THE PROMISED WAR Page 4

  Deker noted all the long spears, sickle swords, bows, slings and shields Elezar was pointing out. True, he saw no AK-47 rifles, no grenade launchers, not even a cell phone. But throw in a couple of satellite dishes and this camp would look right at home in the twenty-first century.

  “This camp is too advanced to be the ancient Israelite camp,” Deker announced. “They’ve got their latrines on one side of the camp, near the decontamination tents we came out of, and their natural water supply on the other. Armies didn’t have this kind of sanitation until World War I. It’s like spotting a digital watch on the wrist of a Roman centurion in some Hollywood swords-and-sandals epic.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Elezar pressed, clearly anticipating a response he would easily dismiss with the irrefutable logic of his inherent seniority, which he equated with superiority.

  “Maybe this camp is some sort of movie studio back lot disguised to throw us off,” he suggested, trying to reason in some way with Elezar, to bring him back to the cold reality. Otherwise, he’d have to attempt to escape on his own. “Maybe the real terrorists and their weapons are hiding somewhere. We just can’t see them.”

  “We can’t see any vapor trails, either, Deker. Have they changed the skies too? It’s been at least ten minutes and not even the distant sound of a warplane.”

  Which was true, Deker thought, as he glanced up at the white-hot sky. There was stillness in the air here. It lent an otherworldly quality to everything he was now experiencing through his physical senses.

  “Maybe we’re not anywhere,” he finally said. “Maybe we’re still strapped in some Jordanian dungeon somewhere, suffering from some torture-induced psychosis. Or maybe we’re dead.”

  From Elezar’s reaction, it was clear to Deker that his superior refused to even entertain the notion of his own mortality, let alone waking up in the same afterlife as his secular, American-born, bad Jew-boy underling.

  “We’re not dead, Deker. And the two of us both can’t be in the same psychosis.”

  “So instead you’re suggesting we’re time travelers?”

  “I’m suggesting we’ve traveled through time,” Elezar said, now passing himself off as a lay physicist as well as a Talmud scholar. “Space-time is like a flat surface. When it’s curved or bent back on itself like a wrinkle, it creates a ‘wormhole’ that connects one part of space-time to another. In our case, the wormhole connects our ‘present day’ in the future to the here and now of 1400 BC in a closed loop. You know how past, present and future seem to collide every day around Jerusalem, Deker, and throughout this part of the world. For all we know, this is the true Tehown, or cosmic ‘tunnel of chaos,’ that this mysterious Waqf splinter group has been after for centuries.”

  It was almost too much for Deker’s brain to process. “To what end, Elezar?”

  “Obviously, to erase Israel from history before it ever becomes a nation,” Elezar said, visibly perturbed that Deker was still playing catch-up with his reality.

  Deker closed his eyes as they walked. He felt the burning sand beneath the soles of his feet. They were beginning to blister. He could hear the sounds of children at play, hammers and saws and shouts in the distance. He could smell the fragrance of desert flowers. Finally, he could still taste that burnt ash on his tongue from the death grove.

  “So if we’re not dead, and we’re not hallucinating, and this truly is Camp Shittim some three thousand years back in time,” Deker said as he opened his eyes, “then where’s the Ark of the Covenant?”

  “Over there,” Elezar said excitedly, pointing out a large white tent that stood out from the others. “That’s the Tent of Meeting. You know what’s in there, Deker, don’t you?”

  “A stolen Soviet nuke?”

  “The Ark!” Elezar was beside himself now, clearly dying to take a peek inside the Tent of Meeting. He cleared his throat and addressed their two escorts in ancient Hebrew. “Can we see inside?”

  The guards looked to where Elezar was pointing and then glanced at each other. The big one snorted. Even Deker could understand it meant In your dreams.

  Deker said, “Well, maybe you can at least explain what that column of smoke is up ahead. The burning bush?”

  “Close,” Elezar told him solemnly. “It’s the very presence of God.”

  “Have it your way, Elezar, but we’re damned if these are Palestinians and damned if they’re ancient Jews. Because in case you haven’t noticed from the spears at our backs, even a Super Jew like you doesn’t make the grade with these fanatics.”

  7

  The presence of God turned out to be a twenty-meter-tall signal tower made of shittimwood beams with ladders leading to its various levels, all building up to a bronze furnace and chimney. It was manned by a contingent of soldiers who stoked it while an officer barked orders.

  Deker was tempted to taunt Elezar with some joke about how many priests Yahweh needed to screw in a lightbulb. But as ordinary as these pyrotechnics turned out to be, the entire scene was still all too extraordinary for him.

  “And we’re the ones who have to prove ourselves?” Deker told a dismayed Elezar. “So much for seeing Yahweh.”

  “So much for your Palestinian camp, Deker,” Elezar countered. “With a column of smoke like that, the IDF wouldn’t need a satellite to know of this camp’s existence. You could stand on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and see this cloud.”

  Which was true, Deker thought as a large group of military officers now entered the clearing behind Bin-Nun. He counted forty of them, in addition to four priests and an older man, only the second Deker had seen so far, counting Bin-Nun.

  “If each commander represents two hundred troops—the equivalent of an IDF combat unit—that puts Bin-Nun’s troop levels at eight thousand,” Deker whispered to Elezar. “If the ancient one-to-four ratio holds and the troops comprise a quarter of the general population, then we’re talking a bit more than thirty thousand Israelites total. Not quite the 2.5 million I recall from Hebrew school.”

  “I knew,” Elezar said, revealing some distress.

  That in turn distressed Deker, because it meant that Elezar truly believed they were back in biblical times, and that this “reality” didn’t jibe with his preconceived notions.

  Deker watched as General Bin-Nun consulted with the other old-timer, who pointed toward a stone monument about a hundred meters away. Bin-Nun nodded, and the group migrated over to what looked like a gigantic stone table but which Deker recognized as a Neolithic dolmen, a flat megalith laid across shorter stones to mark an ancient tomb.

  This dolmen was ancient even by ancient standards. Its horizontal capstone ran four meters long and two meters wide. Each of the three upright stones supporting it was about a meter tall. At one time there had been a mound of dirt covering the tomb, but the winds of history had stripped it away, and all that remained was the skeleton of stones.

  Here the commanders gathered in a semicircle around the two of them, and for a crazy moment Deker worried they were going to be stoned and buried under the dolmen. Instead, the other old man came forward with Deker’s pack of explosives.

  Deker snatched them while the old man spoke to Elezar.

  “Kane is the head of the Israelites’ arsenal,” Elezar told Deker afterward. “Their chief weapons procurer. Swords, spears and all that. He’s a Kenite and a cousin of Moses. Basically an arms dealer who trades in metals and manufactures the weapons of Joshua’s army. He joined up with the Israelites after the Exodus when Joshua was first starting to breed his army for Moses. He can’t reverse-engineer what he’s calling our ‘magic mud bricks,’ but he knows from the blinking timers that they’re not of this world, and the slight odor of elemental sulfur in the bricks suggests that they possess the same properties as whatever Yahweh’s angels used to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. So Bin-Nun wants you to demonstrate their power. He wants you to destroy the dolmen.”

  Deker paused. “This would be the first bomb I set off since Rachel.”


  “Yes,” Elezar said. “And you’ll do it to save your life and mine.”

  Deker looked at Elezar. “And take out the Israelite high command here in one strike so we can escape?”

  Elezar looked at him coldly. “See those eight commanders over there with the purple tassels on their breastplates branded with the sign of Gemini?”

  “What about them?”

  “Tribe of Benjamin. Isn’t that the tribe of your family’s ancestry? Kill them all here and you’ll have never been born. Neither you, nor I, nor the nation of Israel.”

  “You’re as crazy as these fanatics,” Deker said, clutching his C-4 bricks. “To escape, we’d have to kill our captors. But you’re saying if we kill our captors, we might not only kill ourselves but all Israel.”

  As he spoke, he could feel old Kane and the group of commanders studying with keen interest how he handled the C-4. It was the digital displays on the timers that seemed to captivate his audience, not the “magic mud bricks” themselves. They mistakenly thought the power resided in the timers, not in the C-4. They obviously had no clue that the kill zone of a single brick was almost twenty-five meters and that nothing or nobody could survive inside that circle.

  For the first time he was afraid there might be something to Elezar’s insane idea that they had gone back in time. These people seemed to have absolutely no clue as to the destructive power of this stuff. That was impossible in the twenty-first century. Even the most backward camp in the Middle East had a bomb maker, if nothing else.

  Elezar said, “Just prove we’re angels of the Lord, Deker, and maybe we can escape this . . . place.”

  Deker looked over his shoulder at the dolmen monument behind them. “I don’t like it. I have no idea how it’s going to break up or where the pieces will fly. Might take us out with them. How about a fire in the hole, a pillar of fire?”

  Elezar repeated this to Kane, who shook his head.

  “They have a pillar of fire,” Elezar said, noting the column of smoke. “They want you to vaporize the stone.”

  Deker carefully inspected the dolmen he was about to blow sky-high. The three supporting stones were sandstone, the capstone travertine. He’d have to direct the blast to flip the top away from the viewing parade of commanders before it broke up.

  His true gift, as Husseini had implied back at the Temple Mount, was his ability to locate in a structure the precise “pressure point” to bring the whole thing down with just the tiniest nudge. A building. A dam. It didn’t matter. Deker was a demolition black belt who used his target’s own weight against itself.

  As he leaned over and got to work with a single C-4 brick, he could feel old Kane breathing over his shoulder, watching him ply the putty into a natural sandstone groove halfway up one of the supporting boulders.

  This is going to be sloppy, Deker realized, but he had no time to prep the stone or anchor the brick properly. This was supposed to be magic, after all: fire from heaven. Too much preparation would reflect poorly on Yahweh’s angels.

  Moreover, since their lives were on the line, he would have to risk overkill and a flair for the dramatic by throwing in another brick for good measure: one brick of C-4 to blow out one leg with a short timer, and then a second brick on a slightly longer timer to push and twist the monument’s capstone up and out in the proper direction—away from his alleged ancestors.

  Bricks lodged and smoothed into place, Deker inserted the twin blast pins with radio receivers deep into each clump of putty. He set the timers just a millisecond apart. The green light on each pin detonator began to blink, signaling that its explosive was armed.

  Taking a look at what his hands had so quickly wrought, Deker suddenly worried that Kane and the rest weren’t far enough away.

  “Get them back, Elezar!” he shouted.

  Elezar began yelling as Deker ran toward the signal tower, most of the others in tow. But Kane, arms folded, remained standing a few meters away, refusing to look panicked or concerned.

  Damn it, Deker thought, and ran back to the old man and dragged him away from the stone monument.

  Stay here! he signaled with his left palm out.

  Deker raised his arms to the sky like Moses for dramatic effect, tightening his grip around the wireless pen-shaped detonator in his right hand. His thumb rested on the red button on top. He pumped once, releasing the safety. Then he pumped again, sending a radio signal to the receivers embedded in the C-4.

  There was a split-second delay, then a one-two blast that blew up the capstone. The shock wave blew him back off his feet and sent the line of commanders behind him to their knees, where they clapped their ears under their helmets. Meanwhile, broken pieces of rock exploded in the opposite direction.

  Deker, ears ringing, felt the ground shake as the boulders bashed each other to bits and came raining down hard, raising a cloud of dust and debris into the air.

  He coughed twice and helped the smiling old Kane up to his feet. If the guy wasn’t deaf before, he probably was now.

  Everybody else removed their hands from their ears. A few went wobbly in the legs, having trouble with their balance. All were staring at the small pieces of rock scattered across the ground.

  It was suddenly quiet again, save for the howls from a few boys who had secretly sneaked out for the show.

  General Bin-Nun suddenly threw his hands up to heaven and shouted, “Kol han-nesama!”

  Hope had returned to his haunted eyes with the explosion, and Deker could see a glint of genuine relief in his face as the rest began to chant after him.

  “Kol han-nesama! Kol han-nesama! Kol han-nesama!”

  But the shouts to heaven had wiped the smiles off the faces of Phineas and the Levites, who looked at Deker like he was the devil.

  “Kol han-nesama! Kol han-nesama! Kol han-nesama!”

  “What are they saying?” Deker called to Elezar.

  Elezar, his eyes ablaze with joy, said, “It means ‘Every breathing thing.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Bin-Nun has declared a holy war. They’re calling for death to everything that breathes.”

  Deker had a sinking feeling. “What about us?”

  “He says we’re free to return to heaven,” Elezar answered. “Just as soon as we spy out Jericho and come back and tell them how to blow up its walls.”

  8

  At sundown Deker stood in the clearing where he had blown up the dolmen monument and watched the column of smoke atop the signal tower turn into a pillar of fire. The change announced the start of a new day on the Hebrew calendar along with his and Elezar’s mission to spy out Jericho.

  Ancient Israelites. General Joshua bin-Nun. The Promised Land. Yahweh.

  None of it made any sense. All he knew was that he wanted to cross the Jordan River and enter the Israeli-occupied West Bank territories and escape this nightmare. The shouts of the commanders from that afternoon were still ringing in his ears.

  Every breathing thing. Every thing that breathes.

  Deker scratched at his itchy change of clothing, which included a long-sleeved gray cashmere shirt, tight-fitting brown-burgundy wool pants and white deerskin boots. He couldn’t wait to see Elezar’s getup when his superior finally emerged from the nearby changing tent.

  Standing by to bless them on their way was Phineas the Levite. The young, fat priest actually seemed sorry to see him go.

  “You and the angel Elezar appeared and gave Bin-Nun his first miracle today,” Phineas told him in ancient Hebrew while he stood before the signal tower.

  Deker was beginning to understand his ancestral tongue after hearing it spoken over his cattle-and-corn dinner, most of the talking coming from Phineas. The priest’s monologues were longer than Elezar’s. Speaking ancient Hebrew, however, would be a challenge, one Deker hoped would be wholly unnecessary as soon as he and Elezar were off.

  “He needed a sign of Yahweh’s blessing on him as Moses had,” Phineas went on about General Bin-Nun, seemingly unaware tha
t the halo effect of the pillar of fire behind him lent him a rather hellish aura. “He seems to have found it with you and your magic mud bricks. He’ll need more signs and wonders to lead us into the Promised Land.”

  Apparently so, Deker realized, what with the likes of Phineas and the rest of the Levites whom General Bin-Nun had to deal with. They obviously had served as Moses’ own sort of Praetorian Guards until Bin-Nun wisely disarmed them upon assuming command of not only the army but also the nation, such as it was. Still, Bin-Nun had to assuage the clergy. Especially now, as they prepared to cross the Jordan River into the land they claimed God had promised their forefather Abraham.

  “The manna grain that has fed us for forty years is drying up, and the troops have resorted to grabbing food by attacking caravans on the King’s Highway to the east,” Phineas confided in him. “The sooner we reach the land of milk and honey, the better for us all.”

  If food was in short supply, Phineas certainly didn’t look like he was suffering as he lovingly used a stone to sharpen the bronze tip of his spear like a pool cue. It was the same spear, he had boasted earlier, that he had used to shish-kebab the Midianite princess Cozbi and her Hebrew backslider in mid-fornication. He took particular pride in demonstrating the motion of his single thrust through the back of the Hebrew and into the belly of the Midianite. He even hazarded a hope that she had been with child, although he confessed she would have been too early in her term to be certain.

  Deker nodded at Phineas as Elezar at last appeared with Salmon and Achan, the young Judah Division guards who had welcomed them into Camp Shittim by hosing them down and whacking them around the decontamination tent.

  Elezar had the horses and supplies, along with his equally hideous change of clothing: a long-sleeved tan cashmere shirt, close-cropped olive wool pants and white deerskin boots.