The conductor of this symphony was clearly General Hamas, and Deker watched as Hamas with great fanfare pointed his thick finger at him for all to see.
“Behold!” Hamas cried out. “The Hebrew!”
He spoke as if that declarative statement were enough in itself to condemn Deker to death. And apparently it was.
There were no jeers now, only stone-cold silence around the outdoor courtyard. There would be no victory cheer until every Hebrew was slaughtered that day. He was simply to be the symbolic first. Just as Bin-Nun had made flint knives to circumcise his troops and unify them in heart and mind before battle, so Hamas was intent on using Deker’s execution as a showpiece to rally Reah in preparation for the impending assault. And if Bin-Nun had his Phineas and Levites to contend with, Hamas had to appease Molech and his priests. To Hamas, Deker was just a piece of foreskin to be tossed into the fires for Molech.
Another gong sounded and the elegant but weak figure of King Alakh stood up and said, “Say your last, Hebrew.”
Deker said the only thing he could say under the circumstances, which was something to support his army, his people and his faith, even if he had little to show for it.
“You hear the blast of trumpets, King Alakh!” he shouted. “You see the armies of Israel surrounding your city. You have been warned. And still you have not surrendered or spared the lives of your people by letting them leave your gates. Their blood will be on your hands, not ours. Leave now and save yourselves from total annihilation. Mark my words, this city will be rubble and dust on the ash heap of history before the sun sets today.”
King Alakh looked at General Hamas and, for the benefit of the people, asked aloud, “Is what this Hebrew says true?”
“No, great King,” Hamas replied.
The whole exchange seemed scripted to Deker, and he expected Hamas to produce the C-4 bricks as evidence of his success in smashing the Hebrew plot to bring down the walls.
In fact, he was hoping for it.
But Hamas produced no magic mud bricks. Instead, he dramatically marched over to the pile of corpses by Molech and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.
“Recognize any friends, Hebrew?”
Deker stared. Four of the twisted faces on top he recognized as belonging to some of the Gadites who had joined up with Bin-Nun at Gilgal. He began to gag at the back of his throat.
The corpses being fed to Molech were Israelite troops.
“Behold the treachery of the Hebrews!” Hamas declared. “Their evil designs have been thwarted.”
Panic washed over Deker as he tried to think where the soldiers had come from, what this all meant. The temple guards lifted one of the dead Gadites by the head and feet and began to swing him to and fro before flinging him into the fiery furnace for Molech to devour.
A flare from the great stone oven stabbed outward and singed the brows of one of the guards, who winced in agony but refused to cry out before Hamas, who, having firmly dug the knife of condemnation in Deker’s back, decided to give it a final twist.
“This stupid, mindless spy was yet another ruse of Bin-Nun’s, a decoy to the real plot to destroy us. Fortunately, they had help from one of our informants.”
A side door in the fortress wall opened and out walked two Reahn guards, followed by Rahab.
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She wore a flowing white robe with her braided hair piled on top of her head like a goddess. Deker watched her turn to face the king and tribunal. She didn’t even glance at him as Hamas spoke.
“Rahab the priestess of Molech will now testify to the treachery of the Hebrews and the courage of our soldiers!” Hamas shouted out.
“The spy came to me again six nights ago,” she declared. “He told me he would use magic mud bricks to open their own gate in our wall.”
“Magic mud bricks,” Hamas repeated for all to hear. “Are these the magic mud bricks he showed you?”
Deker craned his neck as Hamas pulled off a white cover from the stack of ten C-4 bricks on the table by the tribunal. His heart skipped a beat with hope. Somehow, should he be afforded some Samson-like moment, he would use the bricks to bring down the walls of the fortress on top of them all.
“Yes, General Hamas,” Rahab replied, in a monotone that told Deker that she, too, had been carefully coached on what to say. “He told me the clay had come from the moon.”
“And what did he tell you his plans were?”
“He told me the Hebrew plan was for me to harbor him six nights until today, at which point he would be given a signal to destroy our walls with these magic mud bricks. But he instead chose to disobey the orders of General Bin-Nun and attempt to bring down our walls the first night. This is when he was captured by you, General Hamas.”
Hamas nodded, and then shocked Deker with his next question: “But this wasn’t the real Hebrew plan, was it?”
“No,” she replied.
Hamas asked, “What was the secret plan of General Bin-Nun, kept even from his unfortunate spy here?”
“The very next day, when the Israelite army first marched around our walls, six more Hebrews climbed into my window,” Rahab testified. “The dust kicked up by the Israelite army circling our walls blinded our sharpshooters and provided the Hebrews the cover they required.”
“And this event was repeated again each successive day until this morning, was it not?” Hamas asked her. “Every day another six Hebrew soldiers, under the cover of dust, would climb up our wall and into your cellar until all thirty-six had been assembled to carry out General Bin-Nun’s true plan to bring down our city.”
“Yes, General Hamas.”
Deker swallowed hard. So that’s why Bin-Nun had been so keen for him to secure a scarlet cord in Rahab’s window, Deker realized. It wasn’t to mark her house so invading troops could avoid it: it was to mark her window so these secret platoons could enter the city after him.
Hamas looked at him with hate-filled eyes and a triumphant smile. “A plan he kept secret even from this sorry spy and sacrifice before us this morning.”
“Yes,” Rahab said, still avoiding his gaze.
“And what exactly, Priestess Rahab, was Bin-Nun’s plan for this secret force of thirty-six men?”
Rahab now turned to Deker, with anything but hate and only sorrow in her eyes. “The plan was to sneak enough troops into the city through my window to create a force just large enough to rush our guards stationed inside the main gate, kill them and then open the gate for the Israelite invaders.”
Now the gasps and jeers finally erupted all around as the simplicity and audacity of the Hebrew treachery was revealed. And Deker was one of those who gasped, personally feeling the sting of betrayal not only from Rahab but more pointedly from Bin-Nun.
This was just like crossing the Jordan, Deker thought bitterly. Bin-Nun may have hoped for the best, but he had anticipated the worst. That meant he had expected Deker to fail all along with the C-4. So he instead used him to secure Plan B, which in all probability was Plan A from the get-go: sneak a covert force into the city and open the gates from the inside. Once inside, they could use battering rams to blow the walls outward. The very same plan that the ancient Greeks would use centuries later with their Trojan horse.
“And how far away is your home from the city gate?” Hamas pressed Rahab.
“It is only fifty cubits away.”
Hamas nodded. “So they could rush the gate from the inside in moments and catch our men by surprise.”
“Yes. As soon as they heard the signal this morning.”
“And what is that signal?”
“A ram’s horn, followed by a war cry.”
Murmurs everywhere, and Deker didn’t know if the sound was of relief that the plot had been exposed or the realization that the horn could blow at any moment and the assault would begin.
“So, at the sound of the war cry, the Israelites will rush our walls while the infiltrators rush our gate from the inside and open it to the invading Hebrew troops.”
“Yes, General Hamas. That was the plan.”
“Was the plan,” Hamas said with finality as he spat at the feet of Deker. “A plan I have crushed.”
Hamas let it sink in—for the king, the noblemen and military officers, and most of all for Deker, who got the distinct impression that this show was for his benefit. Not only had Hamas beaten him, but he had shown that Bin-Nun had never had any confidence in him whatsoever.
And it was all true, Deker knew. Had he just waited even a day, he would have been in Rahab’s cellar to see the six new men and learn the true plan. No, he had to go ahead to save these people about to slay him as they had slain the thirty-six and soon all of Israel.
A final gong sounded and King Alakh rose to deliver the official death sentence.
“They are the Hebrews, whom their God has cursed and with whom He is so angry that He will never again be satisfied,” the king said. “Israel is a warmonger to the nations, and now they are attacking us. Always they slap away the hands extended in peace and instead choose to kill everything that breathes before them.”
The jeers began to grow louder now as the king continued.
“For this Hebrew spy before us, death is a judgment of mercy,” the king cried out. “For he shall be a burnt offering to Molech, and his kind thereafter. May Molech feast on Hebrews for one hundred days!”
The crowd erupted into cheers as guards cut Deker from the obelisk and pointed him toward Molech with the tips of their spears. The heat from the metallic god was intense, and Deker doubted he would live to even see the inside of the furnace.
“People of Reah!” Hamas called, drawing out his sword and holding it high in the air. “With this sword I will smite the first Hebrew who falls against our walls. And with a new sword I will cut off the head of the last Hebrew alive: Joshua, son of Nun!”
The air seemed to crackle with electricity as Hamas turned to Rahab. For a wild moment Deker thought Hamas was about to throw her into the fire along with him.
“The Hebrews thought to buy your heart with gold,” Hamas said to Rahab for all to hear.
“They did, General Hamas,” she said, and then stepped aside to reveal her brother Ram behind her. He was carrying something in his arms. “They gave me this bowl of gold and silver coins to betray my people. I now offer these to my god Molech as a sacrifice, so you may melt them into the sword that will cut off the head of Israel forever.”
Ram offered the bowl up to the sky and turned to face Deker and Molech, and Deker’s throat caught at the sight of the black and red bowl—and a small unmistakable copper fuse sticking out from the coins.
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Deker sucked in his breath and felt his heart pound in his chest as he realized that the bowl of coins was really a frag bomb that Molech was about to devour. It would detonate once the fuse lit inside the Reahn god’s belly, destroying Molech and everybody else in the way of its exploding metal fragments.
The offering is a sign of her faith in Yahweh—and in me. She’s really offering me a way out.
In slow motion he saw Ram hand the bowl over to Rahab, and then she in turn brought it to him. By all appearances the Reahn priestess was giving the Yahweh-worshiping Hebrew his worthless bribe to take with him to his death in the belly of the almighty Molech.
But the look in Rahab’s eyes told Deker she knew very
well what this bowl of coins was supposed to do, or at least what she had been told it could do before the Israelites who gave it to her were captured and killed, some or all perhaps even by her brother Ram.
Rahab stepped right up to Deker, as close as she could, to hand him the bowl. She was chanting, it seemed, but she peered intently into his eyes. The crowd began chanting and roaring along with her, and as their volume swelled she suddenly dropped her voice and spoke to him.
“Samuel Boaz Deker, listen to me: the rest of your bricks are in my cellar,” she whispered in Hebrew as she handed the bowl over to him. “Elezar showed me how to push the button.”
The shock had barely registered in his brain before she pulled away and he stared at her in horror. She didn’t know that the C-4 exploded. She only thought it opened a wider door in a wall.
Elezar had arranged for her to blow up the lower city wall and take herself and her family out with it!
The bowl now weighed like death in Deker’s hands. He simply stood there in the middle of the plaza, flat-footed, waiting for Rahab to back off with Ram, motioning with his eyes back to the gate in the far wall from which they had entered. He couldn’t tell if they had made it, however, because the tip of a spear prompted him to turn his back to them and face Molech and his priests.
A drum roll began beyond view, and Deker took one inexorable step after another toward the towering monument of Molech, smoke bursting out his horns into the sky and stench-filled clouds of burnt flesh belching out his belly.
One last time he looked over his shoulder at the king and tribunal behind him with the entire palace guard. There was no sight of Rahab or Ram, although they could have remained just beyond his view.
He then felt the long spears at his back retract for a moment as the guards prepared to stab him hard and drive him headfirst into the furnace.
That was his chance.
He hurled the heavy bowl of coins in an arc into the great fire and dove to the side of the furnace, hitting the paving stones as a terrific explosion ripped open Molech’s belly and blasted a million metal fragments across the temple courtyard.
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Deker felt the blast in his ringing ears and throughout his body as he struggled to get up. The great idol of Molech, now a creaking mass of metal, collapsed into a heap with a crash. What was once a god was scattered in pieces along with the shredded limbs and charred remains of its worshipers.
There was chaos everywhere as Deker scrambled for his C-4 bricks at the heavy table next to where the tribunal had been seated. The table had been blown back on its side and shattered. The king was dead, half his face blown off. The noblemen had been cut in two through their midsections. The shrapnel had fanned out a meter above the ground, cutting down anything that had been standing.
Deker’s memory flashed to what Hamas had told Rahab on her terrace the week before about the Angel of Death in Egypt. Something about natural gases rolling across the ground of Egypt to kill the firstborns as they slept. At least, that’s what Deker thought he had overheard from his perch in the pergola. Today in Jericho it was the reverse: death had felled everybody standing one meter above the ground—everybody but himself.
Deker scanned the courts. There was no sign of Hamas in the floating dust and ash. Nor of Rahab or Ram. But he found his C-4 bricks scattered behind the pieces of wood. He was able to find only eight bricks, each embedded with bits of metal, and only a single detonator still in one piece. It would have to do. He tore a bloody cape from a fallen Reahn guard, wrapped the C-4 bricks in it and threw it over his shoulder.
In spite of all the carnage around him, Deker knew he had done nothing to the wall that would advance the Israelite attack. He had to blow the north wall of the fortress.
And then somehow, someway, he had to get to Rahab’s and stop her from blowing herself up before the Israelites gave their war cry.
The curtain of debris parted to reveal the iron door to the barracks in the north wall. But it also exposed him to the archers on the ramparts above, who immediately started firing down on the only moving target below.
He made a run for it in the opposite direction, toward the octagonal spire at the south wall that rose over the fortress city. The entrance door was open, the bodies of three guards and two priests on either side. He dove inside just as dozens of arrows rained down behind him.
There were shouts above and he looked up to see that a spiral stone staircase inside the tower ran all the way up to the spire. Between the voices at the top and his position at the bottom, there was a doorway to the ramparts of the fortress wall. He might have just enough time to im
provise and get out of there.
He reached out and dragged in the corpse with the least damaged military uniform and helmet and threw them on. Then he quickly unpacked his C-4 and wired the bricks to his detonator inside the octagonal base of the spire. He wiped his dirty arm across his sweaty face as he worked the fuse and prayed to Yahweh it was still good. He tried to set the timer to five minutes but it displayed only two—and counting.
He swore and jumped up the stone stairwell five steps at a time and ducked out the second-story door just as three Reahns from the tower came into view.
A second later he was outside on the ramparts of the southern wall lined with hundreds of Reahn spearmen and archers. He quickly turned to his right and headed toward the corner watchtower connecting the southern wall with the western wall when the lookouts began shouting after him.
“Go see what they want!” he barked to a couple of soldiers standing in his way, and then brushed past them to the rampart tower.
Instead of following the rampart path through the tower to the western wall of the fortress, he took two flights of steps down to the lower tunnel that ran below. He pushed his way through the reserves to the end, where he climbed another stairwell to reach the rampart of the tower connecting the western and northern walls of the fortress.
As he ran along the top of the northern wall, he looked down to his left and saw the north-side slums of the city below. He could pick out Rahab’s villa nestled next to the lower city wall, as well as the mass of Israelite troops out in the desert.
God, don’t let them give the war cry.
Shouts rang out and Deker looked ahead to see a vengeful Hamas marching straight toward him, a bloody sword in his hand and a black cape flying off the back of his body armor. Marching behind Hamas in lockstep were hundreds of Reahn guards. The rampart shook beneath their boots.
THE PROMISED WAR Page 16