to the Defense Minister,” he said, and then, angrily, “Who do you think? It’s Kupferman….What? Somebody’s knocked me out and stolen my phone, and now he’s using it for this instead of calling his uncle in Bangladesh? Are you crazy? No thief is that dumb.”
The rabbi’s sarcasm was fun to listen to—if it wasn’t aimed at you.
“Natan? It’s Shlomo,” Kupferman said. “Did the ayatollahs launch on us?…They did….What happened?…It did?” Bushy eyebrows leaped. “Are you sure?…Are you as sure as you can be, then?…Call me back when you know more. Shalom.”
“Well?” Yitzhak was ready to tear answers out of him if he had to.
But Kupferman didn’t seem ready to give them yet. He looked up at the sky and said, “ ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.’ ”
“Well?” Yitzhak said again, his voice harsher this time.
“Very well, thank you.” Kupferman went on, “It was a real launch. Three missiles, two from the east, one from the northeast. The Patriots were about to go, and then…the missiles disappeared.”
“Disappeared? What does that mean?” Yitzhak asked.
“What it says,” Kupferman answered. “One second they were there, the next…gone. Off the radar. Not stealth or jamming or anything. Gone. I mean gone, or they would have hit by now.”
“That’s insane,” Yitzhak said. “What could do such a thing?”
“Not what,” Kupferman said. “Who”—and Yitzhak understood why he’d recited the Shma. Could God do that? If it wasn’t God, what was it? Yitzhak had asked the same question after Brandon dropped dead. You could say that was a coronary or a coincidence…if you wanted to. Were three missiles plucked from the sky another coincidence?
Another Americanism sprang to mind. Yeah, right.
Rabbi Kupferman’s phone rang. He held it to his ear. “Natan?…Oh. Shalom, Binyamin.” Yitzhak wondered if he should back off. Kupferman was on the horn with the Prime Minister. But, nosy as any other Israeli, he decided to stick around. “What?” the rabbi said, and then, “What?…They’re crazy. We couldn’t do that….Yes, of course you know.” He was muttering as he put away the phone.
“Now what?” Yitzhak said. Too much was happening too fast.
And he thought that before Kupferman said, “The President of the Islamic Republic of Iran is dead. They found him in his office. The Defense Minister of Iran is dead. He died in the middle of a phone call. The Grand Ayatollah is dead. He fell over in a mosque in Qom, in the middle of a sermon about how they would slaughter the infidel. These all happened at the same time as the missiles disappeared. There may be more we don’t know about yet.”
“My God,” Yitzhak said, and then, in a different tone of voice, “My God.”
“I think so, too,” Kupferman replied.
* * *
—
Al Jazeera laid an Arabic voiceover atop the Farsi feed from Ira
nian TV. The Israeli channel put a Hebrew voiceover over that. Even at two removes, the Iranian broadcaster sounded frantic. “The murderous Zionist dogs left their handiwork in the President’s office!” he shouted, pounding the desktop in front of him. “God will punish their effrontery!”
“How could we?” Orly asked Eric. “Why would we?”
They sat on their bed. They’d been watching the deconstruction of the Dome of the Rock. That turned into a missile attack, which turned into—something else—when the missiles didn’t show up. And the something else turned into…this.
“See what they did!” the broadcaster on the TV cried, in Farsi via Arabic via Hebrew.
The picture went to the President’s office. He still flopped, dead, on his desk. The camera lingered on his expressionless face, then panned to the left, to the wall near a big portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. The ayatollah’s fierce stare seemed aimed at the characters scrawled there.
“See what they did, the dirty Mossad dogs!” the broadcaster said. “They murdered the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but mocked him with Hebrew words from their lying scripture. It is from their Book of Daniel—what they call the writing on the wall. Mene, mene, tekel upharsin. They want to say that the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been weighed in the balance and found wanting—by God, they want the world to believe it!” He pounded his fist again. “They lie!”
“Gevalt,” Eric muttered. Orly looked down her nose at Yiddish, but he didn’t care. Nothing else fit. The Iranians had good scholars on the job—good, but not good enough.
Mene, mene, tekel upharsin wasn’t Hebrew. It was Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Middle East in the sixth century BC. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon wouldn’t have understood Hebrew. Well, he didn’t understand Aramaic, either (or, more likely, didn’t read it—he probably clung to cuneiform)—he needed Daniel to interpret for him.
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