Conrad nodded. “Why do you think Solomon married all those Egyptian princesses? To gain access to the sand hydraulic technology that built the pyramids. Except what he did here was amazing. He inverted the design so that everything you know is upside down.”
That’s crazy, she thought. But now that he mentioned it, the tunnel made sense.
Conrad said, “You know that shaft I was telling you about under the Dome of the Rock?”
She craned her head up and saw the opening in the ceiling overhead. It appeared to go all the way up to the top of the Temple Mount. “I thought I felt a draft.”
“Back when the First Temple was up there, the top of the shaft was capped with a platform on which the Ark of the Covenant could be lowered during a siege,” he told her. “Here, take this.”
She looked down in her palm and saw a brick of C4 explosive. “Where on earth did you get this?”
“From the driver of your Sunday-school van in Gaza,” he told her. “Now climb up on my shoulders and stick this inside the mouth of the shaft. We need to close it off in case we fail to stop the Flammenschwert. Otherwise, a geyser of fire is going to incinerate that mosque.”
She took his hand, put a boot on his knee, and stepped onto his shoulders until her head was inside the bottom of the shaft. She planted the C4 on the wall of the shaft and jumped back down onto the stone platform.
She said, “You gave us only twenty minutes on the fuse.”
“Insurance that we close the shaft to the surface before the Flammenschwert goes off,” he explained. “The important thing is to make sure the mosque is still standing on the surface. Without Arab uprisings in the streets, Gellar can’t justify the disproportionate Israeli response that will ignite a wider war. Whatever happens down below here is, well, secondary.”
She looked down into the great gallery below. “The King’s Chamber is down at the bottom, isn’t it?”
“Right.” He pulled out his Glock, the one he had killed Lorenzo with, and checked the clip. “So are the globes, the Flammenschwert, and God knows what else.”
50
With a full-blown national emergency under way, Commander Sam Deker of the Israeli Shin Bet had no trouble assembling the elite five-member counter-terrorism unit known as the Yamam. They were beneath the temple in under six minutes.
They gathered inside the top-secret Map Room, itself a national secret. The chamber looked like a flight briefing room, with theater-style seating for six in front of computer consoles and a nine-by-twenty-four-foot curved screen with 160-degree views. Each officer carried the standard M4 assault rifle with a Glock 21 .45 sidearm.
“We all follow the plan used in the Taibe raid a few years ago,” Deker told them. “We’re to capture or kill an armed group hidden in the tunnels below us and secure a device that may be nuclear in nature before it goes off. I cannot overemphasize how grave this threat is to the Temple Mount and the very existence of Israel.”
High-definition three-dimensional images of the tunnel system filled the screen. In addition to live security feeds, the computer models used military flight-simulator technology to enable virtual remote viewing around the tunnels. Gellar in particular preferred a remote hookup. Being Orthodox, he refused to walk the holy limestone tunnels himself, leaving it to impure types like Deker.
“Four security zones make up the Temple Mount in descending order: this Map Room, Solomon’s Hall, the King’s Chamber, and the four River Gates region. We pair in three teams of two. Team One stations itself here. Team Two stations itself in the King’s Chamber and monitors access to the River Gates. Team Three patrols the tunnels. Shoot to kill anybody who is not in this room. Should you exit the tunnels alive, you will not speak of this again.”
The faces he saw understood him perfectly. Yamam forces specialized in both hostage-rescue operations and offensive takeover raids against targets in civilian areas such as the Temple Mount. Most of their activities were classified, and their success was credited to other units. Most important to Deker, they answered to the civilian Israeli police forces rather than the military, although most came exclusively from Israeli special forces units.
“Let’s go,” Deker said.
As the unit prepared to disperse, the officer who had been paired with Deker called him over to his console. “There’s something you should see, sir,” he said.
Apparently, the officer had been curious enough to research the construction of the Map Room and had called up the names of the A-list experts who had consulted on the project with the Israel Antiquities Authority and the UCLA Urban Simulation Team in the United States.
The top archaeologist on the list was Conrad Yeats.
“Looks like Yeats kept or cut a tunnel or two for himself,” Deker said, red-faced. “If it’s not on the map, it’s not on the camera. We’re going to have to move out with the others.”
“There’s more, sir,” the officer said. “The shaft plugs to secure the tunnels were manufactured by an Israeli company based at the Tefen Industrial Park. It’s a subsidiary of Midas Minerals & Mining.”
Deker frowned. “The Midas conglomerate?”
“Yes, sir. And it appears that General Gellar has an interest in the Tefen subsidiary. What does it mean?”
Deker heard a thud and turned to see two Yamam on the floor and the rest gasping for breath. He smelled almonds in the air and realized it was cyanide gas. The door to the chamber was closing from the top down, and Deker knew that anybody trapped inside would die.
“Gellar has betrayed us!” Deker shouted, and made a flying leap for it.
51
The Flammenschwert was gone.
Conrad stood with Serena inside the King’s Chamber—an expansive vault in the shape of a perfect one-by-two rectangle, its height of forty cubits exactly half the length of its eighty-cubic floor diagonal. In the center of the stone floor stood the three globes, but the armillary globe was split open like an empty womb. On each of the chamber’s four walls was a towering archway, each leading down its own tunnel.
Four tunnels, two people, little time, Conrad thought. The Flammenschwert could have been taken down any one of the four shafts.
But Serena was already ahead of him, reading the ancient Hebrew letters over the archways, trying to figure out which tunnel to take, because they’d only have one shot.
“This is incredible,” she said. “Do you know what these say?”
“I have my suspicions,” he told her. “The star shafts of an inverted pyramid obviously can’t point to the heavens. So I figured there weren’t any beneath the Temple Mount. These are well shafts.”
“Each one leads to a different river,” she said. “Their names are written in some kind of Proto-Semitic language. It’s practically pre-Atlantean. That door says Tigris, that one says Euphrates, that one over there says Pishon, and this one here says—”
“Gihon,” Conrad said. “The four rivers of Eden. So Uriel is the angel with the flaming sword at the gate of Eden after all.”
Serena said, “But Eden was in Mesopotamia, where the ancient Babylonian civilization originated.”
Eden was like Atlantis, Conrad knew. Everybody had a different idea about where it could be, and archaeological evidence to back it up. But Jewish legend pinpointed the land of Israel as one distinct possibility. What seemed to throw off most archaeologists was the second chapter of Genesis, which described four separate rivers in the Land of Eden that shared a common headwater source. Only two were ever found—the Tigris and the Euphrates. Nobody had discovered the rivers Pishon or Gihon. But Genesis never said all four rivers were aboveground.
“Mesopotamia is just where the Tigris and Euphrates empty out,” Conrad told her. “Their headwater source could be down here somewhere, along with the underground waterways of the Pishon and the Gihon.”
“Genesis does refer to underground waterways providing water to the surface,” she said, the linguist in her apparently rising to the surface. “The original Hebrew word
is ‘springs.’ Genesis says the springs came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. And the Book of Revelation says that at the end of time, those four rivers will flow out from the temple.”
Conrad closed the armillary globe and locked its two hemispheres in place. He could feel Serena’s stare as he began to adjust the dial that controlled a tiny marker in the spiral groove representing the motion of the sun.
“This works just like the observatory deck at the Temple of the Water Bearer in Atlantis and the west patio of the U.S. Capitol,” he said. “The only difference is that this deck is underground. You can’t look at the skies with your naked eye to mark the position of the sun in relation to the stars. You have to use these globes.”
“Gellar said the armillary uses planetary geometry,” Serena said.
“It does,” he said. “The planets align to form the Star of David. Which was how the Israelis got their national symbol in the first place. It’s astrologically derived, just like the fish symbol of the early Church in the age of Pisces. Anyway, the trick is to follow the path of the sun across the alignment until X marks the spot. In this case, it’s a location beneath the Temple Mount.”
“Uriel’s Gate,” Serena said all of a sudden. “The gate to paradise. That’s where Midas has taken the Flammenschwert.”
“Eureka.” Conrad checked the clip in his Glock again and rammed it back in. The click broke Serena’s trance; she stared at the gun and at him. Which was what he’d intended. “The sun marker points to the Gihon shaft to reach Uriel’s Gate,” he said.
“You have to be sure, Conrad.”
“This isn’t a panel discussion at some conference. Look around you. We’re in an ancient chamber deep beneath the Temple Mount with three globes and four doorways. The Gihon Spring of Jerusalem obviously has its source in the same Gihon River of Eden.”
He stopped and stared at the gateway marked Gihon.
“That’s it, Serena. That’s the revelation of the globes: The Temple Mount guards the gate to Eden.”
“The River of Life,” Serena said. “The properties in the water contain the building blocks of life on earth.”
Conrad nodded. “This is what Midas was after all along, what all the money in the world can’t buy him: life. He’s using the Flammenschwert to light the Gihon ablaze and trace it back to its headwater source.”
“And at the same time destroy the Dome of the Rock,” Serena said.
Conrad heard another click of a Glock, but it wasn’t his. He looked up at Serena, who was staring over his shoulder, and then heard a voice say, “Hands up, Yeats.”
Slowly, Conrad turned to see an Israeli soldier pointing a gun at him—Sam Deker. Conrad knew him from his earlier digs at the Temple Mount. A good if humorless man.
“It’s your boss you should be after, Deker,” Conrad said.
Deker kept the gun trained on him. “What makes you sure Gellar is involved?”
“Because he told me,” Serena said when a bullet struck Deker in the shoulder.
Conrad turned to see Vadim pop up from the entry of the Gihon Gate. He made a grab for Serena, and she screamed as he pulled her down into the hellhole.
“Serena!” Conrad shouted and ran over to the tunnel as a flurry of bullets flew up at him from the dark. He dove for cover. Breathing hard, he realized that Midas and Vadim were one step ahead of him—the final step. They must have removed the Flammenschwert from its globe and were preparing to detonate it at the source of the Gihon below. And now they had Serena.
“There’s another way down to the Gihon,” said Deker, who was sitting up against another wall, his hand on his shoulder, blood seeping through his fingers.
“Oh, so now you’re convinced that I’m not with Gellar?”
“Just tell me what you’re really after, Yeats.”
Conrad said, “Stopping Armageddon. Midas has an incendiary weapon that’s about to ignite the Gihon and everything on the surface. I have to stop it, and you have to go back up and stop Gellar if I fail.”
“You know how to dispose of a nuclear device? Because that’s what I do,” Deker said. “Maybe I should go down and you go back up.”
“It’s not exactly a nuke, but I can disarm it,” Conrad said. “But I can’t disarm Gellar if I go up. Or stop your government from overreacting after the Arabs overreact if the Dome of the Rock blows.”
Deker nodded to the Pishon Gate on the other wall. “You can take that shaft down to the end and turn right. Follow the riverbank, and it will lead you to the two pillars by the Gihon.”
Conrad helped Deker to his feet and then made his way to the Pishon Gate. He looked back inside the King’s Chamber. Deker had already disappeared back up to Solomon’s Stairway, and Conrad realized that he had forgotten to tell Deker about the C4 under the Dome of the Rock well shaft.
No matter, Conrad thought as he started down the shaft. Deker had as much chance of reaching the surface as Conrad had in reaching the Flammenschwert in time to stop it.
52
Midas was with the Flammenschwert at the banks of the Gihon River when Vadim and Serena emerged from the two pillars that guarded the entrance of the tunnel back up into the Temple Mount.
“Behold the Gihon,” Midas told her with a sweeping gesture across the vast subterranean cavern. He made a show of punching in the activation code on the instrument panel. The display lit up as the Flammenschwert came to life.
The timer counted down from 6:00…5:59…5:58…
Midas let out a sigh of relief. He had done it. He had obtained the Sword of Fire. He had found the gate to Eden and the primordial waters of life on earth, the waters that could heal his fatal neurological condition and let him live forever. The very River of Life that had scared even the God of Genesis. Now Midas would blow it open and restore paradise on earth.
The old order would pass. The old religions would be swept away in the cleansing fire of Armageddon. Then the cool water of the new world order would come. And he would control it. He, the Water Bearer. Truly, this would be the Age of Aquarius. The age of Pisces and the Church was over.
“Vadim,” he called. “It’s time.” He motioned Vadim over to the Flammenschwert and watched him take it to the water.
“It’s going to work like this, Sister Serghetti,” Midas said, digging his gun into her side. “The Flammenschwert will ignite the water. The heat will force it to rise like a coil through the well shaft you just emerged from, gather steam from the chambers above, and ultimately spew out fire like a geyser, destroying everything topside. It could alter geography significantly. In fact, I think that’s what this whole complex was built to do, like some sort of geothermal machine.”
“I know how it works, Midas. I’ve seen it before.”
Midas said nothing for a moment, making sure Vadim launched the Flammenschwert into the water correctly. The casing assembly floated by itself, an amber light blinking six times before burning a steady red.
Serena said, “Hope you’ve got a place to hide when this blows, Midas, because you’re going to fry when it does.”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Midas said, then barked his final order to Vadim. “You stay with the Flammenschwert until the two-minute mark. Then you can join us in the Map Room. It should be clear by now.”
Vadim looked unsure about staying behind but nodded.
Midas could feel Serena shaking as he pushed her back toward a stone stairway she hadn’t seen before. “The Map Room, above the King’s Chamber, is separated from the main line and closed off. We’ll ride out the chaos for a few days and then emerge into a new world.”
Midas knew Serena was smart enough to accept that he was going to kill her, but she would go along with him in the vain hope that her beloved Conrad Yeats would come to the rescue. Midas doubted that. But just in case, he would keep her close.
“I see what Gellar thinks he’s going to get out of this, Midas,” she said as they began to ascend the narrow stairwell. “And I see wh
at the Alignment is sure it will get out of this. But I don’t see what you get out of blowing up the Dome of the Rock.”
“That’s not what I’m blowing up, Sister Serghetti. I’m blowing up what is at the other end of the Gihon River, buried deep beneath us. The very Gate to Eden. The primordial waters of life itself. If you can live forever, you don’t need heaven. You don’t need God. Because you are a god.”
“You know, Lucifer had that problem. He confused himself with the Creator.”
Midas laughed, but then the steps started to shake from an explosion high above. He felt an elbow in his gut as Serena tried to push him down the steps. He recovered swiftly and gave her a blow across the face with his gun. She cried out in pain.
“I’m in control,” he hissed in her ear. “Soon the world will know it.”
She said nothing in the dark, but he could hear her breathing.
He was pushing her forward when he heard a gunshot back at the Gihon. Then the voice of Conrad Yeats rang out.
“Vadim bit the big vitamin, Midas. I’ve got a deal for you: the Flammenschwert for Serena.”
53
URIEL’S GATE
Conrad stood dripping wet by the banks of the underground river. The Flammenschwert warhead he had retrieved from the water was on the stone platform next to Vadim’s body. The timer was down to three minutes and counting.
How the hell am I going to deactivate this thing? he wondered as he began to unscrew the casing of the sphere with the blade of his knife. Then he thought better of it and stopped. Maybe all I have to do is keep this out of the water when it explodes.
The Atlantis Revelation: A Thriller Page 19