THE PROMISED WAR Page 2

  It’s over. Now the game is to go out without compromising Israel.

  Deker blinked his swollen eyes open again and saw that he was inside a dark stone chamber—a basement of some kind. A second man with long black hair stood over a small bank of medical equipment.

  “Before the sun rises in a couple of hours, a large portion of the Temple Mount will collapse, and it will look like you two here did it on behalf of the Orthodox Jewish fanatics,” the Jordanian said. “Palestinian rioters will overrun Jerusalem, raise the Palestinian flag, and Israel won’t be able to stop the world from recognizing the capital of the new nation of Palestine.”

  “That could work,” Deker said. “But it won’t. Or else you would have already killed me and Elezar.”

  Like Stern, Deker thought, heaping more guilt upon himself. He remembered how his driver had been jumpy about the mission from the start—for good reason, as it turned out. Then his thoughts turned to Stern’s young wife, Jenny, and their eighteen-month-old son, David. He had failed to protect them, like he had failed to protect Rachel. But he would not fail Israel now, he vowed to himself. He could not. It was all he had left to live for and to die for.

  “The Tehown,” the Jordanian said, using the Hebrew code name for Israel’s top-secret fail-safe. “Tell me about this so-called gate of the deep or tunnel of chaos that will save the Jews but kill the Arabs. We need to know what kind of Jewish physics we’re dealing with.”

  Deker now understood what this was about. He was one of only three Israelis besides the prime minister who knew the secret of the Tehown. Not even his superiors in the IDF knew its details, including Elezar, for fear they would use it before its intended time as Israel’s last resort.

  Elezar began to shout, “I’ll kill you myself if you break, Deker! I swear it! I’ll kill you myself!”

  The Jordanian nodded to the guard next to Elezar, who shoved an electric prod into the IDF veteran’s groin and delivered enough blue voltage to knock him out and create a thin wisp of smoke.

  “Your superior officer is rather annoying, don’t you think?” the Jordanian asked. “He is certainly no friend of yours. Look what he sent out earlier this evening.”

  The Jordanian held up Deker’s BlackBerry so that Deker could read a Twitter alert from the Jerusalem Highway Patrol, complete with his picture.

  Deker looked at himself on the small screen. The stone-faced expression made Deker himself wonder if a heart could still be beating inside this man. Only the dark, half-dead eyes revealed the faintest smolder of a passion snuffed out by life a long time ago.12:43 a.m. Male. 26. 5’11". Brown hair. Gray

  eyes. Armed and extremely dangerous. Shoot if

  subject resists arrest.

  “That last order seemed completely uncalled-for,” the Jordanian said in a flat voice, thick with sarcasm. “And these are supposed to be your people.”

  That Elezar and the Shin Bet never wanted him to succeed in persuading the Waqf to acquiesce to an electronic surveillance net didn’t surprise him. If anything, after a botched assassination attempt in Dubai a couple of years back that caught Mossad agents on camera, his superiors preferred to avoid a repeat the next time they had to storm the Temple Mount and kill a few Waqf guards.

  Nor was he surprised that the Jordanian attempting to break him now would use Elezar’s APB to divide his Israeli captives.

  But Deker was indeed surprised by the shoot-to-kill order.

  I’ll deal with Elezar and the IDF once I escape, he vowed to himself. But first he would have to escape. To do that, he’d have to kill their captors and see just where on earth they had been taken. If they were in the basement of the GID HQ in Amman, he and Elezar were finished. But Deker didn’t think so. They were probably still close to Jerusalem, perhaps in some safe house in Jericho or the West Bank.

  If so, we still have a chance.

  Without warning, the Jordanian struck him on the side of the head. A flash of light exploded before his eyes.

  “The Tehown fail-safe, Commander!” he yelled with a maniacal growl. “What is the nature of the fail-safe?”

  As the howls echoed in his ears, and the flash of light dissipated, Deker could see a glowing cord extend out from a bank of computer screens. It traveled straight toward his head, just above his eye, where it seemed to bore into his skull.

  What the hell? This experiment had gone beyond anything in the GID playbook—or anything else he had ever experienced.

  Pure panic now overwhelmed him as he realized with horror that there was a shunt in his head with a thin intravenous line attached, some sort of fiber-optic cable pulsating with a neon purple light.

  Deker winced as the Jordanian pressed on a button and suddenly another blast of lightning flashed before Deker’s burning eyes. The unbearable pain lingered like a mushroom cloud inside Deker’s head. When the overexposure finally lifted, he could see the ghost of its outlines.

  Deker struggled to catch his breath. Terror tore his conscience as he sensed whatever human resolve was left in him was beginning to wither. “I’ll tell you how to wipe the Zionist state off the map,” he said desperately, gasping. “But you won’t like it and you won’t do it, because you all have your heads up your asses.”

  “I’m listening,” said the Jordanian, for once without the threat of imminent violence in his voice.

  “Call their bluff,” Deker told him, aware of Elezar beginning to stir in his chains. “Lay down your arms. Ask to be fully recognized citizens of Israel. Israel is already ten percent Arab, the West Bank almost ten percent Jewish. Two states side by side is apartheid. Nothing changes. One state with an Arab majority risks Israel losing its Jewish identity.”

  “Never!” Elezar shouted, fully awake now and aware of Deker’s words. “I’d sooner have two states and keep the foreign dogs in their pounds.”

  “See,” Deker said with a weak smile. “Our heads are up our asses too. So tell me, Hamas or Hezbollah or whoever you are. What do you want? More rockets? I can get them for you. More explosives? Just tell me how you want them delivered. The more you lob rockets, the more you secure the borders of a greater Israel and hurt your own. You are Israel’s secret fail-safe.”

  The Jordanian was not amused. He was about to fire another burst of light when Deker’s hand reached out for the rod behind Elezar’s knees. In one smooth motion he slid it out from the chains with a yank and struck the Jordanian on the back of his head with all the force he could muster. As his captor, still conscious but dazed, put his hands up to his head, Deker reached down and pulled out the Jordanian’s sidearm and turned as the other one fired a shot. Deker used the stunned Jordanian as a shield for the oncoming bullet and returned fire, killing his captor with a bullet between the eyes.

  Deker looked up to see Elezar, dangling in his chains with the rod removed.

  “Get me out!” shouted Elezar, unimpressed by Deker’s latest feat.

  Deker unchained Elezar. His superior officer fell to the floor and gasped as his bloody bare soles touched the ground as he rose to his feet.

  “Thank you very much, Commander,” Elezar said tightly, and punched Deker in the face, sending another flash of light across Deker’s skull. “You think this erases what you’ve done? I warned the PM not to sign off on your crazy scheme to test the Waqf at the Temple Mount. You thought you were testing their defenses. It’s clear now that they were testing you—the IDF’s weakest link.”

  Deker had to steady himself for a moment. Elezar’s weakened fist didn’t land all that hard a blow. But Deker felt as if there were some kind of splinter in his brain and found the sensation unnerving. “Your text alert calling me dangerous didn’t help.”

  “I had to stop you before it was too late,” Elezar said. “Instead I find Stern dead at the wheel, and myself captured and tortured.”

  Stern, thought Deker as another wave of guilt washed over him again.

  “Who knows what you’ve told them?” Elezar went on. “Even you don’t seem to know. Our
business isn’t over, Deker. You will answer for this failure in security.”

  “What failure in security, Elezar? You getting captured?”

  “No, fool. You’re the lowest in the chain of command with knowledge of the fail-safe. They’re going to use whatever you told them along with your breach of the Temple Mount tonight as a pretext for their own attack and pin the blame on us.”

  It was bad, Deker knew, worse than he could comprehend at the moment. Still, they had to keep moving, and that meant ignoring the hot-blooded Elezar’s commentary second-guessing everything he did. He had grown used to it over the years. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing his BlackBerry and explosives pack.

  They moved quickly down the outside corridor, the hum of the air-conditioning heavy in the air, and slowed down at intersections with other hallways. But they encountered nobody else and reached a metal door. Deker slid the heavy metal bolt aside and paused. He eased the door open, heart beating as it scraped too loudly against the stone step, and they stepped out into the night.

  The horizon was a moonscape dotted with squat, whitewashed concrete boxes, rooftop satellite dishes and minarets. But there was also the unmistakable silhouette of an old Byzantine church on a hill.

  Deker’s heart sank. They were much farther from freedom than he had hoped.

  “We’re in Madaba,” he told Elezar. “‘City of Mosaics.’”

  “Jordan? How do you know?”

  “The mosaic on the floor inside—they’re in half the old houses here. And St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church over there. It has that famous tiled mosaic map of Palestine on the floor. Most Christian town in Jordan. Very tolerant.”

  “For Christians and Muslims,” said Elezar, “not for Jews like us. Not if bad elements of the GID are involved.”

  “If we’re lucky, we can reach the border in twenty-five minutes,” Deker said, working his BlackBerry. “But I can’t get a signal on my phone, and the GID is going to know we’ve escaped in five, if they don’t already.”

  Deker checked his pack for his Jericho 9mm, but it was missing. The memory of his last moments struggling in the service van flitted across his brain, and he realized his gun was probably back in that van. His zipped his pack closed with a yank of frustration, then set off down the stone steps toward the street, Elezar behind him.

  Deker crept close to the wall, slowing at the end of the alley to motion Elezar to pause while he peered into the street. He felt naked without his gun, vulnerable and angry. And his head pounded. His eyes should have adjusted to the dark by now, but his vision seemed dull and blurry. When a car came down the street, Deker pushed his back against the whitewashed wall, squeezing his eyes shut tight as the beam of the headlights cut through the darkness and seared his brain. He waited for the car to pass, and for both the light and pain to recede.

  Deker stepped cautiously into the deserted street and made his way down the sidewalk, concealing himself in doorways and behind hawkers’ stands closed up for the night. They hadn’t gone two blocks before he heard voices and smelled tobacco. Two men stood talking to each other, leaning against the wall of a darkened restaurant. And beyond them in the alley sat a black S-Class Mercedes.

  “I’ve got the one on the left, you’ve got the one on the right,” Deker said, his body going cold as they moved forward, the iron discipline of the IDF kicking in. He hit the guard on the left with a blow to the back and then across the Adam’s apple. Elezar simply grabbed the head of the other guard and with a twist snapped his neck. Both men were on the ground without a sound.

  Elezar lifted a phone off the driver and tossed Deker the car keys. “You drive!”

  Deker threw open the driver’s-side door and jumped behind the wheel, Elezar sliding in shotgun. Deker gunned the engine and shifted into drive, running over an empty fruit cart on the way out of the narrow alley. He switched on the headlights and swung by the roundabout, onto the main road heading north out of town.

  3

  Deker blew past the turnoff to Amman a mile outside Madaba and cut across the desert in the opposite direction, anxious to avoid roadblocks. In order to secure extraction, they had to contact the Israelis before they reached the Allenby Bridge at the Jordan River. But so far Elezar had no luck finding a wireless signal.

  “You’ve got to let our side know we’re coming,” Deker said. “No private vehicles are allowed to cross the Allenby. We’re as likely to die from Israeli bullets as Jordanian.”

  “I would if this Arab piece of shit worked.” Elezar banged the phone he had lifted from the Jordanians against the dashboard. “Just drive.”

  Deker’s mind, still a jumble of images from his torture, was racing faster than the stolen Mercedes. This mysterious Arab organization had penetrated the Waqf, perhaps now controlled it, and was planning to blow the Temple Mount. No doubt they would leave the Dome of the Rock standing and blame the failed attempt on Jewish extremists—specifically, him and Elezar. Riots would ensue and the Palestinians would declare Jerusalem, at least the Old City, as the capital of a new Palestine. Arab nations, and probably the Russians and Chinese, would instantly recognize the new nation, much as President Truman of the United States recognized the State of Israel in 1948. At that point, arms would flow into the new Palestine, further threatening Israel’s existence and making it even more of an isolated fortress than it already was.

  Unless the Tehown was activated.

  But the legendary fail-safe required an artifact Israel did not officially possess, one that Deker had buried beneath the Temple Mount. And so far as Deker knew, the Tehownwas more pedestrian than this cosmic gate or tunnel the Jordanian imagined. Now Deker was beginning to wonder if, in fact, he knew as much as he and his dead captors thought he did.

  The speedometer showed 120 kilometers, but the Mercedes felt as if it was dragging. Or maybe it was the lingering effects of his torture. The flashes of light seemed burned into his retinas, as if he had stared into the sun too long. Even now, in the dead of night, he couldn’t blink the brightness away. The needle marks on his arm also concerned him, and he wondered what sort of chemical cocktail was coursing through his veins.

  Deker looked out his window and was at once both reassured and troubled to see the black cutout of Mount Nebo soaring above the Jordan Valley as they crossed into what in ancient times was known as the plains of Moab.

  “Mount Nebo is where Moses viewed the Promised Land,” Elezar lectured authoritatively, as he often did. “You can see the Jordan Valley, Jericho and the Judean hills beyond.”

  Deker had been to Nebo’s summit with Rachel. The two of them used to hike the canyons of the Wadi Mujeb nature reserve off the King’s Highway to the south. They had planned to come back one day.

  “You know who Moses is, Deker, don’t you?” Elezar asked with condescension in his voice.

  Despite Deker’s many demolitions and decorations in heroic service for Israel, Elezar had never considered him to be a “true Jew.” That’s because Deker grew up an American Jew on the coddled Westside of Los Angeles. Not like Elezar, twenty years his senior, who was raised in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank, knowing his family could be wiped out in an instant.

  “Just because I’m not an observant Jew like you doesn’t mean I’m entirely ignorant of our history, you self-righteous ass.”

  Deker long ago had lost patience with self-appointed holy warriors like Elezar. At one time the IDF was led by men like Deker: secular, Western and educated. Now it was controlled by religious nationalists like Elezar. But just because Elezar was anointed with oil by Brigadier General Avichai, the IDF’s chief rabbi, and liked to wave the holy Torah around, it didn’t make Elezar or his fellow former Golani Brigade officers the official representatives of the Jewish people.

  “It’s your ignorance that compromises the IDF,” Elezar said. “How do I know that you’re not the Black Dove?”

  Deker bristled. The Black Dove was the code name for a suspected Hamas mole deep within the IDF. Unti
l Rachel’s death, Deker had always wondered if the IDF made up the Black Dove to justify all kinds of military operations against Hamas as well as periodic purges of undesirable officers within its ranks. But the Black Dove clearly knew enough about the IDF’s plans to switch the bowl that Deker had crafted to assassinate him and senior Hamas officials. Later Deker suspected that Husseini, the Waqf official at the Temple Mount, might be the Black Dove, as he was someone whose position gave him access to both Israeli IDF and Jordanian GID personnel. That’s what prompted him to conduct tonight’s test of the Temple Mount. It was also why he almost killed Husseini when the bastard brought up Rachel’s death and showed him a similar ceremonial washbowl like the one that killed her. In hindsight, perhaps he should have.

  “So because I’m not a self-righteous ass like you, I’m a mythical Palestinian mole inside the IDF?” Deker asked, to expose the absurdity of Elezar’s logic.

  But Elezar was unrepentant. “You might as well be the Black Dove if they broke you.”

  “The only thing broken is your recording of these accusations that you insist on playing over and over,” Deker replied. “You’re not helping the situation.”

  Elezar was quiet for the next few minutes, except to occasionally curse his Jew-hating phone and blather in the darkness about the history of “God’s people”—meaning himself.

  Deker concentrated the best he could on the road as the highway expanded to two lanes both ways. He pressed the accelerator through the floor.

  “Forget the phone: Get the guns,” Deker said. “We’re not stopping until this car skids to a halt on the other side of the Jordan like a block of Swiss cheese shot full of holes.”

  Deker peered through the windshield as they approached the bend in the highway, trying to sense how close they were. The Jordan River flowed down from the melting snow atop Mount Hermon in Lebanon to the Dead Sea. It was easy enough to pick out from satellite overheads, because it coursed two hundred kilometers through a tectonic fault zone known as the Great Rift Valley with its two plates on either side. But right here, right now, he couldn’t see the river.