by Jon Land
For that moment there was nothing but soupy gray-black air between her and the frigid seas hundreds of feet below. Feeling another explosion rock the Ulysses, Danielle kicked her feet through the air to reach the Sea-Scape.
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CHAPTER 59
F
or Ben, the sensation of moving through the tunnel was that of clawing through a grave, trying to fight his way up from death. Rabbi Mordecai Lev had thought his defenses were impregnable. But somehow the force composed of what Nabril al-Asi had identified as the Knights Templars had gotten through in a sweeping, overpowering action that had placed the entire population of the settlement at their mercy.
The tunnel was lit to the dull glow of sporadically placed naked bulbs, strung together with wire that dangled overhead. Ben heard no signs of pursuit and took that as a sign that the Israeli soldier he had shot must have passed out before he could direct his fellows to the trapdoor.
Ben continued on, no idea of how much distance remained before him. By now his movements had become wholly automatic and he had lost track of how much ground he had covered already. He tried to focus on the bigger picture, what had struck him before. The killers had torn the synagogue apart, because they didn’t have what the Americans found at their Area 6 of the Judean Desert. Rabbi Lev certainly didn’t have it and neither did the Israelis. Ben wouldn’t have even believed it existed if not for seeing himself the box carried by his nephew on the video disc. A disc taped secretly by a guard placed with the team by Commander Moshe Baruch of Shin Bet.
So where was the lost scroll, where could it be?
There was only one possibility, Ben had finally realized, and he was headed there now.
* * * *
D
anielle managed to throw her legs over the top of the plastic escape tube. She clamped down hard and drew the Sea-Scape closer to the rest of her body as her hands clung to the line for dear life. Still bent at an awkward angle, she finally let go of the rope and dropped in, her weight absorbed by the spongy plastic. Her chin slapped the rim, stunning her for an instant, and she groped for a hold on the tube’s sides with her hands.
Using the Sea-Scape was like walking down an endless succession of thinly angled, interconnected ramps that stretched all the way to the swirling waters below. The center of the tube was easily wide enough to accommodate her, and she used her arms to brace herself against the sides as she began her descent. She could still see at least two lifeboats floating in the sea. As she watched, though, a huge chunk of concrete fell atop one of the enclosed craft and smashed it like a child’s toy in a bathtub, leaving only one intact.
Danielle picked up speed rapidly. She had finally settled into a decent rhythm by learning how to push her gloved hands in against the plastic, when pops began to sound in the tube above her. She knew it was gunfire, well out of range thankfully for the kind of offensive weapons the assault team had brought with them. That didn’t mean a lucky shot wouldn’t find her, but the Sea-Scape’s proximity to the platform further obscured her from view the closer she drew to the sea.
There was another problem, though. A person couldn’t survive more than a minute in these icy waters of the North Atlantic, and that was precisely where she might well end up. Danielle would have to work her way straight from the Sea-Scape to the one remaining lifeboat. She hadn’t had time to don an orange survival suit before fleeing, and that would cost her if she miscalculated in the least.
The powerful winds shook the Sea-Scape from side to side, and the angry swells pounded the tail end of the plastic chute in the very spot Danielle would have to emerge. Even then, though, she judged the remaining lifeboat would still be ten feet away. Ten feet of frigid water. Beneath her, Danielle could see chunks of a small ice flow fragmented by the explosions from the sinking barges. She welcomed the flames rising from what was left of those barges for the false warmth they provided, distracting her from the idea of just how cold the water was.
Then she took a closer look at the chunks of ice floating around her. She tried not to think of what all this might be doing to the baby inside her, and instead imagined for a fleeting instant that Ben Kamal was standing beneath her, ready to catch her in his open arms.
She halted just short of the bottom portion of the Sea-Scape and waited until a hefty chunk of the iceberg approached, on a trajectory that would take it between the chute and the lifeboat. Danielle dropped down to the ice as soon as it was beneath her. It felt rock-hard and slippery, but she managed to dash across it, leaping the final two yards across the cold, black sea onto the plastic cover shielding the deck of the one remaining lifeboat.
Clutching the cover with one arm, Danielle found the zipper and drew it open. Then she dropped through onto the lifeboat’s deck.
* * * *
B
en emerged from the tunnel a quarter mile from the grounds of the settlement. Despite his haste, he made sure to close the hatch after him and cover it with dirt.
He headed south through the fading heat of dusk. He came upon no trace of humanity until he reached the outskirts of yet another Amudei Ha’aretz settlement in the midst of construction well beyond the original Kiryat Arba. Ben thought he recalled that this was to be part of a major expansion effort throughout the West Bank undertaken to placate Israel’s hard right, appease them for the many land concessions made of late. One of those was the stretch of the Judean Desert that included the spot where the Americans had been murdered, the spot where Ben was now headed.
At the work site, he noticed a pickup truck bearing a construction company’s markings in Hebrew and climbed quietly into the cab. Construction workers lingered within easy view, seeming in no particular rush to get the day over with, and Ben stayed low beneath the dashboard until he found the truck’s keys sitting atop its console. He eased them into the ignition and turned the engine on. Then he pulled casually away, the nearby workers noticing just as he reached up to adjust the rearview mirror.
* * * *
U
pon climbing into the lifeboat, the first thing Danielle saw was a neat stack of survival suits wrapped in plastic piled in the corner. The small boat bobbed mightily atop the swells as she stripped the plastic off and climbed into one of the suits, finding instant comfort in its thick warmth. The material felt rubbery and smooth, and Danielle quickly located the pull tabs used to ignite the air pockets layered at chest level in case she fell overboard.
She moved to a chair set before the steering wheel and pressed the craft’s starter button. It resisted at first, but then cranked to life. Danielle eased the throttle forward and the boat tore through the sea, leaving the Ulysses GBS in its wake.
* * * *
CHAPTER 60
W
hat the American’s had called Area 6 in the Judean Desert now looked strangely empty. Other than the large cargo trucks that were anomalously still present, all the equipment had been removed.
Ben parked the pickup as close to the cave entrance as he could. A pair of Israeli soldiers approached, looking bored. The truck’s white Israeli license plates led them to let their guard down long enough for Ben to get his pistol drawn and on them before they could reach for their rifles.
He used rope from the truck’s rear bay to tie the soldiers up, leaving them leaning against the tailgate. He found a shovel in the truck and a flashlight as well, and hurried up the steps of the goat path leading to the entrance. It would be dark soon and he didn’t want to be caught inside without light. He might be here awhile; after all, he wouldn’t be leaving until he found what he had come for:
The mysterious box containing the lost scroll of Josephus.
Inside, the cave was dim and murky. Ben looked around him, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the semidarkness. It had to be here, he thought again, and began to dig in an area slightly back from the spot where his nephew had originally found the box. Rabbi Lev’s people didn’t have it, Gianni Lorenzo’s Knights Templars were still looking, and the Israel
is hadn’t even known it existed, interested only in covering up the truth of the Americans’ mission.
The minutes passed. Dusk descended outside the cave. Ben intended to dig here until dawn and beyond, if that’s how long it took, even if it meant venturing into the deep, unexplored recesses of the cave about which Abid Rahman had warned him.
The validation of his own being seemed at stake, and he went about the task with a maniacal energy indicative of a man not only with something to prove, but something to gain. He wanted Christ to just be a man, wanted to change the way people thought about God. To prove that he had been right all along in abandoning his faith. There was no great light at the end of the darkness; that was the joke the prophets and priests had been playing on man for centuries. The darkness just kept going and a faith soon to be revealed as baseless kept man walking through it toward nothing.
Ben felt the grime of the cave sticking to his face, the sweat acting like glue. As he continued to dig, flecks of dirt danced in front of the flashlight’s beam. He had laid the flashlight on the floor of the cave, readjusting it every time he moved on from one aborted hole to another, certain his nephew had reburied the box in this very cave for safekeeping. The last place anyone would think to look.
Ben’s shoulders were aching terribly but he wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop. Hot, dry dust coated his throat, making it hurt to breathe. It felt like he had swallowed glass and nearly gagged a few times, each cough making the pain worse. His hands had started to hurt too now, his strength ebbing but not his determination. There was no longer any pattern or order to his work; he simply dug in places he hadn’t dug before, refusing to let himself be denied. His nephew would have wanted to protect his discovery, take precautions, hide it where no one would expect.
What if. . .
Ben shuddered.
Of course!
He adjusted the flashlight beam toward the front of the cave and moved to the shallow depression he and Danielle had examined two days ago, the depression from which the box had originally been lifted by the Americans.
Ben sank his shovel into the bottom of the small trench and worked the blade around, removing only thin layers of dirt at a time at first before picking up the pace. He was down six inches when the shovel struck something hard.
Trembling, he abandoned the shovel and dropped to his knees. Then he plunged his hands into the deepened hole and cleared the rest of the dirt aside with his fingers.
The box lay before him, caught in the dim glow of the flashlight beam. Clay-colored dirt was matted to its surface, the steel latch having no more than a simple peg worked through its slots. Ben pried the peg gently free and lifted the box toward him.
As the box tilted, something shifted inside it, clacking hollowly against the box’s sides. Ben suddenly felt out of breath.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there with the box cradled in his lap. He maintained enough presence of mind not to open it for fear of what a sudden rush of air might do to its fragile contents. Ben stuck the peg back through the latch to reseal it.
A wave of dizziness swept over him. A bright light burned his eyes and he was certain he must be about to pass out.
But a second light joined the first, followed by a third. Voices he couldn’t understand exchanged words and then a large figure stepped through the cave’s entrance into the spill of the new light.
“I’ll take that,” said Commander Moshe Baruch.
* * * *
CHAPTER 61
E
xhausted, Danielle clung for life to the boat’s steering wheel. The powerful swells had lashed her lifeboat across the sea, swallowing it only to spit it out again. A heavier craft, one with less buoyancy, would have certainly been lost. But this craft’s balance, together with her skill as a pilot, allowed her to ride out the thrashing and harsh spray rising off the waves.
Still, the sea seemed on the verge of finishing the killers’ work for them. Pulverized, the boat was taking on water at an alarming degree by the time she reached calmer waters.
Suddenly a spot of land appeared on her right, its rocky shoreline illuminated by shafts of moonlight sneaking through the clouds. Danielle tried to turn for it, but the steering wheel fought her every inch of the way. It took all her strength to manage the task and even then the lifeboat’s engine finally gave out a quarter mile from shore, just after she had fired a flare into the night.
With no other choice, Danielle dropped off into the sea in her survival suit and felt strangely warm, her body heat trapped within to keep her from freezing to death. She pulled both emergency cords and the suit inflated with a quick burst of air that left her able to do little but float on her back.
The survival suit could give her ninety minutes in these conditions, and Danielle wondered if she could reach the shore in that time. She managed to flap her arms a bit, paddling to make use of the currents. She landed on the sand of the shoreline with plenty of time to spare but in no condition to celebrate. Her time at sea had left her motions slow and lethargic, her muscles seeming to have lost their elasticity to such a degree that she could hardly walk or raise her arms.
Danielle released the air from her suit and collapsed atop the rocky shore, safe from the waves and still warmed by her space-age suit. Come morning, she would rely on whatever warmth the sun gave up to revive and recharge her.
The first boat came well prior to that, though. Danielle saw its light sweeping across the shore well before she heard its engine above the crashing waves. She sat up and tried to wave her arms, found she couldn’t muster the strength. But the crew must have seen her, because they dropped anchor and came ashore in a dinghy.
As soon as she saw the eyes of the two men who had arrived she knew. This was no rescue party that fortuitously had happened to be in the area; these were members of the same assault force that had destroyed the Ulysses GBS just to keep their secret safe.
Danielle had summoned her own executioners to her!
She found enough strength to twist to the side and grab a jagged rock, ready to use it on the first man who reached down for her when a heavy boot clamped down painfully on her wrist. Danielle cried out and tried to thrash free.
She saw another man draw a heavy-caliber pistol from his belt and steady it straight on her.
* * * *
CHAPTER 62
B
en was too dazed by fatigue to hand the box over right away. Instead, wordlessly, he tucked it tighter against him, almost as his nephew had in the recording made of the box’s discovery.
Baruch had come a little closer to him. “Inspector Kamal, I advise you not to make things any harder than they already are. We know you took the two guards on duty here captive. And you are also suspected of wounding two Israeli soldiers at the settlement of the Amudei Ha’aretz.” His voice cracked a little. “Am I to conclude you had some part in the massacre that occurred there as well?”
“How many?” Ben rasped.
“What?”
“How many were killed?”
“I don’t know. We found dozens hiding in underground bunkers. Children mostly.”
Ben breathed a sigh of relief for that much and looked up, but his voice still sounded as if someone had scraped sandpaper across his vocal cords. “How did you know I had been there?”
“The shirt we found pressed into that soldier’s wound had your name inside it.”
“Because I tried to save him.”
“You are a mass of contradictions, Inspector. I must also assume that you stole the vehicle parked outside an Israeli construction site, and now you have violated a crime scene and removed what may be material evidence.”
“Would you like me to put it back?”
“I would like you to give it to me and then I am going to place you under arrest.”
Ben could have done many things, responded in many ways, at that point. But he only smiled, not budging.
“Must you make this difficult, Inspector?”
More
silence.
Something kept Baruch from approaching any closer. “I will contact your people immediately, do what we can to avoid making this a bigger incident than it is already.”
Ben lifted the box to his face, as if to examine it closer. “Do you have any idea what’s inside?”
Baruch shook his huge head, looking almost pleased. “You still haven’t realized what’s really going on here, have you?”
“I know enough. Plenty.”
“Not even close.”