by Jon Land
The first steel door Ben came to had been latched from the outside and buckled outward. The image chilled him, clear evidence that the attacking force had trapped everyone inside before lobbing in the grenades. He didn’t have to pry one of the blast-rippled doors open to know there would be no survivors inside, could only hope the children had managed to seek safety in underground shelters Ben was certain the Amudei Ha’aretz would have constructed.
None of the other buildings showed any more signs of life than the first and the closer Ben drew to the center of the settlement, the more bodies he found in the streets. Almost all of those he saw crumpled upon the ground were armed. For these there had been enough time to mount a response to the ambush. Ben could only hope there had been enough time for the settlement’s women and children to seek refuge in underground shelters.
The synagogue was directly before him and Ben approached it cautiously.
* * * *
A
t the sound of the alarm, Danielle moved to the security monitor and switched it on. She quickly flipped through the various camera angles, stopping when she came to a long view of the center of the Ulysses GBS. Workers were scurrying in all directions in response to the incessant, shrill alarm. She continued scanning through the various viewpoints, in search of what might have spurred the alarm. She stopped the screen on a view off the Ulysses east to the water. The huge barges she had seen earlier were heading straight for the platform on a collision course.
Of course! What better way to gain access to an inaccessible oil rig at sea. . . .
Yet whoever was steering the barges could not expect a collision to do any real harm. Nor could they expect to simply board and take the Ulysses from such a disadvantageous position at sea level.
And then the explosions began.
* * * *
T
he door to the synagogue was still closed when Ben got there. He threw it open and heard it rattle against the frame as he lunged inside, pistol ready.
The synagogue smelled clean, of the fresh leather recently laid over the pews. It looked unmarred by gunfire or explosions. At first glance, there was no trace of damage to any of the structure and even the windows were, for the most part, whole.
When Ben looked closer, though, he saw the bema had been torn apart. The podium had spilled over onto its side, the loose pages of a prayer book scattered across the floor. The ark where the ancient Torah was stored had been ripped open, the ancient scrolls shredded. The paper composing the scrolls had been spread out, strung like toilet paper during an American Halloween prank. The leather covering of the pews, too, had been torn apart. Someone had done it systematically with a knife, by the look of things. Not maliciously and not hatefully either; they had been looking for something, and Ben had a pretty d idea what it was.
He continued on toward the front of the synagogue, half expecting to find the body of Rabbi Mordecai Lev lying there not far from his favorite seat so close to the wrecked bema. Upon reaching the first row, though, Ben found nothing but the old man’s cane lying on the floor, covered at one end by a tattered strip of a Torah scroll etched in perfectly aligned Hebrew lettering.
The paper had the feel of parchment, much like the lost scroll of Josephus that Winston Daws had pulled out of the ground over fifty years ago. That scroll was what the killers had come looking for. But they had encountered no more luck finding it here than they’d had in the Judean Desert after Ben’s nephew had dug it out of the cave.
Then where was it?
The answer began to dawn on Ben as he stood there.
Of course! he realized. No one has been able to find the manuscript because . . .
The synagogue’s front door banged open, freezing Ben in midthought. He sank to the floor and ducked under the front pew as footsteps thumped toward him.
* * * *
CHAPTER 56
D
anielle felt the cabin floor tremble beneath her. She heard glasses from a nearby shelf clattering together an instant before the next series of explosions sent them hurling for the floor. She looked back at the security screen, but the monitor had filled with static and she didn’t bother trying for a different view; what had happened on the Ulysses GBS was clear enough to her already.
The enemy had rigged explosives on the barges to explode on impact with the platform. But Danielle knew that was just a distraction to clear the way for an attack now that the killers from the desert had somehow traced her here.
Danielle found a tweezers in the cabinet located in the small bathroom. She bent the tweezers straight and used it to pick the lock on the door, had it open in under a minute. She flung on her parka and moved into the hall, dashing forward into a noxious white smoke that seemed to rise in rhythm with the incessant wail of the security alarm.
Another explosion rocked the Ulysses, a vibration that rose from deep inside the platform. It was just the way she would have planned the attack herself. Create chaos in order to preempt any potential defense. The real enemy had done its homework.
But Danielle had her own plan. The platform certainly had emergency evacuation procedures and she rushed down the stairs to join the process. The _alarm had shut off, replaced by a prerecorded message to follow emergency directions to the proper lifeboats. She reached the deck, still five hundred feet above the water’s surface, to a rumble that shook all of Ulysses as the entire structure trembled atop its base. Huge plumes of fire shot out of the structure when oil being sucked up from the sea was ignited by more blasts.
The bravest workers continued scrambling in an attempt to put out the fires and regain control. The swirling winds caught the smoke and spread it like a blanket, obliterating the view of anything farther off than Danielle’s own hand before her. The sickening stench of oil gobbled up the frigid, salty air and left its residue across her face in a thick film. It stung Danielle’s eyes as she moved toward the edge of the platform, recalling the position of the lifeboats.
Danielle pressed herself against one of the modular structures for guidance and shielded her eyes with a sleeve. She used her free hand to feel her way, nearing a corner when a figure lunged out in front of her.
“Get back where you belong!” Shoshanna Tavi ordered, holding a pistol even with Danielle’s face.
“Are you crazy? Don’t you see what’s happening here?”
“I’ll shoot you myself!” Tavi screamed.
Before she could pull the trigger, a stitch of automatic fire clanged off the steel immediately over their heads. Both women went down, still in the sights of a masked gunman charging toward them.
* * * *
CHAPTER 57
T
ucked under the front pew of the synagogue, Ben silently drew his Beretta, reluctant to use it for the additional forces the gunfire would be certain to draw. Right now he counted only two sets of footsteps he would have to deal with, if necessary.
But how?
A few feet from him, just within his reach, lay Rabbi Mordecai Lev’s cane. He shifted his upper body slightly and snaked a hand out to snatch it before the two new entrants drew within sight.
Ben’s hand had just closed on the cane’s handle when he noticed something else. At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, but he could see there was some kind of trapdoor built into the bema, revealed when the podium had been spilled over by the killers. Was that how the old rabbi himself had escaped?
The slow pace of the pair that had just entered convinced Ben they were methodically checking each pew; probably in search of Lev, since their initial sweep must have failed to net him. Ben’s hiding place would not stand up to such scrutiny and he readied himself to move as soon as the first man drew within his range.
The cane gave him an extra three feet of reach and he intended to take advantage of it, hoping that would help him avoid use of the gun. One of the men walked far enough ahead of the other for Ben to ready the cane like a spear, prepared to thrust it out and capture a leg.
A moment of shocked silence followed from his partner, at which point Ben rolled out from beneath the cover of the pew and landed on his knees. The second man raised his gun and fired once. A curl of wood exploded behind Ben’s head. The coughed-up splinters stung his eyes and the gunshot’s stinging echo made it feel as though somebody had poured ice pellets into his skull. But Ben managed to get his pistol up and fired, was still firing when the second gunman collapsed.
Ben’s first thought w as to check both men’s right arms for the tattoo of the cross patee, insignia of the Knights Templars. Then he got his first clear look at the one he had shot.
It was an Israeli soldier, barely out of his teens, lips trembling and eyes wide with terror.
What have I done?
Ben abandoned thoughts of escape through the trapdoor and moved to the soldier. He eased him onto his back to check his wounds, ready to scream for help as loud as he could.
He had caught the soldier twice, once low in the thigh and once below the right shoulder. The shoulder wound was worse, bloodier, and Ben tore his own undershirt apart to use for pressure.
The Israeli patrol must have arrived shortly after Ben had entered the synagogue, alerted by a survivor, perhaps, or just a desperate plea for help over a phone or radio. They hadn’t announced themselves, nothing to tell Ben they were anything but the Knights Templars that had attacked the Amudei Ha’aretz settlement, killing indiscriminately.
I need some help here.
Ben pressed the balled-up T-shirt into the young soldier’s shoulder wound to stanch the bleeding. But he had little medical training and couldn’t stay much longer in any event.
Yes, sir, I shot your soldier. Put two bullets in him. And the other one lying here with the busted-up skull; I did that too.
The kid he’d shot, though, would die without quick work by someone who knew what they were doing. Ben had been so fixated on the soldier’s wound he hadn’t noticed the walkie-talkie clipped to his gun belt. Keeping pressure on the wound with his blood-soaked T-shirt, Ben pried the radio free and drew it to his lips.
Good workmanship, state of the art, and top of the line—something the Palestinians would not see for a decade or so.
“Man down, man down!” he said into the mouthpiece. “Synagogue, rear quarter of area. I need help here!”
Ben lay the walkie-talkie on the floor and maneuvered the soldier’s left hand up to replace his over the T-shirt.
“Say again,” the radio squawked. “Repeat, say again and identify yourself.”
“Keep the pressure up as best you can,” Ben told the young soldier. “They’ll be here in no time.”
“Identify yourself,“ the radio squawked once more.
Ben pushed himself up from the floor. He moved onto the bema and searched in the dim light for the trapdoor. Up close it was harder to spot somehow, and Ben had actually begun to believe he had merely imagined its existence when his fingers closed on its rim.
He gave it a jerk and the trapdoor snapped upright, revealing a ladder and darkness beyond. Ben lowered himself onto the rungs and eased the door closed before beginning his descent, wondering how long it would be before the Israelis found his escape route and began their pursuit.
* * * *
CHAPTER 58
L
ying flat on her back on the swaying deck of the platform, Shoshanna Tavi twisted her pistol away from Danielle and clacked off several rounds at the onrushing gunman. Impact staggered him and he fired a wild spray into the sky. Danielle hoped that the awareness of a common danger might soften the woman from Shin Bet, desperation having forged an uneasy alliance between them.
But Tavi instead resteadied her pistol on Danielle. Before Tavi could pull the trigger, Danielle jammed a hand under her elbow and jerked the gun away. A single round whizzed by her ear. The gun clattered to the deck out of reach. Danielle used her free hand to smack Tavi in the nose, felt the woman from Shin Bet grab and yank her hair in response.
The oily air had blackened Tavi’s face, including the scar that ran down one side like a teardrop. Her eyes were wild and unfocused. Her breaths came in rapid, rasping bursts. With her gun out of reach, she launched a series of blows that Danielle’s thick parka easily absorbed. Danielle retaliated with a knee to the other woman’s belly and then a fist that snapped Tavi’s head backward.
Danielle lurched forward in that same motion, momentum allowing her to slam Tavi’s skull against the steel support rail immediately behind them. Shoshanna Tavi’s enraged eyes grew glassy and she slumped to the deck. Danielle picked up the pistol from where it had fallen and dragged Tavi with her across the platform.
Tavi came alert and began struggling anew.
“Stop it! They’ll see us!” Danielle warned.
But Tavi continued to fight, trying to tear free of Danielle’s grasp.
“I’m trying to help you, you stupid bitch!”
Tavi clawed at Danielle’s cheeks and Danielle slammed her in the head with the butt of the pistol. She felt something crunch and Shoshanna Tavi instantly went limp, slumping to the grated section of the platform.
Danielle left her there and moved off amid the black swirling smoke that now threatened to choke off her breath. She covered her mouth with a sleeve when she coughed, trying to hide the sound. The wind stung her eyes with oily smoke, and she felt them watering as she pressed on, moving toward the lifeboats.
Before her, she could now make out crewmen working them desperately, fighting the hydraulics that were supposed to lower the covered boats to the sea at the flick of a button. But it looked as if the ferocity of the explosions had crippled the lines and generators, and she could see crewmen outfitted in black-streaked protective jumpsuits trying to release two of the lifeboats manually.
The Ulysses shook again as one of its pipelines ruptured in a huge flume of flame and smoke. Danielle lost her balance and clutched for a cable that tore free of her hand. The deck came up too fast to cushion the fall and she found herself staring at a sky camouflaged by the black smoke, with flames spreading around her. She lay still long enough to see the pair of the lifeboats plunging downward, nothing to slow their descent but the sea, which was like hitting the sidewalk from ten stories. The men inside the boats were screaming when they passed her, and then the wind swallowed their wails and the sickening thuds that would have accompanied their impact with the sea.
Danielle had just propped herself up on her elbows, pulling her legs in to rise, when she spotted the steel glimmer of a submachine gun poking out of the smoke. She steadied Shoshanna Tavi’s pistol before her, fought to still the trembling, and fired. Three times, until she heard the plop of a body hitting the deck.
Danielle lurched to her feet and sliced through the oil smoke on a diagonal to the man she had hit. One of her bullets had obliterated his face; she saw that clearly enough as she pried the shoulder strap of the submachine gun free and took it in her own hands. She could feel upon it the warm sweat of the man she had killed. She wiped it clean against the outside of her parka and pressed on.
The Ulysses’ deck was slick and wet, and that meant she had to worry about her footing, along with everything else. As the sea air pushed the oil smoke closer to the platform’s edge, Danielle saw she had a bigger problem: no lifeboats remained in sight, all having been stripped or lowered from their perches.
Still Danielle continued on, listening to the staccato bursts of machine-gun fire through the wind and crackling flames. All the sounds and swirling smoke conspired to deny her a firm fix on distance and direction.
Drawing closer to the platform’s edge, though, she saw something flapping in the wind. At first she assumed it was just a pie
ce of the rig that had broken away, yet closer inspection through the oil smoke revealed it to be an emergency escape chute called a “Sea-Scape.” It must have inflated automatically at the first sign of alarm, a twisting, curving plastic form laid out in an interconnected S-pattern. If she climbed in through the top, and followed the handholds, the Sea-Scape would guide her all the way to the surface of the sea, where several of the lifeboats that had dropped from their moorings looked intact.
But the force of the explosions had twisted the Sea-Scape away from the deck, leaving a gaping chasm between it and the top of the chute. Danielle yanked it back as best she could, but it wasn’t enough. In the end she would have to use the rope attaching it to the Ulysses to shimmy her way over. Knowing she had only one chance, Danielle leaped up and grasped the rope.