Deker looked out his window and was at once both reassured and troubled to see the black cutout of Mount Nebo soaring above the Jordan Valley as they crossed into what in ancient times was known as the plains of Moab.
“Mount Nebo is where Moses viewed the Promised Land,” Elezar lectured authoritatively, as he often did. “You can see the Jordan Valley, Jericho and the Judean hills beyond.”
Deker had been to Nebo’s summit with Rachel. The two of them used to hike the canyons of the Wadi Mujeb nature reserve off the King’s Highway to the south. They had planned to come back one day.
“You know who Moses is, Deker, don’t you?” Elezar asked with condescension in his voice.
Despite Deker’s many demolitions and decorations in heroic service for Israel, Elezar had never considered him to be a “true Jew.” That’s because Deker grew up an American Jew on the coddled Westside of Los Angeles. Not like Elezar, twenty years his senior, who was raised in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank, knowing his family could be wiped out in an instant.
“Just because I’m not an observant Jew like you doesn’t mean I’m entirely ignorant of our history, you self- righteous ass.”
Deker long ago had lost patience with self-appointed holy warriors like Elezar. At one time the IDF was led by men like Deker: secular, Western and educated. Now it was controlled by religious nationalists like Elezar. But just because Elezar was anointed with oil by Brigadier General Avichai, the IDF’s chief rabbi, and liked to wave the holy Torah around, it didn’t make Elezar or his fellow former Golani Brigade officers the official representatives of the Jewish people.
“It’s your ignorance that compromises the IDF,” Elezar said. “How do I know that you’re not the Black Dove?”
Deker bristled. The Black Dove was the code name for a suspected Hamas mole deep within the IDF. Until Rachel’s death, Deker had always wondered if the IDF made up the Black Dove to justify all kinds of military operations against Hamas as well as periodic purges of undesirable officers within its ranks. But the Black Dove clearly knew enough about the IDF’s plans to switch the bowl that Deker had crafted to assassinate him and senior Hamas officials. Later Deker suspected that Husseini, the Waqf official at the Temple Mount, might be the Black Dove, as he was someone whose position gave him access to both Israeli IDF and Jordanian GID personnel. That’s what prompted him to conduct tonight’s test of the Temple Mount. It was also why he almost killed Husseini when the bastard brought up Rachel’s death and showed him a similar ceremonial washbowl like the one that killed her. In hindsight, perhaps he should have.
“So because I’m not a self-righteous ass like you, I’m a mythical Palestinian mole inside the IDF?” Deker asked, to expose the absurdity of Elezar’s logic.
But Elezar was unrepentant. “You might as well be the Black Dove if they broke you.”
“The only thing broken is your recording of these accusations that you insist on playing over and over,” Deker replied. “You’re not helping the situation.”
Elezar was quiet for the next few minutes, except to occasionally curse his Jew-hating phone and blather in the darkness about the history of “God’s people”—meaning himself.
Deker concentrated the best he could on the road as the highway expanded to two lanes both ways. He pressed the accelerator through the floor.
“Forget the phone: Get the guns,” Deker said. “We’re not stopping until this car skids to a halt on the other side of the Jordan like a block of Swiss cheese shot full of holes.”
Deker peered through the windshield as they approached the bend in the highway, trying to sense how close they were. The Jordan River flowed down from the melting snow atop Mount Hermon in Lebanon to the Dead Sea. It was easy enough to pick out from satellite overheads, because it coursed two hundred kilometers through a tectonic fault zone known as the Great Rift Valley with its two plates on either side. But right here, right now, he couldn’t see the river.
Deker scanned the night horizon for the first sign of the Allenby Border Terminal. Known as the King Hussein Bridge to Jordanians, the Allenby was the biggest of three bridges over the Jordan River connecting the country of Jordan to the Palestinian territories of the Israeli-controlled West Bank.
He began flashing distress signals in code with the headlights, but it was too late. Dead ahead was a line of Jordanian military trucks and police patrol cars blocking the road to the bridge.
“Roadblock!” Elezar shouted, leaning out the passenger-side window and firing bullets until he emptied his magazine.
No fire was returned. It wasn’t necessary. Through his windshield Deker could see a thick nail strip across the freeway coming up fast, ready to blow their tires and stop them cold before they ever reached the roadblock.
Deker swung the wheel, scraping the nearside fender against the metal rail so that sparks flew. There was a thud, and then they were off the road, driving over the pocked and bumpy rock of the desert and covered in a cloud of sand and dust. The car skidded across the soil as Deker hit the accelerator, the tires chewing rocks and spitting them up against both sides of the car with loud pings.
“Ditch the car!” Elezar commanded.
The banks of the Jordan were coming up fast, even if Deker couldn’t see them. As soon as he sensed the downward slope, he turned to Elezar and yelled, “Jump!”
Deker grabbed his combat bag from the backseat with one hand, kicked opened his door and dove out, hitting the rocky soil hard and tumbling several times as trained to lessen the impact. He was cut up everywhere, to be sure, and maybe even broke something. But now was the time to move, before the surge of adrenaline from the shock wore off.
“We go for the old footbridge,” Deker said as he made his way across the moonscape, aware of Elezar stumbling alongside him, breathing heavily. Elezar didn’t seem injured, but no matter how excellent his physical condition, the two additional decades he had on Deker weren’t helping him here, and Deker easily beat him down the banks to the water.
But he couldn’t find the footbridge. He looked up and down the winding waterway and couldn’t find any bridge in the distance, including the Allenby.
“The bastards have blown the bridge!” Elezar raged. “They’ve started the attack! This is all your doing, Deker! If we survive this, I’ll have you executed for treason!”
“Then at least I’ll be executed by Jews,” Deker said, unmoved. “We have to swim for it.”
Deker lifted his pack onto his shoulder and descended the banks to the river until he felt the cold water around his ankles. Agriculture over the decades had drained the Jordan of whatever depth and current it might have possessed in ancient days. He couldn’t see the other side in the dark. But the distance was probably less than seven meters across, and the depth in some places less than one.
“Elezar—”
But there was no reply. He glanced over his shoulder at Elezar, crumpled on the ground. He looked up the embankment at five black figures cut out against the stars. He turned to dive into the water when he felt a searing stab in his back.
He reached behind, yanked an object out and brought it before his eyes. It was a spear. He stared in confusion and dismay at the large, leaf-shaped spearhead, like something from the Bronze Age exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
He saw the black stain on the tip in the moonlight and realized he was losing blood fast. His eyes began to blur as he watched the spearhead fall in slow motion from his hands. Then he felt himself lurch forward and tumble into the cold, dark waters of the Jordan.
4
Seated inside the airy temple in Los Angeles for his bar mitzvah, his family and friends smiled through tears as the rabbi reached into the open Ark and handed him the Torah scroll containing the Five Books of Moses.
It was one of the older Torahs, weighing almost fifty pounds, and he struggled to carry it in his slender, trembling hands. It felt like a boulder. He was thirteen and considered a man now according to Jewish tradition. But
