THE PROMISED WAR

THE PROMISED WAR

Also by Thomas Greanias

The Atlantis Revelation

The Atlantis Prophecy

Raising Atlantis

THE

PROMISED

WAR

A THRILLER

Thomas Greanias

To friends Mark and Melinda, Bill and Priscilla,

Frank and Jeanne, Skip and Lara and all who have

devoted their lives to breaking down the world’s walls of

misunderstanding through their love and compassion to

people of every race, color and creed.

They did not gain possession of the land by their own sword,

but by your mighty hand, because you favored them.

—Zabur 44:3 (Psalm 44:3)

1

JERUSALEM

The Dome of the Rock mosque rose like the moon behind the towering wall that surrounded the Temple Mount. Sam Deker cleared the top of the wall and dropped into the gardens below, a wraith in the night. He glanced at the illuminated hands of his Krav Maga watch. Seven minutes to three. He had told Stern fourteen minutes back at the van. He had used up six. Time was running out.

Deker reached into his combat pack and pulled out a brick of C-4. He had enough bricks to take out half of the thirty-five-acre complex. If he had any doubts about this operation, now was the moment to turn back. He slipped the C-4 back into his pack and moved through the maze of trees and shrubs.

The Temple Mount was the most contested religious site in the world. For Muslims, the eight-sided, golden- capped Dome of the Rock mosque protected the “noble rock” that they believed to be the foundation stone of the earth and the place from which the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.

But religious Jews believed the rock was the place from which God gathered the dust to create the first man, Adam, as well as the site of King Solomon’s Temple. According to Jewish prophecy, it was also where a new temple would be built—once the Dome of the Rock was gone. Many of these Jews, like Deker’s fanatical superior officer, Colonel Uri Elezar, refused to set foot on such holy ground.

None of this was a problem for Deker. He could care less. Deker had been recruited by Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, precisely because he was a secular American Jew who had served with the U.S. Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan as a demolitions officer. Who better to protect the Temple Mount, he was told, than a twenty-six-year-old who specialized in the destruction of major structures and equally offended both sides of the religious divide?

Deker followed the route he had planned well in advance, timing his steps with the movements of the Palestinian security guards of the Islamic Waqf, or religious trust.

For almost a thousand years the Waqf had served as the protectors of the Temple Mount, even after Israel captured Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Such was their status as the true guardians of Islam—and allegedly above the petty political interests of the modern Palestinian Authority, which claimed it had sovereignty over the site.

Deker, however, knew the Waqf to be as political as any Muslim organization; it simply saw the Arab-Israeli struggle in terms of centuries, not decades. So far as the Waqf was concerned, Israel’s resurrection as a modern state in 1948 after three thousand years of exile was but a foul blot on the long scroll of history. Israel, meanwhile, decided it best to prevent unnecessary provocations by its own more zealous citizens. So not only did it allow the Waqf to continue to manage the Temple Mount, it even enforced a controversial ban on Jewish prayers there.

When Deker finally reached the east wall of the Dome of the Rock mosque, he pressed his back against the blue ceramic tiles of the outer wall and peered around the corner. A Waqf guard was making his way across the vast plaza toward the other mosque on the Mount, the silver-capped Al-Aqsa. Deker waited until the guard passed under the ma’avzin arches and disappeared down the steps to the lower plaza. Then without hesitation he darted across the colonnaded entrance of the mosque and ducked inside.

The Waqf officer in charge that night was rounding one of the titanic marble columns that supported the dome twenty meters overhead when Deker entered the mosque. The Palestinian managed to grab his radio, but before he could engage the device to transmit even a sound, Deker gave him a chop to the throat. He crumpled to the floor.

Deker made sure the guard still had a pulse before he turned to his right and followed the plush ruby carpet to the steps that led down to a cave dedicated to King Solomon. A relic of the Crusades, the cave had been carved out by the Order of Knights Templar after they had converted the Dome of the Rock into their Templum Domini, or “Temple of Our Lord.”

Medieval maps marked the cave as the “center of the world,” and the “well of souls” beneath it was said to have once served as the resting place of the legendary lost Ark of the Covenant. According to the ancient biblical account, the sacred Ark—an ornate box made of shittimwood and coated with gold—contained the original Ten