THE PROMISED WAR Page 5

  “What the hell is going on, Elezar?” Deker demanded as they mounted their horses. “We look like pimps from Tel Aviv.”

  “The book of Joshua in the Hebrew scriptures says that Joshua the son of Nun sent two spies from Shittim to Jericho in advance of the invasion.”

  “Surely their names weren’t Deker and Elezar.”

  “Scripture mysteriously doesn’t say,” Elezar answered him. “But we have no choice except to play along and hopefully cross the Jordan to our time.”

  What a strange idea, Deker thought. But he said nothing as Phineas blessed their horses with his branch and holy water, said his prayer for the success of the jihad-obsessed Israelite army and waved them off.

  9

  It took forty minutes on horseback in the dark to reach the secret Israelite river base. They secured their horses and gathered around a stone table illuminated by several oil lamps. It was a dolmen capstone almost twenty feet long, conscripted to serve the base as combination outdoor mess hall and operations center.

  Deker couldn’t see the Jordan, but he could hear the river’s waters just beyond the tents and wood sheds. He also heard some rustling in the bushes, and out came the man they had come to see with a parchment rolled under his arm.

  The big Judah Division soldier, Salmon, immediately greeted his hero. “Caleb,” said Salmon. “Last of the old ones.”

  “You’ll get there, son,” Caleb said, glancing at Deker and Elezar. “If our friends here don’t fail us.”

  Caleb was nearly as tall as Bin-Nun, with deeply tanned and weathered skin. His clothing was different than that of the tribal commanders—he wore no body armor or sword—and he had a quieter air about him than General Bin-Nun or Kane the Kenite. But his flint-sharp, probing eyes seemed to miss nothing, and he clearly commanded the same respect as the two other “old ones” with the Israelite army’s rank and file.

  Caleb unrolled the parchment beneath the flicker of the oil lamps. It was a map of Canaan, the “Promised Land” to the ancient Hebrews, which would later be called Palestine and which Deker knew as modern-day Israel.

  Caleb then stretched a long, muscular finger, flecked with age spots, over the map. He pointed to a city about four kilometers away on the other side of the Jordan. It was bounded by Mount Nebo to the east, the Central Mountains to the west and the Dead Sea to the south.

  “Jericho,” he said. “‘City of the Moon.’ Its Hivite inhabitants call it Reah, and themselves Reahns. Its strategic location allows it to control the trade routes through many cities of Canaan. As a result, Jericho is the perfect base from which to destroy or capture enemy convoys. Unfortunately, there is no way to conquer Canaan without first taking out Jericho. And we can’t take out Jericho without destroying her walls.”

  Caleb looked up from the map, first at Elezar and then with unblinking eyes at Deker, holding his gaze until he seemed sure that Deker fully felt the essence of his mission: namely, that he and Elezar were to spy out the area, infiltrate Jericho’s defenses and blow up the walls. Because, come hell or high water, tens of thousands of Israelites were going to invade the Promised Land.

  “Then give me my magic mud bricks,” Deker said in halfway decent ancient Hebrew and with his own unblinking gaze. “We’ll be on our way.”

  But Caleb, who understood him perfectly, eyed him coldly. “No magic mud bricks. You are to spy out Jericho and come back with a report first.”

  “Only a report?”

  Deker looked at Elezar for some help here. But Elezar responded only with a pained look on his face. Now was not the time to show off fluency in ancient tongues, his expression implied, or question orders, or do anything to delay their crossing.

  “We’ll want several plausible lines of march to the city,” Caleb said, speaking directly to Elezar now, peer to peer. “And a full assessment of the fortifications and walls. Any weaknesses? Any way under or over? Most important, we need you to gauge the morale of the people of Jericho, especially her troops. They’re now under the command of an Egyptian mercenary, General Hamas.”

  “Hamas?” Elezar said out loud with a start, echoing Deker’s thoughts.

  “You’ve heard of him, then?” Caleb said. “An evil monster who executes any officer who fails him with his own blade, but only after he feeds their children to Molech before their eyes.”

  “What’s the king’s name?” Deker asked Elezar directly in English. “Hezbollah?”

  Elezar frowned at Deker, but Caleb seemed to pick up the gist of the question.

  “Alakh is the provisional king,” Caleb said. “It is said Hamas dispatched the king before him, and the one before him too. There is no royal family, only wealthy landowners whose taxes secure the troops who defend their holdings.”

  Deker heard a grunt from behind as Salmon, seeing their utter ignorance of the region’s geopolitics, leaned over to Achan and quipped, “Angels of the Lord.”

  Caleb then handed Elezar a folded piece of papyrus. “One of our spies, before he died, intercepted this for us on the trade routes. It’s a communiqué from Hamas to the kings of southern Canaan.”

  Elezar translated the text for Deker. “Hamas is asking local city-states for a consignment of the following weapons: 3,000 bows, 1,500 daggers, 1,500 swords and 50 additional chariots,” Elezar told him in English.

  “Sounds like he knows Yahweh is coming,” Deker said.

  Caleb said, “That’s enough weapons to equip six thousand troops, more than twice the daytime population of Jericho and almost ten times the number of its men in uniform.”

  “But he’s not asking for troops,” said Elezar, handing the scroll back to Caleb. “Just weapons.”

  “So, where is Hamas finding the extra bodies?” Deker asked.

  “Something else for you to find out,” Caleb said. “There are rumors that Hamas has some kind of shadow army of demons ready to wipe out any invader who breaches Jericho’s walls.”

  A shadow army, thought Deker, suddenly on alert. It sounded suspiciously similar to the phrase legion of demons that his superiors in the IDF often used to refer to the secret fail-safe he had buried beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Like Jericho’s so-called shadow army, the Israeli fail-safe was a weapon of last resort, the ultimate self-destruct mechanism that would wipe out Jews and Arabs alike but ultimately ensure the survival of Israel.

  The Israeli demons were contained inside a replica of the Ark of the Covenant that the IDF had code-named “Pandora’s Box.” Deker once knew what exactly was inside the box, before military hypnotherapists inflicted reverse-regression treatments on him to make him forget what he had buried. Indeed, the only image or feeling that he still could recall about the fail-safe was that it was very ancient. He also suspected it was a bioweapon of some sort. But such a device would be well beyond what General Hamas and the armies of Jericho were capable of developing.

  Suddenly, Deker felt self-conscious of his thoughts, worried that he shouldn’t even be thinking about the Israeli fail-safe or acknowledging to himself that it even existed.

  For a split second Deker wondered if the wall of time and space was as porous as Elezar thought, and his sixth sense tingled, as though he had spotted a glitch in the universe. Then it was gone and he wondered if he had sensed anything at all.

  I have to get back to Jerusalem, he reminded himself. Have to stop the attack and prevent a wider war.

  “Deker!” said Elezar, breaking his trance. “Pay attention.”

  Deker refocused his eyes as Caleb presented him with a couple of thin bronze tags: passports of some sort, it appeared. The Israelite veteran then unrolled a long leather strip with jewelry and amulets pinned inside. Two more wraps sat on the stone table.

  Young Achan let out a low whistle.

  It was quite understandable. Deker figured there was probably two or three million U.S. dollars’ worth of gems and precious metals in those jewelry wraps, and it made him wonder if he and Elezar were really going to walk out of there alive.


  “You cross the Jordan tonight dressed as jewelry traders from the east. Kane the Kenite has prepared your cover here with passports and jewelry. Before daybreak, you will cut through the barley fields and olive groves on the other side of the Jordan. The road to Jericho is wide and well traveled. Hamas has reconnaissance chariots that regularly patrol it. You will join the road after the last checkpoint to Jericho, so that the main gate will be your one and only inspection. If you pass, you’re in.”

  Elezar nodded, and it seemed they were done. But then Salmon slammed his fist on the stone table.

  “This is not the plan,” he nearly shouted at Caleb, the words hanging in the night air. “Achan and I were supposed to cross the Jordan and join the barley workers, bring the harvest through the gates of Jericho, spy it out and come back.”

  “Yahweh works in mysterious ways, Salmon,” Deker said, and helped himself to the two other wraps, tucking them inside the folds of his tunic.

  Caleb sighed and looked at Salmon. “It is what it is.”

  Deker then noticed one last little leather pouch that old Caleb fingered under his weathered hand. “What’s that?”

  Caleb opened the pouch with great care and presented him with a necklace with a silver pendant in the shape of a crescent moon. “If you get into trouble, you can go to Rahab’s Inn,” he said. “Give her this.”

  Deker picked up the necklace by the chain and looked at the crescent moon, the light from the oil lamps dancing like fire across its shiny surface. He watched Caleb’s eyes follow his hand as he carefully put the necklace around his neck next to his IDF tag.

  “She’s the whore from the story, isn’t she?” he asked Elezar in English, trying to recall the details of the book of Joshua, if only to prove Hebrew school wasn’t a complete waste of his parents’ money.

  “And older than I am, according to tradition,” Elezar shot back, and then addressed Caleb. “It won’t be necessary. We’ll be out before the gate closes and return the necklace to you as you have given it to us now.”

  “That’s probably best,” Caleb said resolutely. “There’s nobody better informed about the guard placements and shifts than the women who service those guards. But they cannot be trusted and may turn you over to be killed. Avoid Rahab’s if you can, then, and bring the necklace back to me.”

  Deker nodded and then put his hand to Elezar’s back. “Bribes, whores and deception,” he said cynically, pushing Elezar forward to get out of there. “The work of Yahweh must go on.”

  10

  The Jordan was a stone’s throw away from the base, so a sullen Salmon and curious Achan walked Deker and Elezar over to its swollen banks to see them off. Deker’s heart sank as soon as he saw the silvery surface ripple under the new moon. It had to be a kilometer across—a virtual impossibility in the twenty-first century, even if Palestinians had blown up every dam.

  “Remember, it’s shallower in the center,” Achan offered, sensing Deker’s concern but misunderstanding its origin. “Only three or four cubits deep.”

  Deker stripped and stuffed everything into the satchel Caleb had kindly provided, as well as two bronze daggers in case things got up close and personal on the other side of the river. Elezar followed suit, and they stepped down the limestone bank. They were joined by a gazelle that had ventured down to the watering hole.

  The water was colder than Deker expected, the current stiffer. At any moment he felt he’d be swept off his feet. Deker had never seen the Jordan move so fast. He knew it dropped an average of three meters per kilometer until it emptied into the Dead Sea. But in the twenty-first century, most of that water had been siphoned off by agriculture.

  He was getting a bad feeling about this.

  He looked back, but Salmon and Achan and everything on the east bank of the river had disappeared behind the mist. Now he and Elezar had to wade through the void on their own to the unseen other side. It felt less like a flight to freedom than an Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange: there was always the outside chance you’d get shot in the back—or the front—before reaching the other side.

  He could still feel the pain in his own back from the bronze spearhead that first brought him here, and he suddenly wondered what the wound looked like. Had they sewn him up back in Shittim? Would there be a scar, should he return to his own time? His mind went to a million places as his feet began to touch the bottom near the shallower middle of the river.

  And then all of a sudden the current picked up, lifting him off his feet and sweeping him downstream. He started kicking and worked his legs furiously, treating the river like a riptide, swimming toward the western bank, afraid that if he stopped for even a moment he would sink to the bottom and never surface again.

  Swallowing some water and choking all the way in, he crawled up on the west bank of the Jordan.

  Elezar dragged himself up after him and said, “If the Lord doesn’t part the waters, the Israelites will never make it.”

  “We made it. That’s all that matters.”

  They ran up and over the bank, moving quickly through the mist into a thick field of barley stalks. There they removed their clothing from their soaked satchels and dressed quickly. The rising sun would dry them soon enough.

  Already the horizon was plain to see as the first light of day began to break. As Deker stuck his head above the stalks, he could see some baskets floating over the fields.

  “The field workers have already started their day,” Deker reported to Elezar, who was having trouble with his deerskin boots. “Let’s pray to God they’re good old Palestinians and this is the West Bank as we know it. Jericho is only four kilometers away. We can hit the Oasis Casino and grab lunch at The Mount of Temptation Restaurant before noon.”

  Deker and Elezar stood up and began to move through the golden stalks, passing curious workers and a few oxen along the way until they finally reached a wide, well-traveled dirt road.

  “This isn’t Route 90,” Deker said quietly as he took in the still air. A sinking feeling of dread began to press down on him.

  “That’s because there is no Route 90, fool,” Elezar told him. “There is no West Bank. There is no Israel. There is only that.”

  Deker followed Elezar’s gaze to the northwest and started. Straight ahead in the distance, towering over an oasis of palm trees, were the grim walls of ancient Jericho, soaring darkly against the dawn.

  Standing cold and damp, his legs still weak from the strength of the Jordan’s current, Deker realized his hopes of walking into the arms of the modern-day, Israeli-occupied West Bank were shattered.

  They had covered too much ground now, from the camp at Shittim to the base at the Jordan and now across the Jordan, to hold on to the thin hope this was all some movie set. Nor could he pass off the megalithic structure on the horizon as some mirage or mental fabrication.

  His presence in this ancient world—this time—was as unquestionable as those massive walls before him. And, as with time, there was nowhere to move but forward.

  11

  The well-worn road to Jericho was on a slight uphill grade, four kilometers beyond the west bank of the Jordan River. Deker was beginning to feel the exhaustion that should have overwhelmed him hours ago. His legs continued to ache even now from that grapevine hold the Israelites had put him into back at Shittim. The crossing of the Jordan hadn’t helped. Bracing himself against the fast current had taken its toll on his already overtaxed muscles. His throat seemed to be perpetually parched in the dry air, and the unfamiliar scents of the field and vegetation on this side of the Jordan inflamed his sinuses, giving him a headache.

  On second thought, he had had a headache ever since his torture back in Madaba.

  Maybe it was the exhaustion or just the simple lack of plausible alternatives, but Deker had finally accepted Elezar’s theory that they were now living among the ancients circa 1400 BC.

  “If this is real, Elezar—if by some miracle or curse we’re back in time—I refuse to live out the rest o
f my life hiding from history in hopes of not changing it. You said yourself, that horse has left the barn.”

  “Whatever fate has befallen us, we must see it through,” Elezar said. “That means we follow the orders of our IDF superiors, and in this epoch that’s General Bin-Nun. We spy out Jericho and get out before the gates close at sundown. Then we return to Shittim to give our report.”

  “And if we fail?”

  “Then there might never be a Jewish nation, present or future. We’re the Palestinians in this world, Deker, and the fortresses of Canaan might as well be modern Israel. Get used to it.”

  Elezar seemed a bit too eager to play a starring role in history by helping the Jews steamroll into the Promised Land. Deker, for his part, refused to surrender his own fate to history. But he had to wonder if the young zealot Salmon was right: this wasn’t the plan. He and Elezar were not supposed to be here. If anything, their presence now could only threaten Israel’s future, not ensure it.

  And yet, where else could they run to in this world?

  They were walking at a steady pace over the verdant land, passing early day laborers until the road widened as it bent toward Jericho and the hills beyond. Apart from the dust, they were dressed in the appropriate attire, and it amazed him that they looked as if they belonged in this land.

  Field workers wore basic tunics while the traders and rich had finer clothing and jewelry: bronze cloak fasteners, gold bracelets and rings. The faces here didn’t seem all that different from those he was familiar with across the Middle East, except that there were fewer beards than he expected, and mostly on older men like Elezar. Younger men shaved, the razor apparently having been invented some time ago.

  The modern man in this world, much like himself, was a clean-shaven one.

  Every now and then a convoy of oxen and carts carrying produce would pass by, the Bronze Age version of eighteen-wheelers. This was a trucking route as much as a passenger trade route. Deker and Elezar would acknowledge the drivers and workers with a nod but not exchange words.