Trailing fire, a badly aimed RPG flew past the Temple and off the Temple Mount. It exploded somewhere in the Muslim quarter of the Old City. Eric assumed the attackers were Muslims themselves. They’d just nailed some of their own.
Another RPG blew up a cement mixer. Wet, gooey cement flew. To Eric, it seemed a waste of an expensive round. A terrorist bean-counter would be unhappy with that guy.
A bullet spanged off the paving too close in front of Eric’s nose and kicked high enough not to blow his brains out on the ricochet. He broke fingernails trying to claw into the rock.
A bulldozer ran down a couple of Israeli soldiers. They kept shooting, and didn’t even try to get out of the way. The machine left red tracks as it ground toward the rising Temple.
What had it been like in the fourth century, when the partly built Temple caught fire in Julian’s reign? Was that an accident or Christian arson? To this day, nobody knew. Or was it a miracle, as church historians claimed? Till now, Eric hadn’t taken the notion seriously enough to laugh at it. But did God say, No, it’s not time yet, and stick His finger in? How could you know? How could you know anything for sure these days?
Eric shook his head, though he didn’t lift it—he was learning fast. He knew one thing. He was scared shitless, almost for real. The pucker factor was mighty, mighty high.
Kupferman groaned. For a second, Eric thought a stray round got him. Then Kupferman said, “The boy! He’s coming out!”
That made Eric raise his head enough to see the Temple entrance. There was Chaim Avigad. The kid was ghost-pale and looked even more frightened than Eric felt.
Chaim wasn’t alone, or not exactly. He had the Ark with him, his hands on the gold-plated handles. The Ark was floating again, whatever that meant.
The terrorists shouted in triumph. “Now we’ve got the Jewboy, too!” one yelled. They turned their gunfire on Chaim and the Ark.
Chaim just stood there, hanging on to the Ark for dear life. Eric thought he put his hands on it, not just on the handles. He didn’t fall over dead, from that or from the terrorists’ fire. All the bullets somehow—or Somehow—missed. As for the ones that headed for the Ark of the Covenant…
Later, Eric wondered what slow-motion digitized replays would show. At the time, all he had to go on was what he saw. Lightning flashed from the Ark, back toward everyone who’d fired at it. Men twisted and fell. One bulldozer caught fire. The other exploded with a muffled whoomp! that lifted Eric off the ground and then dropped him again, hard.
Diesel engines weren’t supposed to blow up like that. Maybe God didn’t read the instruction manual. Or maybe He’d written His own.
All of a sudden, it got quiet. Eric looked at his watch. Four minutes had gone by since Kupferman decided he didn’t like the looks of the bulldozers. Was that possible? It seemed like four hours, or years.
“Is it over?” somebody asked. Eric needed a second to recognize the voice as his own. It wasn’t just because his ears were blasted. His wits were, too.
“I…think so.” Orly sounded as shellshocked as he felt. She looked around. “None of those assholes is moving any more.” The obscenity came out in Arabic.
“Thanks for knocking me down, babe,” Eric managed.
She gave him the tag end of a smile. “Any time.”
Eric got to his feet. That was when he realized he’d tried to dig without pick, shovel, or trowel. His hands were a bloody mess. He stuck them in the pockets of his jeans.
Then he thought about Kupferman. “You okay?” he asked him.
“Yes.” Shlomo Kupferman didn’t sound as if he had any doubts. He rose more smoothly than Eric had—but his hands were torn up, too. Kupferman went on, “You have a song in English, don’t you, that goes, ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…’?”
“Sure. ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ ” Eric said.
“Whatever the name is.” Kupferman sounded impatient with the details. “I don’t know what the man who wrote that hymn saw—”
“It was a woman.”
Kupferman’s formidable, bristly eyebrows flexed down into a frown. “That’s not my biggest worry. What we just saw is.”
“Well—yeah.” Eric looked around for Orly and didn’t see her. Then he did: she was giving a wounded soldier first aid. The Temple Mount stank of blood and high explosives and hot metal and burning diesel fuel and burned meat and fear. Some of the fear came from Eric—but not all of it.
And the Ark glittered in the sun, and Chaim Avigad stood there, looking stunned. Eric decided he needed first aid more than the wounded Israeli soldiers. How much of what had happened was his doing, how much the Ark’s? Was there any dividing line?
As Eric went over to the kid, he walked past a dead terrorist. The man wasn’t just dead. He was scorched and worse: whatever the Ark did to him burned him small, like a steak on the barbecue too long. That burned-meat smell rose from him and his pals. Eric’s stomach did a slow lurch.
Chaim Avigad’s eyes showed white around the iris, as a scared horse’s would have. “Easy,” Eric said gently. “It’s over.”
The kid who’d unwillingly gone into the Messiah business shook his head. “It’s never over. It just gets worse.” He pointed to the shrunken terrorist Eric had walked by. “I heard him die. I felt him die. I felt them all die, on both sides. Now they’re…part of the crowd.” He gestured.
His entourage of revived souls surrounded him as usual. With the Ark, they reminded Eric not to get too close. The archaeologist didn’t know what would happen if he came among them. He didn’t want to find out, either.
How can I help him? Eric wondered, seeing he’d bitten off more than he could chew. How can anybody?
He asked, “How did you get the Ark out here?”
“It wanted to come,” Chaim answered. “I was in the Holy Place—not the Holy of Holies, but the big room in front of that—looking around when the shooting started. I didn’t know what to do. But I heard it, like, calling me, so I went in there.”
“Uh-huh.” Eric made himself nod. If you didn’t listen to what Chaim was talking about, he sounded like every other teenage boy of his generation.
“When I got there, it was floating. It hadn’t done that since it settled down on the rock where it used to be.” Chaim could talk about days 3,000 years past as if they were yesterday morning. The Dome of the Rock? An afternoon visitor, gone now. The maybe Messiah went on, “It was, like, floating, so I grabbed it, and it didn’t seem heavy or anything, so I brought it out.”
“How did you do that?” Eric asked.
“I just did—same way I knew to get it,” Chaim said, which wasn’t exactly an answer…unless, of course, it was. “So I brought it out here, and all that weird stuff happened.”
“Yeah. All that weird stuff,” Eric agreed tonelessly. “How did all the bullets miss you?”
“Beats me,” Chaim Avigad said. “They did, that’s all.”
“You aren’t allowed to go into the Holy of Holies.” That wasn’t Eric. That was Rabbi Kupferman, who’d come up behind him. The old man’s eyes blazed. “No one may go in there but the High Priest alone, and he only on Yom Kippur.”
“I did what the Ark told me to do.” Kupferman might have sixty years on the boy, but the look Chaim gave back was as unfriendly—and as fierce—as the Religious Affairs Minister’s. Chaim went on, “I’ll listen to God before I listen to you any old day, Rabbi.” He turned the title of respect into one near hatred. “I’ll listen to anybody before I listen to you. You killed Rosie. You think I forgot?”
Kupferman drew himself up straight. “If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been revealed as the Messiah. You should thank me.”
“Thank you?” If Kupferman’s eyes had blazed, Chaim’s were the inside of a star. Why that gaze didn’t vaporize the rabbi, Eric had no idea. Kupferman
was made of stern stuff—or maybe he just hadn’t figured out what he was messing with. “Thank you?” Chaim repeated. “You think I want this? You think I enjoy this?”
“If God wants you to have it, you have it,” Kupferman returned.
“Cus ummak!” Chaim shouted—not a messianic thing to say. “If God wants me to go into the Holy of Holies, who are you to say no? You’re not the High Priest, even if you play like you are.”
For the first time, Kupferman winced. As Religious Affairs Minister, as a senior rabbi, as the man who’d sacrificed the red heifer, he had more of a claim on the high priesthood than anyone else. But Chaim was right. It wasn’t his yet.
Sirens wailing, ambulances screeched up the ramp. The paramedics glanced over to the gleaming Ark—how could you help it?—but stuck to business. Eric admired their single-mindedness.
He didn’t have much of his own. He realized Chaim had said something to him, but he had no idea what. “I’m sorry?” he managed.
“I said, will you help me get the Ark back into the Holy of Holies? I brought it out myself, but it’s easier with two.”
Eric noticed that he didn’t ask Kupferman. Kupferman noticed, too, and didn’t like it. Eric wasn’t sure he did, either. What would happen if he touched those ancient handles? Would he fall over dead, the way Brandon Nesbitt had?
“Okay.” Did that come out of his mouth? It did. Only one thing accounted for it: fear of looking like a coward in front of other people. If not for that terror, how could war go on?
“I—” Kupferman started, then stopped. What was he going to say? I forbid it? If he tried that, Chaim would give him the horse laugh. Eric extended him credit for being smart enough to see as much. One of the rules archaeologists and historians had was that an order proclaimed time after time was an order everybody was ignoring. You didn’t want to issue those orders. They sapped your authority, and you might need it later.
All of which went through Eric’s head in maybe half a second. He had time enough to look around before his battered hands closed on the gold-plated shittim wood. There was Orly, relieved of first-aid duties by the paramedics. She stared at him. Behind his glasses, his eyes were bound to be enormous, too.
The old gold was cool under his battered hands for a moment, but took on his warmth. I can feel that. I’m not dead, he thought.
Then Chaim said, “You have to lift a little.” Eric remembered he wasn’t doing this only to risk his neck. It had another purpose, too.
“Oh, yeah.” How long would he have stood there if Chaim didn’t remind him?
He pulled up on the handles. He could feel some weight when he did, but not much. The Ark came up easy as you please. He and Chaim had no trouble carrying it inside the Temple.
The interior walls were still bare concrete. It was like walking through a house before the occupant moved in. Yeah, just like that, Eric thought uneasily. Compared to the splendors of the Dome of the Rock, it seemed even plainer than it would have otherwise.
Into the Holy of Holies: a smaller box of hand-laid stone blocks, not concrete. “Are you sure this is okay?” Eric asked.
“No. The bogeyman’ll jump out and get you,” Chaim said. Eric shut up. There was the stone of the Temple Mount sticking up through the flooring, the way it had in the Dome of the Rock. Chaim pointed at marks on the stone. “It goes right there.”
“Mm-hmm,” Eric said. Yes, that was where archaeologists thought it had gone in the days of the First Temple. Eric helped Chaim guide it there.
“Let it down,” Chaim told him. He did. It settled into place. The rock groaned for a moment. How much weight had settled onto it? An awful lot more than Eric had carried—he was sure of that.
Once he was no longer holding the Ark’s handles, he got out as fast as he could. If Chaim wanted to sneer at him, fine. But Chaim didn’t hang around, either.
“Wow!” Eric gasped when he got out into the open air again. “Oh, wow!”
Orly took his arm. Was that awe on her face? Eric didn’t see awe enough to recognize it. “What was it like?” she asked.
“It wasn’t like anything,” Eric said. “Oh, wow!”
“Like Jacob, you should change your name to Israel.” Kupferman sounded serious. “You have wrestled with God and prevailed.”
The words from Genesis came closer to what had happened than anything Eric could have come up with. He’d touched a power as much greater than his own as an acetylene torch’s was than a moth’s, and it let him live. Was that prevailing? “You know something?” he said. “Maybe I will.”
He had more trouble prevailing over the IDF medic who swabbed off his cuts and scrapes with bandages soaked in rubbing alcohol. He hissed like a cobra and had all he could do not to howl like a coyote—having the wounds cleaned was worse than getting them in the first place. Of course, he’d been full of adrenaline then; now he felt empty of it and everything else.
That Orly yipped when her turn came made him feel a little better, but not much. “Hush, both of you,” the medic said. “Do you want infections?”
“I want it not to hurt,” Orly snapped, beating Eric to the punch. “Why couldn’t you use something with lidocaine in it?”
“Because this is what I’ve got left,” the medic answered as he swathed their hands with clean gauze. “Thank God the two of you didn’t catch anything bad.”
“We do,” Eric said. Orly nodded. The medic scratched his head. He hadn’t come up onto the Temple Mount till after the shooting and the miracles were over. The blood that splashed his tunic and trousers and arms said he’d saved minor hurts like theirs for last.
They went down into the Old City. As soon as they were off the Mount, Orly said, “I’m starved.”
“So am I!” Eric exclaimed. Along with adrenaline’s ebb, that explained part of the emptiness inside him. The terror and terrorism diet, he thought muzzily. How many calories had a brush with death and another with the Lord scoured out of him? Quite a few, by the way he suddenly shook.
“There’s a shawarma place not far from here,” Orly said.
“Lead on!” Eric hoped he didn’t sound too much like a hungry wolf when another said it knew of a limping moose somewhere close by.
Lamb sliced from a joint on an upright spit and stuffed into a pita with salad fixings tasted the way the gods on Olympus (who likely weren’t nearly so real as the one on the Temple Mount) only wished ambrosia would. Even the smoke from a new customer’s cigarette couldn’t faze Eric, though he usually hated it as much as most Californians did.
Then he recognized the middle-aged man behind those dark sunglasses. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Munir,” he said in English. Of the languages they had in common, that one seemed safest.
“Hello. Hello, both of you,” Munir al-Nuwayhi said, also in English. “Did I hear you got married? Congratulations if that’s right.”
“Half right, or maybe a little more,” Eric answered.
When Munir quirked an eyebrow, Orly explained, “We went to Cyprus. We haven’t had the religious ceremony yet. Bureaucrats!” She turned the last word into a curse.
“Ah.” The Israeli Arab nodded. He likely had more, and less happy, acquaintance with the Jewish state’s form-fillers and card-filers and rubber-stamp-wielders than she did. “May you be happy together. May your children be many, if that’s what you want.”
“Thanks,” Eric said with his mouth full. Orly, whose mouth was fuller, nodded back at Munir.
The Arab switched to his birthspeech to order, then returned to English: “Were the two of you on the Haram al-Sharif just now? Your hands make me think so.”
“Yes. That was—scary.” Eric felt the inadequacy of words. I didn’t shit my pants, though, he thought, not without some pride.
“Those ISIS maniacs—” Orly began.
For a wonder, she did stop when Munir h
eld up the hand with a Marlboro between nicotine-yellowed index and middle fingers. “Are you surprised something like that happened when you took down the mosque and the Dome of the Rock? Are you really?”
“Surprised? No,” Eric said before Orly could answer. “But even if the Ark hadn’t stopped them, that kind of raid wouldn’t have done them any good.”
“The Ark?” Munir said, so he didn’t know everything that had happened up there.
Eric and Orly took turns filling him in. “What do you think of that?” Orly added after they got to the end.
“I think…the world is a much stranger place than I dreamt it was not very long ago,” al-Nuwayhi said slowly. The counterman gave him his shawarma. He paid, waved away change, and removed the cigarette to bite into it. Eric thought exactly the same thing. Munir went on, “Congratulations on your chance for unexpected archaeological observations, Professor Katz.”
“If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d’ve rather walked,” Eric said. Munir raised his eyebrow again. He translated out of slang: “Some things you’d rather not do any which way.”
The Israeli Arab bobbed his head; he got that. Then he asked, “You aren’t glad the power of God showed itself that way?”
“I’m glad it saved…us.” Again, Eric adjusted language. Saved our bacon would have annoyed both Munir and Orly. “But I wish God stayed out of the world, same as you do.”
“Whose God?” Munir and Orly asked the same question at the same time.
“You pays your money and you takes your choice,” Eric said. That wasn’t standard English, either, but they both followed. He continued, “Staying secular gets harder by the day, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Orly said.
“Oh, yes,” Munir agreed. “Fewer and fewer people bother trying, either. That’s why…things like what happened up on the Haram al-Sharif happen more and more. If you were observant before, you grow more observant now. If you weren’t, you start.”
Alpha and Omega Page 36
