THE PROMISED WAR

by Thomas Greanias

  Deker looked behind him and saw a hundred more Reahn troops emerging from the west tower, hemming him in from that direction as well.

  At that moment he knew his only means of escape was to make a flying eagle leap off the wall into the city below. He began scanning the rooftops for a pile of drying flax or barley to use as a landing pad. But his eyes kept drifting down to the panicked people running through the streets as the great dust cloud of the Israelite army rolled closer and closer to the city.

  Then came the explosion from inside the fortress. Hamas and all his soldiers looked up in shock as the city’s great spire swayed in the sky like a giant stone palm tree, a huge gash at its base as if some divine axe had struck it.

  Deker stared as the watchtower’s spire blocked the sun for a second and cast a dark shadow across the rampart before it began to topple like a falling tree. He stood very still, gauging the trajectory of the fall, and didn’t move.

  Too late, Hamas and his Reahn guards along the middle of the northern rampart looked up to see their impending deaths. The spire crashed across the north wall, slicing clear through to the bottom before breaking into three pieces. A torrent of stones and dust billowed out from the abyss before him.

  Hamas was gone, for good this time.

  And then Deker heard the long blast of a horn like the trumpet of an archangel.

  The Israelites were about to give their war cry.

  46

  Deker raced across the rooftops of the lower city toward Rahab’s, jumping down into the narrow alleys between the battened-down homes as arrows started flying from the fortress archers behind him. He made it to the red-scarf district, opened the gate in front of Rahab’s villa and ducked into the courtyard. The inn was deserted. He climbed down the steps to the cellar.

  “Rahab!” he called out.

  The door was ajar. He pushed it open and found Salmon and Achan on the floor, hands and feet lashed together, mouths gagged, eyes on fire. Rahab slipped from behind the door and rammed the tip of a sword between his shoulder blades.

  “Turn around slowly or I’ll kill you.”

  Deker slowly pivoted and saw her frightened look turn to relief as she dropped the sword and wrapped her arms around him and sobbed.

  “Samuel,” she sobbed. “It’s all lies. I didn’t betray your friends.”

  Deker grasped her firmly at the throat, catching her by surprise as he rammed her against the wall, next to the skulls of her own sisters.

  “Then what do you call that on the floor?”

  “Elezar said they were traitors.”

  “Elezar is dead.”

  “No, he’s not. He left not long ago.”

  Deker was confused. “Where’s the detonator?”

  “Here.” She held up her tight fist, her thumb on the button.

  Slowly he lifted her thumb and then unfurled her fingers to see the detonator, and he cursed Elezar for thinking he could kill two birds—Rahab and the outer wall—with one stone.

  “Untie them,” he ordered, and Rahab quickly loosed Salmon and Achan, who worked his aching jaw as he rubbed his sore wrists.

  Deker looked around and realized there were dozens of people huddled in the shadows of the cellar. They were all members of Rahab’s family, or at least she had counted them as such. He hadn’t noticed them before. The crushing gravity of the situation and lack of time pressed unbearably down upon him.

  “Where are my mud bricks?” he demanded.

  “In my hiding place,” Rahab said.

  She wiped some dirt from the earthen floor to show him a door with a thin knotted rope attached. She then lifted the door to reveal a small compartment with the explosives.

  They were rigged to blow.

  “Elezar,” Deker cursed as he carefully deactivated the wiring and removed the bricks. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Rahab said. “But he left you a sign. He said you would know what it means.”

  She pointed to the inside of the trapdoor she had propped up against the wall. Burned into it was the black outline of a dove.

  The Black Dove.

  Deker stumbled back on his feet, his mind reeling. As much as he hated Elezar, Deker—who questioned everything, even the legitimacy of the State of Israel itself—had never thought to question his loyalty as a Jew. And yet, the evidence was there all along that Elezar was the Black Dove, the legendary Palestinian mole within the IDF.

  Suddenly it all made sense: the right-wing posturing, the image of a Jew beyond reproach, the finger-wagging at the less-than-Jews like Deker in the IDF. Most of all, it was now perfectly clear why Elezar wanted to eliminate Christianity—as well as the State of Israel before it could ever be born out of the Promised Land—by eliminating Rahab.

  Worse than this revelation about Elezar was the realization that this was Deker’s fault, the result of some deep, psychological defect on his part. He had been so wounded about what it meant to be a good Jew, so painfully aware of how much he fell short, that he couldn’t see the hypocrisy and pretense of Elezar, who knew the Torah backwards and forwards. He was a zealot. Just not the kind of zealot that Deker had thought he was.

  “What does it mean?” Salmon asked.

  “Elezar has betrayed us all,” Deker said as Reahn soldiers began to pound on the villa’s doors outside. It would be only minutes before the Reahns stormed the cellar.

  But the stab of betrayal that Deker felt didn’t come from Elezar but from himself. Deker now had to question everything. Because if he missed this, what else had he missed his entire life?

  In his mind he went back to the beginning, to what Elezar could have been doing while he was testing the Temple Mount. Could Elezar have actually been the one who killed Stern? Then he went back even further in his memory, to when he had first met Elezar after the botched attempt on the Black Dove that killed Rachel.

  Jesus Christ, he thought. Elezar killed Rachel.

  47

  Deker felt an ominous wind blow in through Rahab’s cellar window, and a chill ran up his back as what he had been waiting for came a second later with the force of a desert storm.

  The war cry of the Israelite army.

  Elezar had left him with an unwinnable dilemma: blow himself up with Rahab and her family in order to open the city to the Israelites, or risk the defeat of General Bin-Nun and the Hebrews as they smashed themselves against the impregnable wall.

  Rahab sensed trouble. “What’s wrong, Samuel?”

  Deker moved to the window and looked out at the Israelite troops rushing toward them. He then ran his fingers down the scarlet cord hanging in the window.

  Bin-Nun doesn’t know his thirty-six-member special-ops team is dead, Deker thought. He thinks they’re going to open the main gate from the inside.

  Another voice said, “Deker?”

  This time it was Salmon talking.

  Deker turned to him and said, “My plans have failed, Salmon. I did not trust Yahweh like Rahab or you or Bin-Nun. But there may yet be a way to accomplish the divine plan. You must see to it that Rahab and her family are spared.”

  Salmon tried to exude confidence before Rahab, but there was a cloud of doubt behind his eyes. “Where are you going?”

  “To blow the main gate,” Deker said as he packed the C-4 in his bag.

  “You’ll be slaughtered as soon as you walk out the front door,” said Ram as he entered the cellar, out of breath. “We’re holding them off, but you’ll never get past them alive. And you’ll never take out the contingent at the gate, even if we all joined you.”

  “I know,” Deker said, and grabbed the coil of rope and moved to the window. “That’s why I’m going to blow the gate from the outside.”

  “It’s still suicide,” said Ram. “If the Reahn archers don’t kill you, your own advancing troops might.”

  “It’s the only way,” said Deker, suddenly calm as he gazed into Rahab’s dark eyes. “It’s the right way.”

  “There must be another way,�
� Rahab begged him. “Yahweh has a plan.”

  Deker felt the throb in his throat. He never wanted to leave her. But he remained resolute. “I’m sorry, Rahab, but I believe I am the plan.”

  Rahab’s eyes unlocked from his and darted over his shoulder. “Ram!”

  Deker turned in time to see Ram at the window, about to climb out.

  “I can no longer protect us from our own people if the Israelites fail,” Ram told them. “And if the Israelites succeed, I cannot protect you from them. But these Hebrews can.”

  And then Ram vanished into thin air.

  Deker rushed to the window and looked down to see Ram land on the ground and pull out his sword. With a shout, Rahab’s big brother ran out alone against the thousands of oncoming Israelites.

  “He’s drawing the attention of the Reahn archers on the ramparts!” Salmon yelled, shoving his way next to Deker. “Now is our chance!”

  “My chance,” Deker told him. “You have to stay here with Rahab and keep Israel’s promise.”

  Salmon began to protest, but Deker cut him off. “There’s no time, Salmon. If you fail, her blood is on our hands, and the hands of all the kings of Israel.”

  Rahab rushed to him and threw her arms around him as if to keep him from leaving.

  There was no time for proper good-byes, so Deker removed his IDF tag from his neck and gave it to Rahab. “This is the token of my promise to you,” he said. “Your family will be safe at Gilgal tonight, and you can return it to me then.” She put it on over her heart and clutched the star in her hand, as if she were willing herself to believe him.

  With one last look at her, Deker sprang out the window.

  48

  Deker slid down the rope amid a flurry of arrows from Reahns on the ramparts above. He hit the ground unscathed and began to make his way along the base of the city wall when he heard shouting.

  It was Ram, about a hundred meters out. He had fallen to his knees, his front and back shot full of arrows from both sides. He raised his sword to the sky one last time in defiance before an Israelite arrow struck him in the head and his helmet flew off before he fell back dead.

  If he had any last words, Deker never heard them.

  What he did hear was an unmistakable whistle, and he darted toward the gate as arrows began to rain down on him from the Reahns on the ramparts. He clung to the base of the wall as he ran toward the gate just around the corner.

  Two arrows knocked him down, one in the shoulder, the other in the calf. He cried out as he landed face-first in the sand, flat on the nose that Hamas had smashed, and began to crawl meter by meter with one arm until he made it around

  the corner.

  He managed to prop himself up against the wall, just several meters away from the gate. He looked out to see the Israelites only fifty or so meters away now.

  They were coming in waves.

  The infantrymen used their shields to protect the slingers, who needed both hands to counter the fire of the Reahns on the walls.

  An entire line of archers, meanwhile, had dug their shields into the ground and from behind them fired at the archers in the towers. But the heavy infantry charged ahead with battering rams and close-combat spears, sickle swords and axes to smite the Reahns.

  Deker pulled out his pack of C-4 and hurled the whole wired package toward the gate. It landed in the middle, just in front of the portcullis, and then he pushed the detonator.

  The explosion ripped the guts of the gate out like the god Molech vomiting out his demons. A giant cloud of smoke and dust mushroomed into the air.

  Ears ringing and light flashing before his eyes, Deker peered into the cloud as he snapped off the arrows in his shoulder and leg. Then the curtain parted and he saw the troops pouring through.

  49

  By the time Deker limped through the gate, all he could see was the flash of swords and shields. The slaughter was well under way.

  The unstoppable column of Israelites snaked through the north side of the town and up through the gash in the fortress wall caused by the fall of the city’s spire. People were shouting to one another but no words could be made out above the screams and shouts of battle.

  From the summit, waterfalls of blood streamed down the fortress walls and into the city below, rivers of carnage floating along the streets past Deker’s boots.

  The dead were already piling up.

  Frightened Reahns ran helter-skelter, trapped inside the walls they had erected to protect themselves. From the towers the soldiers could only watch their families die before they, too, were struck and began to fall off the ramparts as the Israelites swarmed them.

  But it was the Reahn families fleeing the inescapable wrath of Yahweh, their tragic faces white with terror, that haunted Deker. The foolish among them were still trying to carry their valuables in their fine but filthy garments. The brave, mostly mothers clutching their children, wound up cornered against stone walls and run through by the merciless blades of the invading Hebrews.

  The only thing escaping the city that Deker could see was its treasures: one cart after another, filled with gold ingots and silver coins and jewelry, was being wheeled out through the gate by the Levites.

  Deker didn’t see Phineas and suspected the priest had decided to contribute to the work of the troops in cleansing Jericho for its sins.

  The Kenites, meanwhile, were lighting up bronze bowls with oil for the passing troops to dip their torches into so they could burn whatever was left of Jericho.

  Deker stepped through the puddles of blood in the market square and headed toward Rahab’s to make sure she was safe. Then he noticed a team of Judeans with a small battering ram heading toward a door in the city wall that he hadn’t noticed before. It had a red cord hanging outside.

  “Wait!” he yelled and raced to the door. “What are you doing?”

  “Rahab the harlot and her family are to be spared,” the commanding officer replied. He looked a bit like Salmon, and Deker guessed he might be a cousin.

  “This isn’t Rahab’s house,” Deker told them.

  “But it’s in the city wall.”

  “Her house is in the slums about fifty cubits ahead. A four-story villa overlooking a small square. You can’t miss it.”

  “Then what’s this?”

  Deker stared at the red cord and shouted, “I think it’s a trap!”

  Sure enough, upon closer examination he saw a crude charcoal drawing on the wood.

  A black dove.

  “Stand guard out here,” he ordered the troops. “I’m going inside. You’ll block this door with carts and crates if you have to, but nobody comes out. If I don’t return by the count of five hundred, see that it burns with the rest of this city to the ground.”

  He looked around to make sure the Judeans understood. They did, but clearly thought he was crazy and in no shape in his blood-soaked uniform to do much damage to anything as he unsheathed his sword.

  “A sword may not slay this enemy,” a voice said. “You may need this.”

  Deker turned to see old Kane step forward with his latest invention: an ancient Molotov cocktail. He held the jug with a fuse in one hand and a torch in the other.

  Deker handed his sword to one of the troops and took the bomb and the torch. “A final gift to send me off, Kane? You shouldn’t have.”

  Kane smiled proudly. Deker was actually going to miss the old warrior.

  Deker didn’t know why, exactly, he was so sure that he wasn’t going to be walking out of the door he was about to enter. But he was sure.

  “Salmon is with Rahab and her family,” he told Kane with emphasis. “I’ve told these troops where they are. See to it that they get safely outside the city before Bin-Nun torches it.”

  Kane nodded. “Do your worst.”

  Deker opened the door, slipped inside and closed it. He immediately heard the thuds and scrapes of carts and crates stacking up behind him. Then he turned and saw the secret fail-safe to Jericho that Hamas had been hidin
g all along.

  The shadow army.

  50

  Ever since Deker had heard about Jericho’s shadow army, he imagined something supernatural, like demons or, more likely, some superstition. Never did he expect it to be the city’s living dead.

  Inside the dark tunnel, Deker immediately knew he was in the presence of thousands of bodies. The damp, rank air hung heavy with the putrid smell of rotting flesh, human waste and desperation. Now he understood why Rahab’s brother Ram had refused to even speak of it. If the soldiers packed inside the upper fortress walls represented a ring of strength, then whatever rotted inside these lower city walls represented a ring of death.

  Deker held up his torch to see just what exactly he was smelling. The flickering light reflected a sea of bloodshot eyes staring from pinched, pallid faces: men, women, children, even animals. This was where Hamas had crammed Jericho’s sick and diseased, here inside the thick lower city walls.

  What kind of defense was this? he wondered as he walked among the dying inside the city walls. These were no soldiers of Jericho. They had no swords, no weapons of any kind, not even food. They were sick and infirm. How could they save Jericho when Hamas had condemned them to die when the walls collapsed on top of them?

  Then he understood. It was all clear now.

  Hamas had packed the walls with the diseased in case they did fall. Then these veritable zombies could escape to infect the Israelite troops. The troops, in turn, would infect their families. And that would be the end of the Hebrews.

  This shadow army was Jericho’s fail-safe that would ensure victory even in defeat. Much like Israel’s fail-safe that he had sacrificed his own life to protect.

  Deker covered his nose and mouth. Cholera, hepatitis B and C, jaundice, dysentery, leprosy—it was all here, and then some, plainly visible on the drawn and blemished faces. And rising above the coughs and hacks of the TB-infected was a madman laughing somewhere down the narrow corridor.