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.
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.
“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?”
