THE PROMISED WAR

gears, the glass behind him shattered.

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s over. Now the game is to go out without compromising Israel.

Deker blinked his swollen eyes open again and saw that he was inside a dark stone chamber—a basement of some kind. A second man with long black hair stood over a small bank of medical equipment.

“Before the sun rises in a couple of hours, a large portion of the Temple Mount will collapse, and it will look like you two here did it on behalf of the Orthodox Jewish fanatics,” the Jordanian said. “Palestinian rioters will overrun Jerusalem, raise the Palestinian flag, and Israel won’t be able to stop the world from recognizing the capital of the new nation of Palestine.”

“That could work,” Deker said. “But it won’t. Or else you would have already killed me and Elezar.”

Like Stern, Deker thought, heaping more guilt upon himself. He remembered how his driver had been jumpy about the mission from the start—for good reason, as it turned out. Then his thoughts turned to Stern’s young wife, Jenny, and their eighteen-month-old son, David. He had failed to protect them, like he had failed to protect Rachel. But he would not fail Israel now, he vowed to himself. He could not. It was all he had left to live for and to die for.

“The Tehown,” the Jordanian said, using the Hebrew code name for Israel’s top- secret fail-safe. “Tell me about this so-called gate of the deep or tunnel of chaos that will save the Jews but kill the Arabs. We need to know what kind of Jewish physics we’re dealing with.”

Deker now understood what this was about. He was one of only three Israelis besides the prime minister who knew the secret of the Tehown. Not even his superiors in the IDF knew its details, including Elezar, for fear they would use it before its intended time as Israel’s last resort.

Elezar began to shout, “I’ll kill you myself if you break, Deker! I swear it! I’ll kill you myself!”

The Jordanian nodded to the guard next to Elezar, who shoved an electric prod into the IDF veteran’s groin and delivered enough blue voltage to knock him out and create a thin wisp of smoke.

“Your superior officer is rather annoying, don’t you think?” the Jordanian asked. “He is certainly no friend of yours. Look what he sent out earlier this evening.”

The Jordanian held up Deker’s BlackBerry so that Deker could read a Twitter alert from the Jerusalem Highway Patrol, complete with his picture.

Deker looked at himself on the small screen. The stone-faced expression made Deker himself wonder if a heart could still be beating inside this man. Only the dark, half-dead eyes revealed the faintest smolder of a passion snuffed out by life a long time ago.12:43 a.m. Male. 26. 5’11'. Brown hair. Gray

eyes. Armed and extremely dangerous. Shoot if

subject resists arrest.

“That last order seemed completely uncalled-for,” the Jordanian said in a flat voice, thick with sarcasm. “And these are supposed to be your people.”

That Elezar and the Shin Bet never wanted him to succeed in persuading the Waqf to acquiesce to an electronic surveillance net didn’t surprise him. If anything, after a botched assassination attempt in Dubai a couple of years back that caught Mossad agents on camera, his superiors preferred to avoid a repeat the next time they had to storm the Temple Mount and kill a few Waqf guards.

Nor was he surprised that the Jordanian attempting to break him now would use Elezar’s APB to divide his Israeli captives.

But Deker was indeed surprised by the shoot-to-kill order.

I’ll deal with Elezar and the IDF once I escape, he vowed to himself. But first he would have to escape. To do that, he’d have to kill their captors and see just where on earth they had been taken. If they were in the basement of the GID HQ in Amman, he and Elezar were finished. But Deker didn’t think so. They were probably still close to Jerusalem, perhaps in some safe house in Jericho or the West Bank.

If so, we still have a chance.

Without warning, the Jordanian struck him on the side of the head. A flash of light exploded before his eyes.

“The Tehown fail-safe, Commander!” he yelled with a maniacal growl. “What is the nature of the fail- safe?”

As the howls echoed in his ears, and the flash of light dissipated, Deker could see a glowing cord extend out from a bank of computer screens. It traveled straight toward his head, just above his eye, where it seemed to bore into his skull.

What the hell? This experiment had gone beyond anything in the GID playbook—or anything else he had ever experienced.

Pure panic now overwhelmed him as he realized with horror that there was a shunt in his head with a thin intravenous line attached, some sort of fiber-optic cable pulsating with a neon purple light.

Deker winced as the Jordanian pressed on a button and suddenly another blast of lightning flashed before Deker’s burning eyes. The unbearable pain lingered like a mushroom cloud inside Deker’s head. When the overexposure finally lifted, he could see the ghost of its outlines.

Deker struggled to catch his breath. Terror tore his conscience as he sensed whatever human resolve was left in him was beginning to wither. “I’ll tell you how to wipe the Zionist state off the map,” he said desperately, gasping. “But you won’t like it and you won’t do it, because you all have your heads up your asses.”

“I’m listening,” said the Jordanian, for once without the threat of imminent violence in his voice.

“Call their bluff,” Deker told him, aware of Elezar beginning to stir in his chains. “Lay down your arms. Ask to be fully recognized citizens of Israel. Israel is already ten percent Arab, the West Bank almost ten percent Jewish. Two states side by side is apartheid. Nothing changes. One state with an Arab majority risks Israel losing its Jewish identity.”