the true Tehown, or cosmic ‘tunnel of chaos,’ that this mysterious Waqf splinter group has been after for centuries.”
It was almost too much for Deker’s brain to process. “To what end, Elezar?”
“Obviously, to erase Israel from history before it ever becomes a nation,” Elezar said, visibly perturbed that Deker was still playing catch-up with his reality.
Deker closed his eyes as they walked. He felt the burning sand beneath the soles of his feet. They were beginning to blister. He could hear the sounds of children at play, hammers and saws and shouts in the distance. He could smell the fragrance of desert flowers. Finally, he could still taste that burnt ash on his tongue from the death grove.
“So if we’re not dead, and we’re not hallucinating, and this truly is Camp Shittim some three thousand years back in time,” Deker said as he opened his eyes, “then where’s the Ark of the Covenant?”
“Over there,” Elezar said excitedly, pointing out a large white tent that stood out from the others. “That’s the Tent of Meeting. You know what’s in there, Deker, don’t you?”
“A stolen Soviet nuke?”
“The Ark!” Elezar was beside himself now, clearly dying to take a peek inside the Tent of Meeting. He cleared his throat and addressed their two escorts in ancient Hebrew. “Can we see inside?”
The guards looked to where Elezar was pointing and then glanced at each other. The big one snorted. Even Deker could understand it meant
Deker said, “Well, maybe you can at least explain what that column of smoke is up ahead. The burning bush?”
“Close,” Elezar told him solemnly. “It’s the very presence of God.”
“Have it your way, Elezar, but we’re damned if these are Palestinians and damned if they’re ancient Jews. Because in case you haven’t noticed from the spears at our backs, even a Super Jew like you doesn’t make the grade with these fanatics.”
7
The presence of God turned out to be a twenty-meter-tall signal tower made of shittimwood beams with ladders leading to its various levels, all building up to a bronze furnace and chimney. It was manned by a contingent of soldiers who stoked it while an officer barked orders.
Deker was tempted to taunt Elezar with some joke about how many priests Yahweh needed to screw in a lightbulb. But as ordinary as these pyrotechnics turned out to be, the entire scene was still all too extraordinary for him.
“And we’re the ones who have to prove ourselves?” Deker told a dismayed Elezar. “So much for seeing Yahweh.”
“So much for your Palestinian camp, Deker,” Elezar countered. “With a column of smoke like that, the IDF wouldn’t need a satellite to know of this camp’s existence. You could stand on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and see this cloud.”
Which was true, Deker thought as a large group of military officers now entered the clearing behind Bin-Nun. He counted forty of them, in addition to four priests and an older man, only the second Deker had seen so far, counting Bin-Nun.
“If each commander represents two hundred troops—the equivalent of an IDF combat unit—that puts Bin- Nun’s troop levels at eight thousand,” Deker whispered to Elezar. “If the ancient one-to-four ratio holds and the troops comprise a quarter of the general population, then we’re talking a bit more than thirty thousand Israelites total. Not quite the 2.5 million I recall from Hebrew school.”
“I knew,” Elezar said, revealing some distress.
That in turn distressed Deker, because it meant that Elezar truly believed they were back in biblical times, and that this “reality” didn’t jibe with his preconceived notions.
Deker watched as General Bin-Nun consulted with the other old-timer, who pointed toward a stone monument about a hundred meters away. Bin-Nun nodded, and the group migrated over to what looked like a gigantic stone table but which Deker recognized as a Neolithic dolmen, a flat megalith laid across shorter stones to mark an ancient tomb.
This dolmen was ancient even by ancient standards. Its horizontal capstone ran four meters long and two meters wide. Each of the three upright stones supporting it was about a meter tall. At one time there had been a mound of dirt covering the tomb, but the winds of history had stripped it away, and all that remained was the skeleton of stones.
Here the commanders gathered in a semicircle around the two of them, and for a crazy moment Deker worried they were going to be stoned and buried under the dolmen. Instead, the other old man came forward with Deker’s pack of explosives.
Deker snatched them while the old man spoke to Elezar.
“Kane is the head of the Israelites’ arsenal,” Elezar told Deker afterward. “Their chief weapons procurer. Swords, spears and all that. He’s a Kenite and a cousin of Moses. Basically an arms dealer who trades in metals and manufactures the weapons of Joshua’s army. He joined up with the Israelites after the Exodus when Joshua was first starting to breed his army for Moses. He can’t reverse-engineer what he’s calling our ‘magic mud bricks,’ but he knows from the blinking timers that they’re not of this world, and the slight odor of elemental sulfur in the bricks suggests that they possess the same properties as whatever Yahweh’s angels used to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. So Bin-Nun wants you to demonstrate their power. He wants you to destroy the dolmen.”
Deker paused. “This would be the first bomb I set off since Rachel.”
“Yes,” Elezar said. “And you’ll do it to save your life and mine.”
Deker looked at Elezar. “And take out the Israelite high command here in one strike so we can escape?”
Elezar looked at him coldly. “See those eight commanders over there with the purple tassels on their breastplates branded with the sign of Gemini?”
“What about them?”
“Tribe of Benjamin. Isn’t that the tribe of your family’s ancestry? Kill them all here and you’ll have never been born. Neither you, nor I, nor the nation of Israel.”
“You’re as crazy as these fanatics,” Deker said, clutching his C-4 bricks. “To escape, we’d have to kill our captors. But you’re saying if we kill our captors, we might not only kill ourselves but all Israel.”
As he spoke, he could feel old Kane and the group of commanders studying with keen interest how he handled the C-4. It was the digital displays on the timers that seemed to captivate his audience, not the “magic mud bricks” themselves. They mistakenly thought the power resided in the timers, not in the C-4. They obviously had no clue that the kill zone of a single brick was almost twenty-five meters and that nothing or nobody could survive inside that circle.
For the first time he was afraid there might be something to Elezar’s insane idea that they had gone back in time. These people seemed to have absolutely no clue as to the destructive power of this stuff. That was impossible in the twenty-first century. Even the most backward camp in the Middle East had a bomb maker, if nothing else.
Elezar said, “Just prove we’re angels of the Lord, Deker, and maybe we can escape this . . . place.”
Deker looked over his shoulder at the dolmen monument behind them. “I don’t like it. I have no idea how it’s going to break up or where the pieces will fly. Might take us out with them. How about a fire in the hole, a pillar of fire?”
Elezar repeated this to Kane, who shook his head.
“They have a pillar of fire,” Elezar said, noting the column of smoke. “They want you to vaporize the stone.”
Deker carefully inspected the dolmen he was about to blow sky-high. The three supporting stones were sandstone, the capstone travertine. He’d have to direct the blast to flip the top away from the viewing parade of commanders before it broke up.
His true gift, as Husseini had implied back at the Temple Mount, was his ability to locate in a structure the precise “pressure point” to bring the whole thing down with just the tiniest nudge. A building. A dam. It didn’t
