by James Becker
He touched her arm in reassurance.
‘If it is those men, then if they’re armed at all they’ll be carrying pistols, and pistols aren’t going to be too much use in a confined space like the tunnel and spaces under the Temple Mount.’
He reached down and picked up a length of rebar – the steel reinforcing bar used in concrete – that was lying on the ground just outside the doorway.
‘Down there in the dark, this will probably be more use than a pistol. I’ll be okay.’
Angela’s face was barely visible in the moonlight, but Bronson could still see from her expression that she was terrified for him.
‘There could be a dozen of them in there,’ she said, ‘just waiting for you to walk in. We should go, just forget all about this,’ she added, repeating herself.
For a few seconds, Bronson contemplated doing just that, taking the easy option. But he knew that if they didn’t get to the bottom of the mystery neither he nor, more importantly, Angela, would ever be safe. There was no option. He had to get in there, no matter what the risks. And having come this far he was desperate to solve this mystery too. He shook his head.
‘I doubt very much if there are that many inside. And they’ll be looking in front of them, searching for this key thing, not behind, where I’ll be.’
For a long moment, Angela just stared at him, her eyes unblinking as if she was committing his face to her memory. Then she bowed her head and nodded.
‘I really don’t want you to do this, Chris. But I know I won’t be able to stop you. I can’t go with you, I just can’t, but I’ll stay out here and listen. And if I hear anything, then I’m going to call the police.’
‘Good.’ He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Stay close and keep your ears open. I’ll be fine.’
And a second later Bronson, a black-suited figure barely visible against the night sky, was gone, stepping inside the gate and out of sight.
In the square, Angela took out her mobile and checked the signal strength and the amount of charge remaining in the battery – both indicated nearly the maximum – then made herself as small as she could, squatting down beside the entrance to the Western Wall Heritage, where hopefully she would not be seen, but would still be close enough to the entrance to hear anything happening inside.
39
Jerusalem
The Western Wall Tunnel runs under the outmost portion of the Temple Mount, part of it behind the Wailing Wall, though this section of the tunnel is only about ninety yards long, while the structure as a whole extends to about five hundred yards.
Over the years, various excavations, authorized and unauthorized, have been made in and around the area, with the result that within the tunnel there are a number of closed-off spaces to which visitors have no access.
Of course, that presupposes that the visitors have not entered the tunnel complex equipped with bolt croppers, pry bars and other tools that would facilitate the opening of a locked gate or door.
Farooq was keenly aware of the problems he would face in the dark and confined spaces beneath the Temple Mount, and he had chosen only two of his men to come with him on his nocturnal expedition. All were carrying their pistols, as well as the tools that they had thought they would need.
They had done their best to prepare themselves as well. The previous evening he and Khaled had spent a considerable length of time online researching everything that was known about the subterranean structures within the Temple Mount, including the detailed maps produced by Charles Warren, the British army officer who had entered the spaces during his three-year dig in Jerusalem in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
They didn’t know exactly what they were going to find when – or rather if – they managed to get into the chambers under the Temple Mount itself, but thanks to Charles Warren at least they had a good idea of where they needed to go.
If Khaled’s assumption was correct, and the inscription’s ‘lost temple’ was one or both of the vanished Jewish temples that had originally stood on the Temple Mount, then what they needed to do was to get into one of the chambers below the Dome of the Rock. As Muslims, both men already knew that one famous chamber existed underneath the present mosque.
Accessible by a stairway was a carpeted prayer chamber known as the Br al Arwah, the Well of Souls, from which could be seen the crack in the Foundation Stone supposed to have been caused by Muhammad ascending from it to heaven and the rock splitting as it tried to follow him. In early Jewish times, the chamber was reputed to have been where the Ark of the Covenant was placed for safety while Jerusalem was under attack, and according to legend the relic might still be hidden somewhere in that cave. Islamic teaching states that the Well of Souls is where all the spirits of the dead will assemble at the end of the world, awaiting the final judgment of God.
But that cave was accessible only from within the Dome of the Rock, and was in any case so well used and documented that the presence of any mysterious inscriptions or carvings would have become common knowledge long ago. No, Khaled was quite certain that the chamber – the hypogeum – that they sought lay below, perhaps some distance below, the Well of Souls, and would only be accessible from underneath.
If they were to take the translated text of the inscription literally, then they should be searching the area that lay directly below the Dome of the Rock. And that meant surveying the wall that had been constructed around the buried portion of the Foundation Stone to form a large chamber, and checking the areas that Charles Warren had named on his map the Great Sea and Cohain’s Mikva, their original purposes and reasons for their names forgotten in the grey mists of ancient history. They might even have to go as far over as the Eastern Wall and the Shushan Gate.
Farooq had waited until just after one in the morning before he and his men had approached the Western Wall Heritage building. He knew that was taking a chance, because they were more likely to be seen at that time of night by residents returning home. But they were only going to get one chance, one night during which they could explore the underground labyrinth, because as soon as their intrusion had been detected, security would be put in place and after that the only way back in would be to use considerable violence. So the earlier they could get inside, the better.
Part-way along the tunnel, the light from the torch Farooq was holding glinted on a series of vertical black bars, and he widened the focus of the torch to show the entire structure. It was a heavy metal gate secured not with a lock into the frame but with two substantial heavy-duty padlocks, one at each end of a thick horizontal steel bar.
He bent forward and inspected the padlock at one end of the bar. It was a high-quality unit, but like every lock ever made it had a weakness, and his visual inspection quickly revealed what that was. The hasp was thick stainless steel, which would have been difficult to either cut through with a hacksaw or sever using a set of bolt-croppers. But the metal plate to which it was attached was much less substantial.
‘Mahmoud, use the croppers and cut here and here,’ he instructed, pointing to the metal above and below the hasp of the padlock.
The man he’d addressed extracted a set of heavy-duty bolt-croppers from the canvas bag he was carrying and closed the jaws of the tool around the metal, then steadily squeezed the ends of the handles together, his face tensing with effort.
After a few seconds there was a sharp crack as the croppers did their work. Immediately, Mahmoud opened the jaws of the tool and closed them over the top of the steel plate. He pressed the handles together, and again there was another cracking noise as the jaws snapped together, having severed the metal. The section of the plate that he’d cut out tumbled to the floor.
‘Do the same again at the other end of the bar,’ Farooq instructed, then pulled the padlock towards him.
It didn’t come free, and when he shone his torch at the end of the metal bar he realized that there was just enough left of the circle of steel to hold the hasp of the padlock in position.
�
�Hand me a pry bar,’ he ordered, and the other man standing beside him reached down and removed the tool from Mahmoud’s bag.
Farooq inserted the tip of the steel bar behind the hasp of the padlock and pressed sharply down on the other end of the tool. The padlock was immediately freed from the steel embrace of the door frame and tumbled down to land with a thud by Farooq’s feet.
Moments later, Mahmoud completed the second cut on the frame at the other end of the bar, pulled the padlock out of position and then lifted away the steel bar from in front of the metal gate.
Farooq reached out, grasped the steel bar on one side of the gate and pulled it open, the hinges protesting with loud squeals. It sounded as though that particular entrance hadn’t been used in a very long time. Behind it was what looked like a normal wooden door, and for a moment Farooq wondered if they would have to pick the lock or break it down, a noisy option that he really wanted to avoid. But when he reached out and turned the handle, the door opened, though not without a certain amount of shoving to get the aperture wide enough to step through.
Beyond, another void beckoned – even blacker, if that were possible, than the unlit tunnel. Farooq aimed the beam of his torch through the doorway, then led the way inside.
When Farooq switched off the torch for a moment, the darkness was impenetrable, though as their eyes adjusted a faint bluish glow became evident, a glow that moved very slightly as he turned to look at it. After a second, he realized that it was the barely luminous numbers on the face of the analogue watch Mahmoud was wearing on his wrist.
Farooq slid the small torch into his pocket and took out a much larger one with a long aluminium barrel and pressed the button to turn it on. He swung the beam around them in a semicircular arc so that they could see what lay to their front, and then turned round to check the wall behind them.
The massive stones of the inner wall extended in a more or less straight line behind them in both directions, while in front the ground was lumpy and uneven, a mixture of dark earth and protruding rock, presumably the bedrock upon which the Temple Mount had been built. A short distance in front of them, another wall, formed from equally substantial blocks of cut and dressed stone, paralleled the structure to their rear, though this was nothing like as long.
Farooq took a printed copy of the Warren map from his pocket, unfolded it and studied the shapes and dimensions of the structures the English army officer had identified well over a century earlier.
‘I think we’re somewhere near Warren’s Gate,’ he said, his voice seeming unnaturally loud in the silence of the subterranean chamber. ‘If so,’ he went on, ‘that wall right in front of us’ – he moved the beam of the torch left and right over the ancient greyish stones – ‘must be the perimeter wall around the Foundation Stone. And that means the Qubbat as-Sakhra, what the infidels refer to as the Dome of the Rock, is almost directly above us. It seems that we have entered the underworld of the Haram Ash-Sharif almost exactly where we had planned.’
Farooq lowered the beam of his torch slightly, illuminating the rocky and broken ground directly in front of them, and led the way over to the wall.
‘You two go around it to the right,’ he instructed, ‘and I’ll go left. Remember what I told you: if you see any kind of carving or inscription, especially if it’s enclosed in a border like the one in the photographs from the underground temple in Iraq, take several photographs of it and remember its position, because I will want to see it as well. We are not interested in anything painted on the wall, only carvings, and not just initials or individual letters. The key we are seeking will almost certainly be two or more words.’
The three men separated, the other two switching on their own torches as they walked away, and began working their way along the wall.
Farooq knew the history of the Noble Sanctuary as well as any Muslim – it was, after all, the third most holy Muslim shrine after Mecca and Medina – and he was supremely conscious, not just of his close proximity to the Qubbat as-Sakhra, but also to the Foundation Stone itself, the last place on earth that the prophet Muhammad trod after his Night Journey and immediately before he ascended to heaven.
He was also aware – and this produced an entirely different emotion – of the tens of thousands of tons of stone and bricks and masonry and wood and other materials that lay above them, a colossal weight that was supported, at least in part, by the wall that he was now inspecting, a wall that looked substantially less impressive in the light of that knowledge. Farooq put the thought out of his mind and concentrated on the search at hand.
He reached the corner without having seen anything of interest, the ancient stones appearing largely featureless apart from the marks made by the nameless masons who had dressed them two millennia earlier. He shone his torch ahead of him and immediately saw a potential problem. Close to the wall were two oblong stone structures that he guessed had been referred to by Warren as Cohain’s Mikva. Those were not the problem, and he would examine them as part of his search, but directly behind them was another wall, a structure that abutted the wall around the Foundation Stone, and which extended up to the north.
He checked the map again, just to confirm his suspicions: he was walking into a dead end and would have to retrace his steps in order to inspect the entire boundary wall. Even then, there was one section that, according to the map, would be forever out of reach, a short section that lay on the other side of the wall he had just seen, and which was enclosed in a kind of triangular shape by a second wall extending to the north. On the other hand, if it was inaccessible to him he would have to assume it had also been inaccessible to the author of the inscription.
Farooq shrugged and continued forward, playing the beam of his torch over the entire surface of the wall from the base to the very top. He reached the wall junction, scanned along the north wall as well, and checked all around the two oblong stone structures.
Disappointed, he turned and retraced his steps. There was no sign of Mahmoud or Salim, but he knew they would have had a much larger section of wall to inspect than the area he had studied. He could hear them talking somewhere in the darkness, and strode along the wall, playing his torch over the stones as he headed towards where they had to be.
Again, the stones in the wall presented an entirely featureless aspect.
Not for the first time, Farooq began to doubt Khaled’s assumptions and beliefs. By any standards, they were exploring the chamber, the hypogeum, that lay below the lost temple of the Jews, just as Khaled had deduced from the decoded inscription, but they’d found absolutely nothing.
And then another thought struck him as he walked towards the dancing torch beams of the other two men. From what he knew of the building of the Noble Sanctuary, it had been done largely as a single piece of engineering by Herod when he built the four huge retaining walls around the natural rocky outcrop, filled in many of the voids, and then laid a flat artificial surface over the whole area, upon which he then erected the restored Jewish Temple. That implied, at least to Farooq, that the various walls and chambers below the temple would have been inaccessible from that period – from the start of the first millennium onwards. And if that were the case, then how could anyone in the mediaeval period, or in fact at any other time, have got inside to create an inscription?
Suddenly, he was convinced that they were just wasting their time.
‘Anything?’ he asked as he reached the other two men.
‘Nothing at all,’ Salim replied. ‘We haven’t seen a single mark on any of these stones that wasn’t made by a stonemason, as far as we can tell. Are you sure we’re looking in the right place?’
Farooq smiled in the darkness.
‘No, my friend,’ he said softly, ‘I am not. But we’ll finish the job, so that we can report back to Khaled.’
They continued around the southern side of the interior wall, examining every vertical surface, and then the eastern side as well. But it all appeared virtually identical: heavy blocks of plain-dressed
stone, devoid of any markings.
‘A waste of time,’ Mahmoud said, as they slowly retraced their steps.
40
Jerusalem
Chris Bronson didn’t speak or understand Arabic beyond a dozen or so words, but as he stood in total blackness just inside the Western Wall Tunnel peering in through the open doorway, he believed that he understood the mood of the two or three men he could hear walking around inside the void.
They didn’t sound happy. In fact, they sounded hacked off and frustrated, which almost certainly meant that they hadn’t found what they were looking for.
And now they were heading his way. Back towards the open doorway.
Bronson straightened up and began to move backwards and to the side, to get out of view. But as soon as he did so, his left foot kicked one of the padlocks lying on the ground, the noise a dull but entirely audible thud.
Immediately, a torch beam speared through the open doorway into the Western Wall Tunnel. The light caught Bronson’s arm and shoulder as he moved sideways, and almost instantly destroyed his night vision. The light was followed in under a second by two shots – a ‘double tap’ – the technique used by professional soldiers the world over. The sound of the gunfire was deafening in the confined space.
By the time the shots were fired, Bronson was already out of view of the doorway, but the copper-jacketed bullets slammed into the solid stone wall on the other side of the tunnel and instantly ricocheted, hot shards of lead and copper flying in all directions, one carving a shallow furrow across his forehead.
As he started running, he could hear his feet thudding on the rock floor and his blood pounding in his ears. His torch beam was dancing across the walls and floors because now he absolutely needed to see where he was going. As he ran Bronson wondered if the firing had been a panic reaction to his presence, or if the shooter had expected the bullets to ricochet from the stone and hopefully injure him.
