neck. It was not a pleasant reaction.
“They are Reahns, General,” the short, fat priest said. He looked like an evil cherub, the way his face sneered as he spoke. “They bear the blazing star. They belong to the cult of Molech. They bow to the same god as the calf worshipers who brought the wrath of Moses upon us.”
“But they are cut like us, Phineas.”
Deker, thoroughly confused now, realized they were talking about his circumcised penis. He could see Bin- Nun making some sort of mental calculation as he curiously considered his two naked prisoners.
“They must die,” Phineas said, glaring at Deker. “Moses would—”
“Moses is dead,” Bin-Nun said, cutting off the priest.
Deker heard the unmistakable swish of a blade and looked up to see the general bring the scimitar down, stopping at the last moment an inch above Deker’s skull.
The general spoke harshly, too fast for Deker to understand.
“What’s he saying?” Deker asked Elezar in English, prompting the warlord’s guards to exchange confused glances. As a political officer, Elezar was fluent in the history and languages of the Middle East.
“It’s ancient Hebrew,” Elezar said haltingly. “He wants to know if we’re for them or against them.”
Deker said, “We don’t even know who the hell these people are.”
“These are Jews.” There was a hint of fear in Elezar’s voice as he looked around, a worrisome sign to Deker. “This is Joshua, the son of Nun, general of the ancient Israelite army. Somehow we have arrived at their camp in Shittim on the eve of their historic siege of Jericho more than three thousand years ago.”
Deker stared at his superior officer. Somewhere during their torture, escape and recapture, something must have snapped in his head.
“They are not Jews, Elezar,” Deker said patiently, aware of the sharp edge of the sword on his skull. “This bastard is not Joshua of the Hebrew Bible come to life, and we have not gone back in time.”
Elezar cleared his throat and gave a reply in the same exotic dialect as this “General Bin-Nun,” although Deker understood the unmistakable name of Adonai only at the end.
To Deker’s amazement, Bin-Nun withdrew his sword and said something else to Elezar and the guards before he marched out of the tent.
“What did you say to him?” Deker demanded as the two guards eased them up and brought them outside the tent.
“I said we’re neither for him nor against him,” Elezar said, blinking into the sun beneath his sweaty brow. “We’re angels in the army of the Lord.”
“What?” Deker stared at the sea of black acacia trees to the south and a sea of white tents to the north, the land of the dead versus the land of the living. “And what did he say?”
“Prove it, or we can rot out there with the rest of the damned.”
6
Deker and Elezar, wearing simple beige tunics, were marched barefoot across the hot sands of the camp toward a towering pillar of smoke in the east. The most striking thing about this city of otherwise weather-beaten tents was how pristine and full of life it was after the filth and stench of the death grove they had left behind.
Deker strained to look beyond the first row or two of tents into the encampment. The population was young—very young—like so many of the Palestinian camps, including plenty of pregnant girls who looked barely in their teens. Other than General Bin-Nun, Deker didn’t see anybody older than thirty. Not a wrinkle in sight.
“This camp isn’t on any of our maps,” Deker said in English.
“Of course not, Deker,” Elezar said excitedly. “This is Shittim. It means the ‘Meadow of the Acacias.’ That’s what all those trees were back there. Shittimwood is what the ancient Israelites used to build the Ark of the Covenant and the desert Tabernacle. This is a miracle.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Deker said with a glance back as the spears from their armed escort prodded them forward. The soldiers either didn’t understand English or didn’t care if they talked. “You call that mass grave we saw back there a miracle?”
“What kind of Israeli soldier are you, to be so ignorant of history?” Elezar scolded him. “Those are the twenty-four thousand Israelites whom Moses ordered slaughtered by the Levite priests shortly before he died. Probably only a month or two ago since the camp seems to be coming off its official period of mourning.”
“Israelites? Moses?” Deker couldn’t believe his ears. “Do you hear yourself?”
“Yes, but do you, Deker? Because you might want to listen up if you want to live,” Elezar shot back. “The Israelites only recently pitched camp here after forty years in the desert. As soon as they did, a lot of the soldiers started screwing around with the local Moabite and Midianite women. Yahweh—that’s God, in case you forgot—then threatened judgment on Israel. So Phineas the Levite, that priest who sprinkled us with holy water back at the grove, picked up a spear and ran it through an Israelite man and Midianite woman while they were in the act. That inspired Moses and the rest of the Levites to pick up the sword and slaughter the rest. We’re living ancient history.”
“Whatever you call that back there, Elezar, I call it a war crime,” Deker told him. “Possibly genocide. At the very least a crime against humanity.”
“Your moral outrage only reveals your ignorance,” Elezar said. “Obviously, sexually transmitted diseases were thinning the ranks of the army on the eve of its invasion of the Promised Land. The slaughter saved the entire Israelite camp here. The sooner you accept our new reality, Deker, the sooner we can deal with it.”
“Bullshit,” Deker said. “And this is a Palestinian camp. A terrorist camp.”
“Look around you, Deker,” Elezar pressed. “This camp is laid out in four sections, each section divided into three tribes. Just like the ancient Israelites pitched their camps. See those Manasseh archers and Benjaminite slingers to our west? That’s the Ephraim Division. And those light infantry divisions to our south? Those are the tribes of Reuben, Gad and Simeon.”
Deker noted all the long spears, sickle swords, bows, slings and shields Elezar was pointing out. True, he saw no AK-47 rifles, no grenade launchers, not even a cell phone. But throw in a couple of satellite dishes and this camp would look right at home in the twenty-first century.
“This camp is too advanced to be the ancient Israelite camp,” Deker announced. “They’ve got their latrines on one side of the camp, near the decontamination tents we came out of, and their natural water supply on the other. Armies didn’t have this kind of sanitation until World War I. It’s like spotting a digital watch on the wrist of a Roman centurion in some Hollywood swords-and-sandals epic.”
“What are you suggesting?” Elezar pressed, clearly anticipating a response he would easily dismiss with the irrefutable logic of his inherent seniority, which he equated with superiority.
“Maybe this camp is some sort of movie studio back lot disguised to throw us off,” he suggested, trying to reason in some way with Elezar, to bring him back to the cold reality. Otherwise, he’d have to attempt to escape on his own. “Maybe the real terrorists and their weapons are hiding somewhere. We just can’t see them.”
“We can’t see any vapor trails, either, Deker. Have they changed the skies too? It’s been at least ten minutes and not even the distant sound of a warplane.”
Which was true, Deker thought, as he glanced up at the white-hot sky. There was stillness in the air here. It lent an otherworldly quality to everything he was now experiencing through his physical senses.
“Maybe we’re not anywhere,” he finally said. “Maybe we’re still strapped in some Jordanian dungeon somewhere, suffering from some torture-induced psychosis. Or maybe we’re dead.”
From Elezar’s reaction, it was clear to Deker that his superior refused to even entertain the notion of his own mortality, let alone waking up in the same afterlife as his secular, American-born, bad Jew-boy underling.
“We’re not dead, Deker. And the two of us both can’t be in the same psychosis.”
“So instead you’re suggesting we’re time travelers?”
“I’m suggesting we’ve traveled through time,” Elezar said, now passing himself off as a lay physicist as well as a Talmud scholar. “Space-time is like a flat surface. When it’s curved or bent back on itself like a wrinkle, it creates a ‘wormhole’ that connects one part of space-time to another. In our case, the wormhole connects our ‘present day’ in the future to the here and now of 1400 BC in a closed loop. You know how past, present and future seem to collide every day around Jerusalem, Deker, and throughout this part of the world. For all we know, this is
