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 cafe, 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
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
