Dead Sea Rising

by Jerry B. Jenkins

  “You’re not sorry!”

  Not only was she right, but Ben had also been just as cold to his own parents the next morning before leaving for the bus station. For months he’d been doing just enough to graduate, while in his spare time he and his best friend, Jimmy, worked out like madmen to prepare for the rigors of marine boot camp. Clearly, neither parent believed he would go through with enlisting.

  “You’re not happy with us, fine,” his dad said. “You feel guilty and want to turn your back on a life of privilege, okay, you’ve already done that. Three schools in four years, no interest in the foundation. But you don’t have to commit suicide.”

  “Suicide?” Ben said. “Look at me! I’m gonna be a fighting machine.”

  His mother dissolved. “You get sent to Vietnam and you’ll come home in a box!”

  “I want to go to Nam! That’s where the action is. We’re about to wrap that thing up, and I can be part of it.”

  “Do you hear yourself, Ben?” his father said. “What adult says such things?”

  “A patriot.”

  “Patriot-schmatriot,” his father said. “You don’t care any more about this country than you care about us.”

  “Well, one out of two ain’t bad.”

  “That’s cruel, Benz,” his mother said.

  He had no comeback. That had been meaner than he’d intended. Ben tried changing the subject. “Jimmy’s as excited as I am.”

  “That’s what you think,” his dad said. “I talked to Mr. Dunklebaum yesterday. He promised James a piece of the dealership, and the boy made the wise decision.”

  “Oh, bull!” Ben said. “The last thing Jimmy wants is to sell cars the rest of his life. Can’t tell you the number of times he’s said that.”

  “You’ve known him for what, one semester?” his dad said. “All you got in common is detentions and demerits.”

  “We’re tight, Dad. Anyway, he couldn’t bail out of the buddy system now even if he wanted to.”

  “Maybe if his father didn’t know somebody in the recruiting office and already got it squared away. Probably gave the guy a car at cost. I’m telling you, Ben, unless you want to ride that bus alone, there’s no sense going.”

  “Nice try, Dad.”

  “You don’t want to go to boot camp by yourself, do you, Benz?” his mother said.

  “I won’t be going alone! But if it came to that, sure, why not?”

  “You didn’t even like boarding school.”

  “I was too young! You shouldn’t have sent me. How was that supposed to make me feel?”

  “You didn’t even like summer camp,” she said.

  “I didn’t like being sent,” he said. “This is my choice.”

  “We’re not taking you to the bus station.”

  “Seriously, Mom?”

  “I told you and told you, I want no part of this. You want to delay college a year, work at the foundation. Then get your degree, and by then you’ll want to take over the foundation some day.”

  “So I gotta take a cab?”

  “You don’t have to go at all.”

  “I’m going! I want to go. This is my life, not yours. Just for once, let me make my own decisions!”

  “You haven’t earned that right.”

  “I heard that, Dad. Too bad I’ve reached the age that gives me the right.”

  Ben’s father waved him off, but his mother sat with a tissue pressed to her mouth as he called for a cab. “You don’t have to do this, Benz.”

  Then he called Jimmy. “Hey, man! You bailin’ on me?”

  “Huh? Nah.”

  “You goin’ or what?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You heard me. Should I have the cabbie pick you up?”

  “Me, no. I’ll find my own way.”

  “You don’t have a ride yet?”

  “Oh, you know,” Jimmy said, “there’s plenty of ways to get there. If Ma or Pa can’t take me, I can take the bus, the train, you know.”

  “So I’ma see you in a hour, bro?”

  “Um, yeah. ’Course. I told ya. See ya down there.”

  “Semper fi, Jimmy!”

  “Yup. Buddies all the way. Boot camp, then Nam.”

  Ben hung up. “Told you! Jimmy’s on his way.”

  “Care to put a wager on that?” his dad said.

  “How ’bout a grand, Dad?”

  “You don’t have a thousand, son, but sure. I win, and you’ll have to work for the foundation to pay me back. No way you’ll make that much with the marines.”

  It turned out that the only thing close to a buddy on the Greyhound had been a middle-aged woman across the aisle who asked if Ben was a recruit and told him she was returning home to Beaufort after a family visit. Half a dozen dingy depot bathrooms and two stale vending machine sandwiches later, another dozen recruits had boarded here and there, but they were with family or friends—some with buddies—and they offered Ben no more than a nod, a Semper fi! or a subdued “Oohrah” on their way to the back.

  One poor sap who instead said “Hoorah” immediately got razzed by the rest—including Ben—who said, “You’ll never live that down at Parris Island, man. Get it right!”

  “What’d you say your name was, Ben?”

  “Berman.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Berman.”

  “I heard you. I’m askin’ you, what’s that, Jewish?”

  “What if it is?”

  The kid raised both hands and moved on with the others. They sat playing cards, insulting each other, and talking too loud. But they never invited Ben back. The woman across the way jabbered on and on about her visit to New York and never took a hint when Ben looked out the window or even dug in his bag for a book.

  The farther the bus rolled from Manhattan, the stranger the landscape. Ben had only read about the south and did not look forward to its legendary heat, stickiness, or bugs. He sat sideways, grateful he didn’t have to share his seat, and that gave him a view of the guys behind him. He detected fear in their eyes and tight-lipped smiles. Wusses.

  Once, he was sure he heard “Jew” and caught a couple of them glancing his way. Slurs had never really bothered him. They only exposed the limited intellect of the bigots. How a person could judge him for his origin, over which he had no control, was beyond Ben. If he had exercised his faith or came off somehow superior because of his heritage, he could see why others might resent him. But besides his name and bloodline, he didn’t feel any more Jewish than the WASPs he’d gone to school with. Like Ben, they played sports, loved the Mets or the Yankees but never both, lied about what girls let them get away with, enjoyed drinking, and hated hangovers. But he got a taste of what his black friends suffered—they for the color of their skin, he for no more than his name and ethnicity. Ben’s father even cautioned him never to insist on a kosher meal in public, as if he ever would. “We enjoy them because we enjoy them,” Mr. Berman would say. “Not because we’re observant. So we never draw attention to ourselves by insisting. If it’s on the menu and you want it, eat kosher. Otherwise, partake at home.”

  The boys in the back of the bus ignited the rebel in Ben, the part of him that triggered the biggest controversy during his last semester. He had demanded a kosher meal in the cafeteria. “All of a sudden you’re Orthodox,” one of the lunch ladies said, and the storm began.

  “Of course I know you’re Jewish,” the headmaster had told Ben’s father. “But at the beginning of his tenure with us, Ben declined the option of kosher meals. So why now?”

  “I’ve become observant,” Ben said before his father silenced him with a stare.

  “It won’t happen again,” his father said, and on the way out of the school he grumbled, “Why, Ben? Why must you always—”

  “I have to do everything they say, Dad. Here was a chance to make them do what I said. Why can’t I—”

  “Because you’re not in charge, son. You’re not even paying for school. You do what they say, and you do what I
say.”

  “Not for long,” Ben said.

  And here he was, admittedly alone on the bus, but finally living the dream. Unfortunately, he had not been able to even doze as the Beaufort woman proceeded to bore him half to death. By the time Ben disembarked at Parris Island, he harbored a deep resentment—in fact, hatred—for his lying former buddy. As rough as marine basic training was supposed to be, he’d handle it with or without Jimmy.

  Really, how hard could this be?

  CHAPTER 32

  Ur

  The first of Terah’s two meals each day was usually more substantial than bread and figs and water—all he could manage in his condition and with his wife away. One thing he could say for Belessunu: the woman could cook. Variety marked her daily first meals. Quantity was her second meal strategy. Terah had not gone to bed hungry for years. He allowed himself to hope she would add meat to his banquet tonight. By then perhaps she would be used to his horrific new face, and—he hoped—might even pamper him.

  The day had emerged cloudless and windless, and Terah wished he could make his way outside and sit in the shade of the overhang to wait for Ikuppi. But if Belessunu preceded him, Terah would be unable to get back inside quickly enough so that revealing his ravaged face—as well as the rest of his injuries—could come in stages.

  All he could accomplish, alone and crippled, was to limp to a chair by the window where he had a view of the road. Ikuppi would arrive in some sort of a conveyance—his own chariot or one appropriated from the palace. Belessunu walked everywhere, despite her age and how close she was to bearing her first child. The servants’ hovels lay less than half a mile away, so Terah assumed his wife and servant girls would arrive before midday.

  On the horizon looking toward the city of Shinar and the palace, rising dust signaled the approach of Ikuppi, not Belessunu, for only an animal pulling a transport produced such a cloud. As it rumbled into view, Terah was surprised his friend had secured the use of one of the king’s own chariots. Ikuppi drove three giant steeds that seemed to enjoy running free with their lighter than usual load. He steered them under the overhang and leapt out, his sword clanging off the side of the chariot. As he reached the door, Terah called out to him.

  “Ikuppi, give me a moment, if you please!”

  “At your service,” he said. “But I bring a message from the king.”

  “When I give you leave to enter,” Terah said, “I beg you close the door and do not approach me.”

  “Are you ill, sir?”

  “I will explain. Can you accede to my request?”

  “Of course!”

  “Enter.”

  Terah leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, pressing the fingers of both hands to his forehead and covering his face, peeking out.

  Ikuppi’s alarm was plain, and his hand appeared to instinctively go for the hilt of his sword. “What is it, friend? What ails you?”

  Terah told him of the wild dogs. “You must not revile me when I reveal my face.”

  “Never.”

  Terah slowly lowered his hands, and Ikuppi gaped. Terah said, “Come, sit, and I will show you the rest of my wounds.”

  Despite that Ikuppi was an elite protector of the king, he seemed to approach timidly. “Glory to the gods you are alive,” he said quietly. “Belessunu must be horrif—”

  “You are the first beyond my servants to see me. When Belessunu returns, Ikuppi,” Terah said, “I need you to intercept her and prepare her.”

  “Very well.”

  “And you say you bring a message?”

  “From the king, yes. He wishes me to remind you how overjoyed he is with the prospect of your first child and to remember to bring the baby to him at your first opportunity. What response should I deliver back?”

  “That I remain honored by his interest and support and will fulfill his wish in all humility.”

  Ikuppi leaned close and whispered, almost as if he feared he might be overheard at the edge of the wilderness. “But you will do no such thing.”

  “Of course not.”

  “What will you do, then, Terah?”

  CHAPTER 33

  Randalls Island, Manhattan

  “Once the looky-loos get their gawk,” Wojciechowski said, “this thing could open up and we’d be at Sinai in minutes.”

  “Sorry to pop your balloon, boss,” Carl said. “S’posed to be like this all the way to the FDR and even over to Madison.”

  “Must be some wreck,” Ben said.

  But when the squad car finally crept past the accident, it was little more than a fender bender still waiting for a wrecker.

  “So you and Virginia,” Wojciechowski said. “What’d she do to win you over, way back then?”

  “First tell me if she said anything that’s supposed to incriminate me,” Ben said.

  “I wouldn’t say it incriminates you—yet.”

  “But like what she said about Nic, it didn’t do me any favors?”

  “Fair enough,” Wojciechowski said.

  “She thinks I hate her too?”

  “No, she didn’t say that, that I know of.”

  “Whatever it was,” Ben said, “she had to be loopy from the meds. Ask anybody who’s ever known us and they’ll tell you we’ve been crazy in love since day one. I’m not sayin’ we agree on everything, and she can be a tightwad, but I’d tell a polygraph machine I love her more every day and the needle wouldn’t even twitch.”

  Wojciechowski snorted. “C’mon, man. You’re not on the Hallmark Channel. I’d love to believe you got a fairy tale goin’ on, but get real. Nobody’s that happy. Not in my world anyway.”

  “You find an iota of anything that shows I would even dream of hurting Ginny, and you won’t find one person who’d believe it.”

  Wojciechowski smirked. “You’ve never strayed?”

  “Not once.”

  “Tempted?”

  “You’re asking if I notice other women? You’ve got me there. But I wouldn’t so much as cross the street to disrespect my wife.”

  “Whoa, that’s gotta be boring!” the detective said. “Who wants to live that way?”

  “People who want to stay married.”

  The driver turned and smiled. “He’s right. Most people married that long, it’s been to two or three different people.”

  Wojciechowski laughed. “How many times for you, Carl?”

  “Three! And I been married thirteen years, total!”

  Wojciechowski turned back to Ben. “Okay, so you’re Dudley Do-Right and she’s the virgin Sunday school kid with the name to go with it.”

  “She was, you know.”

  “What—a virgin? What’re the odds of that?”

  “No idea, but I know her.”

  “And you believed her.”

  Ben narrowed his eyes at the detective. “Careful.”

  “Okay, Berman, let’s say if you believe her, I believe her. Should I believe what she said about you in the wee hours this morning?”

  “Depends on what it was. When she’s fully conscious, you can take to the bank whatever she says.”

  “And how ’bout you, Dudley?”

  “I tell the truth,” Ben said.

  “No, I’m sayin’, you married a virgin—but did she?”

  “What’s that got to do with this?”

  “In my business we call that a nondenial denial,” Wojciechowski said.

  “I’m not denying anything. I just don’t see how my past is relevant. I don’t talk about it. I was an entirely different person before I met Ginny. That’s my whole point. Haven’t you ever heard ‘Old things have passed away and all things have become new’?”

  “What’s that, Robert Frost?”

  “C’mon,” Ben said. “Good Catholic boy like you ought to recognize Saint Paul in Second Corinthians.”

  “Aah, shoulda known. But fair’s fair. I don’t talk about my former life either. It’s been a long time since I been to church.”

  “Never went
to Sunday school?”

  “We called it Parish School of Religion, somethin’ like that. But back on point. How’d Virginia turn a, what’d you call yerself—nonpracticin’ Jew—into a guy who quotes the saints? You didn’t even wanna talk religion with her, right? Played the I’m-Jewish card?”

  “Exactly. And I was watching to see how she’d get around that, like sales people are trained to do. That’s how I took it at first—her trying to sell me something. But I never expected her to appeal to my intellect.”

  “Like how?”

  “She tells me she’s disappointed I’m not more into my heritage because she’s so curious about it. Says there’s all these Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament—pretty much the Jewish Bible, you know—and that they’ve all clearly been fulfilled in Jesus. So I say, ‘Whoa there, I may not know much, but one thing I do know, in fact one thing everybody knows, is that Jews don’t believe in Jesus. The Messiah the Hebrew Scriptures talk about, that’s not Jesus.’ And she says, ‘He sure fulfills all those prophecies.’ I tell her no, she’s got it wrong, and she says, ‘Prove it.’ I tell her you don’t prove religious stuff, that’s what I don’t like about it—it’s based on faith and you either believe it or you don’t, and I don’t.”

  “But she got in your head,” Wojciechowski said.

  “She was so earnest! But naïve. I mean, everybody knows Jesus isn’t the Jewish Messiah, right? Even Gentiles know that. It’s the difference between Judaism and Christianity.”

  “That’s what I always thought,” the detective said.

  “Well, now I was going to have to prove it,” Ben said. “She told me she’d send me a list of all the prophecies written hundreds and sometimes even thousands of years before the birth of Jesus, and I could look them up. Then I had to show why even one of them did not apply to Him. That was a challenge I couldn’t blow off, plus her smile was growing on me and I wanted to see more of her.

  “Now, I’d never been that great a student. Not because I didn’t have the smarts. I tested off the charts, which was why I was always in trouble for being a screw-up in high school. I couldn’t pretend I was incapable of a lot more.”

  “Website says you’ve got two doctorates, just like your daughter.”