THE PROMISED WAR

Salmon saw it too, and brought his camel around to Deker, scowling all the way over.

“Behold the great faith of General Joshua bin-Nun,” Salmon said. “He trusts in Yahweh, yet leaves nothing to chance.”

28

The local Gadites greeted the arriving convoy with the sound of shouts and slinging of arrows into the air.

“What’s all the fuss?” Deker asked Salmon.

“They’re just blazing off for the hell of it,” Salmon said. “An annoying waste of ammunition. I’ve come to my wit’s end trying to explain to them that Kane’s smiths aren’t working night and day to manufacture arrowheads so they can shoot them off whenever they feel like it. But they consider themselves wild men of the mountains.”

As they came down into the camp, more Gadites ran along beside them to take their camels. A fire burned in the center of the earthen floor, around which the arriving Gadites had clustered.

“Food!” Achan declared.

Deker saw that the Gadites had spread a rug on the ground in front of the fire for him and Elezar. A young Gadite offered him what looked like seasoned lamb sausage on a stick. The aroma, however, smelled foul to Deker and he politely declined.

“You insult them,” Elezar said, joining the others in helping himself.

Deker sat down and looked around the circle at the rough faces and curious eyes fixed on him. He decided to pretend he was back at Pink’s in Los Angeles and this lamb sausage was just a hot dog.

Gingerly he took the stick on which the sausage was speared and bit off one end. The first sensation was his tongue burning from the heat, but then the fat and spices exploded in his mouth and he realized these Gadite chefs could take on any Top Chef. Eagerly he devoured the sausage and accepted another.

He wasn’t even halfway finished with his second before the Gadites peppered him and Elezar with questions.

“What’s Bin-Nun doing down at Shittim?”

“When is the invasion coming?”

“Are you really angels of the Lord?”

Elezar cleared his throat. “Tomorrow we will cave in the banks of the Jordan to dam the waters. Then you will see the power of Yahweh.”

At that moment a sullen Salmon marched up with the detonators in his fist. He held them over the fire as if he were about to drop them into the flames.

“Surely an angel of the Lord doesn’t need trinkets like these to work a miracle,” he said, his voice trembling.

Deker glanced at Elezar, who neither approved nor disapproved of what was happening. In Deker’s mind, he was only encouraging the foolish Salmon. Slowly, Deker rose to his feet and faced Salmon.

“No,” Deker told him, and then showed off his command of ancient Hebrew after a week of total immersion. “But apparently you do, big man, to stand up to an angel.”

Salmon’s hand wavered over the flames. Any second Deker expected to see blisters forming on the skin.

An alarmed Achan said, “Give the angel his flints for his magic mud bricks, Salmon! We’re under orders from Bin-Nun, under whom your father served.”

“My father served Moses and the Lord God Yahweh!” Salmon cried out. “Moses needed no magic mud bricks, nor any angels to work miracles! He spoke to Yahweh face-to-face, and he parted the Red Sea with a stick!”

Deker eyed Salmon’s white-red knuckles, looking for the first sign Salmon might let go. “Elezar, talk to me. What’s going on?”

“Salmon is the son of Nahshon bin-Amminadab,” Elezar said in ancient Hebrew, so Salmon could understand the angels knew his family well apart from Bin-Nun. “He is a direct descendant of Judah and the brother-in-law of Aaron, brother of Moses. When Moses stretched out his staff on the banks of the Red Sea and the waters did not part, Salmon’s father entered the waters up to his nose and then the sea parted. This was more than twenty years before Salmon was born.”

Deker now understood that Salmon had wanted to emulate his late father’s exploits and place of honor among the Israelites, but that he and Elezar had preempted that dream with their arrival.

Salmon said, “Tell me, angel, is it true?”

“Is what true?” Deker asked.

“Everything our fathers told us,” Salmon said. “The Exodus—the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea.”

Elezar said, “Of course it’s true, Salmon. Everything happened as your father said.”

“Not you,” Salmon said. “I’m asking the bad angel.”

The bad angel.

Deker empathized with the young soldier. Everything Salmon had seen in the last few days—the bridge, the stones, the magic mud bricks, suspicious spies dubbed “angels”—was nothing at all like the Sunday-school stories Salmon, and Deker himself, had been taught growing up. Salmon’s world as a refugee in the desert was so paltry and brutish compared to his father’s big-budget Exodus, it was only natural for him to wonder if anything he had been taught ever happened.

“I wasn’t there, Salmon,” Deker said. “Elezar is your angel of ancient history. I know only the future—or did. Everything is a bit up in the air right now.”

Deker in that instant dove over the fire and tackled Salmon, slamming the back of Salmon’s hand with the detonators against the ground until the fist opened and they spilled out for Elezar to grab.

“I serve Yahweh, the God of my fathers!” Salmon screamed. “We all serve Yahweh! We need no angels!”

A fire log came down on Salmon’s head, knocking him out. Holding it at the other end was Achan. Deker got the distinct impression this wasn’t the first time Salmon had gone out like this.

Deker sighed, looking sadly at the poor man sprawled in the dirt. Deker could relate to Salmon. After all, he himself had been questioning reality ever since his escape in Madaba. How could he fault Salmon for doubting his own reality?

“Poor Salmon cannot compromise,” Achan explained. “That’s what makes him a warrior in battle but a fool around the fire.”

29

The following day Deker watched Salmon wake up on the west bank of the Jordan and get his bearings. Salmon frowned when he saw where he was—in a grapevine hold around a sycamore tree—and that the dam had been made below. Deker, meanwhile, looked down the long, dry riverbed to the south, where seventeen kilometers away a column of smoke rose into the sky.

That was the signal from General Bin-Nun that the armies of Israel had successfully crossed over the Jordan.

“Congratulations, Salmon, you’re on the other side,” Deker told him, and offered him a fig. “The land of milk and honey. Want some?”

Salmon refused, seemingly determined to go on a hunger strike until he saw the hand of the Lord. “Have the Ark and the people crossed?”

“See for yourself.” Deker pointed out the distant, distinctive pillar of smoke on the west bank. “I’m sure Phineas and his Levites dipped their toes in the Jordan as soon as the water table dropped below the top of the washout bridge.”

“Some miracle,” Salmon said in defeat.

“Yes. Actually, look over there at our dam.” Deker pointed it out to him. “See the mud between the boulders? See the small waterfalls? It’s beginning to break up under its own accord from the force of the water. I won’t have to use my magic mud bricks after all. The Jordan will be back at flood stage in no time.”

Deker himself was eager to reach the new Israelite camp, grab the rest of his C-4 and finally save Rahab and blow the walls of Jericho once and for all. Then history would be right again—and maybe Israel and himself too.

“‘Our people,’” Salmon muttered. “What do you know about our people?”

“Only their future.”

Salmon stared at the IDF dog tag with the Star of David emblem dangling from Deker’s sunburnt neck. “I see the future in your Blazing Star. If that is the seal of Israel, then our future is as bleak as Bin-Nun feared. We will conquer the Promised Land only to be conquered by the false gods of foreigners.”

“These foreigners are your cousins, Salmon, and some of them fear and worship Yahweh.”

“Like this whore you spoke of with Bin-Nun?” Salmon seemed singularly unimpressed.

“Yes. Unlike you, this whore doesn’t need to see the miraculous signs of Yahweh to believe. Her faith is greater than yours.”

“You offend me.”

“That’s not too difficult,” Deker said. “But don’t worry. In three thousand years Israel will still have those like Phineas and Elezar to carry the Law around and enslave the people. Israel will still be surrounded by her enemies on all sides. People like Kane the Kenite will still give Israel weapons, even some that can incinerate cities in the blink of an eye like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

They sat silently for a while watching the dam naturally break up from the pressure of the waters behind it. First the large chunks of mud broke off, and then came the waterfalls. The rocks would be swallowed up by the rising floodwaters and disappear.

Deker then helped untie the young Judean from his tree and get him to his feet. “Salmon, would you care to lead us to the new camp Bin-Nun is setting up in the Promised Land? Believe it or not, he wouldn’t share the location with me in advance.”

Deker’s gesture seemed to pick up Salmon’s spirit a bit, although the soldier tried not to show it over the course of the long and winding route they and the two hundred Gadites had to travel to avoid any trouble with long-range Reahn patrols.

The day wore on, slowly giving way to night. The convoy stopped to rest, the Gadites pulling out dried dates and flatbreads from their packs, and supplementing their meager meal with fresh figs and other fruits they pulled from surrounding trees. After an insufficient amount of time to sleep, they rose before dawn and pressed on toward the new Israelite camp.

As the horizon blazed red with dusk, they straggled down the rocky slope toward the Jordan and into the camp. Deker smelled smoke.

They passed over a ridge and saw the plains below. Deker immediately knew something was horribly wrong. Hundreds of columns of fire and smoke billowed up into the night above the sea of tents. The last time he had seen anything like it was during his first tour of duty with American forces in Iraq.

“We’ve been attacked!” he shouted, and raced ahead of the contingent behind him toward the inferno.

30

Deker jumped off his camel and raced down the hillside toward the new Israelite encampment, watching the columns of smoke rise into the setting sky, worried that the war for the Promised Land was over before it had even begun and that Israel’s future and his own were lost forever.

His first hint that something was off was the Judean guards at the eastern edge of the camp. Unlike the Gadites back at Adam, they welcomed him not with shouts and arrows into the air but with bows trained on him until they saw Salmon, Achan, Elezar and the Gadites behind him with their banners.

“Has Hamas struck?” Deker asked.

“No,” said a guard. “As soon as the Amorite kings west of the Jordan and all the Canaanite kings along the coast heard how Yahweh had dried up the Jordan before us until we crossed over, their hearts melted in fear and they no longer had the courage to back up Hamas and face us! Yahweh reigns!”

“Then what happened?” Deker demanded. “Where is the rest of the army?”

But the guards preferred instead to report everything to Salmon in clipped words Deker couldn’t understand.

As Deker left them and marched ahead toward the camp, he saw no men, only women with baskets full of grain picked in the Promised Land. Some were dumping their grain into four silos freshly dug into the side of a small hill. On the hill were six distinctive redbud trees, their thick, bent trunks ablaze with pink flowers. Beyond the hill was the rest of the camp: tents, tarps, stables and the distant plumes of smoke and fire.

What the hell is going on? Deker wondered, and then he stopped in his tracks.

There before him, in the center of the camp, was the golden Ark of the Covenant, incandescent with the reflection of the surrounding fires, perched atop a pyramid of twelve tribal dolmen stones.

The sight of it took Deker’s breath away.

He stumbled forward toward the altar of stone, both drawn toward the Ark and yet cautious to keep a safe distance. The Levites had erected a perimeter of poles with banners about twenty cubits around the altar, and here he stopped.

Elezar was right behind him, also breathless. “This is only a tenth the distance required when the Ark is in motion during battle. Enjoy the view now with your naked eyes, Deker, because I don’t think we’ll ever see it again in our lives.”

Deker was mesmerized. The chest of shittimwood was smaller than Deker had imagined: not even two meters long, and barely a meter wide and tall. But its gold overlay gave it a jewel-like aura. A crown of gold cropped the top edges of the chest, on top of which stood two golden cherubs, their wings extended to form the mercy seat.

And on top of that mercy seat, according to Jewish tradition, sat the invisible presence of Yahweh.

“Inside this Ark are the tablets Moses smashed, the manna from heaven and the rod of Aaron with a flower bud,” Elezar told him reverentially. “They represent the presence of God, the provision of God and the resurrection power of God.”

But all Deker could think of was the shittim wood beneath the gold of the Ark, and that only made his mind go back to the death grove at Camp Shittim. Had that same horror been repeated here? Where were the soldiers?

He looked around and saw no bodies hanging from trees. But he saw no troops either. Only some commotion farther inside the camp that demanded attention.

31

Beyond the Ark stood the priest Phineas, recounting the crossing of the Jordan to several thousand children spread out as far as Deker’s eyes could see, all the way to the mysterious, natural-gas–like bursts of fire at the south end of the camp.

“So when the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant went ahead of them!” Phineas cried out. “Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet, as soon as the priests who carried the Ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down was completely cut off. So the priests who carried the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord stopped in the middle of the Jordan and stood on dry ground, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground.”

Something like that, Deker thought, and wondered to what extent Phineas’ revisionist history was what Salmon and Achan had heard as children about the parting of the Red Sea. Even the fate of the dolmen stones now under the Ark, which earlier had formed the stone bridge across the Jordan, got a poetic

rendition.

“So the Israelites did as Joshua commanded them. They took twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, as the Lord had told Joshua; and they carried them over with them to their camp, where they put them down. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”

The altar of dolmen stones holding up the Ark was assembled like a ziggurat and stood about four meters tall—six dolmens across the bottom, four across the middle and two across the top. The altar was a stone monument unto itself, which was probably the intent as soon as the Ark was lifted up and out by the Levites to carry before the armies of Israel.

Deker looked at the dolmen stones and realized it must have taken a company of men from each tribe to haul each one out of the river and drag it to this place.

But it was all part of the show, and Deker could see Elezar take a seat on the ground in front of a couple of small children and nod his approval to an appreciative Phineas.

As he stared at the remarkable scene, he sensed somebody standing next to him. It was Salmon, who had gone from sullen to exultant.

“Bin-Nun has done it!” he said.

“Done what, Salmon?”

“Honored Yahweh by bringing us here forty years to the day of the Passover in Egypt before the Exodus. Tonight we celebrate the Passover in the Promised Land!”

“That was the hurry to cross the Jordan at flood stage?” Deker asked. “He wanted to hit a date?”

“This is his sign from Yahweh,” Salmon said. “Don’t you see? All of this is the sign the people needed to see.”

“What sign do you see, Salmon? I see no sign.”

“The holiness of Yahweh is before your eyes in the Ark.”

Deker thought back again to his bar mitzvah, and the symbol of the Ark and how he had dropped the Torah. “You mean the 613 laws and purification rituals to show how ungodly we

mortals are.”

Salmon looked at him curiously. “The Torah and Law of Moses do not promise salvation, because keeping them all is impossible. The Law reflects the holiness of Yahweh, to show us our dependence on Yahweh’s grace like Abraham. Without the Law we would know neither justice nor mercy.”

Salmon sounded like Rahab up on her terrace in Jericho. True believers in a world ruled by those who seemed to make up the rules to suit themselves. It was beginning to make sense to Deker now, this notion that the fledgling nation of Israel existed to bear witness to the Law in a lawless world. But not this idea of faith in Yahweh’s mercy. Thus far he had seen little of that from Bin-Nun.

“Bin-Nun has depended on nothing but me so far, Salmon. Phineas too.”

“You will tonight,” Salmon promised. “All the troops will.”

“That’s the problem, Salmon. I don’t see any troops. Where are they?”

“Healing.”

“Healing? From what?”

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”

32

Deker followed Salmon to the Tent of Meeting, where a line of Gadites snaked outside with Achan at the end. Salmon and Deker walked past them inside the tent where Deker saw General Bin-Nun in the front with a priest beside him at the altar. The troops were lined up as though they were about to receive Communion, but it was no cup that Bin-Nun held in his hand.

“It’s a flint knife,” Salmon explained from the back corner of the tent where they stood.

“I see the knife, Salmon. Who is the priest?”

“Phineas’ father, Eleazer. His name is almost the same as the good angel.”

The good angel.

Deker watched as a soldier dropped his field kilt and knelt before Bin-Nun, his back toward the line, and looked up at his leader. Bin-Nun fixed his gaze on his soldier and brought down his knife. Deker himself tensed at the sound of the blade scraping the stone. There was a pause, and then Bin-Nun used his blade to flick a piece of foreskin to a pile at the end of the altar.

“Holy God,” he said under his breath. “He’s circumcising them, Salmon. But why? They’re adults.”

“Our fathers who came out of Egypt were circumcised, but we who were born in the wilderness were not,” Salmon explained. “Today Yahweh has rolled away the reproach of Egypt from us. The sons of Israel can finally take the place of their fathers. That is why General Bin-Nun is calling this place Gilgal.”

A hot fury quickly succeeded Deker’s revulsion. His efforts to save Bin-Nun’s army when they were most vulnerable, crossing the Jordan in a single day, were all for naught. This stupid mutilation of the troops would set back the attack on Jericho by days if not weeks. Rahab would remain at risk, and Hamas would have an incalculable reprieve to regroup and draw help from neighboring cities. Worse, it left the Israelite troops at less than half strength. Hamas could attack them at any moment.

“This is insane,” he said, trying to keep his voice low, but aware that his raspy words and snarling tone had turned several soldiers’ heads. “You can’t sack a city after you chop off the tips of your men’s dicks.”

Salmon moved closer to Deker, trying to shield his anger from the others. His eyes were still bright with hope, his voice imploring. “But this is the sign of faith in Yahweh from Bin-Nun we’ve been looking for,” Salmon said. “Don’t you see? Bin-Nun has surrendered his war plans to Yahweh and seeks a new directive. Yahweh will lead the way in battle now. Bin-Nun is announcing it was Yahweh and not Moses who led us through the desert for forty years to test our hearts. And it will be by the hand of Yahweh and not the edges of our swords that we take the Promised Land.”

Deker asked, “How long will the healing take?”

“They say about fourteen days for the healing to be complete,” Salmon said. “But the men can fight after seven, which is the end of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which begins tomorrow.”

Seven days!Deker thought. Rahab could be dead by then. She could be dead already if Hamas suspected that she gave the Hebrew spies the intel on his ambush plans. Meanwhile, they were all sitting ducks in this Gilgal place, with troops operating at less than half capacity.

What Bin-Nun was doing, Deker now concluded, was cleverly securing single-minded devotion from his troops ahead of the impending attack on Jericho. Circumcision and the Feast of Unleavened Bread during the healing would keep the men from feasting on sex with their wives and food from the new land. There would be no repeat of the mistake Moses had allowed when the Israelites first pitched camp at Shittim in Moab.

Deker knew then and there he had to grab the rest of his explosives from Kane and break for Jericho that very night. He had done Bin-Nun’s dirty work twice now. He could wait no longer.

“I’m up soon,” Salmon told him stoically. “You’ll stay to watch?”

Watch? Deker knew Salmon considered this bizarre mutilation of male adults a holy ritual. But Deker had seen enough. “I’ll skip the butcher shop, Salmon. I’m already cut and ready for action.”

As Deker left the tent, he sensed Bin-Nun’s eyes follow him on his way out. But Deker didn’t look back, only heard the sound of the flint knife strike the stone and the scrape of the blade behind him.

33

Waiting until it was completely dark and the Passover meals had begun in the tents throughout Gilgal, Deker quietly made his way to the dramatic fires at the south end of the camp facing Jericho. There he beheld acres and acres of smelting furnaces—hundreds of them—stoked by Kane the Kenite’s army of metalsmiths. The pillars of fire lit up the night.

Bin-Nun has bred his army, Deker thought. Now he was going to forge his swords.

But as Deker looked closely at the smelting furnaces on his way to find Kane, he noticed only wood was going in to stoke the fires. Not a single blade or any other metal was being forged.

These pyrotechnics, he realized, were yet another example of Bin-Nun’s psychological warfare designed to strike the fear of God into the melting hearts of the Reahns huddled behind their walls. He could only imagine how the multiplication of Israel’s pillar of fire into more than three hundred fires looked to Rahab and what must be going through her mind even now.

At the same time, the firewall proved to be an invaluable defensive move, blocking the ability of the Reahn watchtowers to see behind it. Deker knew from night training how a bright object at night affected the naked eye’s ability to see behind it. A Reahn on the walls who turned his eyes away from the fires might require a half hour for his eyes to readjust. Bin-Nun, meanwhile, could safely maneuver his troops behind the light until he was ready to attack. Deker supposed the same could be true in the daytime with the smoke. Either way, the Reahns were blind.

“Is anything around here real?” he asked when he saw Kane standing outside his tent, tending to one of his larger furnaces.

Kane was smoking some stinking, home-fashioned cigar and seemed to have been expecting him. “Only the tin and copper inside the treasury of Jericho.”

Deker had already begun to suspect as much.

“So that explains why Bin-Nun is attacking Jericho,” Deker said. “And why he’s going to kill every breathing thing in Jericho, burn all its grain instead of feeding his own people with it and declare a herem ban preventing anyone from picking up even a penny from the blood-puddled streets under penalty of death. He says he needs the metals for the Treasury of Yahweh. But they’re for you, Kane, so you can forge them into the weapons the Israelite war machine will need to fight in the wars beyond Jericho.”

“The survival of Israel is at stake,” Kane said, pushing his iron poker into the furnace to stoke the fire. “If we prevail against Jericho, we will need all the weapons we can forge if we are to have any hope of going up against the superior armies of the five kingdoms to the south and the even stronger armies to the north. Gilgal here will serve as a station for the rest of the campaign for the Promised Land,” he pointed out. “The troops can pass through anytime for repairs and new weapons.”

“After they destroy Jericho and everyone inside.”

“Every breathing thing,” Kane said. “From the river to the Great Sea.”

Deker stood in the glow of the heat and looked out across the desert toward Jericho. He couldn’t even see it. All their lights were out, like a blackout for an air raid. Deker wouldn’t be surprised if many Reahns, despite the assurances of General Hamas, feared hailstones of fire were about to rain down on them as they had on the Egyptians forty years ago. Such was the cloud of terror General Bin-Nun had successfully blown over their walls. But it was a mirage that would blow over soon enough, and the walls would still be standing when it did unless Deker took action.

“Give me my explosives,” Deker demanded.

Kane eyed him up and down. Deker flashed no blade, but Kane seemed to understand Deker didn’t need anything more than his bare hands to kill quickly and quietly. “You want to go to Jericho tonight?”

“We promised her,” Deker said.

Kane screwed up his eyes. “Rahab the harlot?”

Deker nodded.

“Well, Israel must keep her word,” Kane said. “But you don’t need explosives to protect her. There’s nothing you can do for her right now.”

“I can bring down the walls.”

“You’ll do that when we attack.”

“The attack is at least seven days away, Kane. Rahab and her family could be tortured and killed by then. Hamas must realize somebody told us about his plans to cut us off at the Jordan. And now that we’ve crossed, somebody is going to pay, and it’s probably going to be her or those close to her. We might pass over her treason, but Hamas won’t, and her blood will be on our hands.”

Kane looked stern. “Bringing down the walls before we attack will only enable and encourage the Reahns to flee their city.”

“Exactly,” Deker said. “No genocide. I’ve seen the future, Kane. Israel will only make the world hate it by killing everything that breathes. I can change it.”

“You believe that the nations will hate the Hebrews because of anything the Hebrews do or don’t do?”

“Yes.”

“They hated the Hebrews when they were slaves. They hate them now that they’re warriors. Sparing Jericho won’t change that. Neither can you.”

“I can try.”

“But if you succeed, the Reahns will take their treasure with them. We won’t have enough weapons.”

“Maybe if I succeed, Israel won’t need as many.”

Kane stood looking at Deker for a long moment. Deker couldn’t tell if his eyes held pity or a kind of respect. Finally, Kane turned toward his tent and said, “I have something for you.”

He left Deker at the furnace and disappeared behind the flap of his tent.

Deker looked around at the pillars of fire lined up across the desert. Bin-Nun had erected as much of a wall to keep the Israelites inside Gilgal as he had to keep the Reahns out. And his circumcision of the troops guaranteed no desertions before the attack. Was Gilgad that different at this point than Jericho? Was General Bin-Nun truly as morally superior to General Hamas as Salmon insisted? Or was he only going to destroy a wall of stone in order to replace it with a wall of religion in the name of Yahweh?

Kane emerged a moment later with Deker’s explosives pack and a small ceremonial washbowl painted red and black. He handed the bowl to Deker delicately.

“I kept one of your bricks and used it to make this.”

Deker’s hands trembled as he stared at the bowl. It looked just like the kind he had seen in Rahab’s place, but the shape reminded him of another, more terrible piece of pottery that had claimed Rachel’s life back in the Israel he knew.

“What’s this for?” Deker said, fighting to keep his voice from shaking.

“To take with you inside the city when you go back,” Kane told him. “Bin-Nun says you’ve proven yourself. Both with the intelligence about Hamas’ plan to cut us down at the water, and by damming the Jordan at Adam. He never expected you to get this far. None of us did. Now only one thing remains: the walls.”

Deker took the bowl, wrapped it in sackcloth and put it in his pack and counted fifteen C-4 bricks left from his original cache. It wasn’t as much power as he wanted. He would have to be pinpoint accurate with where he laid the blasts and how he allocated the bricks between them. Assuming he got that far.

“God is my strength and power,” Kane told him. “He teaches my hands to make war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. But I have not seen such a display of his power in anyone besides Moses—and you.”

“What are you saying?” Deker asked.

“Even Moses did not set foot where we stand—east of the Jordan. Because he could not control the power God had granted him. Be careful, Deker. Once you set loose the power of God, even you cannot control it.”

34

Sam Deker flew like a phantom under the full moon, through the forests of palm trees, farmlands and abandoned hamlets. He wanted to save Rahab as much as Israel. But it was Rachel’s death he remembered now as he ran toward Jericho.

It was Monday, March 29, 2010. Passover.

Deker sat in the café, sipped his coffee and stared through the window at the three-story yellow bungalow across the narrow street in East Jerusalem. He glanced at his new Krav Maga watch, a gift from Rachel. Ten minutes past six, which left him twenty-two minutes until sunset. Rachel was probably at the Western Wall by now, preparing her Shabbat candle for the first evening of Passover and herself for disappointment when he failed to show up for her yet again.

He patted the pocket of his dark kurta shirt and pulled out a small pen-shaped detonator with a red button at the end. A single tap would raise the trigger. A second tap would detonate the C-4 explosive disguised as a ceramic bowl inside the bungalow’s second-floor parlor. He twisted the safety feature at the base of the pen to reset the trigger to prevent any premature accident and put it back in his pocket.

The bungalow was an elegant older building crammed between the newer multistory apartment buildings. It was also the home of Abdul Omekh, who had served as chief of staff to the former Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. These days Omekh was a professor of modern history at Al-Quds Open University and lectured that the Jews had no historical connection to Jerusalem or the Western Wall.

Tonight Omekh was hosting a special dinner of great interest to the IDF. Four cars already had pulled up and left within the past half hour, depositing guests. One of these guests, according to IDF intel, was the Black Dove, a Palestinian mole within Israel’s counterterrorism unit whom no one had been able to unmask.

Deker was a demolitions specialist, not an assassin, and he had told his superiors that he thought this plan was a bad idea. Already he could imagine the lead in the Jerusalem Post: “A powerful bomb blast killed one of the Palestinian Authority’s leading political scientists last evening in East Jerusalem as he sat down to dinner with family and friends.” University students and colleagues would describe Omekh as “a respected professor.” Hard-liners would describe him as “a revolutionary martyred by Israeli terrorists.”

Deker instead suggested placing a camera in the bungalow to make the identification and deal with Black Dove at a time and place of the IDF’s choosing. But his crazy new superior, Uri Elezar, insisted it was better to take care of the Black Dove now and identify him later through dental records.

So last week Deker and his partner Stern paid a service call to the bungalow in a Gihon Water and Sewage Company van. The rains must have backed up the sorry sewers in the street again, the housekeeper explained, and now the stench was filling the home only days before an important dinner. When Stern returned to the van an hour later with a plumber’s snake and planted a bag of clumpy drain blockage, he handed Deker the bowl from the table in Omekh’s parlor.

It was the first time Deker held the original bowl in his hands, and he was pleased with how exact a replica he had made of it with his C-4 bowl based on photos Stern had snapped from his first service call a few days prior. So exact was his copy of this bowl that for a second he worried Stern had botched the switch. But then he saw a chip beneath the base of the bowl and got angry with Stern.

“Did you chip this bowl?” Deker demanded.

Stern looked doubtful. “I don’t think so, boss.”

Deker swore. “My bowl has no chip,” he said, and started reviewing the photos of the bowl that Stern had snapped before. He couldn’t see a chip. “What happens if Omekh sees that his bowl has magically repaired itself? He’ll know it’s been switched, and we won’t get another shot at the Black Dove.”

So far, however, it appeared that Omekh had noticed nothing. The GPS tracker in the bowl showed it was still in Omekh’s parlor.

Now the last car pulled up and Deker saw one of the few guests he could identify—a Hamas section chief—step out, followed by two more men Deker didn’t recognize. They were patted down at the door by two plainclothes security types and then disappeared inside. The car drove off and Deker took out his monocular and looked up at the second-floor window. All the guests had gathered in the parlor. Everybody who was going to attend had arrived.

Deker glanced at his watch. It was 6:15 p.m.

The bronze sky outside the café seemed to weigh heavily over the squat buildings as sunset neared. But the narrow street was livelier than Deker had hoped. There were women carrying grocery bags, boys riding bicycles and street vendors hawking their wares. The explosion would shatter windows for fifty to one hundred meters around, and Deker worried about injuring innocents in the street.

Rachel, of course, would be mortified to know that this was why he had missed her at the Western Wall tonight. Nasty business, and he was through with it. Which was why he would never tell her, only ask her to marry him and move back to the States, where she could pursue her graduate degree in psychology and then spend the rest of her life rehabilitating him.

The thought of Rachel was the only thing that could bring a smile to his face. She knew something was up. She had come in on him at his apartment when he was hiding Omekh’s chipped bowl in his closet. She must have suspected he had already picked up an engagement ring. She had made some passing remark at dinner a few days later about “conflict” or “blood” diamonds and how important it was to make sure you knew where things really came from, and not to support industries that exploited children or funded wars.

Fortunately, he would be able to assure her that the diamond he was giving her had come from his nana, and the only conflict it had seen was World War II. They could then talk about their bright, open future together. Deker yearned for that kind of innocence and passion for life again—before his two wars with the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan and this recent stint with the IDF in Israel.

Rachel was the way.

Deker looked at his watch. It was 6:16 p.m. He could picture her right now at the Western Wall. He could see her pour the water into a special bowl for the Shabbat hand-washing ceremony and dry her soft, strong hands with her little towel. And now, at exactly eighteen minutes to sunset, she was lighting her Shabbat candle.

As the candle burned, she would spread her hands around the flames and draw them inward in a circular motion three times to indicate the acceptance of the sanctity of Shabbat. Then she would cover her eyes and recite the blessing:

“Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has hallowed us through His commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the lights of the holy Shabbat. Uncover your eyes and behold the Shabbat lights.”

Deker swallowed and took the detonator out of his pocket again. He looked out the window of the café and pressed the red button twice and watched.

There was a terrific explosion, and he felt the café shake. But the villa across the street stood still. The explosion had come from several streets away.

People started shouting in the streets outside, but Deker just sat there, stunned.

Almost immediately the TV in the Arab café blared the news that a blast had gone off at the Western Wall. Two young men in back high-fived each other, but the half-dozen other faces watched in sober dismay.

Deker stared at the detonator in his hand as a wave of panic and nausea overwhelmed him.

No, no, no, he thought. Jesus, no.

Rachel.

35

Deker raced on foot through the twisting alleys of East Jerusalem toward the Temple Mount, tears forming in his eyes as he was breathing, “No, no, no!”

By the time he reached the Western Wall Plaza, the lights of the ambulances, police cars and news crews glowed in the twilight. He slowed his pace, catching his breath as he brushed past the EMTs toward the taped-off area.

Four people were dead, a newswoman was breathlessly reporting as she stared into the lens atop her cameraman’s shoulder. Six others were injured, two critically.

He scanned the crowd as he pushed his way to the police line. There were more onlookers than people praying at the wall. Knowing Rachel, she’d be the first to be offering comfort to the victims or support to the first responders.

But he couldn’t see her anywhere in the chaos.

He could, however, see Stern and Elezar standing to the side with a couple of plainclothes Mossad officers conducting their inspection before any evidence was completely contaminated. They were blocking his view.

He approached them slowly, not certain if he wanted to talk to them or not. His feet felt like lead, his mouth was dry. The shouts and cries circling his head from the crowd gave him a headache, and the sight of the small ceramic shard in Stern’s hand made him nauseous.

It’s the explosive bowl I made to blow up the Hamas gathering. I mixed it up with the original bowl. Rachel must have found it at home. Oh, my God. I’ve made a tragic mistake.

Their faces said everything when they half-turned and saw him. They looked away as he pushed his way through and beheld the charred bits of limbs and flesh of the victims strewn across the plaza.

Deker collapsed to his knees, his soul swallowed up by a black void of grief and hopelessness, and wailed like a dying animal.

Rachel was gone, and with her the spark of his own life.

36

Even from the abandoned farm, Deker could see from a distance that Jericho was sealed up tight as a drum. Everyone must have fled the surrounding fields as soon as the Israelites had crossed the Jordan and sought refuge inside the walls of the city. No one went in and no one came out.

That included Rahab, assuming she was still alive.

As he looked up to see the clouds move like a spirit across the moon and listened to the rustling trees whisper ancient secrets, Deker felt as if he were the last soul alive in this world.

Until he spotted a movement out of the corner of his eye.

Moving quickly and quietly through a date grove, careful not to betray himself with a sound, he peered out through some palm leaves and started.

Kneeling in the dirt, hands stretched out toward the heavens with his sword across them, was none other than General Joshua bin-Nun.

He seemed to be talking to somebody Deker couldn’t see.

Deker squinted his eyes and scanned the horizon, looking for a security detail of young Judeans like Salmon and Achan—or, worse, Hamas and a squad of Reahn assassins. But there was nobody else.

Deker couldn’t believe Bin-Nun would expose himself to the enemy while his troops were recovering from the mutilation he had inflicted on them back in Gilgal.

Deker whipped out his scythe sword, just in case he had missed some shadow force, and rushed through the brush toward Bin-Nun.

Bin-Nun, sensing his approach, spun around quickly with the point of his sword to Deker’s throat, stopping him cold. Then, looking at him quizzically, Bin-Nun asked him, “You mean to save her, don’t you?”

“I do.” Deker sheathed his sword. “Who was that you were talking to? Why is the general out alone without his guards?”

“I came to inspect Jericho for myself,” Bin-Nun told him. “I was praying and looked up and saw an angel standing in front of me with a drawn sword in his hand. It was a real angel, not like you. I went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’ The angel replied, ‘Neither, but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.’”

Deker took a breath. “The commander of the army of the Lord?” he repeated in as even a tone as possible, so as not to suggest he doubted Bin-Nun. “What did he say?”

Deker stiffened as Bin-Nun put a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the city about a kilometer away. “Can you pick out this harlot’s window in the city wall from here?”

Deker pointed. “That one: sixth window to the right along the north wall.”

Bin-Nun asked, “You are certain?”

“Yes,” Deker replied, although he wasn’t really.

Bin-Nun glanced at the pack of explosives Deker had slung over his shoulder. “You will enter the city through the harlot Rahab’s window tonight with your explosives,” he told him, and Deker felt a wave of electricity rise up his spine as the words he longed to hear spilled from Bin-Nun’s lips. “You will lie in wait for six days, and on the seventh day you will blow the walls on our signal. This is the plan that Yahweh has revealed to Israel.”

Deker nodded. He hadn’t seen this angel of the Lord, but he was pleased with the angel’s instructions to Bin-Nun all the same, as well as Bin-Nun’s response of faith in going along with them. Surely that would make the Levites happy. “How will I know the signal?”

“For six days the army will march around Jericho behind the Ark of the Covenant and seven priests carrying rams’ horns,” Bin-Nun said. “But on the seventh day we’ll circle the walls seven times with the priests blowing their trumpets. Listen for a long blast on the trumpets. That’s when I’ll have the army give the war cry. Our shout will be your signal to blow the walls. We’ll rush the stairway of rubble you will have created and climb over the walls and into the city. The city will be doomed to destruction and all who are in it.”

Even as Bin-Nun spoke these final words, Deker could hear footsteps in the brush growing louder and turned to see Elezar emerge from the shadows, eyes on fire.

“General Bin-Nun,” Elezar said, breathing hard as he glared at Deker. “What is the meaning of this?”

Deker cleared his throat. “We are discussing Rahab the harlot and her family,” he said quickly. “She hid us from Hamas and helped us escape with the knowledge of his plans to cut us down at the Jordan. She also warned us to march at least five hundred cubits away from the walls to remain outside the long range of the archers.”

Bin-Nun pursed his lips. Deker had forgotten to give him that intel earlier about the kill zone, and it was clear the general considered it more than useful. Then again, Deker spared Bin-Nun the obvious reminder that he himself had made a similar sort of promise to Rahab’s grandmother forty years ago, and that it was about time he fulfilled it.

“Rahab the harlot shall be spared,” Bin-Nun said, and Deker felt his lungs exhale in relief. “Only Rahab and all who are with her in the house, because she hid you, and only on two conditions.”

Deker took a breath and waited. So did Elezar, keenly searching for any loopholes Bin-Nun might give him.

“First, you will make sure she binds a scarlet cord in the window through which she let you down and which you are about to climb up,” Bin-Nun said. “This will be a sign to me that she hasn’t betrayed you to Hamas. It will also be a sign for our troops to avoid her house when we storm the city walls. If she fails to do this, we will be blameless in her death.”

Deker nodded. This was the very blood-on-the-doorposts Passover protection and sign of her faith in Yahweh that Rahab had been seeking all along.

Deker asked, “And the second condition?”

“She must bring her entire family into her house, or they will be slaughtered with the rest of the Reahns,” Bin-Nun stated. “Whoever ventures outside the doors of her house into the street, his blood—or hers—shall be on his own head, and we will be guiltless. If any of our men lay a hand on her family inside her house, their blood will be on our head.”

It was Deker’s turn to glare at Elezar. “Got that?” he said, and turned his face to the walls of Jericho.

37

Deker could see the walls clearly as he and Elezar approached slowly and quietly in their camouflaged uniforms they had soiled with the dirt in which they now crawled. The concrete revetment wall ahead cut an even line across the sandy ground, the jagged brick wall above it rising into the dark. Every now and then, when a cloud broke to reveal a thin shaft of moonlight, he could glimpse the Reahn helmets and spears waiting for them atop the wall.

According to his calculations, Rahab’s cellar window on the north wall was only thirty or so meters from the main gate around the corner at the east wall. So Deker used the gatehouse tower to his left and the forbidding city spire dead ahead as his markers all the way in. But the walls were coming up fast now, blocking his view of the markers, and the clouds were parting too much, forcing him and Elezar to move more quickly than they’d like to keep from being spotted overhead.

Deker dragged himself across the sand to the base of the wall when a dazzling white light from the sky stabbed the ground just behind him and in front of Elezar, who stopped cold just outside the patch of light.

Deker pressed his back against the rock and held his breath in the shadows. The ground was awash with moonlight now, brought by a break in the night clouds. Deker was aware of the crunch of boots and the sound of voices growing louder on the wall high above.

“Clear!” shouted one of the Reahn sentries.

“All clear!” repeated another sentry.

Soon Deker was standing up, back flat against the wall, staring out toward Gilgal and its awesome pillars of fire, waiting for Elezar. For a terrifying moment, Elezar looked as though he were sure he had been spotted and was about to do something stupid. But the shaft was cut off again by another cloud and Elezar made it over quickly in the dark.

“They can’t see a damn thing with the fires, Elezar,” Deker assured him in a low whisper. “We just have to keep quiet.”

Deker turned and looked up the sheer face of the wall. There beyond his view was Rahab’s window. All he needed to do was climb the wall, pull himself through the window in Rahab’s cellar and then drop Elezar a rope. The reddish brick wall that began five meters overhead was uneven enough that an experienced climber like himself could manage it without much difficulty.

It was the first five meters—that damn concrete revetment wall—that was the problem. Deker dropped his pack, pulled off his boots and tied them to his belt. Then he picked up the axe inside his sack that Kane had packed.

“I need to stand on your shoulders,” Deker told Elezar, who nodded as he breathed harder and louder than Deker would have preferred.

Elezar bent over and Deker climbed onto his back until he stood on his shoulders.

The top of the revetment wall formed a tiny ledge at the base of the brick wall above. It was just out of his reach.

Deker slid his hand behind his back to his belt and pulled out the axe. He raised it as high as he could, his feet shifting as Elezar moved beneath him, and hooked the axe head on the ledge. It held sufficiently for him to pull himself high enough to grab the ledge with his other hand.

He could feel Elezar fall away from him. He then dropped the axe and grabbed the ledge with both hands, swinging one foot up. With three points of contact he was able to pull his entire body up, belly flat against the wall, arms spread wide.

Deker caught his breath and slowly made his way up the wall, digging his fingers and toes into any solid crevice he could find. Some crevices were more solid than others, and at one point halfway up a brick gave way and he lost his footing, leaving him hanging by two fingers. He looked down to see the broken pieces crash to the ground, where there was no sign of Elezar.

The sound of the falling brick must have alerted the sentries overhead, because he could see a couple of torches above him.

“They just reinforced that section last season,” said a Reahn sentry, from what Deker could gather.

“I’m not reporting it” was the reply of a second sentry. “Hamas might make me go out and fix it.”

A third sentry laughed. “Afraid some Hebrew is going to reach up from the shadows and grab you by the ankles and drag you down to hell?”

It was a thought. But Deker was too far down the wall for that, and still hanging by his two fingertips while his foot searched for a toehold. With immense relief he found one a moment later. Once he was sure the sentries were gone, he continued to work his way up the ragged brick wall until he could see the shape of an open square window above him.

He paused, sweat dripping into his eyes, and realized that he could be wrong about this window, despite what he had told Bin-Nun. It might not be the same window that Rahab had lowered him out of.

Lord, help me, he prayed, knowing full well that he had already committed himself at this point to entering this window. Before Deker had even thought to pray, the good Lord would have had to rearrange the entire architecture of Jericho to suddenly make this Rahab’s window if he was wrong. Which seemed ludicrous to Deker. I’ll never have the faith of Abraham.

Cautiously, he raised himself up so he could look inside. But it was too dark to make out anything. He listened for a moment. Then, detecting no sound, he crawled through the window and into the cellar hewn out of the city wall.

With immense relief he realized that this was, indeed, Rahab’s cellar. He took a breath, said a silent prayer of thanks and began to look for the rope that Rahab had used to let them down before so he could help Elezar up.

He found the rope coiled in a corner among the jars and skeletons. He never thought he’d be so happy to see those Reahn skeletons again. He picked up the rope and turned toward the window to let it down for Elezar.

But as he moved toward the square of stars, a big shadow moved in front of the window. A feeling of blind panic seized Deker as all the skeletons in the room seemed to step toward him.

Then the grillwork behind him opened and he saw a hooded figure holding an oil lamp. The hood came down and he saw Rahab, dressed much more modestly than during their first encounter.

“Rahab,” he said, starting toward her.

But she said nothing, looking over his shoulder.

Her oil lamp flickered and Deker looked around the dimly illuminated cellar. He was surrounded by four Reahn soldiers.

They must have been waiting for me as soon as they saw the pillars of fire go up at Gilgal and knew the Israelites had crossed the Jordan.

Rahab pointed at him and told the soldiers, “This is the Hebrew spy.”

38

Deker watched Elezar haul himself through the window. He looked relieved to set his feet on solid ground until he saw the four Reahn soldiers behind Deker.

“Rahab’s brothers,” Deker told him. “We’re good.”

Rahab said, “They were all conscripted into the Reahn army as teens. Their uniforms disguise their hearts. We aren’t all what we seem.”

With a steely gaze Elezar asked, “How is this good, Deker?”

“They’re going to get me into the fortress to plant the C-4,” Deker said. “They know the weak spots in the wall. I’m going to plant two charges with timers—one short and one long—to blow the walls. Fortress wall first, city wall second.”

Rahab translated what Deker was saying to the biggest and apparently the oldest of her brothers, who looked no older than twenty-four and whose rippling physique would have qualified him as a Mr. Universe contestant in the twenty-first century.

Ram, as Rahab called her older brother, looked at him intensely, with all the passion of an eldest brother. His unspoken warning seemed to say, Mess with my sister and I’ll rip your head off. Then he turned to Rahab and said something in a deep, gruff voice.

Rahab said, “Ram knows the disbursement of troops in the city, the checkpoints and roadblocks, as well as the layout of the fortress, secret gates and guard shifts. But he wants to know what assurances we have, if we help you now, that your soldiers won’t destroy us along with Reah?”

Deker glanced at Elezar and in English said, “Nice to know that at least they think I’ll be successful.”

“Tell her we gave her our word and that’s enough,” Elezar replied, going back to his original non-promise to her when she first helped them escape a week earlier.

“Thank God even Bin-Nun is more principled than you.” Deker shook his head and turned to Rahab and said, “General Bin-Nun declares that you and all who are with you in your house will be spared on two conditions.”

Rahab repeated this to Ram, who showed no change in expression, and looked at Deker eagerly with her dark, animated eyes. “Tell us these conditions and we will meet them.”

“I will meet one of them for you now.”

Deker was aware of Elezar’s death stare as he pulled out his dagger, cut a piece of the red rope on the floor and moved to the open window. He found one of the bronze hooks inside the top of the window used to keep grillwork in place. He fastened the scarlet cord to the hook and then closed the hook with one sharp, soft blow from his axe.

Now Bin-Nun and his scouts would know from the start that she hadn’t betrayed him and everything was a go.

“This is your blood on your doorpost, Rahab,” he told her. “This is the sign for our angels of death to pass over your house when they storm the city.”

Deker watched her eyes grow wide and mouth drop as she heaved a sigh of relief and wonder. Truly, she considered this an answered prayer.

“If this cord should be removed, however,” he warned her, “we will be blameless in your deaths.”

Rahab nodded profusely and repeated everything to her brothers, who glanced at one another and nodded tentatively.

“What is the second condition?” she demanded anxiously.

“You must bring your entire family into this house or they will not be passed over and will be slaughtered with the rest of your people.”

“You mean my mother and father and brothers?”

“Yes,” he told her. “They will be spared.”

“What about my brother Ram’s family?”

Deker could hear Elezar groan behind him as he answered, “Them too.”

“And my girls who work for me?”

“Holy shit,” Elezar said. “Enough, Deker. One whore is enough.”

Deker ignored him. “All who belong to you, Rahab,” he said. “Bring them into your house. But do not tell them about our deal. Simply offer them refuge in advance of the siege.”

Rahab again repeated everything to her brothers, who finally began to ease up. Deker realized she had probably negotiated quite a lot on behalf of the family for years and they’d trusted her on more than one occasion to secure the best terms on the deal points.

“Remember,” Deker warned her again, “whoever ventures outside the door of your house into the street, his blood—or hers—shall be on his own head, and we will be guiltless.”

Rahab nodded slowly, and Deker realized the deal had hit a snag.

“Here we go,” grumbled Elezar.

“We have a problem,” Rahab said. “Ram can get his family inside the house before the attack. But he must take his post on the walls when called or he will be labeled a deserter and they will look for him and his family.”

“Then what’s he doing here right now?” Elezar shot back.

“His shift starts soon,” Rahab said. “He’ll have to leave.”

Elezar was suspicious. “How convenient that all of your brothers happen to be off duty just when we happen to climb through your window.”

“Oh, these aren’t all my brothers,” Rahab said. “I have six more on duty right now.”

“Jesus Christ, Deker!” Elezar cried out too loudly. “This is why Bin-Nun takes no prisoners.”

The tension was palpable in the room, Rahab and her brothers listening carefully to see if Elezar’s bark had attracted any attention, however unlikely that would be from their location.

Deker lowered his voice and said, “You want us to be captured, Elezar?”

“We’re all but captured already, Deker, what with you bringing half the city into our little operation.”

“That’s why Ram here is taking me into the fortress tonight,” Deker told them all.

Rahab gasped. “Bin-Nun is attacking tonight?”

“No. I am. With these.”

Deker pulled out his C-4 bricks.

Rahab and her brothers looked completely mystified.

“Go ahead, Deker,” Elezar goaded. “Explain your magic mud bricks to her. See what big Ram thinks of staking his life on something you can’t demonstrate to him until you actually bring the walls down.”

“These bricks create fire to melt your walls,” he told them all, neglecting to mention that such a feat normally required hundreds of small shots and far more than six days to prep, and that was with robust computer technology to control and time the blasts to the millisecond.

Rahab translated.

“How can this be?” Ram demanded. “You have only fifteen bricks and our walls contain thousands upon thousands.”

“I only have to melt a section of a wall, not the whole wall,” Deker explained. “It’s like cutting down a palm tree to make it fall in a particular direction. If you can help me find the weakest part of the northern wall of the fortress, I can melt the bricks at the bottom. All the bricks on top of it will collapse and avalanche down the slope and maybe break through the lower city.”

“So what you’re really saying is that you’re going to blow the walls tonight if you can,” Elezar said, challenging him before Rahab and her brothers.

Deker said, “If Reahn security proves tougher than expected and forces me to plant one well-placed blast to bring down both walls at once, then yes, I have to take the shot.”

“That’s not the plan,” Elezar said, careful not to tip off the six-day timetable to Rahab and her brothers.

“And Bin-Nun told you this when?” Deker asked. “I recall you missing the first half of my conversation with him out in the fields.”

“It’s in the bloody Hebrew Bible, you ignoramus. But I forgot. You don’t read.”

Elezar was standing by the window for effect, the pillars of fire in the distance, the threat of Yahweh’s coming wrath palpable to Rahab and her brothers.

All Deker could think of right now was the bowl in his pack that Kane had given him, and the memory of how he had failed to save Rachel. He wouldn’t fail Rahab.

Deker lowered his voice and spoke in English. “The longer we wait, the more we risk exposure and capture by Hamas,” he reasoned. “It’s use them or lose them with the C-4 bricks.”

“That’s not your reason, Deker. You want to blow the walls so that Rahab and all the Reahns can escape. Once they see their defenses fall, they’re going to run. That’s not Bin-Nun’s plan.”

“Bin-Nun’s plan is to murder every man, woman, child and animal.” Deker looked at Rahab and said, “Plans change, Elezar. You said so yourself.”

Elezar spat on the ground and straightened up by the window. “What are you doing, Commander?” he demanded of him in English, pulling rank on him.

“The Israelites are talking more than holy war . . . Colonel,” Deker said, without the respect he knew his superior officer demanded. “They’re talking genocide as a strategy to strike the fear of God into their enemies. To do that, they’ll kill everything that breathes.”

“So you think that if you blow the walls now, you’ll put the fear of God not just into the Reahns but all the cities of Canaan.”

“They’ll surrender like Japan did after the Americans dropped the atom bomb, and Israel will have her Promised Land without the genocide,” Deker explained. “Maybe this will generate some kind of good karma in the future and spare our people centuries of worldwide hatred and even the Holocaust you want to prevent.”

“Maybe even save Rachel in the future?” Elezar added.

Deker nodded. That was exactly what he was hoping for. “Think, Elezar: we can stop the forever war between Jews and Arabs and the rest of the world.”

“You’re a fool, Deker. Your arrogance might not only get us killed here in this time, but it could also prevent us from even being born in the future, maybe even prevent the birth of Israel as a nation. You’re the genocidal maniac, Deker, not Bin-Nun. Stand down.”

Deker knew there was nothing Elezar could do to stop him now, so he ignored him and turned to Rahab. “So what now?” he asked in Hebrew.

“Ram will take you inside the fortress to set your signal,” she told him, and looked over his soiled clothing. “Where is your uniform?”

“We left them behind to avoid detection when we approached the walls.”

She matched him up with one of the other brothers, Rah, and they stripped and switched. Rah then gave him his identification card, a square of bronze with an official seal on it along with his engraved serial number: 3,257.

Deker showed Elezar the card and then looked at Rah: “You are number 3,257?”

Rahab translated and Deker suddenly seemed to understand the gist of their language when Rah spoke.

“I am,” said Rah, with a What’s it to you? inflection in his voice.

“Then there are at least 3,257 soldiers in Reah?”

“Ten thousand,” Ram answered.

“Ten thousand?” Deker repeated to make sure he understood correctly, too easily expressing his surprise and spooking Rahab, Ram, Rah and the rest in the cellar. Then, aware of the stares, he got ahold of himself and took a breath. “The shadow army, of course.”

Hamas had certainly evened his odds with Bin-Nun’s 8,000 troops. No, he had done more than that. Suddenly the prospect of blowing the walls wasn’t enough. Not if Bin-Nun was expecting to confront 1,500 Reahn troops inside the city, only to be swarmed by 10,000. How could he have missed the count so badly on his first visit? Where had Hamas hidden them?

“What’s wrong?” Rahab asked him, and Deker could see her concern, but there was also a flicker of shame in her eyes that confused him.

“Nothing,” Deker said, and strapped on his explosives pack. “I’d like to see this shadow army with my own eyes.”

Ram nodded. “I’ll take you now.”

“Deker,” Elezar said sternly. “We’re supposed to wait.”

“You wait here,” Deker said, and gave Elezar five C-4 bricks and detonators and kept ten for the fortress wall.

Elezar seemed surprised that he would entrust him with the explosives. But Deker knew that if he succeeded in bringing down the upper fortress wall, these bricks weren’t necessary. Faced with such a breach, the Reahns would surely pour out the main gate and flee. If he failed at the upper wall, he’d at least have some backup below. And if he was captured, the Reahns wouldn’t have the remaining explosives.

“Once I’ve set the charges at the fortress and established the direction of destruction, I’ll come back and we’ll set the rest here farther north along the city wall that lines up with the first blast,” he concluded. “Then we’ll blow this whole thing open. Tonight if we can, later if we must.”

39

Deker followed Ram past the blocks of darkened houses toward the fortress, smelling only suspicion and fear on the surface streets of Jericho. The citizens were holed up inside with their families, while the soldiers outdoors floated like shadows on the dim walls above and in the empty squares below.

In almost no time Deker followed Ram straight through the fortress gate. Not one guard dared stop the big Reahn and what appeared to be one of his many brothers nipping at his heels—such was Ram’s reputation—and Deker began to appreciate even more the tangled web Rahab had spun just to make it this far to save her family.

Deker’s plan to bring down the fortress involved setting off a blast in a weak spot in the northern wall, and this was where Ram said he would take them before they left Rahab’s cellar. Deker had pointed him in the right direction by suggesting they find a section of the wall where a gate once existed but had since been walled up. Ram said he knew of just such a section.

Now the spire of Jericho’s giant stone tower gleamed like a minaret against the full moon as they crossed the fortress’s plaza. The iron door Ram was heading toward was on the opposite end of the plaza, in the middle of the north wall.

The central plaza of the fortress was dark, but Deker could make out the columns of the royal palace to his left and the colossal metallic temple of Molech glinting to his right. It was at least several stories tall, with two great bronze doors in its belly and a head in the shape of a bull.

Deker could almost feel Molech’s eyes follow him and Ram toward the inside gate of the north wall.

So far, Deker had yet to see the garrison headquarters and troop barracks, let alone the military supply dumps. Which was odd, considering the number of troops Ram claimed Hamas had under his command.

The guards on duty at the iron gate recognized Ram and let them in.

What Deker found inside was another world: a network of tunnels built inside the fortress walls, floor upon floor.

“Welcome to our barracks,” Ram said as they pushed their way through the crowded tunnels, past stepladders and rows of hammocks. Torches hung like chandeliers above to give as much shoulder room as possible.

This was how you hid ten thousand healthy, well-fed troops in a city of two thousand or so, Deker thought: pack them inside the upper walls enclosing the six-acre summit of Jericho’s inner fortress.

“The shadow army?” Deker asked quietly.

“Yes,” Ram grunted.

“So there are at least as many more in the lower city wall?” Deker pressed, knowing that perimeter wall around the entire eight-acre city mound could theoretically hold almost twice as many troops.

“We do not speak of those,” Ram whispered gruffly.

At least, that’s what Deker thought he said. “What do you mean?”

Ram either didn’t understand him or was simply changing the subject. “The torches make it too bright in here. You are no longer my brother but a soldier. I don’t know you. Follow me at intervals.”

They crossed several more compartments and made their way past one of the mess halls before turning down a narrow flight of steps.

Deker could only marvel. This was a city within a city.

Although the tunnels in the wall were laid out in relatively straight lines, he quickly lost his sense of direction as he followed his guide up and down ladders and steps through various levels and compartments toward the middle of the north wall.

Their odyssey ended in a ghostly hall with a vaulted ceiling. The rotting wooden beams could barely support the caved-in roof, so a giant concrete pillar had been built to hold up the ramparts above.

And next to the pillar was the walled-up gate, its bricks a shade different from the rest of the interior wall.

But there was a problem. A lone stonemason stood before them in a dirty apron, wiping the grease from his hands with a blackened cloth. He wore a handkerchief knotted over his head, his angry eyes in his soot-smeared face looking Deker over.

“This is my relief?” he asked Ram.

“No. This is,” Ram said, and snapped the mason’s neck.

Deker watched the mason crumple to the floor and stared at Ram. “What did you do that for?”

Ram said, “He’s going to die anyway, isn’t he? Either by your mud bricks or by Bin-Nun’s sword.”

Deker couldn’t really argue with that logic and didn’t have the time. The clock was ticking and he had to get to work.

Thanks to Ram, he had located the critical structural element in the north wall. It wasn’t the walled gate, as he had expected, but the concrete pillar. It was an impressive meter wide in diameter and ten meters tall.

“The mud bricks will remove this pillar, and removing this pillar will allow the rest of the wall to collapse on itself,” Deker tried to explain to Ram as he set out his C-4 bricks. “Just like a tree falling down.”

Ram looked up at the pillar thoughtfully and frowned. “But if you do that, then it will fall on top of the houses in the city below.”

Deker said nothing, but he could see the reality sinking in as Ram had pictured it. Deker hoped Ram didn’t have any relatives there. But from the size of Rahab’s extended family, that seemed unlikely.

“What about the walled gate?” Ram asked. “That part of the wall seems weaker.”

“This is better,” Deker said. “I can’t explain it now.”

He could definitely blow open the walled gate. The blast would turn the bottom five meters of the fortress wall to rubble. The problem was at the top of the wall. The ramparts above were reinforced like a bridge for the troops to march between watchtowers. Deker would need to blow up the top several meters of the wall to get it to fall properly. Otherwise the rubble would block the Israelites from entering the fortress.

The key was this pillar. A single shot down the center would take it out.

He didn’t need all ten bricks to take out this pillar and its section of the wall. But he had only one shot, and it would be messy. Ordinarily he’d use hundreds of small shots and control their timing with a handheld computer. Also, he’d usually have several days to prep this kind of blast. Now, however, he was trying to do it in less than an hour.

The big slowdown was loading the C-4 properly into the bottom of the pillar. Normally, he’d drill a few hundred holes for his explosives, each one less than two centimeters in diameter and a few centimeters deep. Tonight he was basically slapping bricks to a pillar, and had to take his time to place them properly.

He had one chance.

Deker worked quietly the next few minutes until he realized things were too quiet. Too late, he knew something was wrong and turned to see Ram holding a dagger.

“You!” Ram shouted, as if he’d never seen him before. “Spread your feet! Hands against the wall!”

Deker did as he was told and could feel the rough hands run over his body. “What are you doing?”

Ram spun him around and pushed the edge of his dagger under Deker’s chin. “Say nothing,” he said, his face close to Deker’s, breathing heavily. “Nothing.”

Ram must have heard something, because several torches bobbed up and down in the darkness and a deep voice boomed, “Ram, is that you?”

Deker remembered the voice from Rahab’s terrace.

Hamas.

“Look what I found!” Ram said, and kicked Deker in the groin.

The blow sent Deker doubling over in agony. He slid against the wall to the floor, groaning in pain.

Ram then reached down and pulled him up by the hair. “You’re in the hands of the Reahn National Guards now, Hebrew.”

In spite of his jarring pain, Deker managed to stand up on his feet.

“Excellent work, Captain Ram,” said Hamas, and Deker felt his eyes look him up and down, registering that the general was unimpressed with this Hebrew specimen. “Although I must say I was expecting a bit more coming from Bin-Nun.”

Deker stared as Hamas walked toward him with several guards behind him, mouth in a snarl.

“I see you’ve killed one of my men, Hebrew.” Hamas smiled. “When I’m done with you, you’ll wish you were as fortunate.”

A giant forearm swung out of nowhere across Deker’s face, and everything went black.

40

There was a flash of light, and Deker felt another blow to his head. He opened his eyes in time to see Ram pull back his iron-hard fist and then bludgeon him in the face again.

“The invasion plans, Deker,” said another voice with a thick Aramaic accent. “That’s your name, Hebrew, isn’t it?”

Deker blinked to see that he was in some dank cell, and that a large figure was standing next to Ram. The figure bent over, and his smooth face with hooded eyes and long hair came into focus.

Hamas. I’ve been captured. Maybe Ram has taken the credit.

A hand reached out toward the silver Star of David hanging around Deker’s neck and roughly dangled it before his eyes. The IDF insignia in the center came in and out of focus, and Deker felt a profound aura of déjà vu settle over him.

“The Hebrew invasion plans,” Hamas repeated. “Or Ram will have to kill you.”

Deker spit in Ram’s face, just to show Hamas they were on different sides and to let Ram know that he needn’t fear exposure—yet. Everything depended on how this all played out.

“What invasion?” Deker asked as Ram wiped the spit from his face.

Hamas said, “Ram, show him.”

Ram grabbed him by his hair and dragged him across the floor with his chains and propped him up by the window. Deker looked out to see a cloud of dust in the distance. There was the glint of the golden Ark, seven priests with their trumpets in front of it. Armed guards marched before the priests and behind the Ark. They formed the clasp of a great necklace of Israelite soldiers encircling the city, six men deep and more than five hundred cubits away beyond the range of the archers.

“That invasion,” Hamas said as he stood behind him, and Deker could smell his foul breath. “Behold the dust kicked up by the vast host of Israelite troops. Bin-Nun has been circling the city for six days now. Did you really think you could frighten us into surrendering with tall tales of Yahweh’s divine power?”

Deker tried to piece together how long he had been held in captivity here. Surely it couldn’t have been six days. But his mind was a jumble of beatings and blackouts, and he had no clue. He turned to look the general in the eye. “Whether I live or die, Hamas, you already know that Bin-Nun is going to win no matter what.”

Hamas smiled. “It’s been six days, Deker. Without you, they have already failed. Including your comrade Elezar. He only lasted two days before he died.”

Elezar dead? Deker didn’t believe it. Dogs like Elezar never died; they always survived somehow. That the Israelites were circling the city, however, was no lie. He could see it with his own eyes.

The familiar feeling of dread that so often overwhelmed him returned with a bitter vengeance. Deker cursed himself for his failure and resolved that, whatever else happened, he wouldn’t break.

“Your cause is lost, Hamas.”

“It’s Bin-Nun who looks lost to me, Deker,” Hamas said. “Is he waiting for a signal from you? Is that why he circles without striking? Or are you the one waiting for a signal from him?”

Deker said nothing.

“Ram, give him a signal.”

Deker turned in time to see Ram cock his giant clenched fist before it hit him like a sledgehammer in the face. His head slammed against the wall and he blacked out.

41

Slowly the lights went on in Deker’s head. He was in a small, spare room with a table and two chairs on either side. On the table were his bricks of C-4 and detonators and a bowl of rotten apples. Two guards stood at the door.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the occultic practices of the Hebrews, and before he died your comrade Elezar called these magic mud bricks,” Hamas said. “What did he mean by that?”

Deker said, “If that’s why you’re keeping me alive, you’re wasting your time, Hamas. Kill me and be done with it.”

“I need you for the show trial. But you need not worry. It will be brief. And then you’ll be exterminated. The people have to see that we’re doing something about the Hebrew vermin crawling inside our walls.”

Deker said nothing. He was too tired. Hamas was disappointed he hadn’t gotten a rise out of him.

Hamas was smarter than he looked. But perhaps that was because of the care he took to maximize his size and build with his armor. He was beefier than the lean Israelite commanders. But his eyes betrayed a stormy disposition, as if he were constantly running scenarios through his head. None of the faraway look of a nut job like Bin-Nun. Perhaps because the Israelites had nothing to lose except their lives. Hamas was compromised in this way, dealing with fanatics like Bin-Nun and presumably Elezar. Perhaps he saw some hope in Deker—a kindred spirit, so to speak.

“Did you know Bin-Nun was a mercenary with the Egyptian army before the Exodus, Deker?” Hamas said. “Oh, yes. He and my father served together. They even got cut together. That’s right. Circumcision used to be a rite of passage for elite Egyptian officers. I see that Bin-Nun has begun to institute the practice with his men, like you. What I can’t understand is why he’d risk using such men as spies. It’s a dead giveaway that you’re a Hebrew. Because you’re certainly no Egyptian.”

Deker was clothed now, but Hamas had wanted him to know he had been carefully inspected.

“You know what I do with my men who disappoint me?” Hamas asked rhetorically as he picked up a worm-ridden apple from the bowl of fruit and began to slice it and the worms to pieces. “I cut off their penises and then their balls to make them eunuchs so they can become priests in the service of Molech. It’s a shame I can’t do the same to you. But I need to show your circumcision at the trial to prove you’re Hebrew. No matter. It’s not like you’ll ever get to use it with Rahab again.” Hamas paused for effect. “I’d hate to drag her into this nasty business.”

Deker showed no emotion, but Hamas smiled as he stood up and pointed his knife over the table at him. The Reahn general either suspected or knew for certain that Deker was one of the two spies who had escaped him the week before at Rahab’s.

“You think you can drop into my city for a night and make one of our moon princesses fall in love with you and risk her life and family for a bunch of Hebrews? Which is more likely, Deker: that Rahab used me to pass along information of our fortifications to you, or that she used you to betray your invasion plans?”

Deker stared at the mud bricks spread out before him as

evidence. “I don’t believe you.”

“Just explain the plan to me, and I’ll spare her,” Hamas said. “There’s no reason why she should be executed along with you this morning for the king’s pleasure.”

Deker’s mind raced in circles, and to his profound amazement he found himself standing up and heard himself shouting.

“We are the Jewish people!” he cried out. “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!”

“So be it,” Hamas said, and delivered a devastating blow to Deker’s gut.

Deker collapsed to the floor, bloodied and bowed. He writhed in pain and saw flashes of light and stars and then the tip of a boot as Hamas gave him another swift kick to the face, breaking his nose.

“The last thing you will see before you leave this earth is me killing Rahab before your eyes,” Hamas told him, making a gesture with his knife across Deker’s neck as everything began to fade. “Then I’ll make a show of killing you in front of the king. Then my ten thousand troops and I will kill Bin-Nun and all the Hebrews. As surely as the sun sets today, the world will finally be rid of your kind forever.”

42

Deker kept his head up as the guards brought him outside to the vast temple court of the fortress like a condemned gladiator into the arena. At least two thousand chanting Reahn citizens were on hand to watch him burn as a sacrifice to their god Molech in hopes the deity would save them from Yahweh.

The rising sun bathed the dust on the paving stones with a golden hue in the early-morning light. The ground quaked as he walked and he could hear the Israelite war trumpets blasting in the distance. With every blast of those Israelite horns, nervous glances would erupt from the faces of the crowd for a moment before the Reahns redirected all their fear and hatred toward the prisoner. A young mother with her three children, all with the same blue eyes, watched him as he was marched past them, and began shouting.

“Molech! Molech! Molech!”

The bronze Sphinx-like visage towering above the temple court had a bull’s head with two towering chimneys for horns and an immense two-story stone oven for a belly. Even now nine eunuch priests, bejeweled and dressed as horned devils, danced before Molech and fed him with sacrifices.

To his horror Deker realized those sacrifices came from a pile of several dozen human corpses beside the statue. One by one the corpses were flung into the furnace of Molech’s belly, much to the delight of the crowd. Every time a corpse was consumed, Molech’s eyes would turn red and smoke would erupt from his horns.

The Reahns had cleaned Deker up and clothed him in a sackcloth tunic, and painted his swollen eyelids in the way they marked their dead, but without the honor. Now they tied him to a stone obelisk in the center of the courtyard before the colossal metallic statue of their god.

The flames from Molech’s belly were so high that Deker felt the heat halfway across the courtyard. But there was a method to this madness, he realized. Every time the Israelites gave a short blast of their terrible war trumpets, the priests would toss another corpse into Molech to divert the crowd.

Deker had no idea if this was the Israelites’ first go-around of the morning or the seventh. At any moment a long trumpet blast would fill the air, followed by the Israelite war cry. But there would be no explosion, no “divine escalator.” Instead, Bin-Nun’s eight thousand troops would smash themselves to pieces against Jericho’s impregnable walls while ten thousand Reahn troops picked them off until neighboring armies, seeing the carnage, would sweep in for the mop-up.

All because he, Sam Deker of the Israel Defense Forces, had brought this cataclysm upon his people and the world. Now, for the first time since Rachel died, he prayed the only prayer he knew by heart.

Hear O Israel: the LORD our God is One.

Deker lifted his eyes to see thousands of bronze helmets, gleaming spears and red, white and black banners. The faces looked like the walls surrounding him: impenetrable stone gazing down at him dispassionately on this Day of Judgment, with no sign of fear or anything else. Only the backs of the Reahn troops on the ramparts and watchtowers facing out seemed to acknowledge the eight thousand armed Israelite troops marching around the city.

Hamas knew he had already won this war before it had begun. This much was clear on his face as a gong sounded and Hamas walked out in his full military regalia before the royal tribunal seated before the pillars of the palace opposite the temple. The small, slight figure of the king sat in the center. He had the face of a bureaucrat, a caretaker, and looked lost amid all the pomp and circumstance of death.

The conductor of this symphony was clearly General Hamas, and Deker watched as Hamas with great fanfare pointed his thick finger at him for all to see.

“Behold!” Hamas cried out. “The Hebrew!”

He spoke as if that declarative statement were enough in itself to condemn Deker to death. And apparently it was.

There were no jeers now, only stone-cold silence around the outdoor courtyard. There would be no victory cheer until every Hebrew was slaughtered that day. He was simply to be the symbolic first. Just as Bin-Nun had made flint knives to circumcise his troops and unify them in heart and mind before battle, so Hamas was intent on using Deker’s execution as a showpiece to rally Reah in preparation for the impending assault. And if Bin-Nun had his Phineas and Levites to contend with, Hamas had to appease Molech and his priests. To Hamas, Deker was just a piece of foreskin to be tossed into the fires for Molech.

Another gong sounded and the elegant but weak figure of King Alakh stood up and said, “Say your last, Hebrew.”

Deker said the only thing he could say under the circumstances, which was something to support his army, his people and his faith, even if he had little to show for it.

“You hear the blast of trumpets, King Alakh!” he shouted. “You see the armies of Israel surrounding your city. You have been warned. And still you have not surrendered or spared the lives of your people by letting them leave your gates. Their blood will be on your hands, not ours. Leave now and save yourselves from total annihilation. Mark my words, this city will be rubble and dust on the ash heap of history before the sun sets today.”

King Alakh looked at General Hamas and, for the benefit of the people, asked aloud, “Is what this Hebrew says true?”

“No, great King,” Hamas replied.

The whole exchange seemed scripted to Deker, and he expected Hamas to produce the C-4 bricks as evidence of his success in smashing the Hebrew plot to bring down the walls.

In fact, he was hoping for it.

But Hamas produced no magic mud bricks. Instead, he dramatically marched over to the pile of corpses by Molech and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.

“Recognize any friends, Hebrew?”

Deker stared. Four of the twisted faces on top he recognized as belonging to some of the Gadites who had joined up with Bin-Nun at Gilgal. He began to gag at the back of his throat.

The corpses being fed to Molech were Israelite troops.

“Behold the treachery of the Hebrews!” Hamas declared. “Their evil designs have been thwarted.”

Panic washed over Deker as he tried to think where the soldiers had come from, what this all meant. The temple guards lifted one of the dead Gadites by the head and feet and began to swing him to and fro before flinging him into the fiery furnace for Molech to devour.

A flare from the great stone oven stabbed outward and singed the brows of one of the guards, who winced in agony but refused to cry out before Hamas, who, having firmly dug the knife of condemnation in Deker’s back, decided to give it a final twist.

“This stupid, mindless spy was yet another ruse of Bin-Nun’s, a decoy to the real plot to destroy us. Fortunately, they had help from one of our informants.”

A side door in the fortress wall opened and out walked two Reahn guards, followed by Rahab.

43

She wore a flowing white robe with her braided hair piled on top of her head like a goddess. Deker watched her turn to face the king and tribunal. She didn’t even glance at him as Hamas spoke.

“Rahab the priestess of Molech will now testify to the treachery of the Hebrews and the courage of our soldiers!” Hamas shouted out.

“The spy came to me again six nights ago,” she declared. “He told me he would use magic mud bricks to open their own gate in our wall.”

“Magic mud bricks,” Hamas repeated for all to hear. “Are these the magic mud bricks he showed you?”

Deker craned his neck as Hamas pulled off a white cover from the stack of ten C-4 bricks on the table by the tribunal. His heart skipped a beat with hope. Somehow, should he be afforded some Samson-like moment, he would use the bricks to bring down the walls of the fortress on top of them all.

“Yes, General Hamas,” Rahab replied, in a monotone that told Deker that she, too, had been carefully coached on what to say. “He told me the clay had come from the moon.”

“And what did he tell you his plans were?”

“He told me the Hebrew plan was for me to harbor him six nights until today, at which point he would be given a signal to destroy our walls with these magic mud bricks. But he instead chose to disobey the orders of General Bin-Nun and attempt to bring down our walls the first night. This is when he was captured by you, General Hamas.”

Hamas nodded, and then shocked Deker with his next question: “But this wasn’t the real Hebrew plan, was it?”

“No,” she replied.

Hamas asked, “What was the secret plan of General Bin-Nun, kept even from his unfortunate spy here?”

“The very next day, when the Israelite army first marched around our walls, six more Hebrews climbed into my window,” Rahab testified. “The dust kicked up by the Israelite army circling our walls blinded our sharpshooters and provided the Hebrews the cover they required.”

“And this event was repeated again each successive day until this morning, was it not?” Hamas asked her. “Every day another six Hebrew soldiers, under the cover of dust, would climb up our wall and into your cellar until all thirty-six had been assembled to carry out General Bin-Nun’s true plan to bring down our city.”

“Yes, General Hamas.”

Deker swallowed hard. So that’s why Bin-Nun had been so keen for him to secure a scarlet cord in Rahab’s window, Deker realized. It wasn’t to mark her house so invading troops could avoid it: it was to mark her window so these secret platoons could enter the city after him.

Hamas looked at him with hate-filled eyes and a triumphant smile. “A plan he kept secret even from this sorry spy and sacrifice before us this morning.”

“Yes,” Rahab said, still avoiding his gaze.

“And what exactly, Priestess Rahab, was Bin-Nun’s plan for this secret force of thirty-six men?”

Rahab now turned to Deker, with anything but hate and only sorrow in her eyes. “The plan was to sneak enough troops into the city through my window to create a force just large enough to rush our guards stationed inside the main gate, kill them and then open the gate for the Israelite invaders.”

Now the gasps and jeers finally erupted all around as the simplicity and audacity of the Hebrew treachery was revealed. And Deker was one of those who gasped, personally feeling the sting of betrayal not only from Rahab but more pointedly from Bin-Nun.

This was just like crossing the Jordan, Deker thought bitterly. Bin-Nun may have hoped for the best, but he had anticipated the worst. That meant he had expected Deker to fail all along with the C-4. So he instead used him to secure Plan B, which in all probability was Plan A from the get-go: sneak a covert force into the city and open the gates from the inside. Once inside, they could use battering rams to blow the walls outward. The very same plan that the ancient Greeks would use centuries later with their Trojan horse.

“And how far away is your home from the city gate?” Hamas pressed Rahab.

“It is only fifty cubits away.”

Hamas nodded. “So they could rush the gate from the inside in moments and catch our men by surprise.”

“Yes. As soon as they heard the signal this morning.”

“And what is that signal?”

“A ram’s horn, followed by a war cry.”

Murmurs everywhere, and Deker didn’t know if the sound was of relief that the plot had been exposed or the realization that the horn could blow at any moment and the assault would begin.

“So, at the sound of the war cry, the Israelites will rush our walls while the infiltrators rush our gate from the inside and open it to the invading Hebrew troops.”

“Yes, General Hamas. That was the plan.”

“Was the plan,” Hamas said with finality as he spat at the feet of Deker. “A plan I have crushed.”

Hamas let it sink in—for the king, the noblemen and military officers, and most of all for Deker, who got the distinct impression that this show was for his benefit. Not only had Hamas beaten him, but he had shown that Bin-Nun had never had any confidence in him whatsoever.

And it was all true, Deker knew. Had he just waited even a day, he would have been in Rahab’s cellar to see the six new men and learn the true plan. No, he had to go ahead to save these people about to slay him as they had slain the thirty-six and soon all of Israel.

A final gong sounded and King Alakh rose to deliver the official death sentence.

“They are the Hebrews, whom their God has cursed and with whom He is so angry that He will never again be satisfied,” the king said. “Israel is a warmonger to the nations, and now they are attacking us. Always they slap away the hands extended in peace and instead choose to kill everything that breathes before them.”

The jeers began to grow louder now as the king continued.

“For this Hebrew spy before us, death is a judgment of mercy,” the king cried out. “For he shall be a burnt offering to Molech, and his kind thereafter. May Molech feast on Hebrews for one hundred days!”

The crowd erupted into cheers as guards cut Deker from the obelisk and pointed him toward Molech with the tips of their spears. The heat from the metallic god was intense, and Deker doubted he would live to even see the inside of the furnace.

“People of Reah!” Hamas called, drawing out his sword and holding it high in the air. “With this sword I will smite the first Hebrew who falls against our walls. And with a new sword I will cut off the head of the last Hebrew alive: Joshua, son of Nun!”

The air seemed to crackle with electricity as Hamas turned to Rahab. For a wild moment Deker thought Hamas was about to throw her into the fire along with him.

“The Hebrews thought to buy your heart with gold,” Hamas said to Rahab for all to hear.

“They did, General Hamas,” she said, and then stepped aside to reveal her brother Ram behind her. He was carrying something in his arms. “They gave me this bowl of gold and silver coins to betray my people. I now offer these to my god Molech as a sacrifice, so you may melt them into the sword that will cut off the head of Israel forever.”

Ram offered the bowl up to the sky and turned to face Deker and Molech, and Deker’s throat caught at the sight of the black and red bowl—and a small unmistakable copper fuse sticking out from the coins.

44

Deker sucked in his breath and felt his heart pound in his chest as he realized that the bowl of coins was really a frag bomb that Molech was about to devour. It would detonate once the fuse lit inside the Reahn god’s belly, destroying Molech and everybody else in the way of its exploding metal fragments.

The offering is a sign of her faith in Yahweh—and in me. She’s really offering me a way out.

In slow motion he saw Ram hand the bowl over to Rahab, and then she in turn brought it to him. By all appearances the Reahn priestess was giving the Yahweh-worshiping Hebrew his worthless bribe to take with him to his death in the belly of the almighty Molech.

But the look in Rahab’s eyes told Deker she knew very

well what this bowl of coins was supposed to do, or at least what she had been told it could do before the Israelites who gave it to her were captured and killed, some or all perhaps even by her brother Ram.

Rahab stepped right up to Deker, as close as she could, to hand him the bowl. She was chanting, it seemed, but she peered intently into his eyes. The crowd began chanting and roaring along with her, and as their volume swelled she suddenly dropped her voice and spoke to him.

“Samuel Boaz Deker, listen to me: the rest of your bricks are in my cellar,” she whispered in Hebrew as she handed the bowl over to him. “Elezar showed me how to push the button.”

The shock had barely registered in his brain before she pulled away and he stared at her in horror. She didn’t know that the C-4 exploded. She only thought it opened a wider door in a wall.

Elezar had arranged for her to blow up the lower city wall and take herself and her family out with it!

The bowl now weighed like death in Deker’s hands. He simply stood there in the middle of the plaza, flat-footed, waiting for Rahab to back off with Ram, motioning with his eyes back to the gate in the far wall from which they had entered. He couldn’t tell if they had made it, however, because the tip of a spear prompted him to turn his back to them and face Molech and his priests.

A drum roll began beyond view, and Deker took one inexorable step after another toward the towering monument of Molech, smoke bursting out his horns into the sky and stench-filled clouds of burnt flesh belching out his belly.

One last time he looked over his shoulder at the king and tribunal behind him with the entire palace guard. There was no sight of Rahab or Ram, although they could have remained just beyond his view.

He then felt the long spears at his back retract for a moment as the guards prepared to stab him hard and drive him headfirst into the furnace.

That was his chance.

He hurled the heavy bowl of coins in an arc into the great fire and dove to the side of the furnace, hitting the paving stones as a terrific explosion ripped open Molech’s belly and blasted a million metal fragments across the temple courtyard.

45

Deker felt the blast in his ringing ears and throughout his body as he struggled to get up. The great idol of Molech, now a creaking mass of metal, collapsed into a heap with a crash. What was once a god was scattered in pieces along with the shredded limbs and charred remains of its worshipers.

There was chaos everywhere as Deker scrambled for his C-4 bricks at the heavy table next to where the tribunal had been seated. The table had been blown back on its side and shattered. The king was dead, half his face blown off. The noblemen had been cut in two through their midsections. The shrapnel had fanned out a meter above the ground, cutting down anything that had been standing.

Deker’s memory flashed to what Hamas had told Rahab on her terrace the week before about the Angel of Death in Egypt. Something about natural gases rolling across the ground of Egypt to kill the firstborns as they slept. At least, that’s what Deker thought he had overheard from his perch in the pergola. Today in Jericho it was the reverse: death had felled everybody standing one meter above the ground—everybody but himself.

Deker scanned the courts. There was no sign of Hamas in the floating dust and ash. Nor of Rahab or Ram. But he found his C-4 bricks scattered behind the pieces of wood. He was able to find only eight bricks, each embedded with bits of metal, and only a single detonator still in one piece. It would have to do. He tore a bloody cape from a fallen Reahn guard, wrapped the C-4 bricks in it and threw it over his shoulder.

In spite of all the carnage around him, Deker knew he had done nothing to the wall that would advance the Israelite attack. He had to blow the north wall of the fortress.

And then somehow, someway, he had to get to Rahab’s and stop her from blowing herself up before the Israelites gave their war cry.

The curtain of debris parted to reveal the iron door to the barracks in the north wall. But it also exposed him to the archers on the ramparts above, who immediately started firing down on the only moving target below.

He made a run for it in the opposite direction, toward the octagonal spire at the south wall that rose over the fortress city. The entrance door was open, the bodies of three guards and two priests on either side. He dove inside just as dozens of arrows rained down behind him.

There were shouts above and he looked up to see that a spiral stone staircase inside the tower ran all the way up to the spire. Between the voices at the top and his position at the bottom, there was a doorway to the ramparts of the fortress wall. He might have just enough time to improvise and get out of there.

He reached out and dragged in the corpse with the least damaged military uniform and helmet and threw them on. Then he quickly unpacked his C-4 and wired the bricks to his detonator inside the octagonal base of the spire. He wiped his dirty arm across his sweaty face as he worked the fuse and prayed to Yahweh it was still good. He tried to set the timer to five minutes but it displayed only two—and counting.

He swore and jumped up the stone stairwell five steps at a time and ducked out the second-story door just as three Reahns from the tower came into view.

A second later he was outside on the ramparts of the southern wall lined with hundreds of Reahn spearmen and archers. He quickly turned to his right and headed toward the corner watchtower connecting the southern wall with the western wall when the lookouts began shouting after him.

“Go see what they want!” he barked to a couple of soldiers standing in his way, and then brushed past them to the rampart tower.

Instead of following the rampart path through the tower to the western wall of the fortress, he took two flights of steps down to the lower tunnel that ran below. He pushed his way through the reserves to the end, where he climbed another stairwell to reach the rampart of the tower connecting the western and northern walls of the fortress.

As he ran along the top of the northern wall, he looked down to his left and saw the north-side slums of the city below. He could pick out Rahab’s villa nestled next to the lower city wall, as well as the mass of Israelite troops out in the desert.

God, don’t let them give the war cry.

Shouts rang out and Deker looked ahead to see a vengeful Hamas marching straight toward him, a bloody sword in his hand and a black cape flying off the back of his body armor. Marching behind Hamas in lockstep were hundreds of Reahn guards. The rampart shook beneath their boots.

Deker looked behind him and saw a hundred more Reahn troops emerging from the west tower, hemming him in from that direction as well.

At that moment he knew his only means of escape was to make a flying eagle leap off the wall into the city below. He began scanning the rooftops for a pile of drying flax or barley to use as a landing pad. But his eyes kept drifting down to the panicked people running through the streets as the great dust cloud of the Israelite army rolled closer and closer to the city.

Then came the explosion from inside the fortress. Hamas and all his soldiers looked up in shock as the city’s great spire swayed in the sky like a giant stone palm tree, a huge gash at its base as if some divine axe had struck it.

Deker stared as the watchtower’s spire blocked the sun for a second and cast a dark shadow across the rampart before it began to topple like a falling tree. He stood very still, gauging the trajectory of the fall, and didn’t move.

Too late, Hamas and his Reahn guards along the middle of the northern rampart looked up to see their impending deaths. The spire crashed across the north wall, slicing clear through to the bottom before breaking into three pieces. A torrent of stones and dust billowed out from the abyss before him.

Hamas was gone, for good this time.

And then Deker heard the long blast of a horn like the trumpet of an archangel.

The Israelites were about to give their war cry.

46

Deker raced across the rooftops of the lower city toward Rahab’s, jumping down into the narrow alleys between the battened-down homes as arrows started flying from the fortress archers behind him. He made it to the red-scarf district, opened the gate in front of Rahab’s villa and ducked into the courtyard. The inn was deserted. He climbed down the steps to the cellar.

“Rahab!” he called out.

The door was ajar. He pushed it open and found Salmon and Achan on the floor, hands and feet lashed together, mouths gagged, eyes on fire. Rahab slipped from behind the door and rammed the tip of a sword between his shoulder blades.

“Turn around slowly or I’ll kill you.”

Deker slowly pivoted and saw her frightened look turn to relief as she dropped the sword and wrapped her arms around him and sobbed.

“Samuel,” she sobbed. “It’s all lies. I didn’t betray your friends.”

Deker grasped her firmly at the throat, catching her by surprise as he rammed her against the wall, next to the skulls of her own sisters.

“Then what do you call that on the floor?”

“Elezar said they were traitors.”

“Elezar is dead.”

“No, he’s not. He left not long ago.”

Deker was confused. “Where’s the detonator?”

“Here.” She held up her tight fist, her thumb on the button.

Slowly he lifted her thumb and then unfurled her fingers to see the detonator, and he cursed Elezar for thinking he could kill two birds—Rahab and the outer wall—with one stone.

“Untie them,” he ordered, and Rahab quickly loosed Salmon and Achan, who worked his aching jaw as he rubbed his sore wrists.

Deker looked around and realized there were dozens of people huddled in the shadows of the cellar. They were all members of Rahab’s family, or at least she had counted them as such. He hadn’t noticed them before. The crushing gravity of the situation and lack of time pressed unbearably down upon him.

“Where are my mud bricks?” he demanded.

“In my hiding place,” Rahab said.

She wiped some dirt from the earthen floor to show him a door with a thin knotted rope attached. She then lifted the door to reveal a small compartment with the explosives.

They were rigged to blow.

“Elezar,” Deker cursed as he carefully deactivated the wiring and removed the bricks. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Rahab said. “But he left you a sign. He said you would know what it means.”

She pointed to the inside of the trapdoor she had propped up against the wall. Burned into it was the black outline of a dove.

The Black Dove.

Deker stumbled back on his feet, his mind reeling. As much as he hated Elezar, Deker—who questioned everything, even the legitimacy of the State of Israel itself—had never thought to question his loyalty as a Jew. And yet, the evidence was there all along that Elezar was the Black Dove, the legendary Palestinian mole within the IDF.

Suddenly it all made sense: the right-wing posturing, the image of a Jew beyond reproach, the finger-wagging at the less-than-Jews like Deker in the IDF. Most of all, it was now perfectly clear why Elezar wanted to eliminate Christianity—as well as the State of Israel before it could ever be born out of the Promised Land—by eliminating Rahab.

Worse than this revelation about Elezar was the realization that this was Deker’s fault, the result of some deep, psychological defect on his part. He had been so wounded about what it meant to be a good Jew, so painfully aware of how much he fell short, that he couldn’t see the hypocrisy and pretense of Elezar, who knew the Torah backwards and forwards. He was a zealot. Just not the kind of zealot that Deker had thought he was.

“What does it mean?” Salmon asked.

“Elezar has betrayed us all,” Deker said as Reahn soldiers began to pound on the villa’s doors outside. It would be only minutes before the Reahns stormed the cellar.

But the stab of betrayal that Deker felt didn’t come from Elezar but from himself. Deker now had to question everything. Because if he missed this, what else had he missed his entire life?

In his mind he went back to the beginning, to what Elezar could have been doing while he was testing the Temple Mount. Could Elezar have actually been the one who killed Stern? Then he went back even further in his memory, to when he had first met Elezar after the botched attempt on the Black Dove that killed Rachel.

Jesus Christ, he thought. Elezar killed Rachel.

47

Deker felt an ominous wind blow in through Rahab’s cellar window, and a chill ran up his back as what he had been waiting for came a second later with the force of a desert storm.

The war cry of the Israelite army.

Elezar had left him with an unwinnable dilemma: blow himself up with Rahab and her family in order to open the city to the Israelites, or risk the defeat of General Bin-Nun and the Hebrews as they smashed themselves against the impregnable wall.

Rahab sensed trouble. “What’s wrong, Samuel?”

Deker moved to the window and looked out at the Israelite troops rushing toward them. He then ran his fingers down the scarlet cord hanging in the window.

Bin-Nun doesn’t know his thirty-six-member special-ops team is dead, Deker thought. He thinks they’re going to open the main gate from the inside.

Another voice said, “Deker?”

This time it was Salmon talking.

Deker turned to him and said, “My plans have failed, Salmon. I did not trust Yahweh like Rahab or you or Bin-Nun. But there may yet be a way to accomplish the divine plan. You must see to it that Rahab and her family are spared.”

Salmon tried to exude confidence before Rahab, but there was a cloud of doubt behind his eyes. “Where are you going?”

“To blow the main gate,” Deker said as he packed the C-4 in his bag.

“You’ll be slaughtered as soon as you walk out the front door,” said Ram as he entered the cellar, out of breath. “We’re holding them off, but you’ll never get past them alive. And you’ll never take out the contingent at the gate, even if we all joined you.”

“I know,” Deker said, and grabbed the coil of rope and moved to the window. “That’s why I’m going to blow the gate from the outside.”

“It’s still suicide,” said Ram. “If the Reahn archers don’t kill you, your own advancing troops might.”

“It’s the only way,” said Deker, suddenly calm as he gazed into Rahab’s dark eyes. “It’s the right way.”

“There must be another way,” Rahab begged him. “Yahweh has a plan.”

Deker felt the throb in his throat. He never wanted to leave her. But he remained resolute. “I’m sorry, Rahab, but I believe I am the plan.”

Rahab’s eyes unlocked from his and darted over his shoulder. “Ram!”

Deker turned in time to see Ram at the window, about to climb out.

“I can no longer protect us from our own people if the Israelites fail,” Ram told them. “And if the Israelites succeed, I cannot protect you from them. But these Hebrews can.”

And then Ram vanished into thin air.

Deker rushed to the window and looked down to see Ram land on the ground and pull out his sword. With a shout, Rahab’s big brother ran out alone against the thousands of oncoming Israelites.

“He’s drawing the attention of the Reahn archers on the ramparts!” Salmon yelled, shoving his way next to Deker. “Now is our chance!”

“My chance,” Deker told him. “You have to stay here with Rahab and keep Israel’s promise.”

Salmon began to protest, but Deker cut him off. “There’s no time, Salmon. If you fail, her blood is on our hands, and the hands of all the kings of Israel.”

Rahab rushed to him and threw her arms around him as if to keep him from leaving.

There was no time for proper good-byes, so Deker removed his IDF tag from his neck and gave it to Rahab. “This is the token of my promise to you,” he said. “Your family will be safe at Gilgal tonight, and you can return it to me then.” She put it on over her heart and clutched the star in her hand, as if she were willing herself to believe him.

With one last look at her, Deker sprang out the window.

48

Deker slid down the rope amid a flurry of arrows from Reahns on the ramparts above. He hit the ground unscathed and began to make his way along the base of the city wall when he heard shouting.

It was Ram, about a hundred meters out. He had fallen to his knees, his front and back shot full of arrows from both sides. He raised his sword to the sky one last time in defiance before an Israelite arrow struck him in the head and his helmet flew off before he fell back dead.

If he had any last words, Deker never heard them.

What he did hear was an unmistakable whistle, and he darted toward the gate as arrows began to rain down on him from the Reahns on the ramparts. He clung to the base of the wall as he ran toward the gate just around the corner.

Two arrows knocked him down, one in the shoulder, the other in the calf. He cried out as he landed face-first in the sand, flat on the nose that Hamas had smashed, and began to crawl meter by meter with one arm until he made it around

the corner.

He managed to prop himself up against the wall, just several meters away from the gate. He looked out to see the Israelites only fifty or so meters away now.

They were coming in waves.

The infantrymen used their shields to protect the slingers, who needed both hands to counter the fire of the Reahns on the walls.

An entire line of archers, meanwhile, had dug their shields into the ground and from behind them fired at the archers in the towers. But the heavy infantry charged ahead with battering rams and close-combat spears, sickle swords and axes to smite the Reahns.

Deker pulled out his pack of C-4 and hurled the whole wired package toward the gate. It landed in the middle, just in front of the portcullis, and then he pushed the detonator.

The explosion ripped the guts of the gate out like the god Molech vomiting out his demons. A giant cloud of smoke and dust mushroomed into the air.

Ears ringing and light flashing before his eyes, Deker peered into the cloud as he snapped off the arrows in his shoulder and leg. Then the curtain parted and he saw the troops pouring through.

49

By the time Deker limped through the gate, all he could see was the flash of swords and shields. The slaughter was well under way.

The unstoppable column of Israelites snaked through the north side of the town and up through the gash in the fortress wall caused by the fall of the city’s spire. People were shouting to one another but no words could be made out above the screams and shouts of battle.

From the summit, waterfalls of blood streamed down the fortress walls and into the city below, rivers of carnage floating along the streets past Deker’s boots.

The dead were already piling up.

Frightened Reahns ran helter-skelter, trapped inside the walls they had erected to protect themselves. From the towers the soldiers could only watch their families die before they, too, were struck and began to fall off the ramparts as the Israelites swarmed them.

But it was the Reahn families fleeing the inescapable wrath of Yahweh, their tragic faces white with terror, that haunted Deker. The foolish among them were still trying to carry their valuables in their fine but filthy garments. The brave, mostly mothers clutching their children, wound up cornered against stone walls and run through by the merciless blades of the invading Hebrews.

The only thing escaping the city that Deker could see was its treasures: one cart after another, filled with gold ingots and silver coins and jewelry, was being wheeled out through the gate by the Levites.

Deker didn’t see Phineas and suspected the priest had decided to contribute to the work of the troops in cleansing Jericho for its sins.

The Kenites, meanwhile, were lighting up bronze bowls with oil for the passing troops to dip their torches into so they could burn whatever was left of Jericho.

Deker stepped through the puddles of blood in the market square and headed toward Rahab’s to make sure she was safe. Then he noticed a team of Judeans with a small battering ram heading toward a door in the city wall that he hadn’t noticed before. It had a red cord hanging outside.

“Wait!” he yelled and raced to the door. “What are you doing?”

“Rahab the harlot and her family are to be spared,” the commanding officer replied. He looked a bit like Salmon, and Deker guessed he might be a cousin.

“This isn’t Rahab’s house,” Deker told them.

“But it’s in the city wall.”

“Her house is in the slums about fifty cubits ahead. A four-story villa overlooking a small square. You can’t miss it.”

“Then what’s this?”

Deker stared at the red cord and shouted, “I think it’s a trap!”

Sure enough, upon closer examination he saw a crude charcoal drawing on the wood.

A black dove.

“Stand guard out here,” he ordered the troops. “I’m going inside. You’ll block this door with carts and crates if you have to, but nobody comes out. If I don’t return by the count of five hundred, see that it burns with the rest of this city to the ground.”

He looked around to make sure the Judeans understood. They did, but clearly thought he was crazy and in no shape in his blood-soaked uniform to do much damage to anything as he unsheathed his sword.

“A sword may not slay this enemy,” a voice said. “You may need this.”

Deker turned to see old Kane step forward with his latest invention: an ancient Molotov cocktail. He held the jug with a fuse in one hand and a torch in the other.

Deker handed his sword to one of the troops and took the bomb and the torch. “A final gift to send me off, Kane? You shouldn’t have.”

Kane smiled proudly. Deker was actually going to miss the old warrior.

Deker didn’t know why, exactly, he was so sure that he wasn’t going to be walking out of the door he was about to enter. But he was sure.

“Salmon is with Rahab and her family,” he told Kane with emphasis. “I’ve told these troops where they are. See to it that they get safely outside the city before Bin-Nun torches it.”

Kane nodded. “Do your worst.”

Deker opened the door, slipped inside and closed it. He immediately heard the thuds and scrapes of carts and crates stacking up behind him. Then he turned and saw the secret fail-safe to Jericho that Hamas had been hiding all along.

The shadow army.

50

Ever since Deker had heard about Jericho’s shadow army, he imagined something supernatural, like demons or, more likely, some superstition. Never did he expect it to be the city’s living dead.

Inside the dark tunnel, Deker immediately knew he was in the presence of thousands of bodies. The damp, rank air hung heavy with the putrid smell of rotting flesh, human waste and desperation. Now he understood why Rahab’s brother Ram had refused to even speak of it. If the soldiers packed inside the upper fortress walls represented a ring of strength, then whatever rotted inside these lower city walls represented a ring of death.

Deker held up his torch to see just what exactly he was smelling. The flickering light reflected a sea of bloodshot eyes staring from pinched, pallid faces: men, women, children, even animals. This was where Hamas had crammed Jericho’s sick and diseased, here inside the thick lower city walls.

What kind of defense was this? he wondered as he walked among the dying inside the city walls. These were no soldiers of Jericho. They had no swords, no weapons of any kind, not even food. They were sick and infirm. How could they save Jericho when Hamas had condemned them to die when the walls collapsed on top of them?

Then he understood. It was all clear now.

Hamas had packed the walls with the diseased in case they did fall. Then these veritable zombies could escape to infect the Israelite troops. The troops, in turn, would infect their families. And that would be the end of the Hebrews.

This shadow army was Jericho’s fail-safe that would ensure victory even in defeat. Much like Israel’s fail-safe that he had sacrificed his own life to protect.

Deker covered his nose and mouth. Cholera, hepatitis B and C, jaundice, dysentery, leprosy—it was all here, and then some, plainly visible on the drawn and blemished faces. And rising above the coughs and hacks of the TB-infected was a madman laughing somewhere down the narrow corridor.

Deker could recognize that condescending laugh anywhere.

Elezar.

Deker knew that he was never going to leave these walls now, never going to see Rahab again. Not if he was to save Israel. He had to entertain Elezar long enough for the Israelites to turn the tunnels into a furnace worthy of Molech and burn them all alive before anyone could escape.

There was a doorway at the end of the section, leading to another beyond. Guarding the doorway were two ghastly-looking Reahn guards who kept the civilian sick at bay. But they didn’t block him from entering the next compartment. It was as if he had been expected.

As soon as he stepped through the door, he felt a blow to his gut and doubled over as Elezar withdrew a bloody dagger from his stomach. Deker began to cough up blood.

“Welcome back, Deker,” said Elezar’s voice from the shadows.

Deker noticed the white salt all over the floor where his drops of blood had begun to splatter. The salt might have been stored there and cleared out, he thought, but something about it felt familiar and threw him off. He slid some of it aside with his boot and saw the flash of color. There was some kind of mosaic in the floor.

A sense of vertigo hit him and the walls seemed to bend before his eyes. As he regained his balance, he saw Elezar emerge from the shadows, laughing louder than ever.

“You did it, Deker!” he said in mock congratulation. “You finally broke.”

Any other day Deker could have taken Elezar. But with the cheap stab, Elezar now had the upper hand. Overwhelmed and losing blood, Deker pulled out his Molotov incendiary.

“Your plan has failed, Elezar. Bin-Nun is going to torch the city. And I’m going to burn us all inside this furnace of death. Jericho is doomed, the future of Israel secured.”

“It’s Israel you have doomed, Deker, and the future of Palestine you have secured once and for all. You’ve just blown the Israeli fail-safe, the secret of the Tehown, the tunnel of chaos the Jews hoped to use to kill us Arabs and save themselves.”

Bits of brick began to fall from the ceiling, and inside, the walls were heating up like an oven as the Israelites began to burn the city to the ground.

But Elezar beamed in triumph.

“You think you are with me in the walls of ancient Jericho 3,500 years ago, Deker. But we’re not really here. We’re back in a safe house in Jericho. You’re strapped to a chair with a fiber-optic line sewn into your skull, and I’m pumping light waves into your brain as I interrogate you.”

Deker felt the sweat coming down his face in the heat. “You’re crazy! You were the one who spent days convincing me that we were in 1400 BC. You’re the one who lost his mind.”

“You’re a fool, Deker,” Elezar said. “This was all a simulation designed to break you, the bad Jew, into revealing the secret fail-safe. It has been such a simple task to guide you to this point, using your brain’s own imagery to reconstruct everything about ancient Jericho along the lines of the Temple Mount to help us find the city’s fail-safe and lead us to what you already knew deep inside your head.”

“And what is that, Elezar?”

“Clearly, Israel’s fail-safe is biological in nature. Most likely a virus created from some ancient bone fragment infected with a disease that doesn’t exist in the twenty-first century. By creating a vaccine from the beginning, the Jews can release the virus and kill as many Arabs as they like and save their own people. But now that we know the threat, we can find a way to neutralize it. Now it’s the Jews who will die, all because of you. Not only have you lost the Promised Land in this reality, Deker, you’ve lost the promised war in ours.”

Deker stared at the Byzantine mosaic on the floor: it was just like the one in the holding house in Madaba—if they had ever been in Madaba. His torture could have taken place anywhere, his delusion beginning with his alleged escape from his captors.

“You’re wrong, Elezar. I didn’t dream this up. I never wanted to be here, so how could I be open to your suggestions?”

“All it took was the ghost of your dear Rachel in the form of Rahab to make you pant like a dog and return to your vomit.”

Deker yelled and swung his torch at Elezar, who ducked. “Was that real enough for you?”

“In your mind, yes,” Elezar said calmly. “In reality, no. In reality I’m about to kill you. But before I do, I thought I’d let you in on a little secret you don’t know.”

Deker brought his torch over Elezar’s head. “It will be the last thing you say.”

“Remember that little explosive you prepared for the assassination of the Black Dove? The ceremonial bowl that your beloved Rachel accidentally blew herself up with?”

“You did it,” Deker accused. “I know now.”

“But it wasn’t me, Deker,” Elezar hissed in pure hatred. “I was under orders from the IDF. The IDF was worried about your impartiality with regard to all sides of the Temple Mount. They wanted to ensure that, if push came to shove, you’d ultimately come down on the side of the Jews, and your guilt over her death was just the thing to do it.”

“That’s a lie!” Deker shouted.

“Is it?” Elezar said calmly. “You know it’s just the sort of dirty trick the Jews have been subjecting their people to for over three thousand years.”

“I’ve got another one here for you,” Deker said, and smashed his Molotov cocktail on the floor, igniting the grains and stores around them.

As fire began to engulf them, Elezar simply looked at Deker and said, “You know what you call an Israel without Jews? Palestine!”

“We are the Jewish people!” Deker screamed, his clothing bursting into flames. “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!”

Just then the ground shook like a great quake. Dust came down between the bricks above, and the walls began to collapse on top of them, burying them alive. And still Elezar shouted in the dark void, his words echoing in Deker’s ears.

“From the river to the sea, Deker! A Palestine without Jews!”

The curtain of dust parted, and Deker stared as an unflinching Elezar stood brazenly before him even as his clothing caught fire. His mouth widened into a macabre smile as his hair burst into flames and he was completely engulfed by the inferno.

“From the river to the sea!”

A rock from above struck Deker in the head and he collapsed into the flames. Deker felt his own life seeping from his smashed body under the relentless avalanche of stone.

Dust in his eyes, he blinked at a shaft of light through the rubble. He felt a hot wind and watched it lift the ash to reveal a flash of metal hovering over him. For a second he thought it was the face of Molech come to drag him to hell.

But it was an unmanned RQ-1 Predator drone hovering over him like a modern Angel of Death. A single Hellfire missile remained beneath its right wing. Now the remote-controlled lens of the camera in its nose cone closed in on him and then opened again.

Then the metallic Predator flew away, leaving Deker to fall into the darkness and die.

51

HADASSAH MEDICAL CENTER

Deker looked out the window from his hospital bed. The modern Abbell Synagogue in the plaza below with its famous stained-glass Chagall Windows depicting the twelve tribes of Israel told him that he was back in the present day at the Ein Kerem campus of the Hadassah Medical Center in southwest Jerusalem. Any further doubts were eliminated by the dozens of IVs, needle tracks and pangs of excruciating pain shooting up and down his battered body.

“You seem disappointed to be alive, Deker.”

Deker turned to see a short, barrel-chested American in a suit standing by his bedside. It was the former U.S. secretary of defense, Marshall Packard, who more than anybody else was responsible for his transfer from the U.S. armed forces to the Israel Defense Forces several years ago. Deker now suspected the IDF had decided to return its defective merchandise to the Americans.

“The Temple Mount—” Deker said, but Packard cut him off.

“All is well,” Packard assured him, then backtracked. “As well as anything concerning the Temple Mount and Jerusalem can be these days.”

“And Elezar?”

“Died in the rubble by the time you were pulled out of that Palestinian house in Jericho.” Packard showed Deker the display of his BlackBerry phone and played a video clip from the nose cone of the Predator drone. “The Hellfire missiles blew them back to the Stone Age.”

Deker nodded. “So Elezar was the Black Dove?”

“Whatever his code name or real name might have been, Uri Elezar was definitely a PLO mole, placed inside the IDF decades ago, probably as soon as he hit puberty. Since the PLO went legit a few years back and other, more militant splinter groups began advancing the Palestinian cause through violence, we can only guess whom he really worked for when he died. We suspect it was a Jordanian cell group within an organization we call the Alignment. We could use your help fighting it when you feel better.”

But Deker was still grappling with the reality that history had indeed changed. He had not made the mistake that had killed Rachel. It was Elezar who killed her. Elezar or, unthinkably, the IDF. Whatever the reality, his guilt now turned to anger. That an innocent like Rachel should suffer like that. That he should suffer still. Now the IDF was going to deny him the opportunity to confront them. They wanted him to go away, to no longer remind them of their own lapse with Elezar—or their own sin.

“When I feel better?” Deker asked. “I can barely feel anything. What did they inject me with?”

“A combination of isoniazid, rifampin, pyrazinamide, streptomycin and ethambutol,” Packard told him. “You picked up extrapulmonary tuberculosis in that hellhole. We had to burn it to kill anything that could breathe from getting out and spreading it.”

“TB?” Deker felt around his neck for his IDF tag and knew it was missing. “No. I’m not talking about all these IVs in my arms. I want to know what those Jordanian bastards did to me.”

“They weren’t Jordanians, officially, but some radical Palestinian Waqf faction,” Packard said. “Somehow they had gotten ahold of a new U.S. interrogation protocol that the Jordanian GID has been testing for us on rendered terrorist suspects. What they did was inject you with a genetically engineered protein from a type of pond algae that’s attracted to light. This virus infected certain neurons in your brain.”

Deker touched his finger to his forehead. “I felt a splinter of light.”

“That’s the fiber-optic cable they threaded through your skull,” Packard said. “It’s what enabled them to send flashes of light directly into your brain. From there they could precisely target certain neurons with light and cause them to fire. They basically took control of your nervous system.”

“To probe my memories?”

“That’s right. Make you talk in your sleep and extract what you knew about the fail-safe under the Temple Mount.”

Deker felt empty, hollowed out, spiritless. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“Fortunately, they didn’t accidentally blind you, and you seem to have escaped permanent brain damage,” Packard told him. “But we really don’t know what the long-term effects are of infecting someone’s brain with a virus that makes it susceptible to light.”

Deker was quiet, thinking. “Last night I thought I woke up for a few seconds and saw my dead driver, Stern, by my bedside.”

“Hmm, that’s interesting,” Packard said. “Like I said, we really don’t know the long-term impact of your torture.”

Deker asked, “So, what happens to me now?”

“You broke under torture and gave up the fail-safe. Now your superiors have come to realize that Jerusalem’s only real fail-safe is the good ol’ U.S.A.”

“More than a few in the IDF would beg to differ,” Deker said. “Israel has God on her side.”

“God can’t help you now, Deker. Because the IDF wants you out, one way or another. You know too much and are an embarrassment in the current political climate. So you’ve been dishonorably discharged to our care.”

“To do what with my life?”

“That’s up to you,” Packard said. “When you figure it out, let me know, because we could use a man like you back home in the States.”

Home.

“I have no home anymore.”

“Then you’ll fit right in,” Packard said, and left the room.

52

THE WEST BANK

The official maps that Deker had obtained after his hospital discharge a week earlier proved worthless as he drove out in the heat from Jericho. All he had to show after three fruitless days of sifting through the sands of time were a few chips from the modern city’s Oasis Casino and a hangover from too much drinking. He had already visited several other “Gilgals” around the area, tourist traps all, but none resembling the real Gilgal.

The real Gilgal.

Deker couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t anymore. Did he really take a trip through time? Or did he simply trip out on military-grade hallucinogens and live to remember it?

Still, an archaeological tour of one of those Neolithic sites along the Jordan River with a group called the Friends of the Earth had given him an idea. That site had been dug some twenty years earlier by a team from the Israel Museum and had unearthed thirteen round buildings made of mud and rock, along with agricultural facilities, including grinding stones, pounding stones, axes and sickle blades. Most interesting was a silo containing a sizable amount of wheat and barley—a fleeting image he recalled that one night in the real Gilgal.

He looked at his Landsat thematic map of the area that also included Shuttle Radar Topography Mission topographic data. It was a gift from the chief archaeology officer in the IDF’s civil administration. The officer told him that this same space technology had led to the discovery of the lost city of Ubar in present-day Oman and the ancient desert frankincense trade route in southern Arabia. He only asked that if Deker actually found something, he’d let the IDF know.

The only thing Deker had found so far came from the pages of Jewish history and tradition. From multiple sources he was able to piece together a general picture of what happened to Rahab and the rest he had met back in time or in his mind. He played the scenario over and over like a movie while he searched for Gilgal.

Rahab and her family were indeed spared death and allowed to live outside the Israelite camp at Gilgal. She almost immediately married Salmon, the son of Nahshon. Rahab shortly thereafter gave birth to a son they named Boaz. Deker wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, and for the time being buried it in his heart. When Boaz had grown, he married a woman named Ruth and they had a son, Obed, who had a son named Jesse, who had a son named David.

David became the king of Israel, fulfilling the prophecy of the six-pointed conjunction of stars in the heavens that Rahab had pointed out to Deker that night on her terrace so long ago. Fourteen generations later, from the line of David, came Jesus, whom his Roman executioners called the “King of the Jews” and whose cousin John the Baptist called the “Passover Lamb” who would take away the sins of the world.

Tracing Rahab’s bloodline to Christ made Deker think back to the scarlet cord in Rahab’s window, and to her faith that Yahweh would “pass over” her sins as the Angel of Death had passed over the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Her faith had been rewarded, and so had Salmon’s.

But would his? Deker wondered.

Salmon’s curious friend Achan bin-Zerah wasn’t as fortunate. He apparently had defied General Bin-Nun’s herem,or ban, on keeping any spoils from Jericho by pocketing two hundred shekels of gold and silver during the pillage instead of turning them over to the Treasury of Yahweh. Bin-Nun figured this out days later when he sent a small unit of thirty-six troops drawn from a single division to capture the town of Ai. A small and easy target compared to Jericho, to be sure, but the Israelites were ambushed and killed. After another face-to-face meeting with Yahweh, Bin-Nun used a mass form of divination—casting lots—to identify Achan as the cause, and had him stoned to death along with his wife, children, sheep and every breathing thing he owned. Then Bin-Nun had them burned and buried under the pile of rocks used to kill them.

From then on, Joshua, the son of Nun, moved from one victory to another in his quest to claim the Promised Land for Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. He split Canaan in two, first taking out the southern kingdoms before turning his attention to the more powerful northern kingdoms. He even gave Phineas a sign to remember forever when, according to the book of Joshua, the sun stood still for an extra day so the Israelites could kill more enemies in a decisive victory. Only Jerusalem remained untaken.

Deker knew that Bin-Nun’s plan to cut the land of Canaan in half was the very strategy that modern Israel’s Arab enemies had long harbored for wiping the Jewish state off the map. To avoid such a fate while he was in charge, Bin-Nun focused on defending Israel’s moral boundaries even more than her natural ones. He was especially concerned about the threat of other religions in Canaan, which ultimately came to roost with King Solomon, who for all his wisdom allowed the influence of his many foreign wives to persuade him to turn the six-pointed Star of David into the official emblem of the state.

“But as for me and my family,” Joshua bin-Nun proudly declared, “we will serve the Lord.”

Finally, before he died, Bin-Nun signed a treaty in which Israel pledged to honor other nationalities in Canaan who honored Yahweh. He signed it at Shechem, the place where God first promised Abraham the land of Canaan.

Surely this must have pleased Rahab.

Reading through these historical documents, Deker had even begun to at least understand the rationale behind Bin-Nun’s strategy of incinerating entire cities and every man, woman, child and animal that breathed inside their walls. Due to the tuberculosis the doctors had discovered in his lungs at Hadassah Medical Center, Deker did some research and learned that archaeologists had also discovered history’s earliest evidence of TB in ancient bones buried under Jericho. Such airborne diseases were rampant in ancient times. Israel, therefore, faced an existential threat any time she came into contact with her enemies. Incineration was the only insurance to counter the threat in that age.

So at least Bin-Nun had had his reasons. And so, perhaps, did Israel today.

All the same, Deker knew he would never be able to erase from his mind that first horrific glimpse of twenty-four thousand blackened corpses strung out among a golden sea of shittah trees.

53

GILGAL

The sun beat down ever hotter as Deker approached the site of his latest candidate for Gilgal. This one had a familiar grade with a few ancient redbud trees bent in a way Deker had seen only once before. Deker was still consumed by an obsession for the truth that his discharge from the IDF and the offer to rejoin the Americans had only inflamed.

He took a shovel and started digging, continuing long after the sun went down and the moon came up.

Then he struck something.

He shined a light on the slab of rock and felt his heart jump when he saw the seal engraved on the surface: the sign of Judah.

It was one of the dolmen stones, but considerably smaller—maybe half of its original size, as though it had been cut or broken in two.

He felt a surge of hope and spent the next two hours digging around the slab, ultimately using his Jeep’s winch to pull it out and reveal the silo beneath it.

The silo was still filled with grain so old and cracked, it was like dust. Simply inhaling made him breathe it in and he coughed. He tied a cloth around his mouth like a surgical mask and dug through it until he struck something else.

It was a small bronze box with a crescent moon on it.

Just like Rahab’s jewelry box.

His heart skipped a beat.

He blew away the dust and cracked open the box.

As soon as he saw what was inside, he fell to his knees, weeping for no reason he could name. A moment later, after he had composed himself, he removed it.

His IDF tag with the Star of David.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Emily Bestler and Simon Lipskar, my editor and agent, for your support and friendship. To Judith Curr, Louise Burke and Carolyn Reidy, my publishers, who make it all possible. To Sarah Branham, Laura Stern, David Brown and the rest of the Atria, Pocket and Simon & Schuster family, my deepest thanks and respect to you all—you are the best in publishing.

To members in various intelligence communities who provided me with their unique perspectives about the three-thousand-year-old struggle that forms the backdrop to The Promised War, your humanity impresses as much as your expertise. To historians such as Richard A. Gabriel, whose works helped me reconcile the ancient biblical and military accounts of the events described in my novel, thank you for invaluable insights.

To those rabbis and scholars with whom I consulted, thank you for sharing your consensus that there is no consensus whenever such an esteemed group gathers. Thank you in advance for overlooking the inevitable errors and contradictions of my fictional account of the ancient siege of Jericho—they are mine and mine alone. Most of all, thank you for showing the humility of students still searching and stretching for meaning in a world that seems to deny its existence.

To my wife, Laura, who loves me for who I am, and to our boys, Alex and Jake, whom we love so dearly, thank you for being the joy in my journey through life.