by Wilbur Smith
Ahead of them the warning signals of the crossroads caught the headlights, and the driver slowed and signalled the left turn. As the headlights caught the signpost, Peter saw that they had taken the Jericho road, turning away from the Dead Sea, and heading up the valley of the Jordan towards Galilee in the north.
Now the bull’s horns of the new moon rose slowly over the harsh mountain peaks across the valley, and gave enough light to pick out small features in the dry blasted desert around them.
Again the driver slowed, this time for the town of Jericho itself, the oldest site of human communal habitation on this earth – for six thousand years men had lived here and their wastes had raised a mountainous tell hundreds of feet above the desert floor. Archaeologists had already excavated the collapsed walls that Joshua had brought crashing down with a blast of his ram’s horns.
‘A hell of a trick.’ Peter grinned in the darkness. ‘Better than the nuke bomb.’
Just before they reached the tell, the driver swung off the main road. She took the narrow secondary road between the clustered buildings – souvenir stalls, Arab cafés, antique dealers – and slowed for the twisting uneven surface.
They ground up onto higher dry hills in low gear, and at the crest the driver turned again onto a dirt track. Now fine talcum dust filled the interior and Peter sneezed once at the tickle of it.
Half a mile along the track a noticeboard stood on trestle legs, blocking the right of way.
‘Military Zone,’ it proclaimed. ‘No access beyond this point.’
The driver had to pull out onto the rocky verge to avoid the notice, and there were no sentries to enforce the printed order.
Quite suddenly Peter became aware of the great black cliff face that rose sheer into the starry night ahead of them – blotting out half the sky.
Something stirred in Peter’s memory – the high cliffs above Jericho, looking out across the valley of the Dead Sea; of course, he remembered then – this was the scene of the temptation of Christ. How did Matthew record it? Peter cast for the exact quotation:
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them –
Had Caliph deliberately chosen this place for its mystical association, was it all part of the quasi-religious image that Caliph had of himself?
He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up –
Did Caliph truly see himself as the heir to ultimate power over all the kingdoms of the world – that power that the ancient chroniclers had referred to as ‘The Sixth Order of Angels’?
Peter felt his spirits quail in the face of such monumental madness, such immense and menacing vision, compared to which he felt insignificant and ineffectual. Fear fell over him like a gladiator’s net, enmeshing his resolve, weakening him. He struggled with it silently, fighting himself clear of its mesh before it could render him helpless in Caliph’s all-embracing power.
The driver stopped abruptly, turned in the seat and switched on the cab light. She studied him for a moment. Was there a touch of pity in her old and ugly face, Peter wondered?
‘Here,’ she said gently.
Peter drew his wallet from the inner pocket of his blazer.
‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘No, you owe nothing.’
‘Toda raba.’ Peter thanked her in his fragmentary Hebrew, and opened the side door.
The desert air was still and cold, and there was the sagey smell of the low thorny scrub.
‘Shalom,’ said the woman through the open window; then she swung the vehicle in a tight turn. The headlights swept the grove of date palms ahead of them, and then turned back towards the open desert. Slowly the small car pitched and wove along the track in the direction from which they had come.
Peter turned his back on it, allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the muted light of the yellow homed moon and the whiter light of the fat desert stars.
After a few minutes he picked his way carefully into the palm grove. There was the smell of smoke from a dung fire, and the fine blue mist of smoke hung amongst the trees.
Somewhere in the grove he heard a goat bleat plaintively, and then the high thin wail of a child – there must be a Bedouin encampment in the oasis. He moved towards it, and came abruptly into an opening surrounded by the palms. The earth had been churned by the hooves of many beasts, and Peter stumbled slightly in the loose footing and then caught his balance.
In the centre of the opening was the stone parapet which guarded a deep fresh-water well. There was a primitive windlass set above the parapet and another dark object which Peter could not immediately identify, dark and shapeless, crouching upon the parapet.
He went towards it cautiously, and felt his heart tumble within him as it moved.
It was a human figure, in some long voluminous robe that swept the sandy earth, so that it seemed to float towards him in the gloom.
The figure stopped five paces from him, and he saw that the head was covered by a monk’s cowl of the same dark woollen cloth, so that the face was in a forbidding black hole beneath the cowl.
‘Who are your Peter demanded, and his voice rasped in his own ears. The monk did not reply, but shook one hand free of the wide sleeve and beckoned to him to follow, then turned and glided away into the palm grove.
Peter went after him, and within a hundred yards was stepping out hard to keep the monk in sight. His light city shoes were not made for this heavy going, loose sand with scattered outcrops of shattered rock.
They left the palm grove and directly ahead of them, less than a quarter of a mile away, the cliff fell from the sky like a vast cascade of black stone.
The monk led him along a rough but well-used footpath, and though Peter tried to narrow the distance between them, he found that he would have to break into a trot to do so – for although the monk appeared to be a broad and heavy man beneath the billowing robe, yet he moved lithely and lightly.
They reached the cliff, and the path zig-zagged up it, at such a gradient that they had to lean forward into it. The surface was loose with shale and dry earth – becoming progressively steeper. Then underfoot the path was paved, the worn steps of solid rock.
On one hand the drop away into the valley was deeper always and the sheer cliff on the other seemed to lean out as though to press him over the edge.
Always the monk was ahead of him, tireless and quick, his feet silent on the worn steps, and there was no sound of labouring breath. Peter realized that a man of that stamina and bulk must be immensely powerful. He did not move as you might expect a man of God and prayer to move. There was the awareness and balance of a fighting man about him, the unconscious pride and force of the warrior. With Caliph nothing was ever as it seemed, he thought.
The higher they climbed, so the moonlit panorama below them became more magnificent, a soaring vista of desert and mountain with the great shield of the Dead Sea a brilliant beaten silver beneath the stars.
– All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, Peter thought.
They had not paused to rest once on the climb. How high was it, Peter wondered – a thousand feet, fifteen hundred perhaps? His own breathing was deep and steady, he was not yet fully extended and the light sweat that dewed his forehead cooled in the night air.
Something nudged his memory, and he sniffed at the faintly perfumed aroma on the air. It was not steady, but he had caught it faintly once or twice during the climb.
Peter was plagued by the non-smoker’s acute sense of smell; perfumes and odours always had special significance for him – and this smell was important, but he could not quite place it now. It nagged at him, but then it was lost in a host of other more powerful odours – the smell of human beings in community.
The smell of cooking smoke, of food and the underlying sickly taint of rotting garbage and primitive sewage disposal.
Somewhere long ago he had seen photographs of the ancient
monastery built into the top of these spectacular cliffs, the caves and subterranean chambers honeycombed the crest of the rock face, and walls of hewn rock had been built above them by men dead these thousand years.
Yet the memory of that faint perfumed aroma lingered with Peter, as they climbed the last hundred feet of that terrifying drop and came out suddenly against the stone tower and thick fortification, into which was set a heavy timber door twelve feet high and studded with iron bolts.
At their approach the door swung open. There was a narrow stone passageway ahead of them lit by a single storm lantern in a niche at the corner of the passageway.
As Peter stepped through the gate, two other figures closed on each side of him out of the darkness and he moved instinctively to defend himself, but checked the movement and stood quiescent with his hand half raised as they searched him with painstaking expertise for a weapon.
Both these men were dressed in single-piece combat suits, and they wore canvas paratrooper boots. Their heads were covered by coarse woollen scarves wound over mouth and nose so only their eyes showed. Each of them carried the ubiquitous Uzi sub-machine guns, loaded and cocked and slung on shoulder straps.
At last they stood back satisfied, and the monk led Peter on through a maze of narrow passages. Somewhere there was the sound of monks at their devotions, the harsh chanting of the Greek Orthodox service. The sound of it, and the smoky cedarwood aroma of burning incense, became stronger, until the monk led Peter into a cavernous, dimly lit church nave hewn from the living rock of the cliff.
In the gloom the old Greek monks sat like long embalmed mummies in their tall dark wooden pews. Their time-worn faces masked by the great black bushes of their beards. Only their eyes glittered, alive as the jewels and precious metals that gilded the ancient religious icons on the stone walls.
The reek of incense was overpowering, and the hoarse chant of the office missed not a single beat as Peter and the robed monk passed swiftly amongst them.
In the impenetrable shadows at the rear of the church, the monk seemed abruptly to disappear, but when Peter reached the spot he discovered that one of the carved pews had been swung aside to reveal a dark secret opening in the rock.
Peter went into it cautiously It was totally dark – but his feet found shallow stone steps, and he climbed a twisting stairway through the rock – counting the steps to five hundred, each step approximately six inches high.
Abruptly he stepped out into the cool desert night again. He was in a paved open courtyard, with the brilliant panoply of the stars overhead, the cliff rising straight ahead and a low stone parapet protecting the sheer drop into the valley behind him.
Peter realized that this must be one of the remotest and most easily defensible rendezvous that Caliph could have chosen – and there were more guards here.
Again they came forward, two of them, and searched him once again even more thoroughly than at the monastery gate.
While they worked Peter looked around him swiftly. The level courtyard was perched like an eagle’s eyrie on the brink of the precipice, the parapet wall was five feet high Across the courtyard were the oblong entrances to caves carved into the cliff face. They would probably be the retreats of the monks seeking solitude.
There were other men in the courtyard, wearing the same uniform with heads hidden by the Arab shawl headgear. Two of them were setting out flashlight beacons in the shape of a pyramid.
Peter realized they were beacons for an aircraft. – Not an aircraft. A helicopter was the only vehicle which would be able to get into this precarious perch on the side of the precipice.
All right then, the beacons would serve to direct a helicopter down into the level paved courtyard.
One of the armed guards ended his body search by checking the buckle of Peter’s belt, tugging it experimentally to make certain it was not the handle of a concealed blade.
He stood back and motioned Peter forward. Across the courtyard the big monk waited patiently at the entrance to one of the stone cells that opened onto the courtyard.
Peter stooped through the low entrance. The cell was dimly lit by a stinking kerosene lamp set in a stone niche above the narrow cot. There was a crude wooden table against one wall, a plain crucifix above it and no other ornamentation.
Hewn from the rock wall was a ledge which acted as a shelf for a dozen heavy battered leather-bound books and a few basic eating utensils. It was also a primitive seat.
The monk motioned him towards it, but himself remained standing by the entrance to the cell with his hands thrust into the wide sleeves of his cassock, his face turned away and still masked completely by the deep hood.
There was utter silence from the courtyard beyond the doorway, but it was an electric waiting silence.
Suddenly Peter was aware of the perfumed aroma again, here in the crude stone cell, and then with a small tingling shock he recognized it. The smell came from the monk.
He knew instantly who the big man in the monk’s cowl was, and the knowledge confused him utterly, for long stricken moments.
Then like the click of a well-oiled lock slipping home it all came together. He knew – oh God – he knew at last.
The aroma he had recognized was the faint trace of the perfumed smoke of expensive Dutch cheroots, and he stared fixedly at the big hooded monk.
Now there was a sound on the air, a faint flutter like moth’s wings against the glass of the lantern, and the monk cocked his head slightly, listening intently.
Peter was balancing distances and times and odds in his head.
The monk, the five armed men in the courtyard, the approaching helicopter –
The monk was the most dangerous factor. Now that Peter knew who he was, he knew also that he was one of the most highly trained fighting men against whom he could ever match himself.
The five men in the yard – Peter blinked with sudden realization. They would not be there any longer It was as simple as that. Caliph would never allow himself to be seen by any but his most trusted lieutenants, and by those about to die. The monk would have sent them away. They would be waiting close by, but it would take them time to get back into action.
There were only the monk and Caliph. For he knew that the dinning of rotor and engine was bringing Caliph in to the rendezvous. The helicopter sounded as though it were already directly overhead. The monk’s attention was on it. Peter could see how he held his head under the cowl, he was off-guard for the first time.
Peter heard the sound of the spinning rotors change as the pilot altered pitch for the vertical descent into the tiny courtyard. The cell was lit through the doorway by the reflection of the helicopter’s landing lights beating down into the courtyard with a relentless white glare.
Dust began to swirl from the down-draught of the rotors, it smoked in pale wisps into the cell and the monk moved.
He stepped to the doorway, the empty dark hole in the cowl which was his face turned briefly away from Peter as he glanced out through the entrance of the cell.
It was the moment for which Peter had waited, his whole body was charged, like the S in an adder’s neck before it strikes. At the instant that the monk turned his head away, Peter launched himself across the cell.
He had ten feet to go, and the thunder of the helicopter’s engines covered all sound – yet still some instinct of the fighting man warned the huge monk, and he spun into the arc of Peter’s attack. The head under the cowl dropped defensively, so that Peter had to change his stroke. He could no longer go for the kill at the neck, and he chose the right shoulder for a crippling blow. His hand was stiff as a headman’s blade and it slogged into the monk’s shoulder between the neck and the humerus joint of the upper arm. Peter heard the collar bone break with a sharp brittle crack, high above even the roar of the helicopter’s engines.
With his left hand Peter caught the monk’s crippled arm at the elbow and yanked it up savagely, driving the one edge of shattered bone against the other so it grated harshly, tw
isting it so the bone shards were razor cutting edges in their own living flesh – and the monk screamed, doubling from the waist to try and relieve the intolerable agony in his shoulder.
Shock had paralysed him, the big powerful body went slack in Peter’s grasp.
Peter used all his weight and the impetus of his rush to drive the monk’s head into the doorjamb of the cell; skull met stone with a solid clunk and the big man dropped facedown to the paved floor.
Peter rolled him swiftly and pulled up the skirts of the cassock. Under it the man wore paratrooper boots and the blue full-length overalls of Thor Command. On his webbing belt was the blue steel and polished walnut butt of the Browning Hi-power .45 pistol in its quick-release holster. Peter sprang it from its steel retaining clamp and cocked the pistol with a sweep of the left hand. It would be loaded with Velex explosives.
The woollen folds of the cowl had fallen back from Colin Noble’s head, the wide generous mouth now hanging open slackly, the burned-toffee eyes glazed with concussion, the big crooked prize-fighter’s nose – all the well-remembered features, once so dearly cherished in comradeship.
Blood was streaming from Colin’s thick curling hairline, running down his forehead and under his ear – but he was still conscious.
Peter put the muzzle of the Browning against the bridge of his nose The Velex bullet would cut the top off his skull. Peter had lost his wig in those desperate seconds, and he saw recognition spark in Colin’s stunned eyes.
‘Peter! No!’ croaked Colin desperately. ‘– I’m Cactus Flower!’
The shock of it hit Peter solidly, and he released the pressure on the Browning’s trigger. It held him for only a moment and then he turned and ducked through the low doorway leaving Colin sprawling on the stone floor of the cell.
The helicopter had settled into the courtyard. It was a five-seater Bell Jet Ranger, painted in the blue and gold colours of Thor Command – and on its side was the Thor emblem and the words: