by Jeff Long
“Don’t go down there,” one said. “Why mess with the gods?” He had a combat soldier’s contempt for the civilian. If you don’t belong, don’t be there.
His partner said, “How about the lions; you been briefed on the lions?”
“Seriously?” said Nathan Lee. It had to be an urban legend. Here be dragons.
The man spit. “From the zoo.”
The first man said, “They found a body in the Armenian quarter. Mauled to rags. One leg missing. That means they they’ve tasted us. They’re maneaters now.”
AT SUNSET the smoke turned bronze.
Nathan Lee found Ochs on a cot in a tent, stripped to the waist. He’d seen pictures of the linebacker in his 400-pound bench-press days, an Adonis on steroids. Nathan Lee looked down at the wreckage of beer fat. Sweat glistened on his salt-and-pepper chest hair. “Wake up,” Nathan Lee said.
Ochs came to with a groan. The canvas and wood creaked as he pried himself from the cot.
“We made a mistake,” said Nathan Lee. “It’s too dangerous. There’s a curfew, dusk to dawn. Shoot to kill.”
“Give me a minute,” Ochs growled.
“It’s a war zone. No one’s in charge over there. They’re at each other’s throats. Hamas and the Hezbollah and the SLA and Israeli army and kibbutz militias.”
Ochs glared at him. “Suck it up, Swift. What did you expect? Nine-point-one on the Richter scale. From here to Istanbul, it’s scrambled eggs.”
“I don’t like it.”
“What’s to like?” Ochs tossed his head side to side like a boxer warming up. The vertebrae crackled. “This time tomorrow, we’ll be on our way home. Think of it as starting the college fund. Grace’s,” he added, “not yours. It’s time you moved beyond your academic ambitions.”
The unborn child had become Ochs’s hostage. Nathan Lee didn’t know how to stop it. The conspiracy between sister and brother was beginning to scare him. “You don’t need me,” he said pointblank.
“But I do,” said Ochs. “Don’t let it go to your head. You’re younger. You have abilities. Come on. We’re on the same team, slick.”
“This isn’t a bowl game,” said Nathan Lee. “We’re trespassing on history. Legends. Everything we do could alter the record. It could bend religions.”
“Since when did you find God? Anyway, you’ve got responsibilities.”
“It was you who taught me about the integrity of the site.”
“Those were the days.”
“You just want revenge,” said Nathan Lee.
“I just want money,” said Ochs. “What about you, Nathan Lee? Don’t you get lonely in there?”
They went to the mess tent. It was crowded with relief workers in various states of fatigue. They spoke a babel of languages. They were fed much better than the survivors. In place of protein bars and bottles of water, they got lamb stew and couscous and candies. Ochs made a beeline for the caffeine.
Nathan Lee went outside with his paper plate and sat on the ground. Ochs found him. “No more seesaw. It’s yes or no.”
Nathan Lee didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no. That was all Ochs needed.
AT MOONRISE, they cast loose of Camp 23.
They wore cotton masks, Red Cross bibs, the borrowed hardhats, and jungle boots from the Vietnam era. The soles had metal plates to protect against punji stakes. Ochs had spotted them in an Army surplus store outside of Georgetown.
In theory, the camps were locked down between dusk and dawn. But for all the razor wire and sandbags and ferocious Israeli paratroopers at the entrance, Nathan Lee had learned there was no back wall to Camp 23. The gate was all show. Nathan Lee and Ochs simply strode downhill and the camp dwindled into darkness.
They left the klieg lights and diesel generators and food lines behind. On the dark outskirts, they passed the mad and dying. Nathan Lee imagined the final circle of hell as something like this.
The hillside sloped gently, cut by terraces. Nathan Lee took the lead downwards. They carried headlamps, but did not use them. He was reminded of climbing in the Himalayas and above Chamonix with his father. Mountaineers called it an alpine start. You kicked off at night while the mountain is asleep. Other senses emerged: night vision, different kinds of hearing, a feeling for the movements underfoot. The world lost its margins, it ran loose out there. Deep joints in the earth snapped like bones. The underworld beat within your skin. That’s how it felt tonight. Ochs’s heavy footsteps drummed on the earth. Even the stars were vibrating.
Nathan Lee looked out across the top of the vile smog. The enormous white moon had finished sucking free of the distant desert. He’d never seen it so large and explicit.
“Slow down,” Ochs said.
Nathan Lee could hear him back there, laboring…downhill. That was not good. They’d barely started the night. The man sounded like horses breathing. Nathan Lee didn’t wait, but at the same time he didn’t let their spacing grow too wide.
They plunged on, lights off, Nathan Lee ahead. Ochs was clumsy. He demanded a rest. Nathan Lee made him demand it three times, then reined himself in. Ochs caught up and sat on a rock. He blamed his football knees and Nathan Lee’s pace. “I know you’re trying to wear me down. It won’t work,” he said.
They continued down through fig and pistachio groves with clusters of ripe buds. The branches of olive trees looked frozen and convulsed. Through his cotton mask, Nathan Lee could smell the blossoms glittering like Christmas tree ornaments. Their scent could not hide the smell of spoiled meat, even at this distance.
They penetrated the layer of oil smoke. The moon shrank and turned brown. Deeper, they passed through a Christian cemetery with toppled gravestones and crosses. They reached the underside of the cloud. Suddenly the walls of the Old City stood before them.
It was a different world under the canopy. Green and orange flares cut the low sky. You would see them rocket up through the black smoke, then slowly reappear from the murky heavens. By night, the gas flames resembled Biblical pillars of fire. Nathan Lee looked at Ochs and the snout of his white mask was caked with soot. He looked like a hyena nosing through the ashes.
Timeless Jerusalem lay squashed flat. Because it was built on a rising hill, they could see over the walls, into the upper neighborhoods. At first glance, the city looked fused, one single melted element. Then Nathan Lee began to discern details in the ruins. In place of streets, there were arteries, and in the arteries moved lights. Hatreds older than America were in motion. Here and there streamers of tracer bullets arced between the pancaked apartment buildings. It was every man for himself in there, militias, sects, rebels, and predators.
Nathan Lee was afraid. This wasn’t like the controlled adrenal hit you got climbing a long runout on rock or ice. It was more insidious, more consuming. And there was another difference tonight. He would have a daughter soon. For some reason, that mattered to him. His life counted for more.
In the distance, poised above the shredded skyline, the Dome of the Rock was still standing. The sight had a peculiar effect. It was an oddity of quakes in very old cities that modern structures will collapse, leaving the ancient buildings intact. The National Cathedral in Mexico City was one example, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul another. The mosque atop the Temple Mount was clearly another. The dome gleamed in the flare light like a golden moon fallen to earth.
They descended into the Kidron valley, then trekked up and reached the base of the wall. It soared above them. Hardin slapped the big, squared blocks of limestone. “We’re in the zone,” he said. “Can you feel it?”
They followed the wall to its southern edge, then skirted west, on the outside of the worst fighting. The Muslim and Jewish quarters rumbled and thundered inside the wall. No rest for the weary. They were fighting right through Armageddon. Bullets and shrapnel sizzled overhead from the platform of the Temple Mount.
After twenty minutes they reached a collapsed abbey. Not much further, they reached the end of the south wall, and took a righthand tu
rn along the original Byzantine wall.
The suburbs were in utter collapse. Disemboweled high-rises teetered above mounds of debris. The bulldozers had not visited this part of the city yet. Every street lay buried. Instead, Nathan Lee followed slight traces that threaded between the mounds of wreckage. It was little more than a game trail. Worn by feet or paws, the path glowed faintly.
Through the archway of the Jaffa Gate, they entered the Old City itself. First they shed their disguise. Inside the walls, relief workers would just be sniper bait. Off came the Red Cross bibs and their cotton masks. Underneath his mask, Ochs had daubed his face with camouflage paint.
Modern rubble gave way to ancient. The pathways wound back and forth through the twisted devastation. There were dozens of forks in the trail. Ochs offered opinions, but always deferred to Nathan Lee’s instincts.
Nathan Lee felt at home here. He had a theory that the stranger always has an advantage in chaos. The stranger can’t lose his way, only find it. People born and raised here would naturally depend on familiar street corners and shopfronts and addresses. He had no such landmarks. Ruins were their own city, the same worldwide, old or modern. The key lay in your mind. Begin in the beginning.…It was a trick learned from his father, the mountain guide.
The rest he got from his mother, the ape lady. Instead of brothers or sisters, he’d grown up with baboon troops in the wild. If you want to know a thing, she would say, go inside it. She and her mountain-man husband were products of their generation, brimming with wanderlust and little Zen sayings and being real. They’d raised him to see worlds within the world.
Ochs kept stumbling. Phone lines and checkered keffiyahs tangled their feet. Blocks of limestone shifted underfoot. Twice the professor nearly speared himself on pieces of iron rod and copper pipe. He needed more frequent rests.
They passed the old and the new. Beside a squashed Toyota lay the remains of a horse stripped by predators. Minarets blocked their path like toppled rocket ships. Five-and six-story apartment buildings had dropped straight down and Nathan Lee found himself walking between small forests of TV antennae fixed atop the former roofs.
An old woman appeared from the shadows, startling them. That was the first time Nathan Lee saw Ochs’s pistol. It was a little Saturday night special. He pointed it at her. She cursed them in Russian, then wandered on.
“Where did you get that thing?” Nathan Lee whispered.
“We should stop her,” said Ochs. “She’ll give us away.”
“She’s crazy. Didn’t you see her eyes?”
“You’re taking us in circles,” Ochs snarled. Low on blood sugar, jet-lagged, he was becoming dangerous.
Nathan Lee held up a hand for quiet.
Ochs pushed him, then he heard—or felt—it, too.
The vibrations traveled up the long bones in Nathan Lee’s legs. The ruins were trembling. Someone was approaching, a patrol or gang or militia. Killers. Night angels. Their footsteps shocked the earth.
Nathan Lee wasted no time calculating their distance. He started up a hillside of mangled debris, racing from one moon shadow to the next. Ochs followed, grunting, boots slugging for purchase. Nathan Lee saw the gun in his fist, a silvery toy. He reached the top of the debris, and stopped.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher stood beneath him. They had reached the Christian quarter.
Nathan Lee had been here before. The place actually housed many places. Crusader towers crowded against Byzantine domes built upon the ruins of a Roman temple of Venus. Here, contained under one roof, were the legendary landmarks of Christ’s death, from the rock of Calvary to the tomb of His resurrection. Some of the outer buildings had fallen, but most of it was intact, even the little crosses on top of the domes.
Ochs reached him, and saw the church. He gasped. “See?” he said. “See?”
Then Nathan Lee heard voices below. Without a word he lowered himself into a hollow where the rubble had sagged. Ochs squeezed in beside him.
“Untouched!” said Ochs. “Just like we saw on CNN.”
Nathan Lee drew back into the shadows. He lay his cheekbone against a concrete slab and rested his fingertips along a prong of rebar sticking from the rubble. The footsteps drew closer. He could feel the tremors gaining strength. Ochs’s sweat stank.
Then they appeared, or their shadows did. He saw shapes, not men, huge shadows streaming against what walls still stood. He saw the glint of rifles. They trampled the ruins like quiet machinery.
Ochs’s eyes were huge and white in the dark recess. His jowls were tiger-striped with black and olive paint. He lifted his gun.
The killers passed.
Ochs stood. “Come on.”
Nathan Lee stayed on his hands and knees. “There’s something down here,” he said. Next to Ochs’s boot toe, the thing jutted up.
Nathan Lee thought at first it was a tiny potted tree growing out of the wreckage, ten inches high, no more. He leaned closer to see what it was. The shock of recognition made him grunt.
It was a hand.
The twigs were fingers, wilted. The wrist was thin. It held a woman’s watch. The long plastic fingers had nails laquered ruby red. The gold wedding ring was shiny and new. A mannequin’s hand, that’s what he wanted it to be. He knew it was not.
“Look,” said Nathan Lee.
Ochs shined his light.
“It’s a woman.”
They had been smelling the dead all night. The odors seeped up from the ruins. Nathan Lee had started to think they might just escape without seeing any bodies.
“Okay, you found one,” said Ochs. He kept his voice flat. “Let’s get going.”
Nathan Lee stayed kneeling. The flares illuminated their ridge top with electric reds and greens. The hand hung limp, forefinger slightly pointing as in Michelangelo’s picture of Adam taking the mortal spark from God. The beautifully painted fingernails were broken off at the tips, and packed underneath with dirt. She had clawed her way out of the tomb. That spoke to him. She had refused to surrender.
“Do you hear that scratching sound?”
Since entering the city, the sounds had been rising up to them from underground. Murmurs, cries, knocking, scratches. They’d done a fine job pretending it was just the city settling in on its own rubble. Nathan Lee couldn’t pretend anymore.
“You’re hearing things,” said Ochs. He drew taller. “She’s dead. The city’s a write-off. Come on.”
Nathan Lee set his ear against the ground. Something was scraping under there. It could be stones whispering against one another. Or nails gently stroking at the dirt.
“Dogs,” said Ochs, “trying to dig their way in. Or house cats. They’re worse, I hear. They go for the face muscles.”
Nathan Lee began lifting stones away.
“What are you doing?”
“It could be her child down there,” said Nathan Lee.
“Have you lost your mind? Her child?”
“It could be.” Nathan Lee pried up one block, but another slid into its place. He tried another stone, and the debris shifted again. It was like a puzzle that refused to be undone. The ruins did not want to give her up.
“You can’t change what’s happened,” said Ochs. “We’re in enough danger.” A machine gun rattled in the distance.
Nathan Lee lifted her fingers on his palm. They were flexible, not entirely cold. He squeezed them gently.
“Damn it. Feel for a pulse,” said Ochs. “Get this over with.” He reached across and stabbed his fingers against the inner wrist.
The fingers twitched. The hand clutched Nathan Lee’s. “God,” he barked. He tried to let go. But she held on. Her grip relaxed very slowly. Nathan Lee stared at his hand.
“A nerve contraction,” Ochs said.
“How would you know?”
“Dead frogs do it.” Ochs milked the wrist, and the hand balled and loosened, a puppet with no brains.
“Stop,” said Nathan Lee. He took her hand again, but this time she didn’t ret
urn his grip. He laid his fingers along the wrist. Was that a pulse, or the earth’s vibrations? The warmth, was it a residue of the day? He returned to pulling at the heavy stones. “Help me,” he said.
“We can’t stay here,” said Ochs. “If the aftershocks don’t kill us, the animals or soldiers will. You’re not going to find your conscience in the dirt, you know.”
Faraway, a man shrieked. Grieving or gut shot or mad. It stopped suddenly.
“Go,” said Nathan Lee. “There’s your church. I’ll be here. I won’t leave without you.”
“I need you down there,” said Ochs. “The trench is deep.”
What trench? wondered Nathan Lee. Ochs had offered no clues to his prey, other than the name of the Church itself. “Help me then,” he repeated. He strained at another stone.
“All right,” Ochs said. “But first you help me. We go into the church. Get what we came for. It will take half an hour. After that you can come back here and dig to your heart’s content.” His teeth glittered red and green.
Nathan Lee balked. “And you’ll help me.”
“I’ll help. If anyone asks what we have in the body bag, we’ll tell the truth. Human remains.”
Another clue, thought Nathan Lee. He marked the edge of the depression with a mountaineer’s cairn, rocks stacked on rocks. Then he led Ochs down the rubble to the flat stone courtyard.
One of the great wooden doors had buckled open. They stepped inside from ruin into relative serenity. Tiles had buckled here and there. Colored glass crunched underfoot. Candles lay toppled and bent. Otherwise the interior appeared to be unscathed.
It was like walking through a dream among the altars and dark icons lining the walls. The rotunda area was larger than he remembered, but that was because the crowds of pilgrims were absent. Pillars and arches surrounded them. Flare light illuminated the surviving stained glass art. Not a soul occupied this safe haven.
“What did I tell you,” said Ochs. “All ours.” The quiet interior put him at ease. “The Tomb of Jesus,” he announced, walking to a boxy shape at the center of the rotunda.
The marble was polished from centuries of fingertips and reverent kisses. Inside the small edifice, Nathan Lee knew, was a tiny gate with a poor view of a rock. As he recalled, the fragment was covered with white and pink wax drippings. Was that Ochs’s souvenir? It would explain the geologist’s hammer and stone chisels. But not the “human remains.”