THE PROMISED WAR

“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