by Paul L Maier
“All right, then, Jonathan. But don’t even think of leaving Israel. I’m alerting Ben Gurion, Ashdod, Haifa, the Allenby Bridge, all our ports and frontier crossovers, not to let you pass. Now put Sonnenfeld on—”
Jon knocked on the office door to recall Sonnenfeld. He came inside, took the phone, and received Gideon’s special instructions. After hanging up, he looked at Jon and said, “All right. You can go. Why, I’m not sure. I consider you no more than a criminal!”
“I can sympathize with that, Dr. Sonnenfeld. Good day!”
“You forgot this—” He handed him the decoy vial.
“Oh. Of course. Thank you.”
On the way out, he threw it into a trash canister. Then he looked at his watch and cringed. Fifty-eight minutes had elapsed! He ran outside and waved to a much-relieved Dick Cromwell, who had just started the Peugeot.
“Great!” said Dick. “Thought I’d see you next in a paddy wagon. Which scenario was it?”
“None of them! We’d probably label it Number 5-B. Anyhow, it looks like I’ll have to get wet on my way to London.”
Cromwell’s head slumped down. Then he shook it slowly from side to side.
They reached the Albright a quarter hour before closing. “Hello, Linda,” said Jon. “Meet Dick Cromwell here. The good news is that he won’t have to use the phone. The bad news is that I will.”
“It’s been a monotonous day, Professor Weber. I’m so glad you got here to change all that. Where is it this time, the White House again?”
He nodded and said, “You’re positively clairvoyant, my dear!”
“I was really hoping it would be Buckingham Palace.”
“Next time!”
Dick Cromwell thought that the scene was a practical joke, but Jon looked deadly serious when Linda handed him the phone and he said, “President Bronson? . . . Yes, this is Ernst Becker in the Promised Land. I’m afraid we’ll have to look to the rising moon . . . I know, I know . . . I’ve checked everything out. It’s doable . . . Oh, yes, Paul Revere is extremely reliable. But he needs help . . . Right . . . Fine . . . I will. And thank you, Mr. President.”
“Now, what was that all about?” Cromwell demanded.
“C’mon outside. Back in a second, Linda.”
“I’m banking on that.”
“Ah . . . I’d be eternally grateful if you could hang in here till about 5:15, Linda.”
“Only if you’ll translate all this for me someday.”
“I will. I promise.”
Outside, Jon said, “We’re killing time until 5:15, when I promised Rast he’d be called.”
“What’s the Ernst Becker bit?”
“That’s my other passport. I forgot to tell you that.”
“Oh, I think I have it. The ‘rising moon’ is the east—Jordan.”
“You got it.”
“But who’s ‘Paul Revere’?”
“Rast, of course. You know, ‘One if by land, two if by sea . . .’ Rast will signal with two flashes, intermittently, from Cape Costigan at midnight.”
“And the ‘help’?”
“The president is having MacPherson, the secretary of state, flash the green light to his alter ego in Jordan so that their frontier police can help Rast avoid mines. I greased the rails for that yesterday, but it was all on hold until we actually had to go that route.”
“Great! Now if only you don’t get blown up swim-ming over there.”
“Now, first thing tomorrow morning, you put in a call to Landau at Rehovot and make an appointment for me late in the afternoon. That’s in case Gideon checks with him. Late that day, you phone Landau and say I’ve been held up. Reschedule for the next day. If he or Gideon calls the next day, you have no idea what in blazes happened to me. Got it? You thought I’d be driving over from the publishers in Tel Aviv. That’s so Shannon doesn’t get suspicious. Once I get to London, I’ll call her to say I’m all right, though I won’t say where I am. She’s to know nothing, you understand.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Okay, It’s 5:13. Time to call Rast.”
They returned inside, and Jon said, “It pains me to admit it, Linda, but this really is the last call.”
“Breaks my heart, Dr. Weber. Where to now? The Kremlin?”
“Not this time. ACOR in Amman.”
They switched from the Peugeot to the Land Rover and salted a dig of their own into its rear compartment. The lowest stratum was loaded with scuba equipment, the upper layers with cameras, tripods, and photo paraphernalia. There was also a lowest or “bedrock” stratum, where Jon would crawl when they approached possible checkpoints. It was reached only by opening the tailgate, but Cromwell had rigged two hidden slide-bolts on the inside, which would defeat any efforts to open it when latched.
Shadows were lengthening in the early dusk as they drove downward toward the Dead Sea, which is almost thirteen hundred feet below sea level, the lowest point on the earth’s surface. The first check-point lay about three kilometers ahead.
“Better pull over, Dick,” said Jon.
When traffic had passed, Jon opened the tailgate, crawled into the cavity where the spare tire was usu-ally housed, and took on a fetal position. No one was at the checkpoint, and Cromwell turned south along the shore road. Jon pushed himself up in the rear to overcome his cramped position and said, “Open the windows, Dick. Already I’m suffocating.”
“Okay. So far, so good, Jon. Not much traffic on the road.”
A half hour passed. Little was said. Glib small talk barely disguised the tension they both tasted. The last two days had seemed one long, rotten dream from which he could not extricate himself by waking up, thought Jon. Would he ever be able to shake off the ghastly mortification he suffered at the Shrine of the Book? Yet in view of the dangers ahead, that episode could eventually prove to have been the easy part!
“We’re way past Qumran and just about to En Gedi, Jon.”
“I’d best hunker down again, then. They have a checkpoint near here.”
“Slide the bolts, will you?”
“You bet.”
Just after a curve around one of the shore promontories, they came to their first manned checkpoint, and the gates were down across the road. “Here we go,” Dick warned.
The Rover braked to a stop. A member of the Israel Defense Force, jaunty beret askew and Uzi at his shoulder, leaned into the window and asked Dick for identification. He supplied it. The IDF trooper scrutinized it closely with his flashlight. “Where are you going this evening?” he asked.
“Masada. I have to do some photography there in the morning.”
Another IDF comrade stepped out of the guard shed and peered into the rear compartment, shining a flashlight over the photographic equipment. “Would you step out, please?” he asked.
“Sure.” Dick opened the door, got out, stretched his limbs nonchalantly. The two frontier troops rummaged a bit through the photo equipment, and then asked him to open the tailgate.
“Wish I could! Something’s sprung the lock mechanism, and I haven’t been able to open it for the past couple of weeks. Been meaning to get it fixed. I load everything through the back doors.”
One of the guards tugged at the tailgate several times. Jon held his breath, as pull pressure was exerted on the two slide bolts.
“Where will you stay tonight?” the first guard inquired.
“At the Masada youth hostel. It’s the only shelter available down there,” Cromwell added, with a little chuckle.
The guard flipped on his walkie-talkie and spoke in Hebrew. Dick understood nothing, but Jon heard him calling his base to phone the hostel and determine if they had a reservation in Cromwell’s name. While waiting for the reply, Dick asked, “What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?”
“Nothing. This is a frontier area, and we have to make a check, especially at night.”
“Oh . . . fine.”
“We also got a special border alert from Jerusalem. You don’t know a . .
.” he paused, looking at his notepad, and continued, “You don’t know a Jonathan E. Weber, do you?”
“No.”
The radiophone crackled and came to life. “Ken . . . ken . . . ken,” the guard responded. Then, turning to Cromwell, he said, “All right. Go ahead.”
A wave of relief splashed over Cromwell as he started the Rover and drove on toward Masada. “You can crawl out now, Jon!” he announced. “Just a bit, that is. I think we’ll make it.”
At Masada, Cromwell checked in at the hostel and lugged some overnight belongings into his cabin. Jon now slid open the bolts on the tailgate and extricated himself from his cramped cocoon. They carried the wet suit and other gear into the cabin, leaving the air tanks and weights in the Rover.
Jon checked his watch and said, “Okay, Dick, it’s 8:45 PM. We have a waning moon. It comes up around 10:00, and I want to get wet before then. Now, this place is very near that spa I visited yesterday. Go ask the manager of the hostel if you have swimming rights there, or, if not, where.”
Cromwell returned a short while later and said, “They simply use a corridor down to the sea a half mile south of the spa. No charge. And get this: there’s even a wadi trail down to the beach there for launching boats!”
“Fabulous! Hadn’t banked on it being that convenient!”
“Somebody up there likes you, Jonathan!”
“Okay, I’ll suit up now.”
A half hour later they got into the Rover and drove down the wadi to the beach. Music was playing at the spa, a string of yellow bug lights to the north pinpointing the source. “Nice distraction,” Jon observed as he opened the door and prepared to slip into his fins.
“Okay, here I go with the final checklist,” said Cromwell. “Ernst Becker passport in waterproof pouch?”
“Check.”
“Your second fake vial in waterproof belt pouch?”
“Check. Stupid of me to throw the first one away!”
“No one ever claimed you were perfect. The genuine vial in waterproof lead pouch around your neck?”
“Check.”
“Once again, what do you do if you’re stopped, stripped, and searched?”
“Before they haul me out of the water, I take the real vial and—”
“Yes?” Dick had a big smile on his face.
“I take the real vial and stuff it up . . . ah . . . I put it where the sun doesn’t shine.” Jon grinned.
“The list says, ‘Emergency insertion into posterior terminus of the alimentary canal.’”
“Same difference.”
“Submersible metal detector?”
“Check.”
“Seventy pound additional weights on shoulders, belt, and lower thighs?”
“Check.”
“Are you sure that’s enough to compensate for the buoyancy of the Dead Sea?”
“Should be. I want to swim just below the surface—nothing deeper—since I have to check my bearings from time to time.”
“Okay, read off the pressure in both air tanks.”
“Two thousand pounds in each.”
“Will that give you enough bottom time?”
“Ninety minutes’ worth. That should be enough to get me into Jordanian waters.”
“Okay. Flashlight?”
“Check.”
“That’s it, Jon. It’s 10:10. Time to move out.”
“Okay, Dick. Now, tomorrow, don’t forget to really do some photography atop Masada, and then head back to Ramallah. Rast will call you there around 1 PM. If I arrived safely and got off to London, he’ll say, ‘The high-speed film you ordered has arrived.’ If not, a code won’t be necessary, and he’ll have to spell out what happened and what you must do to save my tail . . . if it’s salvageable.”
“I hope to God it’s the first alternative. Now, don’t forget your sightings: the point you want on Cape Costigan falls in line with the moonrise over those hills there across the Dead Sea.”
“Those are the Mountains of Moab.”
“And if that metal detector starts whining, for goshsake, stop until you use your flashlight to see what’s in front of you.”
“Right. Ah . . . Dick, I don’t want to get mawkish here, but if anything happens to me, tell Shannon why I had to do this, why I had to keep it secret from her, and . . . that my last thoughts were of her. She’s the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened in my life. And then you have to carry on the crusade with Glastonbury to prove things, one way or the other. Promise?”
“I promise, Jon. Please take care.”
Jon waded into the water, constantly scanning a 180-degree arc in front of him. Dick stepped out of the Rover and did the same for the rear 180 degrees. Mercifully, there seemed to be no witnesses.
Fifteen minutes later, a waning moon started to peep over the eastern horizon of hills. Jon was now a quarter-mile off shore and making rather steady progress, although he was still disturbingly visible in the swatch of moonlight, Cromwell noted, to his dismay. Why didn’t he swim with a lower profile?
Dick heard a squeal of brakes behind him. Whipping about, he saw an Israeli jeep parked just behind the Rover, and a white-helmeted frontier guard climbing out. “What are you doing here?” he demanded in Hebrew, then English, Israel’s second language.
Cromwell cringed internally but said, calmly, “Just enjoying the moonrise. I hope this isn’t some restricted zone.”
When asked for identification, Cromwell stood shoreside from the officer so that he would have to face land and not sea while examining it. Swim on, Jon, he called silently, and swim quietly.
He intentionally took an abnormal amount of time, fishing through various pockets until he found his passport and gave it to the Israeli. Just then, obnoxiously loud rock music blared out from the spa to the north. Cromwell, who loved Bach and hated rock, was grateful for the throb of nonmusic that easily masked any soft splashing in the Dead Sea.
“Where are you staying?” asked the frontier guard.
“Up there,” Cromwell pointed, “at the hostel. I was just checking the boat-launching facilities here in case I bring my rig along sometime.”
“I thought you were enjoying the moon.”
Cromwell laughed. “Both! The two aren’t exclusive, are they?”
“All right. But if you ever do take a boat out here, be careful and don’t go out too far. We have mines near the international border over there.” He pointed uncomfortably close to where Jon was swimming.
“I certainly will. Thanks for the warning.”
Cromwell started the Rover and followed the jeep away from the shore, then parked at the hostel. He would spend the next two hours peering at the sea with powerful binoculars, hoping not to see the bright flash of an explosion that would reach his eye sooner than the awful sound.
Jon swam toward the moonlight. Early on, however, he sensed a bad miscalculation. He had not loaded on enough weight for the extraordinary buoyancy of the Dead Sea. No matter how hard he tried to dive, he promptly resurfaced, the back of his wet suit breaking into visibility atop the brackish waters. He kept swimming. What other option was there?
He was now in line with the canal. Looking back, he saw, to his horror, the lights of the Israeli jeep and he hove to, dead in the water. Any spotlight trained on the sea might doom his mission, and he could only wait, motionless, while the issue was decided. But the sound of rock music and the sight of retreating lights on shore heartened him, and he continued swimming, now with maximum thrust on his fins.
Then he realized a second, potentially disastrous mistake: he should not have been able to hear the music, but ought to have been listening to the hum of the metal detector. He quickly flipped it on, tuned it, then continued his swim, the probe of the detector strapped to a shoulder harness and projecting in front of him.
A half hour passed. He continued to aim for the rising wedge of moon and now reached the fields of floating salt bergs, nearly halfway to his target land-fall. The hum from the detector continued
evenly, no oscillation to indicate the presence of a metallic mine. He had settled into a routine of twenty kick cycles per minute, the briny near-syrup of Dead Sea water compelling such a low rate and slow progress. A scattering of ghostly white salt bergs floated into and out of his way, and Jon had to change his course repeatedly to avoid them.
It must be near midnight, he calculated. The witching hour was the time Rast had said he would start his double flashing. He scanned the horizon of land to the east but saw nothing. By now, though, he must be in Jordanian waters, he thought, which could well be mined also. He increased the volume of the neutral hum of his detector. Still no light on shore.
His legs began to ache. Fun this was not. The whole ordeal was taking on a chimerical cast, a return of the recurring nightmare. He needed some-thing to aim toward, to hope for and head for. He should have told Rast to start his signaling at 11:30 PM. And, of course, there was another possibility: the plan had miscarried, and Rast was not there at all.
Did he see a tiny pinpoint of light? He would know in thirty seconds, the interval between flashes they had specified. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three—he counted, until he reached twenty-eight. Clearly, gloriously, and just a little to the left of his heading were two distinct flashes. A half-minute later, the same magnificent sequence. Jon reached down to his belt, pulled out the flashlight, aimed it toward the light source, and flashed twice. As agreed, he was immediately answered by three flashes. Contact!
The final leg to shore still required three-quarters of an hour, but now it was duck soup. The end was in sight, and thus the end was won.
“Lo, Walt!” said Jon, as his feet touched gravelly bottom near shore. “I hope they have ferry service here someday!”
“Welcome to Jordan, you amphibious nut!”
Flanking Rast were two officers of the Royal Jordanian Army. The senior, a captain, shook Jon’s hand and said, “The government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan extends you its welcome, Professor Weber—or ‘Becker,’ that is!”
“Thank you! Grand of you to stage this reception, gentlemen!”
