the priests who bore the Ark of the Covenant stood on dry land in the middle of the Jordan until all the people had finished crossing the Jordan.”
Elezar reluctantly had to agree, but still managed to look down his self-righteous nose at Deker with a glare. Elezar was still steaming over Deker’s “dishonorable circumvention” of his authority back at camp by revealing the deal with Rahab. That Elezar learned of the secret Hamas plan to cut them off at the river at the same time as everybody else only further infuriated him. “You’re untruthful, Deker,” he had fumed. “And you cannot be trusted.”
Neither, it seemed, could Bin-Nun.
“Bin-Nun leaves nothing to chance,” said Salmon from behind, and with more than a hint of bitterness. “Nor to Yahweh.”
Salmon and Achan must have known about the bridge all along. Yet another reason for Bin-Nun to sub him and Elezar for the Jericho mission in case they were captured and talked.
“Maybe,” said Deker. “But your bridge runs below the surface of the water. Your engineers miscalculated how high the Jordan would rise at flood stage.”
The Jordan had a zigzag current where its shallowest depths were in the middle. The center of the bridge actually broke the surface of the water every now and then, but it was clear the flooding was worse than even Bin-Nun had accounted for, and much of the bridge was a good meter underwater.
“The swift current is a concern to the Levites carrying the Ark,” said a squeaky voice.
Deker turned to see Phineas, who seemed to have perfected the art of creeping up silently and unannounced. “If anything were to happen, it would break the morale of the people even before they set foot in the Promised Land.”
“I don’t know, Phineas,” Deker said. “It would be a shame to see the Ark float down the Jordan. But I’d rather enjoy watching you slip and fall on your fat ass.”
Achan started to laugh but caught himself, assuming the stern look of the others.
“We crossed the cliffs and canyons of the Wadi Zered to reach Shittim,” insisted old Caleb, who seemed to read Deker’s concern. “We can get all forty army contingents and forty thousand women and children across the Jordan. But it will take longer than the three days we allotted. The current is faster than we anticipated, and the floodwaters higher.”
Caleb was waiting on him now for some kind of answer.
“You get Kane to give me back my C-4, and I can get you all over the Jordan in one day,” Deker said.
“One day?” Caleb repeated.
Deker drew a groove in the ground with a stick to represent the Jordan. Then he put a rock in the center to represent the bridge.
“In the American West, when a family wanted to cross a river, they brought their wagon upstream to break the current,” he said, knowing full well Caleb didn’t know what the hell he was referring to. But the old man got the idea. “We do the same upstream—say, at Adam, where the Jordan narrows. By blowing some rocks and caving the banks, we can dam the Jordan. That will slow the current, drop the water level and let you cross on dry ground, or bridge, so to speak.”
Caleb and Phineas looked at each other for a moment and then slowly nodded. Salmon and Achan could not argue with the logic either. Elezar said nothing, but seemed to burn in anger at him all the same.
“Now you’ll still camp on the banks for three days, but you’ll cross over in one,” Deker explained. “When Hamas sees your pillar of fire jump the Jordan that first night he’s going to shit his own bricks and call off his attack.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Caleb pressed.
“At least you’ll have your full army to fight.”
Caleb was almost convinced, but not quite. “What about the Moabites hitting our rear guard?”
“As soon as your last man is across the Jordan, you’ll send units back to haul out those dolmen slabs from the dry riverbed,” Deker said. “As soon as you send up a pillar of smoke to signal you’re all on the west bank, I’ll detonate a second blast up in Adam to blow the dam I created with the first blast. That will release the floodwaters of the Jordan again. The force of that wave will wipe away what’s left of your bridge and drop a wall of water between you and the Moabites, keeping them where they belong on the east bank. It will also keep your people on the west bank from going wobbly when you attack Jericho. Because there will be no going back.”
Caleb and the rest seemed to follow what he was saying, at least the gist of it.
“This is the divine plan of Yahweh,” Phineas announced conclusively, almost reverently. “I will take this to Bin-Nun. He will tell the commanders to prepare the people to move out tomorrow. The Levites will lead the way.”
“This is not the plan,” Salmon angrily muttered.
“Good,” said Deker, ignoring Salmon and addressing Phineas. “And you’ll remind General Bin-Nun that he has Rahab the harlot to thank for this plan.”
Elezar, however, was anything but pleased with the plan, though apparently for different reasons than Salmon. He saved his wrath for Deker until they were alone.
“You’re a liar, Deker,” he said. “You pretend to be ignorant of Scripture and then propose we dam the Jordan at Adam. The book of Joshua says that’s exactly what miraculously happened, perhaps thanks to an earthquake.”
“Or maybe the Israelites threw some boulders in,” Deker said, adding, “Really, I didn’t know.”
“Tell me then how you came up with the idea,” Elezar pressed, refusing to let it go. “I suppose Yahweh personally presented it
to you?”
“Maybe,” Deker said. “My first year in the IDF, drought caused the Jordan River to recede to a level never seen before. This caused boulders to appear beside the Adam Bridge. It looked like a dam. Jordan accused Israel of stopping the flow of water so Israeli farmers could irrigate their crops while farms and tourism on Jordan’s side of the river withered.”
Elezar’s angry eyes widened slightly, revealing he indeed recalled hearing something about the water crisis that had flared briefly between Israel and Jordan.
“I was dispatched to Adam with earthmoving equipment and explosives if necessary to clear stones from the river and prove to the Jordanians that Israel wasn’t at fault,” Deker continued.
“And what happened?” Elezar demanded.
“We cleared the rocks but the water still didn’t flow. That proved to everybody that the real issue was the farmland on both sides of the river. It was siphoning off the water and causing the drought, turning the Jordan into the sick trickle of a stream that you and I know in our own time,” Deker said. “Still, I always had my doubts about how the stones got there in the first place.”
“And now, I suppose, you know for certain?”
“Yes, I do,” Deker told him. “I put them there.”
27
The next morning Deker and Elezar, along with the Judah Division officers Salmon and Achan, left the camp at Shittim and headed toward Adam. The small town was a good seventeen kilometers upstream from Shittim and a full day’s march. So they rode on camels instead of horses to cut the number of times they had to stop for water.
The entire area was controlled by the Israelite tribe of Gad, which was going to commit its troops to the crossing into Canaan but keep the land east of the Jordan. Deker thought the choice ill-advised, as the Gadites would forever expose themselves to attack on three sides, whereas the tribes that crossed the Jordan and settled in Canaan would have the river to their east and mountains all around as natural barriers.
But it wasn’t worth the fight to second-guess a Gadite. That much Deker could tell halfway along the march when they watered their camels at a small town in the low plains called Beth-Nimrah. More than two hundred armed Gadites were waiting to escort them the rest of the way to Adam. Big, burly warriors with rough beards and
