by Jon Land
Ben raced up the steps of the goat path leading to the cave and yanked a flashlight from his pocket once he was inside. Ben recalled how this particular cave swirled downward and guessed the Americans had included that in their report. Rabbi Lev would likely seek out the lowest point and drill down as far as he could before dropping in an explosive.
The rest would unfold with inevitable precision. The shale above the oil would rupture. The pressure would force the reserves upward into the land. Within months, weeks even, the oil would seep into the primary aquifer servicing the West Bank and poison it for years, perhaps decades. With their water supply tainted, and no other source readily available, two million Palestinians would be forced from their homes. The West Bank would become a wasteland, true to Lev’s—and Moshe Baruch’s—mad vision.
Before pressing on, Ben removed a pistol and Heckler and Koch submachine gun from his pack as well. Then, submachine gun shouldered behind him, he began following the serpentine cave path he had only glimpsed the previous times he’d been here. The going was tough in places, all of it downhill and much of it very steep. Ben’s trek was complicated by the fact that he was trying to move silently and didn’t want to shine his flashlight too far ahead for fear of alerting Lev and whoever else had accompanied him into the cave.
The angle of descent changed to almost a sheer drop all of a sudden, and Ben fell onto his buttocks, sliding down the grade. He felt his skin lashed by rocks and stones and lost his grip on his flashlight that crashed somewhere below. He tried desperately to stop himself, but succeeded only when the grade leveled off once more. The back of his head struck something at the last and he touched it to find the wet stickiness of blood already matting down his hair. He felt dizzy and sick to his stomach, and tried to find some bearings in the darkness. He had quite literally entered Rabbi Mordecai Lev’s world now.
Afraid he’d pass out if he waited any longer, Ben pulled himself back to his feet and trudged on, wobbling from side to side. He felt ahead with his hands that were already scraped and battered raw by his scrabbling fall. It grew colder, but he couldn’t tell if he was shaking as a result of the temperature drop or the concussion he had likely suffered at the end of his fall.
Finally Ben heard the steady hum of machinery nearby. Not very loud, but enough to snap him reasonably alert again. He pressed himself against the wall and snailed on, choosing his footing with extra caution since a slip this close to whatever awaited him was certain to give his presence away to anyone present.
The dim glow of lighting gradually sharpened as he crept forward. Ben swung the Heckler and Koch submachine gun around before him. His heart hammered against his chest, his breath suddenly short, and he tried to steady himself by thinking of Danielle.
Danielle . . .
If nothing else, she and the baby would come away from this safe and alive. He took great comfort in that, resigned to whatever else might happen.
The light ahead brightened and now Ben could hear words exchanged in Hebrew, hushed beneath the steady whir of machinery. He readied his submachine gun and stopped just before a large gap between two shiny rocks that led into a large flat area, perhaps the lowest point of the cave. He pressed against one of the rocks and peered around it.
Dressed in his dark ceremonial robes, Rabbi Mordecai Lev stood bowed in a position of prayer in the spray of powerful hydrogen vapor lights that had been set up around the cave floor. They illuminated the whole interior space from its high ceiling to its rough, stony floor. Nearby, a generator feeding power to the lights hummed loudly. In a slight depression before the rabbi, meanwhile, a pair of his followers had just finished removing a drill bit, twelve inches in diameter, from a mechanically operated cable attached to a winch that stretched a dozen feet up into the air. At their feet, a neat circular hole had been bored in the cave floor, likely descending hundreds of feet to the shale and bedrock that had concealed the oil for these many years.
Ben watched one of Lev’s men remove a cone-shaped explosive called a shape charge from a black case and attach it to the cable in place of the drill bit. The other man moved to the winch’s control panel, both his hands busy programming instructions that rendered the gun holstered on his hip useless as well. Besides Lev, these were the only two in sight.
Ben stepped down into the open area and steadied his submachine gun before him. “Stay where you are.”
The two men tensed, stopping just short of going for their pistols.
Lev swung in Ben’s direction. “Inspector Kamal, is that you?”
“You lied to me, Rabbi.”
“The world is full of lies, Inspector. Have you brought me the scroll?”
“Tell your men to move away from the winch.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Suddenly the man on the left drew his pistol. Ben dropped into a crouch and fired, pulling the trigger and holding it until both men had been hit. Impact hurled them backward, almost out of sight, and left the explosive device to sway harmlessly over the hole it had been destined for.
“It’s over, Rabbi,” Ben said, advancing straight toward him.
Ben heard stones shift behind him and spun. He saw a figure lunging at him from a dark corner of the cave. Before he could bring his submachine gun around, a shovel struck Ben square in the middle of the back and pitched him forward. His submachine gun clacked across the cave floor as he dropped to his knees, then fell face first to the hard cave floor. For a long moment he couldn’t feel his legs, and when the feeling came back they were numb. He looked up as the large figure ol Asher Katz reached down and stripped the pistol from his belt, tossing it aside.
Katz took a single step back and aimed his own submachine gun straight down on Ben.
* * * *
CHAPTER 89
N
o!” Lev ordered sensing Katz’s intention as clear as though he had sight. “I want him to see. I want him to bear witness to the end of his people and the return of Judea and Samaria to Israel. Is he alone?”
“Yes,” Katz reported, and slid slightly away from Ben. “There’s no one coming behind him.”
“As I expected.”
Through the pain, Ben fought to turn his gaze on Rabbi Lev as Katz took the place of the dead man at the winch’s controls. A flip of a single switch on a small panel was all it took to send the cable descending into the dark hole drilled to accommodate the shape charge now attached to its end. It looked as though the cave floor were swallowing it, one rapid gulp at a time.
Rabbi Lev removed a transistorized detonator from his pocket and held it reverently before him. “When the cable stops its descent, it will be time to return this land to its rightful owner. We will await that moment together, Inspector Kamal.”
“Go to hell.”
“The very place you have been these many years, and where your people will go when they leave the land of Israel.” Lev continued to stand reverently, placidly. “The Palestinians at last will be vanquished, and at the same time my vengeance against an even older enemy is achieved.”
“You’re wrong, Rabbi.” Ben could feel his strength returning as the machine’s whine steepened. “Daws’s scroll doesn’t tell the story you were expecting at all. Quite the opposite. It proves there was another Messiah before the one you’re waiting for and His name was Jesus Christ. Sorry to disappoint you.
Mordecai Lev’s face twisted into a scowl beneath his dark glasses. His body trembled.
“You can kill me,” Ben said quite calmly. “You can blow up the oil and poison our water, but you still don’twin, Rabbi, because the entire basis of the Amudei Ha’aretz’s existence is a lie. Do you hear me? A lie!”
Lev stumbled forward, tripped, and started to fall. Asher Katz lurched to catch him, his attention turned away from Ben.
Ben wasn’t sure where he found the strength to lunge, couldn’t be sure his legs would even work when he needed them. But he managed to crash into Katz as the bigger man supported Lev with both hands. Al
l three of them tumbled back to the cave floor. The detonator skittered across the dirt, coming to rest yards away from Lev.
A loud click followed as the cable reached its preprogrammed end, the explosive now within blasting distance of the shale protectively sheathing the oil.
Mordecai Lev, sunglasses stripped off, rummaged about the ground for the detonator, fanning his hands desperately through the dirt. His elegant robes soiled now, a tear in one of the shoulders.
Ben locked on to Katz and rolled with him across the cave floor. Katz tried to free up his submachine gun but wasn’t able to do so with Ben pressed against him. They exchanged wild blows, none having very much effect until Katz fastened his thumbs on Ben’s throat from beneath him. Their bodies came to a halt against the winch, the angle improving Katz’s leverage.
Ben felt the cartilage lining his windpipe begin to give, crackling audibly. He tried to strip Katz’s grasp off, tried to pound his way free with no success. Then, as Mordecai Lev continued to flail about the ground behind him in search of the detonator, Ben latched one hand on to the cable and found enough slack to twist it around Katz’s throat. The big man could still breathe, partly at least, until Ben stretched a hand up and pressed the button that started the cable rising out of the ground again.
The slack was taken up instantly and Katz’s grasp on Ben was stripped away. The force of the cable rising jerked Katz to his feet and slammed him against the machine’s housing. His face purpled and a low gurgling noise began to emanate from his throat. Katz’s extra weight, though, tripped the machine’s automatic shutdown circuit. The cable ground to a halt again, leaving Katz to strangle to death, his feet twitching madly.
Ben swung back toward Mordecai Lev just as the rabbi’s right palm grazed the steel of the detonator. His fingers closed on it and he raised it before him in trembling hands, feeling for the button.
Ben tried to lunge, but his legs betrayed him and he found himself half crawling, half lurching across the cave floor. He threw himself through the air, screaming as Lev’s thumb finally found the button.
Ben saw it compress, saw the red light flash on.
“No!”
But no explosion sounded in the earth beneath them. No rumble shook the cave.
Ben crashed his shoulder into the rabbi and sent the detonator flying again. It landed well back in the darkness, and Ben moved stiffly toward the winch’s control panel. He untangled the cable from Asher Katz’s neck and pulled his corpse down from the steel housing. Then Ben activated the controls to bring the shape charge back up. The winch began to whir and the cable climbed smoothly from the ground. Soon the explosive would clear the surface, preserving the Eastern Aquifer.
“God help me!” he heard Mordecai Lev scream. “God be with me!”
Ben swung to see that the old rabbi had found the detonator again. Holding it before him, Lev ran his thumb about the mental housing once more until he found the button and pressed it a second time.
A low-pitched rumble shook the walls. The floor quaked and nearly tore Ben’s feet out from under him. The winch apparatus spilled over atop Asher Katz’s corpse. Ben swung round one last time to see Rabbi Mordecai Lev standing with his arms raised toward the heavens in his scuffed and filthy robes.
Then Ben launched himself toward the cave path rising back to the entrance as the world began to crumble around him.
* * * *
D
anielle finally gave up calling out for help, abandoned the futile effort to free herself from the steering wheel. She jammed keys to the Jeep into the ignition and gunned the engine. She used her free hand to shift into gear and tore across the floor of the Judean Desert, heading for the cave.
The hand Ben had cuffed to the wheel slowed her, but only slightly. Danielle aimed the Jeep straight for the steps for the goat path leading to the cave entrance. She switched on her high beams to help pierce the night and floored the gas pedal.
* * * *
B
en rushed through the darkness, coughing up the grit and dust that had spilled down his throat. He could feel the walls and roof of the cave collapsing around him, its structure compromised when the explosive charge had detonated too close to the surface. The pervasive black air before him gave up little view, and at times the steep increase in grade had him slipping back downward no matter how much he struggled to drag himself on. Yet, somehow, he fought to keep going, still believing he could make it out until the opening in the path before him started closing up, sealed by the time he reached it. Earth and stones began to pile upon him and he coughed dryly, spitting up dirt.
Trapped ... No way out . . .
Ben pushed his palms desperately against the new wall before him and felt the world itself slipping from his grasp.
* * * *
B
en never hesitated, increasing her speed as she thumped up the steps of the goat path. Her high beams stretched for the sky as the heavy tires struggled up the incline. The Jeep bucked and rocked, but nonetheless climbed for the opening.
She had just realized the entire hillside around her seemed to be shaking when the Jeep slammed through the cave’s entrance. Falling rocks pounded its hood, shattered its windshield. The cave was disintegrating before her eyes in the spill of the Jeep’s headlights.
* * * *
B
en believed he saw a light. Just a sliver of it shining through the very top of the wall before him, but still enough to give him hope. He brushed the sand and dirt from his eyes and pulled himself to his feet. Stretching his hands upward, he found the opening and began to claw the soft dirt of the wall away. The more he clawed, the more light streamed in until, finally, the gap was wide enough to squeeze himself through.
Ben emerged on a crumbling incline. He inched along on his stomach, hands raking the dirt and stones. He pulled himself over a rise in the cave and the light grew almost blinding. Ben’s watery, dirt-clogged eyes focused enough to see the nose end of Danielle’s Jeep wedged through the entrance to the cave.
Her eyes bulged when she saw him leap onto the hood through a shower of rock and dirt and grab hold of the lip. She instantly shoved the powerful engine into reverse. The Jeep shook mightily, then freed itself. It plummeted down the steps sideways, Ben shed from its hood on the first of two rolls that left the Jeep lying inert on the driver’s side when it hit the bottom.
“Danielle!” Ben screamed, dragging himself for the Jeep as the entrance to the cave vanished above him.
* * * *
EPILOGUE
I
n the end we had something in common after all, Inspector,” Gianni Lorenzo said to Ben Kamal, who sat across from him in a common room of the Vatican residence in Jerusalem. “We are both men of our word.”
Diplomatic and political concerns ruled out the Vatican maintaining an official consulate in Israel, but the residence fulfilled much the same purpose by allowing church officials to perform duties similar to those of an ambassador. But the common room’s dark wood paneling and burgundy leather furniture gave it a somber cast neither the soft lighting nor a crackling fire could relieve. Ben sat with his back to that fire and could feel its heat through his chair.
“You are a good Christian,” Lorenzo continued. “You have done a great service to the church.”
“Because the killing would have continued otherwise, wouldn’t it?” Ben challenged. The aches and pains from the previous night lingered. Every motion drew a grimace from him. His right arm should have been in a sling and he would be limping for months. But he felt only anger as he faced Lorenzo. “How many more would have died?”
“As many as necessary.” Lorenzo looked at the pile of pages still in Ben’s lap, reconstructed from the floppy disc Ben had left with Father Mike the night before for safekeeping. “But none now, thanks to you.”
“Too late to save my nephew,” Ben said bitterly.
“I was fulfilling a charge passed on to me many years ago, Inspector,” Lorenzo defended. “A
s a soldier of the church, I had no choice. You must understand that.”
“I understand that a lot of good people are dead.”
“So is Mordecai Lev.”
“It’s not a fair trade.”