The Promised War

THE PROMISED WAR

Also by Thomas Greanias

The Atlantis Revelation

The Atlantis Prophecy

Raising Atlantis

THE

PROMISED

WAR

A THRILLER

Thomas Greanias

To friends Mark and Melinda, Bill and Priscilla,

Frank and Jeanne, Skip and Lara and all who have

devoted their lives to breaking down the world’s walls of

misunderstanding through their love and compassion to

people of every race, color and creed.

They did not gain possession of the land by their own sword,

but by your mighty hand, because you favored them.

—Zabur 44:3 (Psalm 44:3)

1

JERUSALEM

The Dome of the Rock mosque rose like the moon behind the towering wall that surrounded the Temple Mount. Sam Deker cleared the top of the wall and dropped into the gardens below, a wraith in the night. He glanced at the illuminated hands of his Krav Maga watch. Seven minutes to three. He had told Stern fourteen minutes back at the van. He had used up six. Time was running out.

Deker reached into his combat pack and pulled out a brick of C-4. He had enough bricks to take out half of the thirty-five-acre complex. If he had any doubts about this operation, now was the moment to turn back. He slipped the C-4 back into his pack and moved through the maze of trees and shrubs.

The Temple Mount was the most contested religious site in the world. For Muslims, the eight-sided, golden-capped Dome of the Rock mosque protected the “noble rock” that they believed to be the foundation stone of the earth and the place from which the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.

But religious Jews believed the rock was the place from which God gathered the dust to create the first man, Adam, as well as the site of King Solomon’s Temple. According to Jewish prophecy, it was also where a new temple would be built—once the Dome of the Rock was gone. Many of these Jews, like Deker’s fanatical superior officer, Colonel Uri Elezar, refused to set foot on such holy ground.

None of this was a problem for Deker. He could care less. Deker had been recruited by Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, precisely because he was a secular American Jew who had served with the U.S. Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan as a demolitions officer. Who better to protect the Temple Mount, he was told, than a twenty-six-year-old who specialized in the destruction of major structures and equally offended both sides of the religious divide?

Deker followed the route he had planned well in advance, timing his steps with the movements of the Palestinian security guards of the Islamic Waqf, or religious trust.

For almost a thousand years the Waqf had served as the protectors of the Temple Mount, even after Israel captured Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Such was their status as the true guardians of Islam—and allegedly above the petty political interests of the modern Palestinian Authority, which claimed it had sovereignty over the site.

Deker, however, knew the Waqf to be as political as any Muslim organization; it simply saw the Arab-Israeli struggle in terms of centuries, not decades. So far as the Waqf was concerned, Israel’s resurrection as a modern state in 1948 after three thousand years of exile was but a foul blot on the long scroll of history. Israel, meanwhile, decided it best to prevent unnecessary provocations by its own more zealous citizens. So not only did it allow the Waqf to continue to manage the Temple Mount, it even enforced a controversial ban on Jewish prayers there.

When Deker finally reached the east wall of the Dome of the Rock mosque, he pressed his back against the blue ceramic tiles of the outer wall and peered around the corner. A Waqf guard was making his way across the vast plaza toward the other mosque on the Mount, the silver-capped Al-Aqsa. Deker waited until the guard passed under the ma’avzin arches and disappeared down the steps to the lower plaza. Then without hesitation he darted across the colonnaded entrance of the mosque and ducked inside.

The Waqf officer in charge that night was rounding one of the titanic marble columns that supported the dome twenty meters overhead when Deker entered the mosque. The Palestinian managed to grab his radio, but before he could engage the device to transmit even a sound, Deker gave him a chop to the throat. He crumpled to the floor.

Deker made sure the guard still had a pulse before he turned to his right and followed the plush ruby carpet to the steps that led down to a cave dedicated to King Solomon. A relic of the Crusades, the cave had been carved out by the Order of Knights Templar after they had converted the Dome of the Rock into their Templum Domini, or “Temple of Our Lord.”

Medieval maps marked the cave as the “center of the world,” and the “well of souls” beneath it was said to have once served as the resting place of the legendary lost Ark of the Covenant. According to the ancient biblical account, the sacred Ark—an ornate box made of shittimwood and coated with gold—contained the original Ten Commandments, the tablets that God gave to Moses at Mount Sinai as the ancient Israelites wandered the desert in search of the Promised Land. Deker thought God—Yahweh to the Israelites—should have simply given Moses a map. It would have saved the Israelites forty years and countless lives.

But the Knights Templar couldn’t hold the Temple Mount for long. A few years later it was back in the hands of the Muslim Waqf, where it had remained that past millennium.

Recently, the Waqf had quietly begun a massive subterranean tunneling operation. The Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, feared that the Waqf was on the verge of discovering an ancient network of chambers and corridors deep beneath the mount that predated even the First and Second Jewish Temples. The front door to that network was none other than the well of souls beneath the Dome of the Rock.

Adjan Husseini, the Palestinian head of the Waqf in Jerusalem, was kneeling facedown in prayer when Deker entered the cave. At the sound of Deker’s footsteps, he lifted his head and started at the sight of the C-4 brick Deker removed from his pack.

Looking Husseini in the eye, Deker held the brick up and said, “Boom.”

“Commander Deker.” Husseini rose to his feet. “Go ahead. Take the shot.”

Deker put the C-4 brick back into his pack and took out his BlackBerry. Draping one arm around Husseini’s neck, he extended the other and snapped a photo with his phone’s camera. He then e-mailed it to Colonel Elezar.

“It’s time-stamped,” Deker said, putting the phone away. “I copied you too.”

But Husseini, eyes wide, was staring at the explosives and blinking LED displays inside Deker’s open pack, catching on that the C-4 charges were real. “You could have blown us all to bits!”

Deker said, “I promised you that I would expose loopholes in your security in the hopes you’d finally relent and let us put up the electronic surveillance net.”

“So you can spy on us.”

“So we can better defend the Dome of the Rock from the ultra-Orthodox Jews who want to destroy it so that they can erect a Third Temple. Or from radical Palestinians who would pin the blame on Orthodox Jews. You’ve seen the intel. The threat’s real and it’s imminent.”

Husseini said nothing for a moment. A hole in the six-foot rock ceiling allowed a shaft of light from the mosque above to illuminate several small altars and prayer niches around the chamber. Deker could see Husseini’s eyes study him with bitter resentment through the haze of incense and flickering candlelight.

“You knew from the start that we’d never agree to Israeli surveillance,” Husseini said. “Yet, you proceeded to pull this dangerous stunt only to humiliate us.”

Husseini was baiting him now, stalling. Deker sensed a trap and realized he had no idea where the Waqf guards outside were at the moment. He thought of Stern back at the van. It was time to leave.

“This security test isn’t nearly as dangerous as the weapons cache you’ve been stockpiling in the southeast corner under Solomon’s Stables,” Deker said.

Surprise registered on Husseini’s face, although Deker wasn’t sure if it was real or manufactured by the man.

“Oh, yes, we know about that,” Deker told him. “And that tunnel you’ve been digging right under this cave. If anyone is going to start the fire, it’s going to be you.”

Husseini picked up a bronze candelabra and brought it down heavily onto the floor’s marble slab. It gave out a hollow thud, revealing the existence of a lower chamber, the well of souls. His face was an unreadable mask again.

“Is that really your concern here tonight, Commander Deker? Or are you afraid we might find something that Israel has been hiding from the world? Wise men have long believed that a cosmic portal exists here, a tunnel through space and time that leads to paradise.”

Deker paused. “Or maybe it’s the gate to hell.”

Husseini was angry now. The expression on his face didn’t show it, and his voice was steady and subdued. But his words were bitter and sharp.

“You think you’re so special, Deker—better than the rest of us. That you’re the human pin in a live grenade, standing alone between old Arabs like me and Jews like your Colonel Elezar. But know this: the Jews won’t stop until they have destroyed the dome above us. Armageddon is inevitable. It’s a time bomb that will go off. You can’t stop it. Just like you couldn’t prevent your girlfriend from blowing herself up with an explosive made by your own hands.”

Deker felt the world give way under his feet at the thought of his Rachel and the horrible mistake he had made that had cost her her life. But he stood firm, emotionless in his expression, and turned to face Husseini, who picked up a ceremonial washbowl with a candle from the altar.

“I’m told the device looked something like this,” Husseini said, stroking the red and black ceramic pattern. “You and your IDF masters intended to assassinate a Hamas militant inside the home of a Palestinian government official. But by some mystery known only to Allah, you mixed up the bowls, and the one with the explosive ended up in the hands of your beloved as she prepared to light her Shabbat candles to celebrate the first night of the Passover at the Western Wall. Mercifully, she perished the instant you hit your remote detonator. News reports said the six injured Jews around her took several hours to die.”

In that second, Deker wanted to reach over and rip out Husseini’s throat. And he would have, if he didn’t know that’s exactly what Husseini wanted him to attempt.

“The grief of your error must torment you every waking hour and haunt you in your sleep,” Husseini went on, the corners of his mouth turning into a slight smile at having gotten even the suppression of a reaction out of him. “Perhaps that’s why you can’t leave this place. To you it was always a holy pile of rubbish, but to her it was her faith and life. Now it’s her tombstone and you are a ghost stumbling in the graveyard of history. But it’s impossible to bring her back. We can’t change the past any more than we can change the future.”

“That hasn’t stopped you from trying.” Deker produced a pottery shard he had found in an open trench at the base of the eastern wall. He pointed it like a dagger at Husseini’s chest. “Your bulldozers are destroying ancient First and Second Temple artifacts. As if you can erase Israel from history.”

Husseini’s eyes flickered in fear for the first time that night as he looked at the shard in Deker’s hand, clenched so tight that Deker didn’t know he had cut himself until he felt a trickle of blood through his fingers. The Palestinian seemed to realize he had pushed Deker too far, but he stood defiant.

“Keeping your dead lover’s memory alive doesn’t change the fact that Jerusalem has always been an Arab and Islamic city,” Husseini said, sticking with the party line to the end. “This piece of pottery you are waving at me is a plant. No Jewish temple ever stood here.”

“Right,” Deker said, placing the bloodstained shard on the small altar as a souvenir of this encounter. “Neither did I.”

“Would that were true,” Husseini told him. “But a man at war with himself can’t keep the peace forever. You have a gift for destruction. You cannot suppress the expression of your nature forever. You will set the fire, not us. Because you are the fire. A tool to be used by your masters.”

Deker wiped his bloodied hand on his trouser leg, gave him a slight bow and turned toward the cave entrance. He then vanished up the steps, leaving Husseini to his prayers.

• • •

Three minutes later—and six minutes later than he had promised Stern—Deker rappelled over the eastern wall and landed on the roof of a yellow Caterpillar backhoe loader parked against the base. He jumped off and raced down the slope of the Muslim graveyard abutting the wall, weaving his way through the tombstones toward the parked Gihon Water and Sewage Company service van.

He stopped the second he saw the cracked windshield and unmistakable bullet hole.

Deker whipped out his Jericho 9mm pistol from his pack and rushed to the driver’s side of the van, aiming his Jericho through the window with one hand as he threw open the door with the other. Stern was slumped over the wheel, motionless. Deker felt sick with rage. He pushed Stern’s head with the steel nose of his gun. The head rolled to the side, lifeless, revealing a bloody hole in the temple.

A flash in the driver’s-side mirror caught Deker’s eye and he glanced back to see a black van barreling up from behind. In the same motion, Deker jumped into the Gihon van, pushed Stern’s corpse away and slid behind the wheel. He heard the squeal of brakes and the crash of boots on the ground. As he turned the ignition and shifted gears, the glass behind him shattered.

He felt a prick in the back of his neck and he lurched forward into the dashboard. His head hanging down, everything spinning, he saw Stern’s twisted face staring at him before everything exploded in a burst of light.

2

The flash of light faded and Deker woke up to a nightmare of pain and confusion. His head was being knocked to and fro by the butt of a gun. He blinked his eyes open to see his superior officer, Uri Elezar, handcuffed and hanging upside down on a Nazi-style “Boger swing” with a rod behind his knees, his mouth open in agony. But Deker couldn’t hear anything. Then another whack to the head opened his ears, and something like the whine of a jet engine filled his head before it faded into an irritating ring and Elezar’s screams filled the room.

“We are the Jewish people!” Elezar shouted. “We came to this land by a miracle! God brought us back to this land! We fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land!”

Deker watched a large figure standing next to Elezar strike the soles of his blackened feet and his back with a truncheon. Elezar cried out, and Deker saw drops of blood from Elezar’s cut forehead hit the tile floor. The floor was covered with white powder, possibly salt, and underneath Deker could see a Byzantine mosaic.

“We are the Jewish people!” Elezar again rasped loudly. “We came to this land by a miracle! God brought us back to this land! We fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land!”

A large face with dark hooded eyes appeared in front of Deker, and a hand reached out and snatched the silver Star of David hanging around Deker’s neck and dangled it before his eyes. The IDF insignia in the center came in and out of focus. Then a hand snapped his head back, thick fingers pulled his eyelids apart and a hot beam of light blinded him.

A voice in English with a thick Arab accent said, “Still with us, Jew? Maybe we’ll have better luck with you.”

The accent of his torturer, the farruj-style beating of Elezar and the mosaic on the floor suggested to Deker that the enemy in the room was the General Intelligence Department, or GID, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s powerful spy and security agency. All of which didn’t make any sense, as Jordan was at peace with Israel and a proven ally of the United States in the war on terror. But it told him was that he wasn’t getting out alive.

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. Until 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.

Deker scanned the night horizon for the first sign of the Allenby Border Terminal. Known as the King Hussein Bridge to Jordanians, the Allenby was the biggest of three bridges over the Jordan River connecting the country of Jordan to the Palestinian territories of the Israeli-controlled West Bank.

He began flashing distress signals in code with the headlights, but it was too late. Dead ahead was a line of Jordanian military trucks and police patrol cars blocking the road to the bridge.

“Roadblock!” Elezar shouted, leaning out the passenger-side window and firing bullets until he emptied his magazine.

No fire was returned. It wasn’t necessary. Through his windshield Deker could see a thick nail strip across the freeway coming up fast, ready to blow their tires and stop them cold before they ever reached the roadblock.

Deker swung the wheel, scraping the nearside fender against the metal rail so that sparks flew. There was a thud, and then they were off the road, driving over the pocked and bumpy rock of the desert and covered in a cloud of sand and dust. The car skidded across the soil as Deker hit the accelerator, the tires chewing rocks and spitting them up against both sides of the car with loud pings.

“Ditch the car!” Elezar commanded.

The banks of the Jordan were coming up fast, even if Deker couldn’t see them. As soon as he sensed the downward slope, he turned to Elezar and yelled, “Jump!”

Deker grabbed his combat bag from the backseat with one hand, kicked opened his door and dove out, hitting the rocky soil hard and tumbling several times as trained to lessen the impact. He was cut up everywhere, to be sure, and maybe even broke something. But now was the time to move, before the surge of adrenaline from the shock wore off.

“We go for the old footbridge,” Deker said as he made his way across the moonscape, aware of Elezar stumbling alongside him, breathing heavily. Elezar didn’t seem injured, but no matter how excellent his physical condition, the two additional decades he had on Deker weren’t helping him here, and Deker easily beat him down the banks to the water.

But he couldn’t find the footbridge. He looked up and down the winding waterway and couldn’t find any bridge in the distance, including the Allenby.

“The bastards have blown the bridge!” Elezar raged. “They’ve started the attack! This is all your doing, Deker! If we survive this, I’ll have you executed for treason!”

“Then at least I’ll be executed by Jews,” Deker said, unmoved. “We have to swim for it.”

Deker lifted his pack onto his shoulder and descended the banks to the river until he felt the cold water around his ankles. Agriculture over the decades had drained the Jordan of whatever depth and current it might have possessed in ancient days. He couldn’t see the other side in the dark. But the distance was probably less than seven meters across, and the depth in some places less than one.

“Elezar—”

But there was no reply. He glanced over his shoulder at Elezar, crumpled on the ground. He looked up the embankment at five black figures cut out against the stars. He turned to dive into the water when he felt a searing stab in his back.

He reached behind, yanked an object out and brought it before his eyes. It was a spear. He stared in confusion and dismay at the large, leaf-shaped spearhead, like something from the Bronze Age exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

He saw the black stain on the tip in the moonlight and realized he was losing blood fast. His eyes began to blur as he watched the spearhead fall in slow motion from his hands. Then he felt himself lurch forward and tumble into the cold, dark waters of the Jordan.

4

Seated inside the airy temple in Los Angeles for his bar mitzvah, his family and friends smiled through tears as the rabbi reached into the open Ark and handed him the Torah scroll containing the Five Books of Moses.

It was one of the older Torahs, weighing almost fifty pounds, and he struggled to carry it in his slender, trembling hands. It felt like a boulder. He was thirteen and considered a man now according to Jewish tradition. But he was still a year away from his growth spurt, and his tired arms weren’t strong enough to carry it.

As he tried to balance the Torah, it began to tip. There were gasps from the adults and a snicker or two from the children. Oh, no! The Holy Law! He tried to right it but overcompensated. I can’t hold it! It’s slipping!Like a dream he watched it fall from his hands, just beyond his fingertips, until it hit the platform with a crash and split open.

Deker woke from his childhood memory into the searing light of day. He felt the hot desert wind blow and heard the rustling of leaves. The scent of flowers was sweet, but it couldn’t mask something foul in the air.

He blinked his eyes open and tried to move but couldn’t. His legs and arms seemed locked. Then he realized he was naked and wrapped around the golden bark of a seven-meter-tall acacia tree. His right leg was bent around the front of the tree and locked inside his bent left leg, which in turn was locked behind the trunk under the entire weight of his own body. They were using the “grapevine” method to secure him as a prisoner. Very old-school, but effective.

He was in some kind of grove of acacia trees, gnarly and black against the sky, their green and yellow leaves blowing like ash in the air.

Pain shot up his spine from the cramping in both his legs. How long have I been left like this?He dug his fingers into the tree trunk and tried to pull himself up. His skin scraped against the bark and he moved up only enough for his head to scratch the sharp thorns of the lower branches. He had an overwhelming desire to throw himself backward to relieve the unbearable pain. But somehow his body sensed that such an action would kill him.

He lifted his head and scanned the grove. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the brightness. He couldn’t make out the strange black limbs of the golden trees. Then he realized they were rotting human limbs, blackened by the sun. The ash in the air was but flecks of charred flesh carried in the wind.

Horrified, he looked up into the branches above him and saw a half-rotten, sunken face staring at him with pecked-out eyes.

Unable to tear his eyes away, he stared back for a moment, a moan unable to take form at the back of his parched throat. All around him were thousands of corpses strung up in the trees, slits of sunlight shining through their perforated torsos, their mouths open in twisted screams.

He looked away and his throat began to convulse to vomit. But nothing came out. Once, twice, his wrung-out body seemed to constrict from the inside out like a dry, twisted rag around the tree.

This was some kind of mass grave, a grove of the dead. Except the genocidal maniacs who had done this hadn’t bothered to bury the bodies, preferring to string them up instead as a warning to somebody.

Suddenly, several shadows blocked the light and he heard a voice in garbled Hebrew say something like “Clean him up.”

A thin hyssop branch with narrow blue leaves was waved in front of his face and he felt the cool sprinkle of some kind of aromatic water.

The drops of water on his dry tongue only awakened his senses, and he could taste a fleck of ash.

He tried to spit it out but could manage only a dry groan as several shadows lifted him up and dragged him away from the tree and propped him up against a low stone wall, where his weak legs could barely keep him upright.

In the distance Mount Nebo lifted into the sky under the blazing sun. He blinked. By all appearances he was still somewhere in Jordan. But something didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t just his personal predicament. Something greater had shifted around him, and the jarring sense of reality shook him to his core.

His nightmare, he realized, had only just begun.

5

Deker was doused with jars of water several times over before he was dragged naked into a desert tent. The tent itself was large and austere, with only a rough-hewn table on which he saw a ceramic jug and bowl—and the contents of his explosives pack neatly laid in a row. Everything about the place seemed washed-out, as though he were looking at the world through some sepia-tinted filter.

Deker was tied to one of two posts that supported the tent. Elezar was tied to the other. His head drooped. He seemed unconscious, and Deker saw bruises and cuts. He couldn’t tell if they were from the night before or new ones. Then he wondered about the spear he had pulled out of his own back as he slid uncomfortably against his post.

A blast of heat blew in as the tent flap opened wide to reveal a sea of similar tents in the sands outside. It was a sight Deker had seen before in the Palestinian refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank. The same for the haunted faces of the two young soldiers who entered and stood before him in all their muscularity.

Palestinians, he could only presume.

“Where the hell am I?” Deker demanded in English. “What did you do to those people?”

The big, strapping, swarthy guard, who carried a giant bronze sickle sword on his rope belt for effect, glanced over at his smaller, towheaded comrade, a confused look on his face, as if he didn’t understand the prisoner.

Deker tried Arabic. “Who the hell are you?”

The big Palestinian answered by slamming Deker’s head against the pole. Deker felt a splinter in his forehead and a trickle of blood run down his cheek.

“Who are you, spy?” the Palestinian demanded in bad Hebrew. At least, it sounded like Hebrew. “How did you sneak into our camp?”

“Say nothing, Deker.”

It was Elezar come to life, a strange look on his face.

The big Palestinian moved toward the table, on which were laid Deker’s BlackBerry and explosives. He picked up the BlackBerry, fascinated. “Where did you get these?”

“Toys ‘R’ Us,” Deker replied, this time getting a firm whack on the back of the head from the other guard.

The big guard pressed some buttons and somehow accessed the music player. The music of “Learn to Fly” by the Foo Fighters blasted out, startling the guard. He dropped the BlackBerry on the table and smashed it to pieces.

Deker sighed and locked onto the water that splashed out of the ceramic pot on the table when the guard smashed the phone. Deker’s mind immediately went to work on how to escape—after a drink from that pitcher. He licked his dry, parched lips. Just a drop to quench the thirst, he thought, when the flap to the tent fluttered again.

A lean, wiry, gray-bearded figure in a strange military outfit entered the tent, followed by a short, fat man in a white priestly garment whom Deker recognized as the one who had sprinkled his face with water and ash back in the death grove.

“General Bin-Nun!” the guards saluted.

Deker saw Elezar’s jaw drop.

A walking piece of bronze in his sixties, this General Bin-Nun had a leathery face with hollow cheeks and wild blue eyes with a far-off gaze. A zealot, in other words. The look was typical of tribal chiefs and desert warlords in the Middle East. But Deker did not recognize the man behind the grey beard. Nor the strange body armor and scimitar sword he was sporting, which gave him the ghastly air of some Afghan warlord in a pharaoh’s armor.

Elezar, however, looked like he had seen a ghost.

Deker watched as Bin-Nun walked around to the table and examined the weapons. He looked at the pieces of the smashed BlackBerry and shot an angry glance at the big guard, who looked down at the ground. Then he picked up a brick of C-4 and put it down again. He seemed particularly interested in the look and feel of the detonators.

“Send these over to Kane,” Bin-Nun told the big guard in the same type of bad Hebrew the guard had used on Deker. It rang familiar enough for him to understand, but just barely, like a strange brew of ancient and modern Hebrew with an exotic, almost Egyptian accent.

The general then turned to Deker, leaning over inches from Deker’s face. Deker could feel his penetrating glare linger before the general’s eyes widened with the shock of recognition at the Star of David around Deker’s neck. It was not a pleasant reaction.

“They are Reahns, General,” the short, fat priest said. He looked like an evil cherub, the way his face sneered as he spoke. “They bear the blazing star. They belong to the cult of Molech. They bow to the same god as the calf worshipers who brought the wrath of Moses upon us.”

“But they are cut like us, Phineas.”

Deker, thoroughly confused now, realized they were talking about his circumcised penis. He could see Bin-Nun making some sort of mental calculation as he curiously considered his two naked prisoners.

“They must die,” Phineas said, glaring at Deker. “Moses would—”

“Moses is dead,” Bin-Nun said, cutting off the priest.

Deker heard the unmistakable swish of a blade and looked up to see the general bring the scimitar down, stopping at the last moment an inch above Deker’s skull.

The general spoke harshly, too fast for Deker to understand.

“What’s he saying?” Deker asked Elezar in English, prompting the warlord’s guards to exchange confused glances. As a political officer, Elezar was fluent in the history and languages of the Middle East.

“It’s ancient Hebrew,” Elezar said haltingly. “He wants to know if we’re for them or against them.”

Deker said, “We don’t even know who the hell these people are.”

“These are Jews.” There was a hint of fear in Elezar’s voice as he looked around, a worrisome sign to Deker. “This is Joshua, the son of Nun, general of the ancient Israelite army. Somehow we have arrived at their camp in Shittim on the eve of their historic siege of Jericho more than three thousand years ago.”

Deker stared at his superior officer. Somewhere during their torture, escape and recapture, something must have snapped in his head.

“They are not Jews, Elezar,” Deker said patiently, aware of the sharp edge of the sword on his skull. “This bastard is not Joshua of the Hebrew Bible come to life, and we have not gone back in time.”

Elezar cleared his throat and gave a reply in the same exotic dialect as this “General Bin-Nun,” although Deker understood the unmistakable name of Adonai only at the end.

To Deker’s amazement, Bin-Nun withdrew his sword and said something else to Elezar and the guards before he marched out of the tent.

“What did you say to him?” Deker demanded as the two guards eased them up and brought them outside the tent.

“I said we’re neither for him nor against him,” Elezar said, blinking into the sun beneath his sweaty brow. “We’re angels in the army of the Lord.”

“What?” Deker stared at the sea of black acacia trees to the south and a sea of white tents to the north, the land of the dead versus the land of the living. “And what did he say?”

“Prove it, or we can rot out there with the rest of the damned.”

6

Deker and Elezar, wearing simple beige tunics, were marched barefoot across the hot sands of the camp toward a towering pillar of smoke in the east. The most striking thing about this city of otherwise weather-beaten tents was how pristine and full of life it was after the filth and stench of the death grove they had left behind.

Deker strained to look beyond the first row or two of tents into the encampment. The population was young—very young—like so many of the Palestinian camps, including plenty of pregnant girls who looked barely in their teens. Other than General Bin-Nun, Deker didn’t see anybody older than thirty. Not a wrinkle in sight.

“This camp isn’t on any of our maps,” Deker said in English.

“Of course not, Deker,” Elezar said excitedly. “This is Shittim. It means the ‘Meadow of the Acacias.’ That’s what all those trees were back there. Shittimwood is what the ancient Israelites used to build the Ark of the Covenant and the desert Tabernacle. This is a miracle.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Deker said with a glance back as the spears from their armed escort prodded them forward. The soldiers either didn’t understand English or didn’t care if they talked. “You call that mass grave we saw back there a miracle?”

“What kind of Israeli soldier are you, to be so ignorant of history?” Elezar scolded him. “Those are the twenty-four thousand Israelites whom Moses ordered slaughtered by the Levite priests shortly before he died. Probably only a month or two ago since the camp seems to be coming off its official period of mourning.”

“Israelites? Moses?” Deker couldn’t believe his ears. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Yes, but do you, Deker? Because you might want to listen up if you want to live,” Elezar shot back. “The Israelites only recently pitched camp here after forty years in the desert. As soon as they did, a lot of the soldiers started screwing around with the local Moabite and Midianite women. Yahweh—that’s God, in case you forgot—then threatened judgment on Israel. So Phineas the Levite, that priest who sprinkled us with holy water back at the grove, picked up a spear and ran it through an Israelite man and Midianite woman while they were in the act. That inspired Moses and the rest of the Levites to pick up the sword and slaughter the rest. We’re living ancient history.”

“Whatever you call that back there, Elezar, I call it a war crime,” Deker told him. “Possibly genocide. At the very least a crime against humanity.”

“Your moral outrage only reveals your ignorance,” Elezar said. “Obviously, sexually transmitted diseases were thinning the ranks of the army on the eve of its invasion of the Promised Land. The slaughter saved the entire Israelite camp here. The sooner you accept our new reality, Deker, the sooner we can deal with it.”

“Bullshit,” Deker said. “And this is a Palestinian camp. A terrorist camp.”

“Look around you, Deker,” Elezar pressed. “This camp is laid out in four sections, each section divided into three tribes. Just like the ancient Israelites pitched their camps. See those Manasseh archers and Benjaminite slingers to our west? That’s the Ephraim Division. And those light infantry divisions to our south? Those are the tribes of Reuben, Gad and Simeon.”

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 that 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.

“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 of 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.

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.

“It won’t be long before they figure out what happened to the patrol,” Elezar whispered as they walked. “You’re going to have to make your assessments quickly if we’re to have any hope of getting out before the gate closes.”

Deker nodded. Like everything else in this world, Jericho paradoxically struck him as smaller than he had envisioned and yet more formidable just the same. Jericho’s mound looked to be barely eight acres if that, maybe the size of six square blocks in modern midtown Manhattan.

“I’ve got the pop count here at three thousand—maybe four thousand during the day when it swells from workers and tradesmen from the surrounding areas,” Deker said, applying the ancient numerical ratio of five hundred people per urban acre. “That gives us a troop count of anywhere between eight hundred to fifteen hundred tops.”

Elezar must have detected the dismay in his voice, because he asked, “Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning who needs Yahweh when you outnumber the Reahns ten to one?” Deker replied.

“Maybe Bin-Nun should even the odds by instead attacking Hazor to the north with its population of thirty thousand,” Elezar said in an icy monotone. “You forget we’re but two men in this city of three thousand. That’s fifteen-hundred-to-one. You like those odds? And what about the mysterious ‘shadow army’ that Caleb and Bin-Nun are so worried about? Their ranks, if they exist, could number like the stars in the heavens or the grains of sand in the sea.”

Deker said nothing and looked up at the sheer fortress wall that rose above them like a stone monolith with nothing but a horizontal slit near the top for still more faceless slingers and archers. Beyond it, the city’s signature spire tower rose higher still. Even if the Israelites could ladder over the city wall in superior numbers, they’d be blocked by this even more immense wall inside, surrounded by the spearmen and soldiers on the ramparts above.

“Ladders are no good,” Deker reported. “The first five meters of that concrete revetment wall will kill them before they even reach the rest of the city wall. All the while, the archers on the ramparts have clear shots from every angle. Then there are the four main towers, two along the lower city walls and two more along the upper fortress walls. On top of that, there’s the fifth tower rising above the entire city.”

They could barely see the glint of spears moving back and forth on the ramparts as they walked. Above them was the second line of sharpshooters atop the fortress wall and, above them all, the stone spire.

Tunneling was out too, Deker could see. The city wall extended belowground, thanks to its concrete skirt, and the city itself sat on a mound inside. As for a sneak attack through the sewer system, the drainage holes were too small for a man to crawl through, and the main well for freshwater, just to their south, had to drop fifteen meters to the natural spring below. It was guarded with its own platoon of Reahn troops and topped with iron crossbars like the main gate. A huge circular stone the size of one of those monster dolmen slabs back at Shittim sat nearby, and Deker expected the Reahns used it to seal off the well any time they closed the main gate.

“You look and I’ll listen,” Elezar said.

They joined the foot traffic moving between the market district and the commercial district on the city’s south side. Deker noted the large number of metalworkers, carpenters and masons. They would be the ones who reinforced the walls whenever earth tremors or water damage eroded their foundations. Then there were the tanners, potters, tailors, bakers and cheese makers he would have expected. One small winery employed workers to stomp on grapes. Their hands had been cut off. Theft was no more tolerated here than bribes.

Most striking to Deker was the grain. It was everywhere: overflowing from jars, drying in stalks on rooftops, being carried back and forth in baskets. This was the harvest in the land of milk and honey. The people were shoving grain into every silo and orifice in the city. And the flow of a water chute from the fortress above suggested massive water cisterns of the kind found on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

“Everything looks fine, but I smell fear,” Deker said. “They’re pretending like there’s no threat of an invasion. But they’re preparing for one just the same.”

“That’s good,” Elezar said.

“No, that’s bad. Because they have enough grain and water to outlast an Israelite siege for years.”

The reality was that, at first glance, Deker didn’t see how Bin-Nun could avoid taking Jericho without suffering massive casualties. The losses in such a so-called victory would break the back of his war machine, demoralize the Israelites and open them to attack by Jericho’s stronger neighbors in Canaan.

The walls had to come down first, somehow. There simply was no other way. And yet, the longer their shadows grew from the setting sun, the taller and more impregnable those walls appeared.

Elezar seemed to read his mind. “So, could you bring down the walls with your C-4?”

“I thought that was Yahweh’s job.”

“Maybe we are God’s hand.”

Deker asked, “How did the walls come down in Scripture?”

“The book of Joshua says the walls fell outward, not inward, and the Israelites marched single file up into the city.”

Deker nodded as he looked around. The trick was ultimately going to be to find a compromised or hollow part of the upper wall and plant the C-4. That would steer the rest of the wall in the proper direction as it collapsed. If he did it right, he could actually use the avalanche set off by the wall cascading down the sloping city to take out a portion of the lower wall to boot. And if he was truly brilliant, the resulting collapse of the city wall would create its own ramp over that lower concrete wall at the bottom.

“It’s possible,” Deker said. “In theory, it’s no different than dropping a high-rise in Tel Aviv. But it’s still a huge job and requires careful planning. We need to get a look inside that upper fortress.”

They began searching for a second gate that connected the upper fortress with the lower city, and found what they were looking for at the end of the commercial district: a guarded bronze gate in the upper wall. The gate was open to reveal wide stone steps leading up to the fortress, where a massive temple, fountains, royal courtyard and government buildings could be glimpsed.

But as they stepped toward the bronze gate, the blast of a horn sounded from a watchtower and a colored flag went up the stone spire. A platoon of shock troops emerged from the fortress and headed straight toward them.

Leading the way was the little boy whom Deker had spared, his throat wrapped with some kind of bandage. He also had a black eye now, swollen shut. He was on some sort of leash, like an ancient bloodhound. His open and animated eye darted to and fro, looking for them, as if his life depended on it even more than when Elezar had held a blade to his throat.

“They found the patrol,” Elezar said. “They know we’re here. We’re blown.”

Deker turned away from Elezar’s accusing eyes as they beat a hasty retreat through the thinning crowds of the market square at dusk. They arrived just in time to see the main gate close with the clanking of chains and an earthshaking thud, sealing them inside.

16

Standing in the middle of the market square, Deker quickly saw they were blocked on three sides: by the advancing police troops from the city’s south side, the wall of the fortress to their west, and the closed city gate to their east. That left them only one direction of escape.

“Rahab’s Inn,” Deker said. “It must be on the other side of the square.”

He heard no argument from the purse-lipped Elezar as they disappeared into the twisting alleys of the city’s cramped north side. This part of town was further stratified, with the better housing uphill against the outside of the fortress wall above them and the slums pressed against the inside of the lower city wall.

They hurried onto one of two main boulevards lined with palm trees that swayed in the darkening sky, then turned into an alley, emerging in another square. The evening was alive with small groups of Reahns strolling about and filling up the taverns. If there was a nightly curfew, it was still a few hours away, and the inhabitants of the city had long ago made their peace with the presence of troops and police searches in their lives.

“This is it,” Deker said, pointing to the red scarves hanging from the windows of the brothels around the square. “The red-light district. Wasn’t Rahab the hooker supposedly spared when Jericho fell because she tied a scarlet cord in her window so that the Israelite troops would avoid her house?”

“Figures she’s the only thing you’d remember from Hebrew school,” Elezar quipped as he scanned the surroundings.

“Not that it helps us,” Deker said. “Almost every window here has a red scarf.”

It was a shabby but busy area dotted with fruit stands, sweetshops and taverns that encircled the square. Elezar made a beeline for an outside table stacked high with dates and pomegranates on one side and jars and cups on the other. The old Reahn woman behind the table didn’t even wait to pour them two cups of pomegranate juice.

Deker downed the sweet juice in one giant gulp. He realized he hadn’t eaten all day, not since the night before in Shittim.

Elezar played it better, taking a sip and nodding his appreciation before he placed the cup down, wiped his mouth with his hand and simply asked, “Rahab?”

The woman seemed puzzled that any man would have to ask, but her eyes drifted to the four-story villa above a tavern and opposite what appeared to be the local police station. It was an open-fronted building with a courtyard on the square filled with straw chairs arranged under the trees.

And packed under those trees, drinking the local ale, smoking the local weeds and playing a game with small pegs while they waited to be serviced, were a dozen Reahn officers.

“We’re fucked,” Deker said under his breath.

“For both our sakes, I hope you’re right, Deker,” Elezar replied. “Reahn custom prevents these men from barging into a woman’s room. They must ask permission to enter. Let’s go,” he said, and started for the inn.

17

Deker saw a lot of strange faces and could hear a number of different languages around the tavern as he and Elezar made their way through a large crowd of drunken Reahn soldiers and the bar wenches who served them. At the counter in back, the inn manager, a slight, dark man, looked visibly irked at being pulled aside on a busy night.

“We’re looking for Rahab,” Elezar said.

“You and everybody else,” the manager said, looking them over. “You don’t have the rank.”

“Maybe this does,” Deker said, and removed from his neck the necklace with the crescent-shaped pendant that Caleb had given them and handed it to the manager.

The manager frowned and looked up at him curiously. “Two specials for our guests,” he called to one of his bar wenches. He then disappeared into a back hallway while a young girl served them a couple of locally brewed drinks.

Deker looked out over the tables to the plaza beyond, watching for trouble. Elezar’s ears, meanwhile, were up like antennae as they sipped their drinks. The brew tasted like a cross between beer and ouzo.

“They’re all talking about Bin-Nun,” Elezar whispered. “The Israelites are undefeated in war and marching to Canaan. The bets are that he’ll hit Jericho first once the Jordan is past flood stage in a month or two. Then they’ll swarm Canaan like cockroaches. If only all the cities united with a national army, it would be the end of the vermin. If anyone can stop them, it’s Hamas. He’s got a secret army to defeat even Yahweh.”

“What is it?” Deker asked.

“Nobody knows. But some are worried Hamas is talking about doubling Reah’s offerings to Molech.”

Before Deker could ask what that meant, the inn manager returned and said, “We’ve got rooms and girls for you both.”

“I’m not interested in your girls,” Elezar scoffed.

“Then I’ve got boys for you.”

Elezar’s face turned red. “That won’t be necessary. I only want a room for the night and privacy.”

“You, old and ugly, follow me,” the manager told Elezar, and then looked at Deker. “You, young and handsome, follow her. She’ll take you to Rahab.”

The manager was pointing to a young girl no older than thirteen—a belly dancer, by the looks of her satin top, flowing pants, bells and glitter, and not a professional yet.

As Deker followed the girl down a long hallway, he began to wonder what he would actually have to do with this woman Rahab in order to secure her help in escaping capture. Elezar had suggested she was likely two decades Deker’s senior, and old Caleb had warned from the outset that she was not to be trusted and should be treated only as their last resort. Apparently there was no such thing as a hooker with a heart of gold in this world, only a hooker with a heart for gold.

Deker and the girl emerged into a cobbled courtyard surrounded by walls. One of those walls was the city wall itself, rising up five meters before his eyes. He could see a Reahn helmet and spear floating at the top.

There was a gate at the far end of the courtyard and, on the right, stone steps leading to the upper levels of the villa, a level higher than even the city wall. This was where the girl stopped and allowed him to continue alone.

As Deker climbed from one level to the next, a magnificent view unfolded below him. There were the catwalks and guards on the walls, and beyond the city he could see the dark hills to the north rolling beneath the moon.

At the top of the steps he emerged onto a broad terrace. There was the scent of almond trees as he passed through an iron gate into a semitropical paradise. The sound of water was everywhere, splashing in fountains and gurgling in the conduits as it dropped from terrace to terrace between palm trees.

In the center was a large divan with a rainbow of colorful pillows. To the side was a long table of jars and bowls of fruit beneath a pergola. The pergola had golden flax stalks piled on top, no doubt to dry during the day, which lent a Polynesian air to the terrace.

Deker watched the door in the wall on the opposite side, waiting for Rahab to appear. But the door remained shut, and he walked over to the table beneath the pergola and helped himself to some dates. There he noticed one of the ornamental bowls was filled to the top with gold coins.

Only then was he aware that she was already there. He put the dates down and turned to see her. She was standing at the balustrade of the terrace, looking out across the desert at the pillar of fire in the distance: the signal tower at Shittim.

Her silhouette against the stars was a thing of beauty, and as his eyes adjusted to the nighttime, he could see her black mane of hair dropping between her bare shoulder blades.

Elezar was wrong. This is a young woman.

She was in some kind of silk wrap that rippled in the breeze, the moonlight revealing a flawless figure underneath. And when she turned to face him, he caught his breath.

Rachel.

The high cheekbones, the wide-set and intelligent eyes and the birthmark over her soft upper lip he could never forget. She could be nobody other than Rachel. Even the way her lustrous hair framed her perfect face was exactly the way he remembered her.

Deker could feel her smoky gaze study him as she floated toward him, charging the air around her with palpable electricity. Then she unclipped the bronze clasp on her wrap, and he watched the silk fall like feathers to the tiles to reveal herself to him.

She was wearing the necklace he had brought. The pendant dangled between her full breasts, round as the moon in the sky.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she told him in Hebrew. Her voice was soft but confident.

“Waiting for me?” he asked, astonished. “How long?”

“My whole life,” she said, and then she kissed him with the most delicious lips he had ever tasted.

18

Deker stood there slack-jawed before this girl. And she was just a girl, perhaps only seventeen or eighteen, which was Rachel’s age as he remembered her. But even Rachel hadn’t been this beautiful, and that alone bothered Deker. He began to wonder what sort of fantasy he now held in his arms. Everything inside him told him to run, but her lips felt warm to his as she kissed him again and placed his hands on her breasts. He dared not let go, afraid she might vanish before his eyes.

She smiled as she lifted one of his hands and used it to lead him to her bed—the king-size divan strewn with pillows of assorted shapes and sizes. And without a further word they began to make love to each other under the stars, as if it were the most natural thing in the universe and they had known each other forever.

Her body moved with a grace and in a way that suggested she had all the time in the world. His body responded in a way that suggested he would accept nothing short of eternity with her. She was bringing him to life, and he suddenly felt more awake than he had in years. He could feel his heart beating again, the blood coursing through his veins and pure electricity tingling across his entire body.

Somewhere deep inside, the hard shell around his soul began to crack, light bursting through. The passion for life he had once shared with Rachel, the spontaneity he thought he would never feel again—that force of nature rose up inside him with a volcanic power that couldn’t be contained. He felt his spirit burst free into pure ecstatic flight.

Only when it was over and they were back in each other’s arms on her divan beneath the starry sky, her long, soft legs draped over his own, did he realize that Rahab was not, in fact, his Rachel.

Rahab was taller than Rachel, her raven hair a lighter chestnut color instead of the black he had first imagined. And, yes, more beautiful still. That this was what he should first notice deeply tormented him, and he looked into her eyes, bottomless black pools in which any man could easily drown.

“You said you were waiting for me your whole life. What did you mean?” he finally asked her.

She looked at him curiously, and he realized that while she understood what he said, his accent had thrown her. It was clearly strange and exotic to her ears. He watched her fingers slide down the chain around her neck to the crescent moon lying on her right breast.

“My grandmother, Rahab, gave this necklace to General Bin-Nun forty years ago when he spied out the land and stayed at our family’s inn,” she told him. “He wasn’t a general then, but young and handsome like you. And cut like you.”

He realized she was talking about his circumcision. “And your family inn?”

“Just an inn at the time,” she said. “Bin-Nun assured my grandmother that Moses and the Israelites were coming. She died still waiting. But she lived long enough to see the former Egyptian colonies in Canaan grow more tyrannical, our inn turn into a fertility temple and my mother forced into becoming a priestess. She was only a few years older than I am now when the priests of Molech told her she was getting too old to bless the land. They started me when I was eleven. I built the business, brought in the foreign traders, cut the deals with the priests and the king. Now I run all the girls here—and the officers of Reah too.”

There was some pride in her voice, and Deker could only imagine the course she had had to navigate to achieve her pinnacle of power and influence.

“Yet, you clung to your belief that one day another young Hebrew spy might show up at your doorstep?”

“News of Bin-Nun’s victories in Moab in recent months and the fear gripping Reah told me as much. Your presence in my bed tells me that the attack is coming any day now. And my informants tell me Hamas has his men doing a house-to-house search for you and your comrade at this very moment.”

Suddenly he felt extremely vulnerable, naked with this woman who held his life in the palm of her hand. Any second she could turn him over to Hamas or the troops searching for him throughout the city.

“You know my name,” she asked him. “What’s yours?”

“Samuel.”

“Son of?”

“My full name is Samuel Boaz Deker,” he told her, dispensing with pseudonyms or code names, since his name meant nothing in this world.

She began to nod slowly. “That is very . . . Hebrew.”

It was, and he had resented it as a child, sticking to “Sam Deker” to anyone who asked. “That’s what I am. A Jew.”

It was the first time in his life that he had said it out loud to anybody, including himself. He had never hidden it nor been ashamed of his ethnic identity. He had certainly been reminded he was a Jew often enough by his nana with her Auschwitz tattoo, his parents and his peers in L.A. But he had never fully allowed himself to be defined by such an identity. He was always something else too. A Jewish American. A secular Jew. A Jew who didn’t look like a Jew, sound like a Jew or date many Jews. Never just “a Jew.”

Yet, in this world, that’s exactly what he was and all that mattered to anybody that mattered: the Hebrews in Shittim and the Reahns in Jericho.

Samuel Boaz Deker.

Jew.

“I see sadness around your eyes when you look at me, Samuel Boaz Deker,” she said. “I remind you of someone you lost.”

“Yes.”

“How did you lose her?”

“I killed her.”

“Oh.”

She looked at him curiously but without judgment.

“It was an accident,” he told her quietly. “There was a bowl, like the one you keep your coins in on that table.”

She glanced at the money bowl and then back at him, confused. “I think I misunderstand you.”

He said nothing.

“I have lost those I love too.” She was fingering his IDF dog tag. “My sisters. But it was no accident.”

“Surely it couldn’t have been your fault, either.”

He could feel her body tremble slightly in his arms. The scent of her hair smelled like pomegranates. For whatever reason, she was as racked with guilt over her sisters as he was over Rachel. Neither he nor she fully understood each other’s guilt. But Deker sensed they shared its depth, each in their own way, and so were linked together intimately and forever.

Rahab knew it too.

She began to trace the points of his Blazing Star with her finger, naming the six stars they represented: “Regulus, Altair, Eridani, Sirius, Arcturus, Ceti.”

Deker rolled onto his back and looked up at the pergola. It was a square against the stars. He realized this was what she had seen every night, probably since she was eleven. The six stars formed a map of the heavens for the prophets.

“See the constellation of the Hippopotamus?” she asked him, and pointed up to what he recognized as the Big Dipper. “She is the goddess of creation. Tell me what you see inside her womb.”

He saw a bright star, Mizar. But next to it was the far fainter Alcor, barely visible to the naked eye. They were known as the Horse and Rider, and he knew that the ancient Romans in several centuries—and IDF millennia later—would test the eyesight of their troops by their ability to detect the two as separate stars.

“I see twins,” he told her. “You call them Israel and Ishmael?”

She smiled. “Half the archers see only the bigger star. Hamas puts them on spear duty on the lower north wall. The true marksmen he puts in the towers of the upper fortress wall. Our allies to the north and south think they have a range of three hundred cubits beyond the city wall. But Hamas has altered their bows and trained the archers to extend their range to almost five hundred cubits. Best if the Israelites keep that distance when they first surround our city.”

Deker peered into her eyes. “Why are you divulging this information to me?”

“Because the stars proclaim the birth of the king of Israel,” she told him. “The king of Reah and all his priests know it, and this is why they are desperate to stop you no matter what the cost.”

Deker remembered Caleb’s instruction to gauge the morale of the Reahns. He resented that intrusion into this moment, but her question compelled his own.

“So the people are scared?”

“Ever since they heard how your god Yahweh dried up the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt forty years ago,” she told him. “But it’s what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings whom you utterly destroyed on the other side of the Jordan, that moved the noblemen to action. They sacked the previous commander of the army and brought in Hamas. Then they began a program to reinforce the fortifications and stockpile supplies in case of a long siege.”

“What about you?” Deker asked her, thinking of Phineas sharpening the end of his spear back at Shittim even now. “Aren’t you scared?”

“Of you, Samuel Boaz Deker, no,” she said. “But I know that the Lord your God is God, in heaven above and on earth below, and He has given the Hebrews this land He originally promised us. Your army will kill us all. Every man, woman and child. Even our animals. Every breathing thing.”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“Yahweh is angry with us. We have abandoned him.”

“You believe in Yahweh?”

“Abraham was my forefather, too, when God promised him this land,” she told him.

“Don’t you think Yahweh is cruel for instructing Bin-Nun to utterly destroy Reah and all the inhabitants of Canaan?”

She looked at him as if he were insane. “Perhaps it is I who have mistaken you for someone else,” she said. “While our Hebrew cousins were slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, we Reahns and all the Amorites around us only increased in our wickedness from generation to generation. Even Pharaoh let your people go. But Hamas won’t let us out of Reah, choosing instead to use our people as a shield.”

Deker was intrigued by the use of human shields this early in warfare and listened to learn if this was perhaps the shadow army Bin-Nun feared. Perhaps that was why he pursued his take-no-prisoners, death-to-all strategy. But from what Rahab was saying, the Reahns cared less for their own people’s lives than the Israelites did.

“What of your family?”

“I have no sisters, only brothers,” she explained. “My sisters were burnt alive as offerings to Molech. I was spared only to serve Molech as a priestess, because my mother could not bear to lose another girl. And the girls who work for me and get pregnant must carry their babies to live births, even if it costs them their lives, because a priestess can have no scars. The babies we bury alive or throw screaming into the fires of the temple. Even the land, the lushest in the desert, is becoming polluted from our sins as a people and will not see another harvest like this one.”

There was silence as Deker pondered her words. Then he heard the scraping of boots and voices from inside the villa.

Rahab stood up and put on her wrap. A servant girl came in and spoke to Rahab quickly while Deker buckled up his uniform.

He couldn’t hear the conversation but knew the answer even before Rahab turned and told him.

“It’s Hamas,” she said. “They’re here.”

19

A minute later the hulking figure of Hamas walked onto the terrace. Deker couldn’t see his face from his position atop the pergola, where he lay facedown between two blankets of flax stalks. But Hamas had taken off his helmet out of respect for Rahab, and through a slit Deker was able to look down and see the long mane of black hair falling over the Reahn general’s broad shoulders. Hamas looked just over six feet tall, with a powerful trunk and legs that moved under the bronze plates and leather joints of his body armor.

A gruff voice in ancient Aramaic said, “You serviced two strangers tonight.”

“The king’s cut is in the bowl,” Rahab replied.

She was dressed again in her wrap and seated on her divan, and Deker now saw that the surrounding tiles of the terrace formed a great mosaic of a six-pointed star that mirrored the heavens. And in the center of that blazing star was Rahab’s bed.

“That’s not why I’m here,” Hamas said as he nonetheless walked over to the red-and-black ceramic bowl of coins just below the pergola. It sat next to a small, bronze jewelry box. Deker watched Hamas remove a small money pouch from his belt and fill it with coins from the bowl. “Your girls serviced two Israelite spies tonight. Show me their rooms and I’ll make it quick.”

“I can tell a Hebrew from a Reahn? You’ll have to round up everybody in the house. Then everybody will know you let two spies into the city.”

Hamas paused in a way that suggested he knew what Rahab was up to and didn’t like it. “The Jordan is at flood stage. Even if Bin-Nun could get his armies across, it would take three days. The king has no fear of imminent attack nor of these spies.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“It’s the traitors inside these walls that concern us more than the Israelites outside.”

Hamas poured himself a drink from a pitcher at the table. He lifted the bronze cup to his lips and downed it in one long gulp. He poured himself another.

“Our people who fear the cult of Yahweh are fools. Plagues on Egypt. Parted seas. All lies. My family lived in Egypt at the time. I was five when it happened, Rahab. The waves, the hail, the pestilence and even the gases that killed our firstborn sons who slept on the floor, as was our custom—all were natural consequences of the volcanic eruption of Thera in the Great Sea.

“Bin-Nun knows this. He knows he can’t repeat these wonders. He can’t even feed his people without raids on farmlands and disrupting trade routes. He can’t occupy a city, so he has to slaughter every breathing thing in it and call it a miracle. This cult of death is Bin-Nun’s only weapon, and he employs it now to weaken the will of our people.

“He knows if he breaks our will—our true wall—our stones will crumble too. And then where would you be, Rahab? Slaughtered like every other man, woman and child in Reah.”

Hamas downed the second drink, slammed the cup down and wiped his long sleeve across his mouth.

“You can never trust a Jew. But you can always trust me to do what I say I’ll do. And you know what I do to the families of traitors. You saw what I had to do to your grandparents.”

Well, there was the leverage, Deker thought. Not a scratch on Rahab. But death to those close to her. Her soul and his were more similar than he realized, as she had clearly carried the guilt for the loss of her sisters and felt responsible for the safety of the rest of her family.

“Then you’re no better than Bin-Nun.”

“Oh, I’m a lot better for you. Look at you, at what you have. You’re the richest woman in Reah. You’re a goddess. We worship you like Molech. Your body cycles with the moon and the crops. You are the heart of our city, not that.”

Deker could see that Hamas was gesturing to her bed in the center of the blazing star painted on the terrace tiles.

“Bin-Nun would cut you down like he did those Moabite women who fornicated with his precious Hebrew soldiers,” Hamas went on, going in for the kill. “A blade through that soft tummy of yours, after he cut off your breasts. The Jews can barely keep a dozen of their divine 613 laws. You think they’d let you—a whore who has broken them all—into their company and pull them down?”

The psychology was brilliant, and Deker could see Rahab cast a glance up at him, her eyes doubtful.

“I, on the other hand, appreciate your many hidden talents,” Hamas said, and began to loosen his belt. “Your comely womanhood blesses our crops in tandem with your cycles of fertility. And your dexterous tongue loosens those of visiting dignitaries, providing us with invaluable information and even state secrets. All this while you pass along to them the false information we give you. Now, unless I hear something interesting from your mouth, I have a better use for it.”

Hamas turned his back to the pergola, dropped to his knees and straddled Rahab with his blackened and bulging quadriceps, hamstrings and calves. Then he ripped off her wrap to behold her breasts like the ripest fruit in Reah.

Deker couldn’t stomach the sight of her about to be ravaged, even if she meant to distract Hamas. Slowly he slid the tip of his sword through a slit in the flax stalks, ready to use both hands to drive the blade down on top of Hamas’ head.

“If you want to perform your religious duties, Hamas, you’ll have to wait another week, because I’m fertile,” she told him, pushing him away. “You’ve seen how fertile my family is, how many of my brothers serve in your ranks, and how many of my sisters have been killed. Unless you are prepared to bear a child with me.”

Deker watched her eyes drift up to him in the pergola for

a moment.

“Tell me, Hamas. Would you feed your own son to Molech?”

“My son? No. My daughter? Without a second thought.”

“Well, you know how it works.” Rahab was all business. “I’m the sacred prostitute priestess who brings forth the crops, the crops bring the money and the money keeps everything going. I’m no good to anybody if I’m with child, and even that is but one burnt offering to Molech.”

Hamas put his rough hand to her lovely throat and said, “The harvest is already here, and so are Bin-Nun’s spies. Tell me what you did for them, or I’ll snap your neck like the stem of a desert flower.”

Deker’s grip tightened around his sword, his eyes locked onto hers. She showed no fear, but her eyes widened as she looked over Hamas’ shoulders and saw him move quietly on the pergola roof. Striking Hamas would mean the end of him and his mission to Jericho. But his feelings for Rahab were an irresistible force of nature he could not control. He simply had to protect her—in the way he failed to protect Rachel. He was emotionally and spiritually committed, and there was no turning back, regardless of the consequences.

But her eyes signaled to him that she was still in control and to back off. He paused, aware of a drop of perspiration rolling down his arm to his hands and the grip of the sword. It trickled down the blade to the point. Any second it would drop on them and reveal his presence above.

“Yes, the men came to me, but I didn’t know where they came from,” she said. “They left before you arrived, at dusk, when the city gate closed.”

Hamas removed his hand from her neck, but seemed in no hurry to get off her. “What did they say?”

“They claimed to be jewelry traders. Asked about the city population. How many pieces of jewelry they could sell. Thought if I bought some and the girls wore them that maybe our customers would buy some for their wives.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t think wives would want to wear the same jewelry as their husband’s whores.”

Hamas gave a low, deep-throated laugh. “And then?”

“Then they said we could tell the husbands to tell their wives that their jewelry was magic and could make them fertile, or even to make them only conceive boys.”

Hamas shook his head and finally stood up, apparently satisfied. “Hebrew magic,” he complained. “They never stop stealing from us Egyptians. That’s why we’ll slaughter them. I think like Bin-Nun. I know what he wants.”

“What is that?” Rahab asked as she adjusted her wrap and looked up at Hamas. Deker could tell she was trying not to look at him on the pergola.

“Bin-Nun wants to know if his magic act of fear has seized the imagination of our population,” Hamas told her, and turned to help himself to some grapes on the table below Deker. “And, thanks to you and these spies of his, he now does. They’ll report this and he’ll decide to try to cross the Jordan even at flood stage and surprise us. He won’t attack right away but will just sit on our trade routes, starve us out and then come in.”

“You know this?”

“My spies and scouts tell me that for the past two months Bin-Nun has had his stonecutters building a bridge of stepping-stones across one of the fords in the Jordan. I even know their line of march. It’s going to take three days to cross.”

Rahab grew still. “You’re going to attack the Israelites.”

“When they’re at their most vulnerable,” Hamas said. “I’m going to let Bin-Nun get half his people over. Then, when they’re split in two, half on the east bank and half on the west bank, we strike.”

“‘We’?”

“I’m going to kill their head, and then Moabite raiders will slay their tail in retribution for the slaughter of their women at the hands of the Levites,” Hamas announced. “Then we’ll finally rid this land of these locusts and I can accomplish what my parents’ pharaoh failed to do.”

Deker could see the scenario that Hamas described vividly. He drew his sword back just a bit, overwhelmed with a desire to kill this swine right now, when the drop from the tip of his blade fell to the bowl and splashed softly on a grape.

In that instant Rahab spoke loudly. “And if that doesn’t work?”

Hamas didn’t seem to notice the splash or turn his face up to the pergola roof. Instead he picked another grape and stuffed it into his mouth and turned to Rahab.

“I have a plan to save us in case we fail,” he mumbled with his mouth full. “Nothing I’d be stupid enough to share with you. Where did these spies say they were going?”

“They didn’t,” she replied. “I don’t know which way they went. But from what you said, it seems plain that they’re going straight for the Jordan to report back to Bin-Nun. Think you can catch up with them?”

“They’re dead already,” he promised her as he walked out

of view and Deker heard a door open. Before it closed behind

him, Hamas added, “Next time I see you, my flower, I’ll eat the sweeter fruit.”

20

It was a shell game as Rahab moved Deker from room to room, avoiding any Reahn soldiers until they finally reached the ground floor. There Rahab pulled back an ornate rug to reveal a trapdoor and stone steps. He followed her down the narrow steps to the cellar below her villa.

Dust filtered down between the creaking wooden planks above, and Deker could hear the boots of the Reahn troops doing room checks. He looked down at the beaten earth below his boots and noticed it sloped upward to a small dark square in the far wall.

“This way,” she told him.

Rahab’s oil lamp illuminated a square tunnel opening in the wall. The bronze grillwork that had covered it lay on the floor.

They ducked through the short tunnel that led to a larger cellar filled with grains and rows of ceremonial jars. Then Deker saw the human skulls on the wall with seashells for eyes. The faces had been made up with lime to create some semblance of life.

“My other sisters,” Rahab said calmly, and continued on her way. “The jars have the smaller bones of newborns burned alive to Molech.”

Between the strange odor of the preservatives in the jars and the scent of plants to mask it, Deker felt ill.

“Your way out,” she said, pointing to the dark end of the room.

Wooden steps rose up to a small alcove and a window, and Deker realized this cellar was actually inside the outer city wall. A shadow moved next to the window and a voice startled him.

“I’ll take the cruel justice of Shittim to this so-called civilization any day,” said Elezar. He was already fastening a rope to the window while the girl who had taken him below looked on. “What took you so long?”

Then Elezar saw Rahab in the light, still holding Deker’s hand, and did a double take at the resemblance to Rachel.

“Rahab,” Deker told him. “She’s coming with us.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, and Deker felt her yank away her hand. “I have family here. Hamas will kill them in retribution as an example to all in Reah for my betrayal.”

Elezar tested the rope and seemed satisfied. “You heard the whore.”

Elezar said it in English, but Rahab got the drift.

“Abraham is my forefather too,” Rahab said in Hebrew, surprising Elezar. “And as Yahweh made a blood provision for Abraham to sacrifice instead of his son Isaac, so he will make provision for non-Hebrews.”

“What do you know of Yahweh?” Elezar spat back.

“I know that forty years ago Yahweh sent the Angel of Death to Egypt, and today he has sent Bin-Nun to Reah,” she said. “But Hebrews were spared if they painted their doorposts with blood and the Angel of Death passed over them. I want to be passed over too. So I beg you, swear to me by Yahweh, since I have shown you kindness, that you also will show kindness to me and my house. Give me a true token, and spare my father, my mother, my brothers and all that they have, and deliver our lives from death when you destroy Jericho.”

“No,” said Elezar.

“She’s saving our asses, Elezar,” Deker shot back, and then told her, “Our lives for your lives.”

“Two conditions,” Elezar added in Aramaic, glaring at her. “One, neither you nor your family nor any of your sluts break your promise and talk about this business.”

She nodded.

“Two, expect no kindness from us until after the Lord has given us the land.”

She nodded again, and as she did they could feel the walls shake.

“What the hell is going on?” Elezar demanded.

“They’re opening the gate for Hamas,” she told them.

Deker stuck his head out the window and looked down the north wall twenty meters to the ground. The sound was coming from his right, and he looked east in time to see Hamas and his horsemen thunder out the main gate, only thirty meters or so out of view around the corner on the eastern wall. They were taking the main road toward the fords of the Jordan. Then the walls began to shake as the city gate closed again. Deker glanced up toward the top of the wall. The angle prevented him from seeing any Reahn guards, and hopefully the situation was the same for them.

He pulled his head back into the cellar and told Elezar, “We’re good to go.”

“Hamas and his riders will be scouring the fords up and down the Jordan,” Rahab told them. “Hide in the hills to the north for a few days. Hamas will think he missed you and return. Then it will be safe for you to cross over.”

Elezar looked noncommittal, refusing to confirm or deny any of their plans with her. Then he spoke to Deker in English. “We go for the Cave of Temptation. No more than a couple of kilometers from here. We hide out and then report back.”

Deker nodded. The cave was allegedly the place where in coming centuries Jesus Christ fasted and prayed for forty days when he was tempted by the devil. By the sixth century, various monasteries and churches had been built over the entrance. By the twenty-first century it was a major tourist attraction in modern Jericho. The tram left from practically where he was standing inside the city and floated directly to the cave entrance. Tonight they’d have to take a more circuitous route.

Rahab said, “Now give me a sure sign that you will save us from death.”

“The sign will be that you’re still alive after we lay waste to your city and leave it on the ash heap of history,” Elezar said, positioning himself in the window to rappel down the wall outside. “Deker, let’s go.”

Deker looked her in the eye. “Your lives for our lives.”

She nodded.

Elezar shook his head. “I hope she’s fucking worth it, Deker,” he said, and disappeared out the window.

It was now just him and Rahab left in the cellar, along with the quiet girl in the corner who had been invisible the entire time.

“Hamas will suspect you lied to him,” Deker told Rahab. “Come with us.”

“No,” she said. “You come back for me.”

She looked at him in a way that told him that she had been saving her soul for him all along, even if she had been unable to save her body. Then she kissed him on the mouth and wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him tight.

Something was released in Deker at that moment, a primal desire to love and protect her, body and soul, no matter what. Like he had always wanted to love and protect Rachel. He didn’t want to let go of her, but knew he couldn’t protect her unless he did.

“I will,” he promised as he moved to the window.

The wind had died down and the desert was an empty sea. Holding the rope, he climbed over the ledge backward, feet planted against the wall below the window until he was staring back inside at Rahab.

“Don’t worry about the rope,” she told him. “I’ll pull it up as soon as you reach the bottom.”

Deker hesitated, the nagging sense that he was forgetting something. Something was off here, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. But time was running out.

He rappelled down the outside of the city wall, stopping twice on the way down. Seconds later his feet hit the ground and he was staring at the concrete revetment wall at the bottom. But there was no sign of Elezar, who had already taken off for the hills.

He gave the rope two sharp tugs and watched it disappear into the dark somewhere beyond view.

He took off into the darkness. Only once did he stop and look back at the city, trying to pick out which window among several in the north wall was Rahab’s. But he wasn’t sure.

Suddenly he realized what he had forgotten and Elezar most certainly had not.

The scarlet cord.

They were supposed to have told Rahab to tie a red scarf in her window as a sign to General Bin-Nun. Her rear cellar window in the city wall. Without that sign, the invading Israelite troops wouldn’t know which portion of the walls, let alone which home inside, to spare.

Rahab was already dead.

21

The clouds had parted and the moon shone down on Deker like a beacon as he crossed the fields toward the cliffs of the Mount of Temptation. At any moment he expected a horn to sound and a rain of arrows to strike him down, or to fall into one of the many trenches dug around the city. But in less than twenty minutes he reached a pomegranate grove and could hear the roar of a creek at the base of the cliffs. He found the narrow goats’ path up the side of the mountain, but no Elezar.

Deker swore and started his steep and winding hike along the eastern slope. A couple of times his boot slipped and he heard a waterfall of stones cascade down the cliff. The higher he climbed, the more he could see of the desert moonscape and Jericho below. All the while he thought of Elezar’s betrayal, seething with rage.

There were a few dozen caves, and it took Deker an additional fifteen minutes to find Elezar by a small fire deep inside one of the larger caves. Elezar didn’t even bother to look to see who entered, although he cocked his ear when Deker removed the sword from his sheath.

“So young Deker didn’t completely forget his years of Hebrew school back in the States,” Elezar said in a calm and even voice.

“The scarlet cord, Elezar,” Deker said, putting the tip of his blade to the back of Elezar’s neck. “We were supposed to tell her to put one of her red scarves in her outside window, to mark her house for invading troops to spare. You left out that little detail. You left her to die for no other reason but your self-righteous religious sanctimony.”

Elezar stiffened only slightly. “Six million reasons, Deker. Six million Jews.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The book of Matthew lists Rahab as part of the human lineage of Jesus,” Elezar said. “No Rahab, no Jesus. No Jesus, no Christianity. No Christianity, no Crusades, no Nazis, no Holocaust.”

Deker paused, horrified at Elezar’s logic.

“You’re assuming that those who do evil in the name of Christ in the future won’t simply create another religion to justify their slaughter of Jews,” Deker said. “You think that by letting Rahab get slaughtered you’re going to prevent the Holocaust? You don’t know that. But you do know that she’s also the great-great-grandmother of King David. You’re going to murder Israel’s greatest king and erase the Psalms from history. You’re insane!”

Elezar sat calmly, tending to the fire with a small stick. “Rahab corrupted and poisoned Israel. You know this now just from the blazing star. The emblem of Israel isn’t even Jewish, confirming what Moses and Bin-Nun feared all along: the Israelites will conquer the Promised Land, only to take up the religious practices of its enemies. We can stop the infection now, before it enters our nation’s bloodstream. God deposed Saul and raised David. He can always find another king of the Jews. And we can make new Psalms. You said it yourself, Deker: if this is really happening, if we are really back in time, then history has already been changed. We make the most of it.”

“This is so wrong, Elezar.”

“No, Deker. This is the cry of six million Jews thanking us. This is God’s judgment on the Amorites or Reahns or whatever they want to call themselves. You saw the whoredom, the oppression and the infanticide. It’s been building for four centuries. We just happen to be the hand of God like the angels that nuked Sodom and Gomorrah. We have been chosen. You should be grateful.”

Deker stepped around Elezar toward the fire, slowly drawing a white scratch with the tip of his blade across Elezar’s neck until its point rested at his throat. The slightest drop of blood formed out of the line where the skin had broken.

“You make a mockery of our national character,” Deker said. “She trusted us, Elezar. She trusted Yahweh. She has more faith than any of you hypocrites. We gave her our word. We gave her our word, and now our word is worth shit. You betrayed our people, Elezar. You will make the world hate us.”

Elezar looked up at Deker, fire in his eyes. “I’m saving our nation both now and in the future, Deker,” he said defiantly. “But you would show less devotion to your Jewish brothers than your foreign whores.”

It was all Deker could do to hold himself back. “Damn you, Elezar. You know that little prick Phineas is going to run a blade through her if Hamas doesn’t beat him to it.”

Elezar said nothing, and silence filled the cave.

Then came the crunch of pebbles outside the entrance, and instantly they went on guard.

“Hear that?” Elezar asked, cocking his ear.

Deker nodded. “Could be goats.”

“Or the sound of your beloved’s betrayal.”

Elezar kicked dirt on the fire, and they quietly made their way to the mouth of the cave and looked outside.

“There,” Elezar said, pointing.

Immediately beneath them on the winding trail, a line of soldiers was moving toward their cave. Were it not for the glint of their spears in the moonlight, they would have been invisible against the cliffs.

Deker said, “The famous shadow army?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Elezar said. “I told you she’d betray us.”

22

Deker edged close to the cave’s entrance and looked out. The troops with their torches were already halfway up the narrow path toward the cave. Another unit was coming down from the top of the mountain, where the Reahns maintained an outpost. He and Elezar were sandwiched in between.

“We break into the open and we’re dead,” Deker whispered, listening to the voices of the troops as they drew near. “What does it mean ‘to feed them to Molech’?”

“It means they’re going to turn this cave into an oven and burn us alive,” Elezar told him. “If we stay here, they could fry us.”

“I don’t think we have a choice.” Deker peered back into the dark cave. “How far back does this cave go?”

But Elezar had already vanished.

Deker felt his way along the cave walls, penetrating deeper and deeper into the mountain. The farther he went, the colder it got. He found Elezar hunched over a small crawl hole from which Deker felt an even colder blast of air.

“Now we’re animals crawling through holes,” Deker told him.

Elezar said nothing and disappeared into the hole as the illumination of torches and the sound of voices behind him grew closer.

“There!” shouted one of the Reahns, and the ground began to shake as the entire unit raced toward the back of the cave.

Deker dove into the hole as splashes of some tar-like substance hit his feet and slowed him down. Slithering as fast as he could, he looked back in time to see a torch at the mouth of the hole.

“They’re in Molech’s Maze,” a Reahn said, his voice echoing through the narrow hole. “Any volunteers?”

There were none.

“Then we feed them to Molech.”

The torch touched the mouth of the hole, and a giant fireball erupted and started chasing Deker through the tunnel. Soon the fissure sloped down, and he started sliding uncontrollably down the chute. He landed in the bottom of a larger cave as a blast of fire shot over his head and singed his hair.

Deker took a deep breath and coughed in the smoky air. He tried to get his bearings before searching for Elezar. He might have escaped the frying pan only to land in the fire. The Reahn scouts obviously called it Molech’s Maze for a reason: a man could get lost in these caves and never come out.

“Elezar!” he called out.

There was no response.

He started moving farther into the mountain, because he couldn’t go back the way he came in. A deep sense of doubt began to torment him. What if his infiltration and escape from Jericho were all for naught? What if he failed to return to Bin-Nun with his intel on Hamas’ plot to hit the Israelites as they crossed the Jordan? They could be slaughtered as soon as they touched foot on the west bank. What if he didn’t get back to Rahab before the Israelites hit Jericho? She’d die with the rest of the Reahns, and with her the Psalms of David and future kings of Israel.

Deker prayed for the first time in a long while that this would not be the case. That Yahweh would reveal himself to him now.

Deker was now aware of another presence in the cave with him. A large presence, bigger than a man. He could hear the deep, groaning breath of some creature. Slowly the outline of a shape became clearer as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and Deker saw a giant hairy head with red eyes staring back at him from the face of a bull.

It was Molech incarnate.

23

Deker pulled out his sword and swung at Molech, sending the head of the bull floating away down the cave on two legs. But this Molech was slow and wobbly, and Deker soon tackled him to the dirt. He pulled off the bull’s head and saw the ravaged face of a Reahn soldier, or rather a former soldier. It looked like the man had tried to cut away a military tattoo from his shoulder.

“Who are you?” Deker demanded in ancient Hebrew.

The man’s eyes went wide, but not in fear. He began blabbering in the dialect of the Reahns, but Deker couldn’t understand him.

“He wants to know if you’re really a Hebrew,” said a voice from behind that Deker immediately recognized as Elezar’s.

“And where the hell have you been?” Deker demanded.

Elezar stepped forward with a torch. “Finding an exit. There’s a cave that leads out the back of the mountain and down into a valley. It will take us a day to reach the Jordan, but if we avoid the Reahn scouts at the fords, we should be able to swim across and make it back to Shittim by the following day.”

The would-be Molech nodded slowly to confirm to Deker what Elezar said.

Elezar bent over the man and examined him under the light of his torch. “This man is dying,” Elezar said. “Look at his pupils, his pale-blue skin. No wonder the Reahn army cut him loose. We should let him die and go our way.”

“A little late for that,” Deker said, and shoved the man up into a seated position against the cave wall. “Ask him what he’s doing running around playing Molech.”

Elezar exchanged words with the man, who grew animated as he spoke quickly and waved his hands until he tired and they fell to his sides. Then the words came more slowly but clearly.

“He says his name is Saleh,” Elezar translated. “General Hamas forced him to wear this real, hollowed-out head of a bull and roam the caves to scare local villagers so that in times of trouble they would avoid seeking refuge here and instead turn to the walls of Jericho for protection.”

Deker asked, “And what did this guy do to deserve this kind of duty?”

“Saleh says nothing. Hamas raped his wife and then offered up the daughter she bore to the great statue of Molech inside Jericho. The daughter was burned in the temple ovens. Then Hamas made Saleh a digger in the trenches outside Jericho where they leave the sick and the dead to rot until the sun peels the skin off their bones. He did this for months until one day there were no more sick—besides himself, at that point.”

Deker frowned. “What do you mean? There are always sick people.”

“Not in Jericho anymore,” Elezar said. “According to Saleh, Hamas proclaimed that Molech had healed all the sick and blessed Jericho with divine health and prosperity. That’s when Hamas sent Saleh to work the caves for the sake of the straggling believers in the outer valley. To keep them more scared of Molech than Yahweh. He is glad to see that the army of Yahweh has finally arrived and that at last the disease of Molech will be destroyed.”

At that moment Saleh grabbed Deker by the shoulders with his gnarled hands and looked at him with his pale eyes, the light of life visibly fading. He babbled something unintelligible before his hands weakened and let go of Deker.

“He said to burn the Reahns,” Elezar said. “Burn them all

to hell.”

24

By noon the next day Deker and Elezar had safely crossed the Jordan and made it back to Shittim. After a quick debrief with old Caleb, some rest and supper, Deker sat silently in the command tent while Elezar delivered his assessment of Hamas and the morale of his troops to General Bin-Nun and his top forty officers.

“Yahweh has surely given the whole land into our hands,” said Elezar, concluding his official report. “All the people are melting in fear because of us.”

Not a word about Rahab, Deker thought, but that would be remedied soon enough. He would do everything in his power to persuade Bin-Nun to send them back to Jericho before any attack. He had to get back to Rahab and make things right for her—and Israel.

It was the junior spy’s turn now, and as Elezar turned the presentation over to Deker he fixed his gaze with a look that warned him not to make trouble. God’s holy angels could not be split in their report, because heaven was not a house divided, and Bin-Nun wasn’t looking for anything other than a rubber stamp for his invasion.

This much had been obvious to Deker as soon as they had reached the Judah Gate at the western entrance to the camp. The Judah Division had been at the eastern end of the camp when they had left for Jericho. While they were gone Bin-Nun had rearranged the order of the camp and troops, pitching it toward Jericho. But he had kept the signal tower with its cloud by day and fire by night east of the camp to fool both the Moabites and Reahns into thinking the camp was still pitched toward Mount Nebo. In so doing, he had shaved a good two or three days off their prep time in breaking down the camp to move out in battle column.

Deker stood up before the clay model of Jericho that he had made. With a thin rod he pointed to and explained the fortifications of Jericho, detailing the composition of the walls, depth, height and defenses.

“You saw what I did with my magic mud bricks to the old stone monument,” he began, and got nods and murmurs of approval from some of the commanders, although Bin-Nun and his defense contractor Kane remained stone-faced. “I can do the same to the walls of Jericho.”

“But what are your mud bricks against those great walls?” asked Salmon from the back of the tent. He was standing in the outer ring of aides, who were supposed to be seen and not heard; but his offense was taken in stride, as it seemed to be the thought on all the commanders’ minds.

“I only have to blow out a section of the wall for you to enter, not the whole thing, and I’ve got enough mud bricks. It’s like

cutting a tree to make it fall in a particular direction. Let me

show you.”

He took his rod and tapped a spot on the north side of the upper fortress wall that he had specially prepared. The section fell like a drawbridge over the tops of the roofs to the lower city wall. Then he tapped the top of that lower wall and it, too, fell like a drawbridge to the reed mat.

There were murmurs all around, and a clear desire for further explanation.

“We don’t have to bring down all the walls to enter the city,” he told them. “Two pinpoint blasts—one in a weak section of the upper fortress wall and another in the lower city wall—will do the trick. The first blast will not only open the upper fortress wall, it will bring down the bricks on top of the buildings below like an avalanche, all the way down to the city wall. It may even be enough to smash through the lower city wall. But just in case, I will have a second blast to blow that wall in two. The bricks that spill down to the ground will create a slope that will enable you to climb over the lower revetment wall and into the city. From there you can climb straight up into the fortress, one after the other.”

The commanders were amazed and delighted.

All except for Bin-Nun.

“You still have not solved the problem of gaining entrance to the city to plant your explosives,” the general said. “By your own assessments, the walls are insurmountable, and you’ll never pass through the main gate again. You fooled the guards once. But you can be sure they won’t make that mistake again, or Hamas will make them pay for it with their lives.”

Deker glanced at Elezar, who instantly knew where he was going, and warned him with his eyes not to go there. “There is another way, General,” he said. “A way to pass through the walls.”

Bin-Nun stared at him and told his commanders, “Leave us.”

25

One by one the commanders cleared the tent, none looking back, until besides him there was only Bin-Nun, Elezar and Salmon, whom Bin-Nun allowed to remain.

Deker cleared his throat and said, “I was with the granddaughter of the woman who gave you refuge in Canaan forty years ago. I gave her the necklace her grandmother gave you before she died.”

Bin-Nun closed his eyes. Elezar stared.

“Her name, too, is Rahab, and as her grandmother did for you, so Rahab gave us refuge and helped us escape Jericho. In return, I promised that we would spare her life and those of her family.”

Elezar said nothing but did not dispute it, including their promise to spare her.

“Through her window in the north wall of Jericho, Elezar and I can get back into the city and plant the explosives,” Deker said.

“If she doesn’t betray us,” Elezar finally chimed in. “There could be a contingent of Reahn soldiers waiting for us. We can’t trust a whore.”

“She saved our lives,” Deker cut in.

“By lying to her authorities,” Elezar shot back. “She is neither truthful nor trustworthy.”

Bin-Nun seemed to wrestle with it for a moment, but then shook his head.

“Elezar is right. It’s too risky. I cannot afford to let you go back and get caught. Before, you knew little. Now you know much. If you are captured, Hamas would have you, your explosives and our plans.”

“Rahab can be trusted,” Deker insisted. “Thanks to her, I learned Hamas’ secret plan to destroy you.”

Bin-Nun looked dubious. “Everybody has a secret plan to destroy us. How do I know this plan is real?”

“The plan is as real as the secret bridge you’ve built,” Deker said, fixing his gaze on Bin-Nun.

The haunted look that Deker had seen in the general’s eyes before he blew the dolmen monument had returned as soon as Deker said secret bridge.

“Hamas knows you’re going to cross the Jordan at flood stage and not wait,” Deker explained. “He also knows that, even with the secret bridge you’ve built, it will take three days for all Israel to cross.”

Elezar stared, speechless for once.

“Hamas intends to bait you for a day and then attack when Israel is only halfway across, General,” Deker went on. “He’s got the Moabites lined up to wipe out the rear here on the east bank.”

Bin-Nun was quiet, all his plans flushed. Elezar was amazed, either because of the quality of the intel or because Deker hadn’t played the card until now.

“But we can help you, General,” Deker assured him. “You show me this bridge you’ve built, and I’ll show you how I can get Israel across in one day. Then it will be too late for Hamas to attack you when you’re at half strength, and the Jordan will fall behind you like a wall to protect your rear from the Moabites. Then you’ll let me return to Jericho through Rahab’s window and bring down its walls.”

26

Looks like wonders have finally ceased, Elezar.”

Deker and Elezar stood with Caleb, Salmon and Achan on the east bank of the Jordan under the stars, just a stone’s throw from the forward base and stone table where Caleb had first given them their instructions to spy out Jericho. Now they saw the secret ford that Caleb and his stonecutters had been hiding all along.

“It’s an Irish bridge,” a shocked and dismayed Elezar said

out loud.

“I see the bridge,” Deker said. “What makes it Irish?”

“During the British Mandate of Palestine in the early twentieth century, Irish engineers in the British army breached dry riverbeds with concrete blocks that would survive the spring floods and allow vehicles to cross over,” Elezar explained. “That’s what Bin-Nun’s army corps of engineers seem to have done here.”

Deker was impressed. Caleb’s stonecutters had constructed their own ford across the bottom of the Jordan by layering one stone atop another to build it up under the water’s surface. Then they topped the whole thing off with twelve massive dolmen slabs, each about seven meters long. In so doing, they had created a platform wide and long enough for forty thousand troops and their families to cross the Jordan.

“So much for the parting of the Jordan, Elezar,” he said. “This explains how the book of Joshua claims that the priests who bore the Ark of the Covenant stood on dry land in the middle of the Jordan until all the people had finished crossing the Jordan.”

Elezar reluctantly had to agree, but still managed to look down his self-righteous nose at Deker with a glare. Elezar was still steaming over Deker’s “dishonorable circumvention” of his authority back at camp by revealing the deal with Rahab. That Elezar learned of the secret Hamas plan to cut them off at the river at the same time as everybody else only further infuriated him. “You’re untruthful, Deker,” he had fumed. “And you cannot be trusted.”

Neither, it seemed, could Bin-Nun.

“Bin-Nun leaves nothing to chance,” said Salmon from behind, and with more than a hint of bitterness. “Nor to Yahweh.”

Salmon and Achan must have known about the bridge all along. Yet another reason for Bin-Nun to sub him and Elezar for the Jericho mission in case they were captured and talked.

“Maybe,” said Deker. “But your bridge runs below the surface of the water. Your engineers miscalculated how high the Jordan would rise at flood stage.”

The Jordan had a zigzag current where its shallowest depths were in the middle. The center of the bridge actually broke the surface of the water every now and then, but it was clear the flooding was worse than even Bin-Nun had accounted for, and much of the bridge was a good meter underwater.

“The swift current is a concern to the Levites carrying the Ark,” said a squeaky voice.

Deker turned to see Phineas, who seemed to have perfected the art of creeping up silently and unannounced. “If anything were to happen, it would break the morale of the people even before they set foot in the Promised Land.”

“I don’t know, Phineas,” Deker said. “It would be a shame to see the Ark float down the Jordan. But I’d rather enjoy watching you slip and fall on your fat ass.”

Achan started to laugh but caught himself, assuming the stern look of the others.

“We crossed the cliffs and canyons of the Wadi Zered to reach Shittim,” insisted old Caleb, who seemed to read Deker’s concern. “We can get all forty army contingents and forty thousand women and children across the Jordan. But it will take longer than the three days we allotted. The current is faster than we anticipated, and the floodwaters higher.”

Caleb was waiting on him now for some kind of answer.

“You get Kane to give me back my C-4, and I can get you all over the Jordan in one day,” Deker said.

“One day?” Caleb repeated.

Deker drew a groove in the ground with a stick to represent the Jordan. Then he put a rock in the center to represent the bridge.

“In the American West, when a family wanted to cross a river, they brought their wagon upstream to break the current,” he said, knowing full well Caleb didn’t know what the hell he was referring to. But the old man got the idea. “We do the same upstream—say, at Adam, where the Jordan narrows. By blowing some rocks and caving the banks, we can dam the Jordan. That will slow the current, drop the water level and let you cross on dry ground, or bridge, so to speak.”

Caleb and Phineas looked at each other for a moment and then slowly nodded. Salmon and Achan could not argue with the logic either. Elezar said nothing, but seemed to burn in anger at him all the same.

“Now you’ll still camp on the banks for three days, but you’ll cross over in one,” Deker explained. “When Hamas sees your pillar of fire jump the Jordan that first night he’s going to shit his own bricks and call off his attack.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Caleb pressed.

“At least you’ll have your full army to fight.”

Caleb was almost convinced, but not quite. “What about the Moabites hitting our rear guard?”

“As soon as your last man is across the Jordan, you’ll send units back to haul out those dolmen slabs from the dry riverbed,” Deker said. “As soon as you send up a pillar of smoke to signal you’re all on the west bank, I’ll detonate a second blast up in Adam to blow the dam I created with the first blast. That will release the floodwaters of the Jordan again. The force of that wave will wipe away what’s left of your bridge and drop a wall of water between you and the Moabites, keeping them where they belong on the east bank. It will also keep your people on the west bank from going wobbly when you attack Jericho. Because there will be no going back.”

Caleb and the rest seemed to follow what he was saying, at least the gist of it.

“This is the divine plan of Yahweh,” Phineas announced conclusively, almost reverently. “I will take this to Bin-Nun. He will tell the commanders to prepare the people to move out tomorrow. The Levites will lead the way.”

“This is not the plan,” Salmon angrily muttered.

“Good,” said Deker, ignoring Salmon and addressing Phineas. “And you’ll remind General Bin-Nun that he has Rahab the harlot to thank for this plan.”

Elezar, however, was anything but pleased with the plan, though apparently for different reasons than Salmon. He saved his wrath for Deker until they were alone.

“You’re a liar, Deker,” he said. “You pretend to be ignorant of Scripture and then propose we dam the Jordan at Adam. The book of Joshua says that’s exactly what miraculously happened, perhaps thanks to an earthquake.”

“Or maybe the Israelites threw some boulders in,” Deker said, adding, “Really, I didn’t know.”

“Tell me then how you came up with the idea,” Elezar pressed, refusing to let it go. “I suppose Yahweh personally presented it

to you?”

“Maybe,” Deker said. “My first year in the IDF, drought caused the Jordan River to recede to a level never seen before. This caused boulders to appear beside the Adam Bridge. It looked like a dam. Jordan accused Israel of stopping the flow of water so Israeli farmers could irrigate their crops while farms and tourism on Jordan’s side of the river withered.”

Elezar’s angry eyes widened slightly, revealing he indeed recalled hearing something about the water crisis that had flared briefly between Israel and Jordan.

“I was dispatched to Adam with earthmoving equipment and explosives if necessary to clear stones from the river and prove to the Jordanians that Israel wasn’t at fault,” Deker continued.

“And what happened?” Elezar demanded.

“We cleared the rocks but the water still didn’t flow. That proved to everybody that the real issue was the farmland on both sides of the river. It was siphoning off the water and causing the drought, turning the Jordan into the sick trickle of a stream that you and I know in our own time,” Deker said. “Still, I always had my doubts about how the stones got there in the first place.”

“And now, I suppose, you know for certain?”

“Yes, I do,” Deker told him. “I put them there.”

27

The next morning Deker and Elezar, along with the Judah Division officers Salmon and Achan, left the camp at Shittim and headed toward Adam. The small town was a good seventeen kilometers upstream from Shittim and a full day’s march. So they rode on camels instead of horses to cut the number of times they had to stop for water.

The entire area was controlled by the Israelite tribe of Gad, which was going to commit its troops to the crossing into Canaan but keep the land east of the Jordan. Deker thought the choice ill-advised, as the Gadites would forever expose themselves to attack on three sides, whereas the tribes that crossed the Jordan and settled in Canaan would have the river to their east and mountains all around as natural barriers.

But it wasn’t worth the fight to second-guess a Gadite. That much Deker could tell halfway along the march when they watered their camels at a small town in the low plains called Beth-Nimrah. More than two hundred armed Gadites were waiting to escort them the rest of the way to Adam. Big, burly warriors with rough beards and sheepskin caps, the Gadites clearly helped Bin-Nun’s army flex its muscle wherever it went. Their torn tunics looked like rags on their swarthy physiques, which revealed a definite penchant for body piercings but, oddly, no tattoos.

Deker had tried to explain to Bin-Nun back at Shittim that this was going to be a small operation. But Bin-Nun would have none of it, insisting on a full contingent of Gadites to assist Deker in damming the Jordan at Adam. Furthermore, Bin-Nun had also insisted on not allowing Deker to carry his C-4 but instead entrusting the bricks to Achan and the detonators to Salmon.

Only if they succeeded with the dam would Bin-Nun reconsider sending Deker on to Jericho with the rest of the C-4 that Kane the Kenite was holding on to. Such was the trust Deker had inspired with the general after his successful spy mission in Jericho.

Some things never changed.

“So I hear you got some milk and honey in the Promised Land,” Achan said, riding up on his camel beside him after they left the town. “And I hear she’s got money too.”

The young Judean was starting to amuse Deker as a comic foil to his big and sober friend Salmon, who was leading the line at the front with Elezar and one of the Gadites.

Deker dodged the question with a wink and asked, “Salmon still have a bug up his ass because he wasn’t the first to cross the Jordan?”

“He thinks that General Bin-Nun has shown no faith in Yahweh by following your plan.”

“So we should wait for the waters to dam themselves at Adam?”

“If Bin-Nun wants the people to see that Yahweh’s favor rests on him as with Moses, yes,” Achan said. “Salmon believes you are stealing Yahweh’s thunder with your magic mud bricks.”

“Is that all?” Deker asked.

“He also says that the blazing star you wear proves we’re doomed. That we may well conquer the Promised Land, only to fall into the same evil as those whom Yahweh has brought judgment upon. Salmon’s feelings run deep like the Jordan.”