THE PROMISED WAR Read online

  The ground started to shake and for a moment Deker thought it was a seismic tremor. The region was riddled with faults. But when he looked back over his shoulder, he saw a cloud of dust coming their way as four horsemen thundered toward them.

  “Must be military,” Elezar said. “They’ll be armed.”

  The patrol had to be based out of Jericho, Deker thought, as horses didn’t have the long-distance water capacity of camels. They had probably made a circuit between the nearest highway oasis and the city.

  Elezar said, “Move to the side of the road to let them pass.”

  But instead of speeding up, the horses began to slow down as they approached. Deker counted four armed soldiers dressed in the heavy body armor of the regular Reahn army—bronze helmets and breastplates—and radiating a distinctly menacing aura.

  The nearer the horses came, the smaller Deker felt. He hadn’t been next to a horse in years, and the pounding of the hooves on the packed dirt rattled his backbone. Their muscles rippled in their legs, their eyes blazed and foam formed around their mouths. Deker would have gladly faced an armored tank instead of these fearsome, fast and powerful means of war.

  “It’s kill or be killed if we’re blown,” Elezar told him. “They go down or we do, and with us the future of Israel.”

  Deker couldn’t argue with Elezar’s first statement, or the rest. He instinctively reached back beneath his tunic and felt the bone handles of the two bronze daggers he had slipped behind his back.

  12

  The hoofbeats stopped as the patrol came to a halt just a few meters away from Deker and Elezar. The four Reahn soldiers were close enough for Deker to see the emblem of Jericho emblazoned on their breastplates: a six-pointed star exactly like the one on the flag of Israel.

  “What’s with the Star of David?” Deker whispered to Elezar.

  “It’s the Blazing Star of Remphan,” Elezar told him. “Quick, pull out your IDF tag so they can see it.”

  Deker removed his hands from the dagger behind his back and made sure his dog tag was on full display over his tunic. “But it’s Jewish.”

  “A six-pointed star could never be Jewish,” Elezar chided him. “Six is the number of man. Seven, like our menorah, is the number of God. The Blazing Star is Egyptian in origin. It represents the star god Saturn or Molech.”

  “Molech?” Deker had heard the name back in Shittim.

  “God of the Reahns and the name of the idol secretly worshiped by the Israelites in the wilderness. Moses had his Levites slay three thousand Israelites because of it. The six-pointed star was never a symbol of Judaism. It was Solomon, David’s son, who made it a symbol of the state.” Despite the circumstances, Elezar seemed to enjoy lecturing Deker on Jewish history once again.

  Deker said nothing more as two of the soldiers dismounted and walked toward them, one wielding a scythe-like sword and the other carrying an axe. The commanding officer remained on his horse. The fourth Reahn, meanwhile, rose up in his stirrups, bow and arrow trained on them.

  One of the stone-faced lieutenants barked in ancient Arabic, “Open your satchels for inspection.”

  Deker glanced at Elezar and understood that these thugs wanted a piece of whatever they might be carrying before they got to the main gate, which in itself suggested bribes and corruption were not tolerated within the city walls.

  Deker wordlessly offered his satchel to the soldier, who ripped it open with his sword. Several pieces of jewelry fell to the ground.

  “We are tradesmen,” Elezar said as the sparkling gems in the dirt fixated the soldiers. “We were going to deposit these at the treasury in Reah.”

  “No you’re not,” said the commanding officer from his horse. “You’re going to deposit them with us, and then I’ll decide if I’m going to kill you and fertilize these fields with your flesh.”

  Deker watched the soldier closest to him bend over to pick up a piece of jewelry, revealing a full view of the bowman with his arrow ready to strike.

  He glanced at Elezar, who seemed to be thinking the same thing he was: The whole mission will be shot to pieces before it even gets started.

  As the Reahn soldier bent over again, Deker saw his opportunity. He gave the soldier a knee to the face. The soldier snapped back upright, and Deker used him as a shield to take the arrow from the bowman. Then he grabbed the soldier’s sword and hurled it at the bowman, catching him under the chin. The bowman grabbed at his throat and fell off his horse, dead.

  The second dismounted soldier came at Deker, swinging his axe, ready to bring it down on Deker’s head. Deker reached back and grabbed the two knives at the small of his back. Bringing both blades out in a flash, he plunged them into the soldier’s gut, just beneath his breastplate. Blood gushed out as Deker withdrew the blades and the soldier fell forward dead.

  He turned to Elezar, who had sliced the captain on his horse but failed to bring him down. Now the horse and its rider were taking off, and Deker couldn’t have that.

  Deker picked up the dead bowman’s bow and arrow from the ground, drew back the string and aimed. The arrow wobbled through the air and overshot the horse. But his target was still within the one-hundred-meter range for one more shot. He picked up another arrow and pointed, aiming a few degrees higher for loft, and let go.

  The arrow missed the rider but hit the horse, and down it went.

  Deker ran with an axe in hand as the captain struggled to get out from under his mount. The man’s leg was pinned painfully below the fallen horse. It took only a single blow to crush the captain’s helmet and the skull beneath. Still the Reahn fought, striking out at Deker with his fist even as blood seeped out of his smashed helmet.

  Deker brought up his axe to finish him off and felt a sharp pain as the Reahn thrust a dagger into his leg. Deker shouted and brought the axe down again on the captain’s face, and the Reahn’s limbs flopped to the ground, his thick fist opening up until the dagger fell from his lifeless fingers.

  Deker’s shout faded away over the field until there was only the whinnying of the wounded horse.

  At the sound of the cracking of a stalk behind him, Deker spun around to see a bloodied Elezar pulling the two live horses he had captured. He was dressed in a Reahn uniform, which hung on his lean frame. Beneath the bronze breastplate he had on a red tunic, belted with leather and cinched up to keep the tunic from falling below his knees. His brown leather boots were part sandal, part shin guard. And the breastplate’s six-pointed star shone brightly in the sun, as if the body armor’s owner had polished it daily. But the bronze helmet was tipped too far back on his head, and Elezar had missed the smudge of blood on his chin strap.

  “Change of plans,” Elezar said, and stopped suddenly as he took in what was left of Deker’s theater of war.

  Deker stood there motionless, his fist loosening just enough to let his Reahn battle-axe hit the ground with a thud.

  Elezar stared down at the dead rider and dying horse with a look of horror and fascination. Deker watched his superior officer’s eyes drift up his blood-soaked body until they locked on his own.

  “Maybe I was wrong about you, Deker. You might make a good Jew yet.”

  13

  Dazed, Deker gazed at the blood all over himself, human and horse. The cold-blooded brutality of such close combat was very different from the relatively detached, remote-control work of bombs and the instant disintegration of body parts they caused. He had seen the results of his handiwork before, but rarely inflicted death with his own bloody hands.

  Deker hated death almost as much as himself for his efficiency at dispensing it. That his own life was at stake, and even the future of his people, did little to lessen his guilt and self-loathing.

  Now, as he took in his handiwork, the old nausea was coming back as it had at the scene of Rachel’s death. Several had been killed in that blast, and he had refused to look. But he had seen a mangled limb fried to a cinder, and while he had told himself it wasn’t Rachel’s, it could have been, and
he could not sleep for almost two months afterward.

  “Deker!” Elezar spoke, bringing him out of his daze. “Clean yourself up.”

  Elezar tossed him a dirty tunic to use as a rag.

  “You’re a bloody mess,” Elezar told him. “Your cover garb is of no use to us now. You’re going to have to piece together a uniform from the body parts you’ve scattered around here. We’ll go in as soldiers and use their papers to get through the gate.”

  As Deker mopped up blood, a muffled roar of pain came from deep within the dying horse. To Deker’s amazement, the horse valiantly struggled back on its feet.

  “Step back,” he told Elezar.

  Wiping the blood from his eyes, Deker swore and took his blade, plunging it into the horse’s side to put them both out of their misery. The horse collapsed and disappeared beneath the tops of the stalks. The shimmering field of grain was calm and peaceful again, as if horses and riders had never been.

  But it wouldn’t hide the carnage for long, Deker thought as he looked at the broken grain stalks around him, covered with blood. Already a lone raven circled overhead like some Predator drone. Soon there would be more crows. A black cloud would hover over the fields like a column of dark smoke rising into the air, a beacon to any and all atop Jericho’s watchtowers.

  “We’re losing time, Deker,” Elezar said impatiently.

  Deker looked at the noonday sun. Elezar was right. They’d be lucky to get in before the gates closed at sunset. Luckier still to make it out before the Reahns knew one of their patrols hadn’t reported back and was missing. Before long the hunt would be on for them. They had to clean up and get out before anybody spotted them.

  Unfortunately, somebody already had.

  Behind Elezar, Deker saw a small face in the stalks, eyes wide open. It was a boy, no older than ten, staring at the bloody clothes on the ground and the dead horse and soldier.

  Before Deker could speak, Elezar’s hand plunged into the stalks and pulled out the screaming boy by the hair before he quickly shut him up with a hand over his mouth and a blade to his throat.

  “No!” Deker told Elezar, watching the boy squirm in Elezar’s arms. “He’s just a boy, a kid who works in the fields.”

  Elezar began to press the blade into the small, tender throat, and the boy’s wild eyes grew even wider. “He has a mouth, doesn’t he? If we let him go, we might as well blow the warning horns from the towers of Jericho ourselves.”

  “He’s a boy, Elezar.”

  “Yes, and in our time he’d probably be strapped with explosives, and we’d already be dead.”

  “But this isn’t our time.”

  “It is now, Deker, and you know it.”

  Deker paused and took a breath. With each passing second the sun was moving faster and the shadows of the walls were growing longer. “We tie and gag him,” he finally said. “The end is the same: we’ve kept him quiet long enough for us to get inside the city before the gates close.”

  Elezar squinted at him in what Deker could only interpret as profound disappointment and even disgust. “I take back what I said just now about you being a good Jew,” he said, putting his blade away and instead tightening his bare hands around the boy’s neck in a chokehold. The boy struggled to breathe. “But I need you for this mission.”

  Elezar’s hands squeezed hard until they crushed the boy’s windpipe and he collapsed to the ground. Deker ran to the prostrate child and bent over the pale, bluish face struggling for air. The boy had a pulse but looked like he didn’t know it.

  “You’re a heartless son of a bitch, Elezar.”

  “He’ll live to see tomorrow, Deker. Which is more than I can say for you and me unless we move our asses.”

  14

  Jericho. City of the Moon. Reah, as the Reahns who worshiped the celestial and lunar deities called it. The city looked like a piece of the moon had crashed to earth in the middle of a tropical oasis. Its walls seemed to rise more than fifty meters above the surrounding palm trees. The late-afternoon sun only lengthened the walls’ ominous shadows—and shortened the time Deker and Elezar had to make it to the main gate before it closed at dusk.

  They rode side by side along the wide entrance road, dressed in the uniforms of the Reahn soldiers they had killed and buried back in the fields. They had passed a couple of chariots and a number of oxen pulling empty carts. The farmers had already brought their goods to market and were returning. Now the traffic was heavier flowing out of the city than in. That would only draw more attention to them when they tried to enter the city gate.

  More fortress than city, Jericho’s profile resembled a giant aircraft carrier cut from a single rock. All the fortifications were aimed at the single main gate in its narrow eastern wall at the bow, pointed like the barrel of a giant cannon at any who approached her.

  The monolithic walls began to separate into two as the road bent to reveal the main gate. Deker could see that there were really two walls around the city.

  The lower outer wall ringed the base of the city mound. It boasted an impressive five-meter-high concrete revetment skirt at the base. The rest of the outer wall, comprising red bricks, rose another ten meters to the parapets on top, where uniformed soldiers with gleaming spears marched between two stone watchtowers on the north and south walls.

  The city’s higher inner wall ringed the fortress at its summit. This wall was almost fifteen meters high and also built of red bricks, with two additional stone towers on its east and west walls. All the towers had slits for the archers. They might as well be housing machine guns, Derek thought, because either way the targets of their fire would be shredded to death in seconds.

  Jericho’s layers of defense at first glance were proving to be far more impressive than Deker had anticipated. So shocked was Deker at this level of engineering that he once again doubted if he was in fact in ancient times or dreaming all this up. The challenge taking shape both perturbed him and yet strangely excited him.

  Soaring high above the city’s walls and the four watchtowers was Jericho’s landmark octagonal spire. It resembled a giant Muslim minaret with a watchtower on top, and afforded the Reahn army 360-degree visibility of all lines of approach. From that vantage, Deker didn’t doubt the Reahns could see the pillar of smoke from the Israelite camp at Shittim.

  He also doubted that anybody up there could miss him and Elezar as they rode up to the wide stone ramp leading to Jericho’s massive and iconic iron gate.

  An iron gate in the Bronze Age, Deker thought. There was no greater symbol of strength and impregnability in this world.

  Deker took in the red banners with the black six-pointed Blazing Star on a circular white field draped from the walls. It was the same color scheme the Nazis used to unfurl their swastikas. He also noted the sun sinking rapidly behind the dark ridge of hills to the north. By now the ravens must have led to the discovery of the slain patrol. All it would take was a smoke signal or blast of a horn in the distance to alert the gate.

  “Even if we beat the gate, we’re going to lose the light,” he warned Elezar.

  “Just stick to inspection of the fortifications, Deker, and let me do the talking,” Elezar shot back quietly. “Maybe, just maybe, we’ll live to see tomorrow.”

  They dismounted and walked their horses up to a line of three camels and a cart at the gate’s entrance. Two armored chariots flanked the gate while Reahn soldiers with scythe blades and spears inspected every sack and person entering the fortress city. More soldiers on the ramparts of the wall paced back and forth, their eyes fixed on the line below. Beyond them was a second line of archers and slingers in the east tower of the fortress above. Deker could pick out their shadows moving behind the slits in the stone.

  The gatehouse was a garrison unto itself, with two dozen Reahn guards and passport inspectors checking papers, baskets and weapons. Two gigantic bronze doors ten meters high, now open, guarded the gatehouse tunnel through the five-meter-thick city wall. The tunnel itself was rife with
murder holes for Reahn archers and spearmen to cut down anybody who managed to slip through the heavy doors as they closed. But that seemed unlikely to Deker. For hanging overhead in front of the massive doors was a heavy portcullis made of crossed iron bars, ready to drop like a guillotine should the city come under attack.

  A military official waved them up to the gate and Elezar handed over their military papers, stamped with the seal of General Hamas himself. An orderly, meanwhile, led their horses to a stable door inside the southern wall of the gatehouse tunnel. That told Deker some sections of the wall were hollowed out for storage of food and other supplies. Depending on the nature of the fill, some sections of the outer wall were either less stable or more reinforced than others.

  The Reahn official then looked about for the rest of the patrol and frowned. “Where are the rest?”

  “Back at the last oasis checkpoint, detaining foreigners,” Elezar said. “They’ll be here soon enough. This couldn’t wait.”

  Elezar unfurled the leather wrap with the jewelry, and Deker gauged the official’s attention.

  The official seemed surprised by nothing, as he had probably seen everything in this post. Nor did he display even a hint of temptation to help himself to any bribe. The ranks of Reahns were apparently more loyal to Hamas—or afraid of him—than Bin-Nun believed.

  “This isn’t the protocol,” the agent said.

  “This isn’t your business,” Elezar said sharply, using his natural arrogance to full effect. “But then, you can explain our delay to Hamas yourself.”

  The agent paused, a pained expression creeping across his stone face. “Carry on,” he said, and they were cleared to enter Jericho.

  15

  As soon as they cleared the gate, Deker and Elezar found themselves in Jericho’s main market square. The square was a flat acre in size and nestled between the main gate and the upper fortress wall. It was a deceptively cheerful, noisy scene, with splashes of color from the shop awnings, fabrics and ceramics. But the troops patrolling the ramparts on both walls above gave Deker the distinct impression that the prosperous ancients shopping and trading in the square below were, in the end, nothing but better-dressed rats in a stone cage.