THE PROMISED WAR

by Thomas Greanias

  Deker scanned the night horizon for the first sign of the Allenby Border Terminal. Known as the King Hussein Bridge to Jordanians, the Allenby was the biggest of three bridges over the Jordan River connecting the country of Jordan to the Palestinian territories of the Israeli-controlled West Bank.

  He began flashing distress signals in code with the headlights, but it was too late. Dead ahead was a line of Jordanian military trucks and police patrol cars blocking the road to the bridge.

  “Roadblock!” Elezar shouted, leaning out the passenger-side window and firing bullets until he emptied his magazine.

  No fire was returned. It wasn’t necessary. Through his windshield Deker could see a thick nail strip across the freeway coming up fast, ready to blow their tires and stop them cold before they ever reached the roadblock.

  Deker swung the wheel, scraping the nearside fender against the metal rail so that sparks flew. There was a thud, and then they were off the road, driving over the pocked and bumpy rock of the desert and covered in a cloud of sand and dust. The car skidded across the soil as Deker hit the accelerator, the tires chewing rocks and spitting them up against both sides of the car with loud pings.

  “Ditch the car!” Elezar commanded.

  The banks of the Jordan were coming up fast, even if Deker couldn’t see them. As soon as he sensed the downward slope, he turned to Elezar and yelled, “Jump!”

  Deker grabbed his combat bag from the backseat with one hand, kicked opened his door and dove out, hitting the rocky soil hard and tumbling several times as trained to lessen the impact. He was cut up everywhere, to be sure, and maybe even broke something. But now was the time to move, before the surge of adrenaline from the shock wore off.

  “We go for the old footbridge,” Deker said as he made his way across the moonscape, aware of Elezar stumbling alongside him, breathing heavily. Elezar didn’t seem injured, but no matter how excellent his physical condition, the two additional decades he had on Deker weren’t helping him here, and Deker easily beat him down the banks to the water.

  But he couldn’t find the footbridge. He looked up and down the winding waterway and couldn’t find any bridge in the distance, including the Allenby.

  “The bastards have blown the bridge!” Elezar raged. “They’ve started the attack! This is all your doing, Deker! If we survive this, I’ll have you executed for treason!”

  “Then at least I’ll be executed by Jews,” Deker said, unmoved. “We have to swim for it.”

  Deker lifted his pack onto his shoulder and descended the banks to the river until he felt the cold water around his ankles. Agriculture over the decades had drained the Jordan of whatever depth and current it might have possessed in ancient days. He couldn’t see the other side in the dark. But the distance was probably less than seven meters across, and the depth in some places less than one.

  “Elezar—”

  But there was no reply. He glanced over his shoulder at Elezar, crumpled on the ground. He looked up the embankment at five black figures cut out against the stars. He turned to dive into the water when he felt a searing stab in his back.

  He reached behind, yanked an object out and brought it before his eyes. It was a spear. He stared in confusion and dismay at the large, leaf-shaped spearhead, like something from the Bronze Age exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

  He saw the black stain on the tip in the moonlight and realized he was losing blood fast. His eyes began to blur as he watched the spearhead fall in slow motion from his hands. Then he felt himself lurch forward and tumble into the cold, dark waters of the Jordan.

  4

  Seated inside the airy temple in Los Angeles for his bar mitzvah, his family and friends smiled through tears as the rabbi reached into the open Ark and handed him the Torah scroll containing the Five Books of Moses.

  It was one of the older Torahs, weighing almost fifty pounds, and he struggled to carry it in his slender, trembling hands. It felt like a boulder. He was thirteen and considered a man now according to Jewish tradition. But he was still a year away from his growth spurt, and his tired arms weren’t strong enough to carry it.

  As he tried to balance the Torah, it began to tip. There were gasps from the adults and a snicker or two from the children. Oh, no! The Holy Law! He tried to right it but overcompensated. I can’t hold it! It’s slipping!Like a dream he watched it fall from his hands, just beyond his fingertips, until it hit the platform with a crash and split open.

  Deker woke from his childhood memory into the searing light of day. He felt the hot desert wind blow and heard the rustling of leaves. The scent of flowers was sweet, but it couldn’t mask something foul in the air.

  He blinked his eyes open and tried to move but couldn’t. His legs and arms seemed locked. Then he realized he was naked and wrapped around the golden bark of a seven-meter-tall acacia tree. His right leg was bent around the front of the tree and locked inside his bent left leg, which in turn was locked behind the trunk under the entire weight of his own body. They were using the “grapevine” method to secure him as a prisoner. Very old-school, but effective.

  He was in some kind of grove of acacia trees, gnarly and black against the sky, their green and yellow leaves blowing like ash in the air.

  Pain shot up his spine from the cramping in both his legs. How long have I been left like this?He dug his fingers into the tree trunk and tried to pull himself up. His skin scraped against the bark and he moved up only enough for his head to scratch the sharp thorns of the lower branches. He had an overwhelming desire to throw himself backward to relieve the unbearable pain. But somehow his body sensed that such an action would kill him.

  He lifted his head and scanned the grove. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the brightness. He couldn’t make out the strange black limbs of the golden trees. Then he realized they were rotting human limbs, blackened by the sun. The ash in the air was but flecks of charred flesh carried in the wind.

  Horrified, he looked up into the branches above him and saw a half-rotten, sunken face staring at him with pecked-out eyes.

  Unable to tear his eyes away, he stared back for a moment, a moan unable to take form at the back of his parched throat. All around him were thousands of corpses strung up in the trees, slits of sunlight shining through their perforated torsos, their mouths open in twisted screams.

  He looked away and his throat began to convulse to vomit. But nothing came out. Once, twice, his wrung-out body seemed to constrict from the inside out like a dry, twisted rag around the tree.

  This was some kind of mass grave, a grove of the dead. Except the genocidal maniacs who had done this hadn’t bothered to bury the bodies, preferring to string them up instead as a warning to somebody.

  Suddenly, several shadows blocked the light and he heard a voice in garbled Hebrew say something like “Clean him up.”

  A thin hyssop branch with narrow blue leaves was waved in front of his face and he felt the cool sprinkle of some kind of aromatic water.

  The drops of water on his dry tongue only awakened his senses, and he could taste a fleck of ash.

  He tried to spit it out but could manage only a dry groan as several shadows lifted him up and dragged him away from the tree and propped him up against a low stone wall, where his weak legs could barely keep him upright.

  In the distance Mount Nebo lifted into the sky under the blazing sun. He blinked. By all appearances he was still somewhere in Jordan. But something didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t just his personal predicament. Something greater had shifted around him, and the jarring sense of reality shook him to his core.

  His nightmare, he realized, had only just begun.

  5

  Deker was doused with jars of water several times over before he was dragged naked into a desert tent. The tent itself was large and austere, with only a rough-hewn table on which he saw a ceramic jug and bowl—and the contents of his explosives pack neatly laid in a row. Everything about the place seemed washed-out, as thoug
h he were looking at the world through some sepia-tinted filter.

  Deker was tied to one of two posts that supported the tent. Elezar was tied to the other. His head drooped. He seemed unconscious, and Deker saw bruises and cuts. He couldn’t tell if they were from the night before or new ones. Then he wondered about the spear he had pulled out of his own back as he slid uncomfortably against his post.

  A blast of heat blew in as the tent flap opened wide to reveal a sea of similar tents in the sands outside. It was a sight Deker had seen before in the Palestinian refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank. The same for the haunted faces of the two young soldiers who entered and stood before him in all their muscularity.

  Palestinians, he could only presume.

  “Where the hell am I?” Deker demanded in English. “What did you do to those people?”

  The big, strapping, swarthy guard, who carried a giant bronze sickle sword on his rope belt for effect, glanced over at his smaller, towheaded comrade, a confused look on his face, as if he didn’t understand the prisoner.

  Deker tried Arabic. “Who the hell are you?”

  The big Palestinian answered by slamming Deker’s head against the pole. Deker felt a splinter in his forehead and a trickle of blood run down his cheek.

  “Who are you, spy?” the Palestinian demanded in bad Hebrew. At least, it sounded like Hebrew. “How did you sneak into our camp?”

  “Say nothing, Deker.”

  It was Elezar come to life, a strange look on his face.

  The big Palestinian moved toward the table, on which were laid Deker’s BlackBerry and explosives. He picked up the BlackBerry, fascinated. “Where did you get these?”

  “Toys ‘R’ Us,” Deker replied, this time getting a firm whack on the back of the head from the other guard.

  The big guard pressed some buttons and somehow accessed the music player. The music of “Learn to Fly” by the Foo Fighters blasted out, startling the guard. He dropped the BlackBerry on the table and smashed it to pieces.

  Deker sighed and locked onto the water that splashed out of the ceramic pot on the table when the guard smashed the phone. Deker’s mind immediately went to work on how to escape—after a drink from that pitcher. He licked his dry, parched lips. Just a drop to quench the thirst, he thought, when the flap to the tent fluttered again.

  A lean, wiry, gray-bearded figure in a strange military outfit entered the tent, followed by a short, fat man in a white priestly garment whom Deker recognized as the one who had sprinkled his face with water and ash back in the death grove.

  “General Bin-Nun!” the guards saluted.

  Deker saw Elezar’s jaw drop.

  A walking piece of bronze in his sixties, this General Bin-Nun had a leathery face with hollow cheeks and wild blue eyes with a far-off gaze. A zealot, in other words. The look was typical of tribal chiefs and desert warlords in the Middle East. But Deker did not recognize the man behind the grey beard. Nor the strange body armor and scimitar sword he was sporting, which gave him the ghastly air of some Afghan warlord in a pharaoh’s armor.

  Elezar, however, looked like he had seen a ghost.

  Deker watched as Bin-Nun walked around to the table and examined the weapons. He looked at the pieces of the smashed BlackBerry and shot an angry glance at the big guard, who looked down at the ground. Then he picked up a brick of C-4 and put it down again. He seemed particularly interested in the look and feel of the detonators.

  “Send these over to Kane,” Bin-Nun told the big guard in the same type of bad Hebrew the guard had used on Deker. It rang familiar enough for him to understand, but just barely, like a strange brew of ancient and modern Hebrew with an exotic, almost Egyptian accent.

  The general then turned to Deker, leaning over inches from Deker’s face. Deker could feel his penetrating glare linger before the general’s eyes widened with the shock of recognition at the Star of David around Deker’s 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?”
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  “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.”