“Father, I praise you for who you are, the God of heaven. And I thank you for your faithfulness, to me and my family, over so many years. Father, I believe you are the reason we are here. That it was your purpose and plan for us to be here. But we’re lost right now. We don’t know what to do; we don’t know where to go; we don’t know where to look to try and find this Temple, and we don’t know how to get out of here without going to jail or losing our lives. We are at the end of ourselves, at the end of this chase unless you show us the way. I don’t know what else to ask you, how else to ask you, except that we are desperate for your help. We need an answer. We need it now. Please, Lord, tell us what to do.”
There was silence in the small, open space they shared.
Bohannon lifted his face toward where he believed the sky would be. Please, Father, he breathed.
Bohannon got up off the floor and turned to Joe’s pack. While the others watched, he opened the lower compartment and withdrew the camera mounted on tiny tank tracks. “Bring the catheters and the video.”
The crevice was higher on this end, high enough that Bohannon could rest the mounted camera on his hip. Bohannon pressed himself back into the crack from which he had just come. He inched along, penetrating a few yards. He could hear Doc and Joe pushing in behind him. Suddenly, he stopped, and looked up.
The shelf was there, just as he knew it would be, just as he had “seen” it during his prayer. Bohannon poised the mounted camera on the shelf and, despite the close quarters, quickly pulled himself up alongside it. His body wedged back against the far wall, Bohannon looked up and saw the second shelf, and the opening above it, just as he expected. Bohannon reached up, stretched, and tipped the camera mount onto the second shelf. Climbing was relatively easy, the space so narrow he could lean back against the far wall if necessary. Standing on the second shelf, he looked up, into the opening. The camera mount went in first, he followed quickly. But before disappearing, he peeked down into the crevice. Joe and Doc were watching from the bottom.
“Use the shelf, there’s two of them. There are plenty of handholds. And you can lean against the far wall if needed. Follow me when you get up here.”
Bohannon turned on his hip. The opening was fairly regular, about a four-foot square, rough enough to be natural but also having the look of being purposeful. Getting into a crouch, he pulled the controller from his pocket, flicked on the power, and began guiding the motorized platform ahead of him, crab-walking behind it. Amazed at the little device’s effectiveness, Bohannon watched as the treads independently overcame each obstacle, like twin snakes undulating across the floor, each at its own pace.
He turned on the small Maglite on the front edge of the camera assembly, helping to break the growing darkness, and began following the camera’s progress more through the small LCD screen on the controller than through his own limited eyesight. The assembly moved forward rapidly, as if by its own volition, as if being called.
“Tom?” Joe’s question was reverential.
“Come on in,” he called softly over his shoulder. “Bring the equipment.”
One hand braced against a sidewall, the other holding the controller, his eyes now glued to the screen, Bohannon inched ahead, stumbling at times, bumping against outcroppings, but never taking his eyes off the screen. So, he saw the end of the tunnel in time to slow and stop the mounted camera before it cracked into the rock face.
Look to your left. He knew it would be there.
A slab of rock protruded from the left, about halfway up the wall. Under the overhang was a hole, about a foot-and-a-half round. Not smooth and finished, but also not simply a jagged, natural formation. The mounted camera fit into the hole, with little room to spare. Enough, he knew. Then he waited.
To his left, Joe and Doc crawled along the shaft. Joe had the equipment bag with the video catheters, hanging down his back from around his neck. Doc followed, the Pelican Box strapped to his chest. Tom waited.
“What have you found?” Doc was breathless, but excited.
“Let me have the catheter tubes.” There was no time for conversation.
Rodriguez pulled three coils of tubing from the equipment bag.
Bohannon took the first. “Start connecting them together. We’re going to need all three.” Turning to the camera assembly, Bohannon connected the front edge of the catheter tube to a prepared clip, just below the lens of the mounted camera. The tubes were really tubes within tubes, the probing camera at the front edge of the catheter able to snake out from its housing.
Controller in hand, Bohannon inched the mounted camera along, inside the hole, which almost immediately began sloping downward. I wonder how reverse works, he thought. “Get the video set up.” Momentarily glancing over his shoulder, he spotted Doc unhooking the Pelican case. “You brought the satellite phone?”
Johnson, clearly consumed by what Bohannon was doing at the entrance to the hole, looked down at the metal case as if seeing it for the first time. “I didn’t know what we would need. General Larsen said not to let this out of our sight. I grabbed the first thing . . . what are you doing there?”
“Wait, you’ll see.” Bohannon turned back to the controller screen. The mounted camera was still slowly descending through the hole, apparently swinging in a gentle curve toward the south. Joe had connected the first, and then the second catheter extension and the last one was getting alarmingly short. Bohannon pressed his gaze into the LCD screen. Where is it? Where is it?
Stop.
The word was so clear he turned to see who had spoken.
Only quizzical glances answered his questioning look. He lifted his thumb. He rotated the joystick to the left. Smooth and dark, a small hole rested right at lens level. Bohannon could feel Doc and Joe at his shoulders.
“What is that?” asked Johnson.
Bohannon changed his grip on the controller and began propelling the catheter’s camera end out of the tube attached under the lens. Like a docking spaceship, Bohannon guided the miniscule camera into the waiting hole. “Feels like an operation,” he said. More and more of the slim tubing disappeared into the hole.
There was some rustling behind him. “The GPS has us located alongside the Huldah Gate entry tunnel,” said Johnson. “The probe must be deeper, and farther south. Right where . . .”
The eyes of all three men were glued to the LCD screen, drinking in the same image. The catheter had just cleared the end of the hole, and Bohannon had quickly stopped its progress. The image was faint. Bohannon turned up the illumination on the camera tip, pushing it all the way to maximum. As the image emerged and cleared, none of them breathed.
Beyond the end of the hole, a room opened up, a large, cavernous space. Inside the space was a towering, ornate structure on a massive scale. Larger than anything Bohannon had imagined, the Third Temple of God came to life in the glare of the amazingly bright light emanating from the miniscule tip of the catheter tube. The light burst into the cavern, and blasted back, reflecting gloriously off the golden columns that seemed to fill the space.
“You see what I’m seeing, right?” Bohannon flipped a glance over his left shoulder.
Rodriguez slowly nodded his head. “I didn’t believe it. All this time, I didn’t really believe it. I didn’t really think we would find it. But it’s here, wow, it’s really here. And God, it’s beautiful.”
“It’s amazing,” said Johnson. “Look at the richness. I never expected it to be so big . . . and so much gold. I’m amazed. How could they have done this? But there it is, the Temple of God, right in front of our eyes. Can you move the camera any? Is there any way to get a different view?”
“Limited,” said Bohannon. “The camera tip can rotate slightly, but it’s not independent of the tube holding it. I can extend it about another inch, then run it through a three-sixty arc after that, but I don’t know how much more we’re going to see. Joe, you got the video running?”
“Yeah, it’s been on since you entered the hole.”
>
“Okay, I’m going to bring it out . . . “
“What, what do you mean?” Johnson was blustering in Bohannon’s ear.
Bohannon stopped, turned away from the LCD screen, frustrated with Johnson’s interruptions.
“Doc, you, more than any of us, should know what we’ve got to do. Right now, what we’ve got is an isolated image. With today’s technology able to create just about anything, we’d be mocked and ignored. We’ve got to validate what we’ve found. We’re going to start over, set the stage and start over. We need to make sure this proof is unassailable. Get the satellite phone powered up and both GPS units operating while I pull the unit out.”
Bohannon went back to the LCD screen and the controller. Only the rustling behind him confirmed that Johnson and Rodriguez had heeded his instructions. With the camera now pointed to the rear, bringing the unit out seemed easier, and faster, than the inbound trip. Grasping the tank tracks, Bohannon extricated the unit and turned it to face Johnson and Rodriguez.
“Turn on the audio, Joe. Doc, call Sam Reynolds at the State Department. Let me know when you have him on the line. We should all sit against the far wall.”
Bohannon set the mounted platform on top of the stone shelf above the entry shaft, then inched himself to the far wall, beside his two partners. With the controller, he swiveled the camera so he had a good, clear picture of the three of them. Johnson was to his left, Rodriguez to his right.
“Mr. Reynolds, this is Dr. Johnson. I know . . . I know. Can you just hang on for a moment?” Doc looked at Bohannon. “Now what?”
“Everything rolling?” Bohannon asked.
“All set to go,” said Joe.
“This is Tom Bohannon. Sitting next to me are Dr. Richard Johnson Sr. and Joseph Rodriguez. We are under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Outside of the Hall of the Sanhedrin, we’ve found a shaft that led us to this point. The mobile camera that is filming us sits on a stone shelf on the far wall of the shaft, only a few feet from where we sit. Doc, hold up one of the GPS units that shows our location. I’m going to turn down the illumination just a bit.”
Bohannon turned to Doc.
“You can see from the GPS screen two important pieces of information. First is the date and time, set automatically by a link to Greenwich Mean—June nineteenth, 6:43 AM local time. The second piece of information is our GPS location. Doc, begin to decrease the zoom, take us farther out.” The image on the screen blurred, then cleared. “There, you can see the Temple Mount.” Blurred again, and then cleared again. “There, you can see the Old City of Jerusalem.
“Okay, Doc, get the other GPS, but start with an entire view of Israel. Okay, good. So, there you see the same time and date as the first GPS. Okay, Doc, begin zooming in closer, bring it in on Jerusalem. Have the GPS home in on its own location, do it automatically.”
There was silence as Johnson fiddled with the controls.
“There, it’s marked its own location . . . 31°47' north; 35°10' east. Doc, hold up the other GPS. What are the coordinates?”
Johnson held the two units up, side-by-side, so the camera had a clear view. “They are identical.”
“Okay,” said Bohannon. “On a secure satellite phone, we are talking with Sam Reynolds, an official from the United States State Department. Sam, are you still there?”
“I’m here, but you guys better listen to me. The entire—”
“Yeah, I know,” said Bohannon, “but that’s not what we need right now, Sam. Tell me, what is today’s date? What is today’s time, there, in Washington?”
“Tom, you men are crazy. Get out of there.”
“Date and time, please, Mr. Reynolds. We need to make sure there is no question about what we’re about to record.”
“Tom, don’t be a fool.” There was no answer. “Ahhh . . . it’s Thursday, June 18. It’s 11:46 PM here in Washington. And I can verify the coordinates of the satellite phone. We can track that kind of stuff from here. They are where they claim to be, either on top of, or underneath, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.”
“Great, Sam, thanks. That really helps. Can you hold on for a few more moments?”
“Sure, I’ll be here. You at least deserve a warning, if you’ll ever listen to it.”
“Okay, Sam, okay, but in a minute.” Bohannon turned back to the camera. “I’m going to get up now and grab hold of the assembly on which this camera is mounted. I’m going to pick it off the rock shelf, turn it around 180 degrees, and insert it into a smaller shaft that appears to be naturally occurring. It looks like it’s been formed over years by the passage of water. There . . . there is the opening of the shaft. I am going to place the mounted platform into the shaft.
“About one hundred fifty yards into the shaft, I will stop the camera and rotate it ninety degrees to the left, where it will face a small hole. I will move the camera toward the hole and then insert a small, medical catheter, with a camera on its tip, into the hole. Here is a view of the catheter. The catheter will move through the hole for approximately seventy-five feet. It will then enter a large cavern, where we will turn the illumination to full power.
“We did this same exercise some fifteen minutes ago. Inside the cavern we found the Third Temple of God, erected in the eleventh century by the leaders of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, Elijah and his son, Abiathar, Gaons of Jerusalem. With the conquest of the crusaders, the cavern where this Temple was built was sealed. It has remained hidden until today.”
Bohannon stopped his lecture and cast a glace at his two companions. Both nodded silently.
“We’re going to leave the audio on,” said Bohannon. “Here we go.”
Bohannon continued his narration as first the camera assembly, then the catheter, retraced their progress to the cavern of the Temple. Turning up the illumination, this time Bohannon extended the camera tip as far as it would go, then began the three-sixty rotation. Although the difference in the camera’s distance from the catheter was not great from their first visit to the second, the rotation still gave the three explorers a significantly expanded view of the Temple. The hole in the limestone emerged opposite what appeared to be the front, right corner, or the southeast corner of the Temple, fairly high along the cavern wall. Rotating the camera angle showed not only more of the front and the side of the Temple’s construction, but the top of its arc revealed a remarkable view of the Temple’s roof area and what appeared to be an opening in the roof.
“That opening,” said Johnson, once again hanging over Bohannon’s shoulder, “is likely situated over the Holy of Holies. I’ve seen renderings that had the Holy of Holies open to the sky above.”
“The Temple construction appears to be cut limestone,” said Bohannon. “The columns in the front also appear to be limestone, but the capitals are covered with gold, as is the decorative detail at the roofline.” Bohannon rotated the camera as far to the left as he could. He could clearly see the large courtyard, the Outer Courts, at the front of the Temple. But from their vantage point, the actual front of the building was obscured for the most part by the front columns. Still, there appeared to be a wall and a great entrance doorway behind the columns. “We apparently can’t get a clear look at the front of the Temple, but there appears to be a doorway, a huge doorway extending more than two-thirds of the way up the front wall. From this angle, it looks like the building is not built square, but more as a trapezoid, wider at the base and more narrow at the roof. The doorway also, though it’s hard to tell, seems to be angled to be more narrow at the top.”
A quiet, but insistent beeping accompanied a vibration in Bohannon’s hand and a blinking battery signal in the LCD screen.
“We’re running out of power. Looks like time to bring the baby home,” said Bohannon. “I’d leave it where it is and just let the power run out, but I want to bring all the equipment home, if we can, just in case there are any questions. Sam Reynolds, for verification, can you tell us again the date and the time?”
“Sure, it’s t
ime to call your lawyer.” Bohannon could hear the frustration and rising anger in Reynolds’s voice. “Are you telling me you actually found a Jewish temple built under the Temple Mount, hidden for a thousand years? You’re telling me you’ve actually got that on videotape?”
“Mr. Reynolds,” said Johnson, “I can understand you might have some skepticism when an investigative journalist claims to have made some historic discovery that’s been hidden for generations. But I assure you, if I have any reputation left, I wouldn’t squander it by foisting what would be a monumentally stupid attempt at deceit. Yes, sir, the Temple is there. I haven’t touched it, but I’ve seen it twice. It’s there, Mr. Reynolds. There is no doubt, it’s there.”
“God help us,” Reynolds whispered. “It’s now Friday, June nineteenth, and it is 12:18 AM in Washington, DC. And I can verify that not only have I heard everything that Tom has been saying, but I have also been recording it and will be able to verify any recording he has made. What you’ve been seeing, well, that will be for someone else to corroborate.”
“Thanks, Sam. One thing? Is there any way you can keep this to yourself? At least for the next several hours? We’re going to need every break we can get to get out of here in one piece.”
“Tom, I can’t do that. You don’t have any idea what you’re asking. The president knows you’re in there, and the cabinet. And we’ve all been ordered to share with the Israelis any information we discover. I don’t have a choice, Tom. And even if I did have a choice, I would never be able to keep this information to myself because I’m not the only one who has this information.”
The three men in the cave looked at each other.
“What do you mean, Sam?” said Bohannon.
“Tom, the Israelis have the same technology that we have. If I could locate you guys, they can locate you guys. And, if they intercept the signal and if they can crack the code . . .”
“Can they do that?”
“Yeah, oh, yeah, they can do that,” said Reynolds. “I’d have to put my money on the Israelis. They probably already have you located and have soldiers trying to get to you right now. Even on the off chance the Israelis haven’t intercepted this communication, when I hang up with you, I will immediately call the secretary of state and fill him in on everything I’ve said and everything I’ve heard. And he will call the Israeli prime minister and hand them the GPS coordinates. I don’t know how you figure to get out of there but, whatever your plan, you’d better move on it right now. You are out of options. Good luck.”
The Sacred Cipher Page 35
