The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  “Why not just drop a time warp over the place? That’s really easy.”

  “Too risky. The slightest ripple in space-time would tip the enemy that we’re making a move.”

  Like he said, no choice, boyo.

  “Anything else of interest I should know?”

  “Actually, Brother Harper . . .”

  Seems the spot atop Mount Nebo where Krinkle was letting Harper off was the exact spot from where Moses (who was something of a raving lunatic, Krinkle added) sat and watched the chosen tribes cross into the Promised Land. And the place Harper would be crossing the river was the very place where the chosen tribes did the deed. In relating those tales, the roadie had switched into babbling-like-a-speed-freak mode.

  “And not far from that spot, John the Baptist—”

  Harper felt his head about to explode with wonderment. He waved the roadie to stop. “Sorry I asked,” he said, picking up the reliquary box by the strap and slinging it over his shoulder. “Let’s get this funfair on the road.”

  The roadie opened the door of his magic bus and pointed across the Jordan Valley to Jerusalem. “You’ll find the abandoned bridge that way, way down there. Just keep the parietal cortex of your brain locked on a heading of 258 degrees as triangulated from this location. That will take you to a palm grove near the river. From there you’ll see the crossing point. You’ll find plenty of shadows there to hide in till sundown. Qumran is across the desert in those foothills on a heading of 220 degrees from the bridge. You tracking me?”

  “Got it.”

  “Cool. Power shutdown at nineteen hundred thirty hours.”

  Harper checked the distance to the river. It was a long hike.

  “I’ve got the crossing no-man’s-land part on foot, but how do I get down to the river?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “That’s very helpful.”

  “Hey, according to the scraps on intel spilling from Brother Astruc, the whole being-smuggled-out-of-the-Holy-Land-in-70-AD-and-getting-yourself-smuggled-back-in-nearly-two-thousand-years-later plan was your idea. We just don’t know why you did it, how you did it, or if it even happened. It could be ghost intel. Whatever it is, it’s on the other side of the river. Oh, reminds me, this is from the cop.”

  The roadie reached in the pouch of his overalls, pulled out a leather strap, and tossed it at Harper. Harper caught it. There was a monocle attached to the strap, of the same sort he’d seen on the drummer. The monocle had X-ray vision or something like it.

  “This is for what?”

  “The Israelis have a shitload of area denial ordnance buried in the border zone and all across the desert till you hit Highway 90. Claymore and fragmentation mines, bounding and directional. Some set to go off by contact, others by trip wire. Get by those and you’ve got antitank mines laid out in staggered grids. It’s a local’s version of a time warp.”

  Harper looked at the monocle. Twenty-four hours ago it was a trip through Hell with a tracking device posing as an egg timer. Now it was crossing the River Jordan into an active war zone with a piece of kit that would rate him as a spy if caught. Unless, of course, he had already taken a head shot.

  “How does it work?” Harper said.

  “It just does. But we can only get a ping on your location every ninety seconds. It will instantaneously triangulate and update your compass position. Anything more would create an identifiable comms signature. You’re reconnoitering the old-fashioned way. Sort of.”

  “Right.” He stuffed the monocle in his coat pocket. He stared at Krinkle; the roadie stared back. “So, I guess that’s that,” Harper said.

  The roadie nodded. “Listen to me, brother, if this is the real deal, we will be there. We will get to you like the last time.”

  “Sure,” Harper said.

  He stepped off the bus, took a deep breath of desert air. He looked back at Krinkle.

  “Just a thought, but why couldn’t you drop me next to Qumran?”

  “Because weird as it sounds, this is the Holy Land. That means you have to go in by the same way you last came out.”

  “Way back then, when I was who I was. Maybe.”

  “Maybe. That’s what you’re here to confirm or deny. Rock on, brother.”

  The door closed, and off the roadie went.

  Watching the bus head off in a cloud of dust, a question dropped in Harper’s head.

  “Smuggled out how, two thousand years ago?”

  He took a few steps to the ridge atop Mount Nebo to survey the expanse of desert before him. There was a dry hot wind coming up from the floor of the desert. It was then the dead soldier in Harper’s head responded to his question. You’ll figure it out, boyo.

  “Sure I will.”

  He refocused on the long hike before him. It was worse than a long hike. Twenty-five miles to the river, Qumran twelve miles farther, then another twenty-five miles to Jerusalem. It was a bloody steep down-and-up, too. From an altitude atop Nebo of nearly two thousand feet above sea level; down to fourteen hundred feet below sea level at the Dead Sea; back up two thousand five hundred feet above sea level to the Holy City of Jerusalem.

  “Just another ride on the cosmic roller coaster.”

  He headed in the general direction of down. He skirted villages and took cover in any shadows he could find. An hour’s walk later, the mountain leveled off at a ribbon of asphalt running parallel to the Dead Sea. Keeping out of sight meant Harper had made a meandering trail. It was still a long way to the river.

  “Now would be a good time for a miracle.”

  There was a mirage where the horizon met the road, and out of the mirage came a dusty vehicle with a Jordanian license plate. Harper saw the driver. He wore a white dishdasha and there was a red-checked kaffiyeh on his head. A Bedouin tribesman who had traded his camel for a clapped-out Toyota, Harper thought.

  “Ask and you shall receive.”

  The tribesman’s eyes widened seeing the western man in a black coat standing at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. The tribesman slowed as he passed, and Harper saw two goats in the back of the pickup. The goats stared at him, too. The tribesman kept driving, but Harper caught the man’s eyes in the pickup’s rearview mirror. He raised the palm of his freshly gloved right hand into the man’s eyeline.

  “Stop,” Harper said.

  The tribesman hit the brakes, and the goats stumbled but quickly regained their footing.

  “Come back.”

  The pickup reversed and stopped next to Harper. He leaned down to the open passenger window. He scanned the man’s eyes for traces of dead black; they were clean.

  “Hello,” Harper said.

  “As-salamu aleykum,” the tribesman said.

  “I wonder if you could take me to the river.”

  “Shou?”

  “I’m a tourist. I’d like to see the River Jordan. Someplace where I could cross into the West Bank. Say, old Allenby Bridge?”

  “Khouth jiser al-yahoud.”

  “Well, yes, I should use the official Israeli crossing, but I seem to have left my passport in Switzerland.”

  “Ma btigdar tigtah al-jiser. Mamnou. Al-jaish bitukhak.”

  “The soldiers will shoot me only if they see me. Which they won’t, or your truck, or your goats.”

  “Inta shitan?”

  “Am I a demon? Actually, I’m one of the good guys.”

  “Shou?”

  Harper opened the passenger door, climbed in the pickup, and stared at the tribesman.

  “What’s your name, mate?”

  “Abu Salah.”

  “Abu Salah, nice to meet you. I want you to look into my eyes and listen to the sound of my voice. That’s it. Now, take me to the river.”

  Harper blinked to nowtimes.

  Evening had arrived and heavy clouds were thick over the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, but darkness had yet to spread over the border zone. Sodium vapor lamps at big Allenby were blazing. Spotlights along the security fence f
looded the BZ with light. He checked his watch: 19:30 hours minus three, two, one . . . The lights went out.

  “Here we go.”

  He reached in his pocket for the monocle, slid the strap over his head, and set the glass to his right eye. The darkness before him became a world of shimmering green light. There was the desert, there was the fence, there was the border zone. Then there was a heads-up display of a compass laid in over the green world. He turned his head from left to right; the compass constantly realigned itself to keep the parietal cortex of his brain focused on a bearing of 220 degrees.

  Clack.

  And there was the gate in the security fence popping open. Words dropped in Harper’s head. He recognized them from Isaiah: Go through, go through the gates; prepare the way for the people.

  “Through a bloody minefield, no less.”

  He picked up the reliquary box, secured it over his shoulder. He hurried from the palm grove and slipped through the open gate. He kept his eyes on the ground till he reached an abandoned one-lane trestle of rusting iron and decaying wood. He stopped and looked down at the River Jordan, where prophets slaked their thirst and were overcome with mystic visions. It really was a pathetic stream in nowtimes, Harper thought. From the smell of it, it was a polluted one as well. The foul smell of the water kicked off a vision in Harper’s own head.

  “The river is dying. The whole bloody world is dying.”

  Then, according to some daft plan he came up with nearly two thousand years ago, Jay Michael Harper strolled across the bridge and back into the Holy Land.

  ii

  He cleared the border zone without blowing himself up. And the intel on the desert beyond was solid. The ground was littered with things that went bang if disturbed. He could see them through his monocle. At first it worked as a night sight, allowing him to see the trip wires and aboveground Claymores. Then, as if anticipating his need, the monocle augmented itself with an X-ray function. Harper saw antitank and fragmentation mines buried in staggered rows as far as his eye could see.

  “This isn’t a local’s version of a time warp, this is bloody no-man’s-land.”

  He scanned the ground in a left-to-right arc; it was the same in every direction. Desert, brush, and tumbleweeds, things that went bang. He would never make it across the desert before the moon came out from behind the clouds; then he’d be a soft target on the horizon for a sniper.

  “Terrific.”

  Twenty yards to the left he saw a depression carved in the desert floor. He zigzagged through the minefield toward it. The depression went seven feet down and was two meters wide. It was the beginning of a network of ravines and gullies spreading out in all directions, some of them in the general direction of 220 degrees. There were earthen steps connecting the desert floor to the bottom of the depression. He saw boot prints in the dirt. The prints were military; an Israeli soldier on patrol maybe. Harper got the picture. The Israelis used the natural landscape as a force multiplier. If attacked they could maneuver quickly on foot, leapfrogging from one position to the next and forcing the enemy to hold in the minefields. It was only a matter of calling in air support to finish off the invaders.

  Smart, the dead soldier in Harper’s head offered.

  “Not if it’s us they’re looking for.”

  Still, if he was going to get to Qumran before the moon turned him into a sitting duck, he didn’t have a choice. He checked the steps and lower ground for trip wires and explosive ordnance; good to go. Harper’s eyes followed the prints to a bend in the depression. A dim light was glowing from around the bend.

  “Hello.”

  He went down into the depression and headed for the light. Coming around the bend, he found a six-inch infrared ChemLight in the dirt. Someone was marking a trail. And given the operating life of the ChemLight, that someone had been here within the last ten hours. Standard military ops, Harper thought. It would prevent patrolling soldiers from getting lost. He listened carefully: no boots on the ground ahead. He followed the prints till he came to an intersection of ravines and gullies. Boot prints went this way and that way.

  Harper plotted the bearing of each ravine and gully to figure his next move. It was a bit like plotting your way through a garden maze. Like the yew mazes at Longleat or Hampton Court maybe, he thought. He wondered which of the dead Brit soldiers in his head would have known such gentle places of fair quiet and innocence. Didn’t matter. In the Holy Land the maze was made of hardened sand and surrounded by killing things. One ravine clocked a heading of 212 degrees. He walked ten yards ahead, stopped. He flashed the roadie’s brief atop Mount Nebo: We’re hoping you’ll pick up some help on the inside, but we’re not sure it will be there. So be wary of any help offered.

  “Or not.”

  He walked back to the intersection, scanned the passages again, this time checking for infrared signatures. The monocle read one glowing against the walls of a gully on a bearing of 319 degrees. Northwest, eighty-nine degrees off his course. Could be coincidence, could be bad news.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  He shifted the reliquary box from his right shoulder to his left. He pulled his SIG Sauer from his kill kit, fitted it with a silencer. He walked on, found another intersection of ravines and gullies. There was another ChemLight in a tunnel heading southeast on 170 degrees. Ten minutes later there was one more in a ravine heading west on 270 degrees. He was heading in the right direction, more or less. Maybe the Holy Land was a no-go zone for his kind. But maybe, once inside, it wasn’t much different from the rest of paradise. Maybe there was no such thing as coincidences or cosmic accidents in this place. Only leaves the bad news, boyo.

  Harper continued to follow the ChemLights in wildly different directions. Forty minutes later the depressions flattened out and opened to barren desert. He was only three hundred yards from the Dead Sea. The smell of sulfur and salt hit him in the face. Well behind him was Allenby Bridge. More good intel: Israeli choppers circled low over the BZ and the lower Jordan Valley searching for incoming threats. He was in the clear, for now.

  He checked the night sky over Qumran.

  The heavy clouds were thinning out. In another hour the full moon would break through and light up the desert. He scanned the desert floor. Bad news: The ground was loaded with explosive ordnance. More bad news: The ChemLight trail went dark. Maybe he was wrong about the Holy Land being not that different from the rest of paradise. Maybe he’d done nothing more than come across the remnants of an Israeli patrol.

  “Bollocks.”

  He scanned the ground looking for a way out.

  He saw a single pair of boot prints in the dirt. Harper followed the track step for step. He walked five yards, came upon a jeep track. A nearby sign, in Hebrew and Arabic, explained the really bad news. He was in a highly restricted military zone and would be shot on sight. The sign also said the ground was heavily mined. In the event he might consider walking closer to the Dead Sea to avoid the mines, he was advised the ground along the shoreline was unstable and frequently collapsed into deep pits, which could cause severe injury and/or death.

  “Cheers for the warning.”

  Harper holstered his Sig, shifted the reliquary box from left shoulder to right. The monocle’s night sight highlighted fresh wheel markings in the dirt. The track was clear of explosive ordnance. If you were an Israeli soldier, this was safe passage through no-man’s-land. The monocle’s compass clocked a heading of 253 degrees, meaning the track probably connected to Highway 90 running along the east shore of the Dead Sea. From there he’d have a clear shot 220 degrees. Maybe. He double-timed it. Twenty minutes later the night sight highlighted the foothills of Qumran. He clocked the distance at less than four miles.

  Suddenly a set of headlamps lit up the track and hit him in the back. Three Israeli Humvees were coming his way in a cloud of dust; each Humvee was topped with a .50-caliber machine gun. He searched the ground north of the track with his monocle. One meter in he saw antitank mines beneat
h the ground and a spider’s web of trip wire everywhere else. He had nowhere to go.

  “Judas Priest.”

  He pulled the collar of his black Burberry up around his neck, stuffed his hands into the pockets, and lowered his eyes to the ground.

  “Lux transit per circuitum,” he said.

  The convoy rolled by but the soldiers did not see him. And when the convoy was well gone, Harper looked up. He saw red taillights turn onto another track and head north toward Allenby Bridge. That one calls for a hit of radiance, he thought. He dug through his pockets searching for his electronic fag. He found it and had three deep hits. The dead soldier in his head piped up: That, boyo, makes the second bloody miracle of the day. Harper shifted the reliquary box from his right shoulder to his left.

  “No shit.”

  He got to Highway 90. He crossed over, checked the ground. Everything in an arc from southwest to northwest was clear of ordnance. The monocle pointed him to 220 degrees. He hustled that way. He went through groves of date palm and fig trees. There was no one around. He crossed a dry riverbed and crossed a patch of barren desert. He skirted an Israeli settlement on his right. Had to be. It was surrounded by a fence and security towers. Harper kept his eyes to the ground as he passed and was not noticed. Five hundred more yards and he came over a rise. He saw the turnoff two hundred yards away. There were two Israeli Humvees blocking the entrance. But there were no fence or foot patrols that he could see. Farther up, atop a hill, were three well-lit buildings. Everything about them said Welcome to the Qumran Tourist Center and Gift Shop.

  He checked his bearings: 220 degrees took him straight through the tourist center and into the far southwest hills. The cave belonging to that last scribe of Qumran was somewhere up there.