The Atlantis revelation

49

Serena knew that ancient cities couldn't exist without a water source, and Jerusalem was no exception. The City of David had developed around the only real water source in the area, the Gihon Spring, which ran through the bottom of the Kidron Valley. During the Assyrian and Babylonian attacks, King Hezekiah had constructed an aqueduct through which the waters could be hidden inside the city, an extraordinary engineering feat at the time.

It was through this tunnel that Serena followed Conrad through waist-high water in the dark with only one flashlight to guide them. It was all their driver from Gaza had on hand. They had been greeted at the beach north of Al Gaddafi by a van from the local Catholic church, which drove them up Salahadeen Road to the Erez industrial zone and the border gate with Israel. The Israeli official at the checkpoint had looked over their bogus work permits, which Serena had insisted would give them a better chance of getting into Israel than the underground smuggling tunnels, which Israeli warplanes bombed almost daily. A long minute later, the soldiers had waved them through. They had crossed the 1950 Armistice Line into Israel and driven toward Jerusalem, only forty-eight miles away.

The drive from Gaza had ended in Silwan, a poor Arab village of cinder-block houses crumbling down the hillsides to the Gihon Spring at the bottom of the Kidron. There, Serena found the Fountain of the Virgin and the church commemorating the spot where Mary once drew water to wash the clothes of Jesus. It was almost one p.m. and a Friday, so the caretaker was about to close the gate. But Conrad gave him a tip, and he let them descend the stone steps into the spring's cave.

It was here that Serena's expertise was exhausted and she had to trust Conrad's knowledge of Jerusalem's underbelly. But sloshing through the ever rising water, she was beginning to have doubts.

Hezekiah's Tunnel was a third of a mile long, mostly under three feet wide, and in some places, under five feet high. The caretaker at the entrance had warned them that the water was knee-high today and the walk would take them about forty minutes before they exited at the Pool of Siloam. Conrad, however, told her that they would be exiting halfway through, at the point where the tunnel took an odd S-shaped course through the rock. This was where Hezekiah's Tunnel branched from the tunnel leading from the Gihon Spring to the bottom of Warren's Shaft.

The tunnel had narrowed, and the dirty water was now waist-high. Serena bumped her head against the ceiling of the tunnel, which had started to slope sharply. The water was now up to her neck.

"The ceiling is lowest here, under five feet high, and the water level highest," Conrad told her. "So you'll have to hold your breath."

He took her by the hand, and they walked forward until their heads were underwater. They walked about three feet before the tunnel ceiling started to rise and their heads surfaced.

They were in a different tunnel, the water level dropping rapidly, and they soon reached a stone platform on the edge of a giant precipice. Serena felt chilled to the bone and wrung her dripping hair like a towel to squeeze out the water. When she looked down, she saw what looked like a giant subway tunnel with wide white limestone steps descending into the depths of the earth. She said, "This looks like the grand gallery of the Great Pyramid in Egypt."

Conrad nodded. "Why do you think Solomon married all those Egyptian princesses? To gain access to the sand hydraulic technology that built the pyramids. Except what he did here was amazing. He inverted the design so that everything you know is upside down."

That's crazy, she thought. But now that he mentioned it, the tunnel made sense.

Conrad said, "You know that shaft I was telling you about under the Dome of the Rock?"

She craned her head up and saw the opening in the ceiling overhead. It appeared to go all the way up to the top of the Temple Mount. "I thought I felt a draft."

"Back when the First Temple was up there, the top of the shaft was capped with a platform on which the Ark of the Covenant could be lowered during a siege," he told her. "Here, take this."

She looked down in her palm and saw a brick of C4 explosive. "Where on earth did you get this?"

"From the driver of your Sunday-school van in Gaza," he told her. "Now climb up on my shoulders and stick this inside the mouth of the shaft. We need to close it off in case we fail to stop the Flammenschwert. Otherwise, a geyser of fire is going to incinerate that mosque."

She took his hand, put a boot on his knee, and stepped onto his shoulders until her head was inside the bottom of the shaft. She planted the C4 on the wall of the shaft and jumped back down onto the stone platform.

She said, "You gave us only twenty minutes on the fuse."

"Insurance that we close the shaft to the surface before the Flammenschwert goes off," he explained. "The important thing is to make sure the mosque is still standing on the surface. Without Arab uprisings in the streets, Gellar can't justify the disproportionate Israeli response that will ignite a wider war. Whatever happens down below here is, well, secondary."

She looked down into the great gallery below. "The King's Chamber is down at the bottom, isn't it?"

"Right." He pulled out his Glock, the one he had killed Lorenzo with, and checked the clip. "So are the globes, the Flammenschwert, and God knows what else."