But the more Johnson studied the pieces of information he managed to find, and the more he thought about the cleverness with which Abiathar had communicated his secret, the more he became convinced that the mystery of the scroll had not been fully unlocked.
“Gentlemen, please, use your heads, not your testosterone,” Johnson pleaded that day in his office. “Look at this scroll. It’s a message, not a language. The cipher Abiathar created was incredibly complex. This man went to extraordinary lengths not only to send this message, but also to hide this message. Do you then think it reasonable that anyone who could decipher this message and find an entryway under the Temple Mount would then be empowered to walk right up to where Elijah and Abiathar had spent decades, and countless lives, to construct the Third Temple? Don’t you think it would be more likely that the closer anyone would get to the Third Temple, the more complex the problem of finding it? After all, neither Elijah nor Abiathar could afford the possibility that some fool Bedouin could stumble into a cave that would lead under the Mount and that, by sheer dumb luck, he could stumble upon the completely finished Third Temple of the Jews. They wouldn’t allow that to happen.”
Johnson was grateful for the reluctant nods around the table, but frustrated with the denseness that still remained.
“Gentlemen, there must exist, yet to come, puzzles, riddles, ciphers, something that will need to be solved, something that will be directly connected to this scroll, this key, which will give us access to the location of the Temple.
“We must,” Johnson said with emphasis, “we must take the scroll with us. The scroll, not a copy, or we will simply be wasting our time.” Suddenly, Johnson was drained. He hadn’t realized how impassioned he was about this search.
Now, standing under the Temple Mount, Johnson looked at the grid in his hands. He hoped he had gotten it right.
Anwar and Aphek, cousins and bricklayers, followed Rasaf’s orders to walk downhill within sight of the entrance to the King’s Garden Tunnel. But that also put them into the midst of the Israeli soldiers stationed all around the tunnel’s entrance. They were scruffy enough to be of no consequence to the soldiers, some standing idly in the rain, some running back and forth on unknown errands. As a result of the demonstration on the Temple Mount, other civilians were also walking up and down the hill in the early morning half-light.
The cousins took no notice of the three men who passed them, dressed in kaftans, stern looks on their faces. They were focused more on the movement of the soldiers. The knives that pierced their necks were so thin, so sharp, that neither felt anything amiss until hands grabbed their shoulders and pulled them into the darkness at the side of the road. They felt nothing as sharp, bloodied knives silently sliced the leather thongs around their necks, the amulets slipped inside kaftans for delivery to the Imam.
What Johnson hadn’t expected was the complexity of the labyrinth they now found themselves exploring. None of his research had prepared him for this.
At the five-pronged fork in the bowels of Zechariah’s Tomb, Johnson overcame his first hurdle. By exploring different forks, and the tunnels that ran from them, Johnson found the tombs were a crisscrossed mishmash of low-ceiling tunnels, some flanked by burial racks stacked like bunk beds along the walls, and some tunnels leading to individual burial crypts. All of these different tunnels spread out from the five-pronged junction, heading in numerous directions for unknown distances. Now he knew why there was a locked iron gate over the Tomb’s entrance.
Under closer inspection, Johnson discovered small inscriptions at the upper left corner of each prong’s portal. The inscriptions were generally in Hebrew or Aramaic and appeared to be listing the family names of those buried in that particular tunnel. That was how he discovered the corridor of the Beni Hazir. And that was how their search began.
Johnson estimated it would take no more than forty-eight hours to determine whether the message of the scroll was true or just a fairy tale. From the outside, he had anticipated an initial period, perhaps twelve to twenty-four hours, of exploratory searching, using the same tunnels or corridors that Abiathar and his workers must have used. From there, Johnson expected the task to become more difficult. From what they knew of Abiathar, the scroll, and the cipher, the old priest would have carefully protected the path to the Temple and, ultimately, was likely to have sealed the existing route altogether. Perhaps in more than one location. But Abiathar would not have wanted to hide the Temple completely. The scroll’s purpose was to eventually lead the Jews back to the Temple when it was safe.
So Johnson surmised there would likely be several critical junctures where choices would have to be made, choices guided either by the scroll itself or by some signal or cipher that Abiathar would have left behind. Depending on the complexity of identifying and unraveling these clues, Johnson had anticipated an additional twelve hours. Throw in some time to sleep, rest, or eat, within forty-eight hours they should either have found the Temple or concluded this was all a hoax.
Drawing on their field experience, in consultation with Larsen, they agreed to provision themselves for three days. If they hadn’t solved this puzzle within seventy-two hours, they would have to come out and try again. And Johnson knew, now, there would not be any second chance. Too many people were determined to stop them. They had gotten lucky, this time. There would not be another time.
They sat in the dark, in the damp, in their thoughts. Supposedly a time of rest, it became more a time of rising anxiety.
Johnson’s mind was running at warp speed, trying to figure out how he could bring the order and certainty he felt in New York City into the dark chaos that was now stripping away his hope.
Johnson and Larsen had planned to use the Mount’s geology as part of their strategy. The Temple Mount was constructed on a long series of ridges, often called Mount Moriah in Scripture. At the northern end was the Damascus Gate; at the southern end the City of David. Mount Moriah was sloped, descending from north to south. When King Herod erected the platform upon which the Temple was built, the northern end rested on the bedrock of Mount Moriah. It was at the southern end of the platform that the bedrock fell away steeply, and there, Herod had constructed a series of arches and pillars to hold up the platform.
It would be fairly reasonable, Johnson and Larsen had surmised, to find an entry point from the south and to continue to move northwest through existing arches and caverns. While many considered the area between the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque as the most likely site for the Temples of Solomon and Herod, there was an alternative, south of Al-Aqsa, recently proposed by Tel Aviv architect Tuvia Sigva and gaining support from scholars. It was here they planned to begin their systematic search, as much as the mountain would allow.
In New York, it made sense. Here, in the cold and dark, an oatmeal clamminess encasing his entire body, Johnson was beginning to experience anxiety, leaning dangerously toward fear. I can’t let this get to me, he lectured himself. I’m the one who’s supposed to know the way. These guys are depending on me. But where do we go now?
Johnson searched the blackness for inspiration, and found only blackness. And it was heavy.
For a time, they followed the tunnel leading from the “five forks” as they called it. There were no highways in the limestone, but the tunnel from the Beni Hazir ran generally in a westerly direction, gently sloping downward as it continued for several thousand yards, becoming more narrow as it descended.
Johnson was not a fan of caves. He didn’t like the air. The lower they descended, the warmer and more fetid the air became. The cave smelled of old, wet dirt. And decay. The rot of flesh, long completed, seemed to ooze from the rock like deathly sweat. At intervals, shallow, bone-filled chambers had been hollowed from the sides of the tunnel. And always, out beyond the edge of their lights, came the faint scratching of claws against stone.
They came to a second junction. Only two choices, they took the one to the right, the one that appeared to be going more in the nort
hwesterly direction they desired. As he had at the “five forks,” Johnson took a small, fluorescent yellow, adhesive dot from one of several sheets he carried. He stuck two small circles near the tunnel floor, just inside the tunnel they were entering and on the opposite wall of the tunnel they were leaving. He had pasted one spot inside their choice at “five forks” and would attach three at their next point of choice. That way, if they doubled back on themselves and found a mark, they would know exactly where they were. And the dots, which they could retrieve, would also direct them to the way out.
This second tunnel was quite short. Soon, they stepped out into a large cavern about forty yards wide and thirty yards deep. Facing them were two dozen arches, twelve stacked on twelve, supporting what appeared to be a natural limestone ceiling. A tunnel opening appeared at the mouth of each arch.
“Yes!” Johnson trumpeted as he ran into the cavern. “Yes. This is it.”
He stopped suddenly, aware of his impulsive reaction, and turned to face his two bewildered colleagues.
“Look,” Johnson said, half turning with a sweep of his arm, barely able to control his elation, “look, these are Herodian arches. See the way they are built up to support the ceiling.” Breathless, he turned back to Bohannon and Rodriguez. “We must have crossed under the Kidron Valley much more quickly than I imagined. The way these arches are built . . . their height . . . this must be the southern edge of the Temple Mount platform.”
Johnson turned once again to gaze at the arches. “This,” he said, his right fist pounding on his thigh, “is a great stroke of luck.”
“Ah, Doc?”
Rodriguez’s voice pulled Johnson from his celebration. “Yes, yes. What?”
“Sorry, Doc, but the GPS doesn’t agree with you.”
Johnson spun on his heel as his stomach settled into the seat of his pants. He crossed to where Joe was resting on one knee, his backpack on the ground, the GPS device in his hands. Reluctantly, he looked over Rodriguez’s shoulder, Bohannon joining them on Joe’s other side.
“See, we’re here,” said Rodriguez, pointing to their position on the map, “at the bottom of the slope, but still on the far side of the Kidron Valley. We’ve still got a long way to go before we hit the edge of the Mount’s platform.”
A long, deep sigh escaped from Johnson, who rested his forehead in the palm of his right hand. “I thought we were so close.”
“Guys . . . I think we have a bigger problem,” said Bohannon.
Doc looked up and saw the light from Bohannon’s helmet sweeping across the arches on the other side of the cavern.
“Which of these tunnels do we take next?”
To conserve their resources, they had agreed to use their power-cell lanterns only when on the move. But the darkness had a different plan. It was so black, it had a living presence—isolating, crawling, invading. They began to hate the darkness.
Three times, they returned to the cavern of the arches after hitting dead ends in one of the tunnels. Twice more, they came to the cavern, coming out from an arch that was different than the one they entered. Several of the arches led not to tunnels, but to something more like fissures in the limestone, tight, confined cracks. With the gear they were carrying, it was hard work moving forward. Each time they returned to the cavern, they were moist with perspiration. Because the air was so damp, they never dried.
They had invested four precious hours and had come no closer to their goal. Cold, damp, tired, and frustrated, they sat in the dark. And waited for inspiration.
Major Mordechai was on the phone again, his generally pale complexion now mottled red.
Captain Levin was amazed the telephone still functioned after the beating it had taken from Mordechai’s frustration.
“No, General, we can’t send troops out now, poking around the Temple Mount, not with thousands of Muslims already staging a demonstration in the courtyard. There are so many of them, they are sprawling over the edges of the courtyard and down the sides of the Mount. If we put any more soldiers out there, it would be a provocation that could spark all-out riots.”
Levin looked again at the monitors. The rain continued.
“No, sir, we don’t know where they went. Yes, sir, I know. We’ve got extra details of men in here right now, we’re poring over every inch of videotape from the last two days, from the first moment Captain Levin became suspicious of these three men.”
Mordechai looked at Levin as he listened to the general on the other end.
“General, I was here in the Aleph Center continuously from late last night. I can assure you that Captain Levin and his men did everything humanly possible to track and capture these people. They’ve been on duty for days.” Another pause. “Absolutely not, sir. If I believed any of them were impaired, I would have pulled this squad off-line immediately. These men have performed admirably. Yes, sir, I agree. We missed something. And we are determined to find out what it was and how it happened. But I can tell you without a doubt, General, there’s no fault to be found here. We all know none of these systems are perfect. But I also know Levin’s squad has done the best they could, the best anybody could, to get these men into custody.”
Mordechai fiddled with the phone cord while he listened. “Yes, sir . . . yes, sir, I understand.”
The major settled the handset into the cradle much more gently this time. Then he turned to face Levin.
“He doesn’t care,” said Mordechai. “The general said we will find those men, and we will do it quickly, or someone else will have this job.”
Arch eleven rescued them from the cavern and restored some portion of hope.
Bohannon had checked his watch on the way into the cavern. Now its hands mocked his expectations. The explorers had spent twelve costly hours deadlocked in the cavern of the arches, and it nearly broke their spirits. Finally, Rodriguez picked up a rock, threw it over his shoulder at the wall of arches, and, following the rock, they found what appeared to be, so far, the way out. Even though it was less than six feet high, causing them to stoop painfully, this route was truly a tunnel, sections of it clearly carved out with tools.
Johnson was in the lead again, pressing forward with the dogged determination of a man on a mission. They passed through a sea of smells—the bitter sweetness of animal urine, like old apple cider turned to vinegar; the wooly musk of ancient dead—and plunged deliberately to the edges of darkness.
Two hours later, his energy sapped, Bohannon pushed himself forward, closing the gap with Johnson. “Doc.” The sound of Bohannon’s voice was a shock. The last few hours in the cavern they had all been quiet, unwilling to speak for fear of sounding retreat. Now his one word bounced off the walls and brought each of them to attention.
“Doc, we’ve got to stop soon and get some sleep.”
In the glare of his lamp, Bohannon saw two eyes that were not yet registering comprehension.
“Doc, all of us have been awake for nearly forty-eight hours. We’ve got to stop and get some rest.”
Bohannon felt as if his words had popped an adrenaline balloon. Suddenly, all three were on the floor, sprawled into a small alcove that had widened the tunnel slightly.
“We should all get into some dry clothes before we pass out,” said Rodriguez. Rapidly, the three men stripped to the skin, put on dry underwear and socks, and crawled into their sleeping bags. Propped against his backpack, Bohannon began to rifle through some of its side pockets and resurrected some trail mix. As he turned with an offer, both Rodriguez and Johnson were already asleep. Not a bad idea, thought Bohannon. He stretched himself out and was snoring before the trail mix bag hit the floor.
37
Captain Levin had never been in Central Command’s Operations Complex before, as if he needed anything else to add to his anxiety. Wednesday morning, he was now three days without sleep. Both he and Major Mordechai had been summoned by General Moishe Orhlon, Israel’s Defense Minister, for a face-to-face explanation of what had occurred since Levin first spotte
d these men Saturday night, more than three days ago. Levin wondered if his military career had come to an end.
They were ushered past the sprawling, electronic operations center to a meeting room dominated by a large table, dominated by Orhlon. The general looked like a man who had bet his life savings on a sure thing and lost. The ashtray in front of him was overflowing with cigarette butts, like the one dangling from his lip. To his right stood Levi Sharp, director of Shin Bet. Levin prepared himself for the blast. But it was Mordechai who stepped into the line of fire.
“General Orhlon,” he said with a salute. “Aleph Reconnaissance Center is my command. We failed in our mission. Our men, they were relentless, but we failed to intercept the Americans. We believe they have found a way to penetrate below the Temple Mount. Their purpose is unknown, but we fear terrorism. I take full responsibility.”
Just inside the door, Levin looked at the back of Mordechai’s head and was once again filled with respect for his commander. Mordechai had trained his subordinates in the credo of the military: there is no excuse; only responsibility. And Mordechai had the courage to put his butt where he held his beliefs. Levin, shaking his head, knew he could do no less.
Unable to speak out of turn, without his superior’s request, Levin also took a pace forward and snapped a firm salute. His eyes searched neither Sharp, to whom Mordechai and Aleph Center reported, nor Orhlon, to whom they all reported. Rather, he searched the far wall, stood silently, and hoped for recognition.
It was clear that, long ago, Orhlon had surrendered in the battle for fitness. He was obese, hypertensive, borderline diabetic. The scuttlebutt filtering down to Levin was that Orhlon probably had lung cancer. But he was no less the warrior.
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