Orhlon’s eyes burned into Levin’s skull. He allowed silence to dance on the table.
“You have something to say, Levin?”
“General, I am honored by Major Mordechai’s loyalty, but the responsibility for what has happened is mine, not his. We spotted these men, what, two days ago? I should have acted then. Everything that has happened since, sir, must be laid on my shoulders.”
Orhlon looked slowly at the two soldiers, both still at salute.
“That is exactly what I want to know,” said Orhlon. “Exactly what has happened since the first time you saw these men. Every detail, important and unimportant. I want it fast, I want it straight, and I want it now,” he snapped.
Levin detected a quick glance pass between Orhlon and Sharp. “So, at ease. Sit down. Levin, you start.”
When Johnson and Rodriguez awoke, “breakfast” was muesli and water, followed by an energy bar. For now, they allowed Bohannon to sleep.
While they chewed, Johnson alternately consulted the maps he and Larsen had sketched out prior to departure and the handheld global positioning unit. He was not encouraged.
“What do you think, Doc? Any idea where we are?” Rodriguez was still halfway into his sleeping bag, admittedly reluctant to relinquish the warmth.
“I’m not sure.” Still staring at the maps, Johnson tried to process his thoughts. “I think I know, but I’m not sure. The GPS works fine at times; then, at other times, it just quits. At those times, there must be something between us and the surface. Right now, I can’t get a signal. But I think we’re here.”
Johnson tapped the eraser of his pencil against the section of map illuminated by his headlamp. When there was no response, he turned toward Rodriguez, bringing the map with him.
Blessed with a trio of GPS positions he had recorded the previous day, Johnson took what he knew and applied it to what he surmised. From Zechariah’s Tomb, they had progressed in a generally northwest direction until hitting the cavern of arches. From that point on, Johnson knew, charting direction was dubious.
“I think we’re along here,” Johnson said, tapping a triangle he had drawn on the map. “If we’re at the southern point of the triangle, then we still have a long way to go before we reach the perimeter of the Temple Mount area. If we’re closer to the midpoint or the top of the triangle, then we’ve come more than halfway to the Temple Mount perimeter. Until I get another reading, I just won’t know.”
Rodriguez looked at the map. “Even supposing we’re halfway to the perimeter, we would still have a long way to go. We still have to clear the Kidron Valley and cross under the Pool of Siloam. Probably another mile, as the crow flies. But I haven’t seen any crows down here. Looks to me like we’re going to have a tough time getting this done in three days, assuming we can even find Abiathar’s cavern.”
The words were confirmation of what Johnson feared. He had hoped this would be the easy part, that the entry portal would lead to a clearly discernable, easily navigated series of tunnels that Abiathar’s workmen would have used to import the materials they needed. He expected difficulty later, once they pierced the underbelly of the Mount itself. Like Rodriguez, he now seriously questioned their chances of finishing in the three days allotted. He responded to Rodriguez with a scowl.
“Perhaps we should begin to conserve our water,” Rodriguez floated, picking up the pencil and tapping it against the map. “Doc, let me ask you another question. The night we were on David’s Tower, you were talking about the power, the presence you felt here in Jerusalem.”
“Yes, the sense of an emanating presence was, well, I felt I could almost touch it,” Johnson replied.
“What about now, now that we’ve come down here?”
How could Johnson explain what he was feeling? In some ways, it felt like anxiety, an emotion with which Johnson was well acquainted: a heavy, pushing weight on his chest; labored breathing; an invasion of his consciousness, pushing other thoughts to the fringes. In other ways, it felt like euphoria: a lightness of being; a sense of peace; elusive, but somewhere in his psyche, a sense of joy.
He could feel it, but he didn’t understand it. And he wasn’t sure if he wanted to describe it.
“Yes, it’s stronger. It’s definitely stronger. And it gets even stronger the closer we get to the Mount.”
Johnson turned his light toward Rodriguez’s face and saw the question in his eyes, a question neither one was prepared to ask.
“I don’t know, Joe. I really don’t know.”
Dampened by the rain, dispersed by the Imam’s henchmen, the demonstration on the Temple Mount ended without major incident. The amulets now rested on the table in front of the Imam. They did little to ease his growing concern, though his lust for revenge had been satisfied.
Da’ud stood before him, eyes downcast, shifting his weight from foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable. There had been no information for more than twenty-four hours. The Americans appeared to have vanished. Most likely, they discovered an entry point and were now underground, perhaps under the Mount itself. Impossible, his mind declared. “We cannot allow this to happen.” Rage began to rise again.
“Da’ud, gather fifty men, trustworthy, competent, obedient men. Gather them immediately. Separate them into five groups, and take them into the Stables.” The Imam began to pace behind the table, considering his strategic possibilities. “Position one group under the Dome of the Rock; position another group under the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Station them in a way to protect the buildings from all sides. They are to protect those shrines with their lives, if necessary.”
He didn’t look at Da’ud; his eyes were off into some distant place. “Direct the other three groups into a systematic search of the tunnels. Find these men and kill them. Find them before they can even attempt their plot.”
Abruptly, he spun on his heel, strode to the table, and swept up the amulets in his hand. “Find them,” he shouted with uncontrolled violence, his outstretched arm pointing to Da’ud, the amulets, speckled red, dangling from his hand, “before this fate becomes yours as well.”
38
Initially, the tunnel in which they slept led them in a general northwesterly direction, without incident, for more than an hour. The tunnel was easily passable. They were making good progress. Bohannon was encouraged.
But then conditions changed, significantly. The tunnel had been gently sloping downward since they entered, but suddenly the slope became more severe with each step. Bohannon’s boots twice skidded on the damp floor. Fifteen feet in front of him, Johnson gave a yelp, lost his footing, and landed heavily on his backpack. He was easily convinced that Rodriguez, the strongest and most athletic of the trio, should take point.
Rodriguez quickly perfected a safer way to descend this slippery slope. Each of them was wearing the spelunking gear they had purchased: shirts with padded elbows; pants with padded knees; thin, form-fitted thermal gloves with textured palms; and hard hats with attached spotlights. Rodriguez leaned his body into the rough wall on the right, using his padded right elbow as a fulcrum, and pressed his boots against where the left wall met the tunnel floor. Supported by both sides of the tunnel, Rodriguez inched himself forward, followed by the other two, who tried to mimic his every move.
After half-an-hour of painstaking progress, Bohannon was worn out by the contortions necessary to navigate the tunnel and wondered where this plunging slope would take them.
“Whoa!”
Rodriguez’s exclamation stopped Bohannon and Johnson dead in their tracks. Bohannon had been concentrating so heavily on his footing and on maintaining his leverage against the walls he hadn’t even noticed that Rodriguez was stopped in the middle of the tunnel, standing upright on a flat, level surface. “Joe, what’s wrong?”
Rodriguez turned his head to look back up the tunnel. “C’mon down and see for yourselves.”
Bohannon didn’t like the disgusted tone in Rodriguez’s voice, but he still took his time to navigate the final portion of the
slope, then turned to offer Johnson any help he might need. Bohannon and Johnson both turned to Rodriguez in the same moment and both felt their stomachs sink.
The three men stood on a flat ledge, about four feet wide and fifteen feet long. The ledge, and the end of the tunnel, overlooked a subterranean lake. Other than the ledge they occupied, the rest of the walls were smooth to the water’s edge. The lake was at least two hundred yards across, and almost as long. There was no way around it. Across the lake, in the distance, above another small ledge, were several openings in the wall.
Bohannon dropped to his haunches and slipped off his pack. “Oh, God, now what?” It was a prayer.
The cigarette smoke hanging in the air between Sharp and Orhlon failed to obscure the serious nature of their situation. And its absence, when cleared by the heavy-duty ventilating system of Central Command, failed to reveal any solutions.
“Levi, this is one awful mess,” said the general, as he squashed another butt into the already-full ashtray. “These guys have been under the Mount for thirty-six hours, God knows doing what, and we sit here scratching.”
Orhlon got up and went to the sideboard, pouring more black coffee into his mug. Returning to the table, he lit another cigarette before his khakis hit the chair.
“The prime minister hasn’t given us clearance to launch any action that might take us under the Mount.”
A young aide came into the room and handed a single sheet of paper to Sharp while Orhlon emptied half his coffee mug in a thunderous gulp.
“Other than that, we don’t know squat about who these guys are, what they’re doing here, what they’re planning, or what’s going to blow up in our faces in the next two seconds. That’s a real comforting record for an intelligence service. Make sure Gefen knows to call us.”
Orhlon was putting another butt to death when he felt Sharp’s eyes. Now what?
“General, we’ve identified the truck. It was stolen from a tobacco farmer—”
“Yeah, between here and Kibbutz Tzuba, right?”
“Yessir. But, sir, we’ve also found two bodies. Arabs, each stabbed through the neck, their bodies were dumped in heavy undergrowth along the road down by the King’s Garden.”
Orhlon sat up straight, his chair turned toward Sharp. “Murderers, have our boys become murderers? Have they always been murderers?” Orhlon’s mind tripped quickly into a more heightened state of alert. If he and Sharp had been facing a potential crisis before, now they were facing the real possibility of massive disaster. These guys didn’t shy away from taking two lives, so they won’t shy away from taking thousands more.
“General,” said Sharp, snapping Orhlon out of his thoughts, “that’s not all. We found the garden guide in the bus station in Tel Aviv.”
“The GPS is absolutely useless,” said Johnson. “I don’t have a clue where we are, but I believe we have been moving closer to the Mount.”
Not much of a consolation, thought Bohannon. Just then, Rodriguez popped back out of the tunnel they had followed into this underground prison.
“It would take us hours to get back up that tunnel,” he said matter-of-factly, “if we could make it at all. It would be very, very difficult with these packs. Besides, what would we be going back to? All the way to the cavern of the arches? No, gentlemen. If we decide to go back, we’ve got to ditch the packs here. We’ll never get up the shaft with them. We ditch the packs, then we’ve got to keep walking right out of the tombs. This chase is all over, and we’ll probably have some type of welcoming committee waiting for us once we emerge above ground.”
Rodriguez’s words were daggers, piercing hope, uncovering their fear. Lost? Stranded? Sentenced to death? Was this their tomb?
Bohannon broke the black spell.
“Okay, if we can’t go back, we’ve got to get across. How can we do that?”
Sammy Rizzo was exiting the men’s room, having replaced his dripping bandages and having swallowed half-a-dozen aspirin to kill the pain, when his New York radar locked on the advancing soldiers. Rizzo, heart pounding, slipped behind a rotating magazine tower and watched from behind the pages of a Jewish “monster chopper” magazine.
Kallie was cool, he had to admit. As the four khaki-clad men converged on her, she managed to kick his pack deep under the bench. As they grasped her under the arms, she never cast a glance back toward the men’s room. As they escorted her out the side door, carrying away only one pack, Rizzo replaced the magazine and slowly walked out the opposite door.
He found an unoccupied bench deep in the shadows out of the sun and gave himself ten minutes to think. He had his passport and his wallet on him, and not much else. The extra bandages were in his pack with his clothes, but the bus tickets were in her bag. When they searched her bag, they would know somebody was with her.
Calm down, Rizman, he coaxed himself. This is a chess game. Play the game.
Rizzo took a deep breath and resisted the demands of his body to lie down and rest. What is the last move and what is the first move? You are no John Wayne, especially with this arm, so you are not going to rescue Kallie. Now wasn’t the time to dwell on that fantasy. You are also unlikely to make it past the Israeli border patrol, unlikely to make it out of this bus station if you don’t wise up. The guys are in Jerusalem. If they were to somehow escape from Israel, they would do it from Jerusalem. The soldiers will be taking Kallie to Jerusalem, where else? She’ll probably get grilled by their toughest thugs, particularly if our guys got under the Mount. It’s all going to happen from Jerusalem.
You’re not getting out of Israel, anyway, Rizzo told himself. The spooks don’t know you exist yet. When they do, the first places they’ll look are the border crossings. No, you’ve got to make like a banana and split.
Another deep breath, and Rizzo gingerly lowered himself from the bench. “Get back to Jerusalem,” he murmured as he walked back into the station. “Maybe you can be of some help.”
Rizzo beat a straight line to the benches where he and Kallie had been sitting not that long before. An elderly woman was sitting there now, a babushka wrapped tightly around her hair, framing her leather-cured wrinkles. Rizzo stopped directly in front of the old woman, put his fists on his hips and peppered her with a withering stare of accusation.
“Israeli mafia, is that it?”
Somebody’s grandmother opened her eyes in alarm and her mouth in protest. “Vos iz?”
“No you don’t,” Rizzo short-circuited, increasing his volume. He didn’t know what language she was speaking, but it wasn’t going to stop him. “Did you really think you could steal my backpack? Is that the scam, use old widows as diversion while you rip off the handicapped, huh? Is that what you’re up to?”
Grandmother shook her head, raised her hands, palms up, and looked around for help. “Farshteyn?” she said to Rizzo. “Fregt mikh bekheyrem.”
“What kind of country is this,” Rizzo shouted, his left arm sweeping across the room, “where you prey on the maimed and the infirmed?”
Grandmother was aghast, all wide-open mouth, wide-open eyes. “Idiot!”
It didn’t sound the same, but Rizzo understood that one. Time to vamoose. “Gimme back my bag!” Rizzo scuttled under the bench and emerged with his backpack on the other side. “This is a disgrace. I’m going to get some help.”
He exited the same rear door, leaving only a memory and a shaken grandma in his wake.
Four well-armed soldiers led Kallie out of Central Command’s conference room. She was weeping, headed to a waiting armored personnel carrier that would take her, under escort, to the military prison at Sha’ves Poser, six miles south of Jerusalem.
Orhlon watched her back retreat out the door.
“General, we’ve got to verify this; we’ve got to verify or discredit this story right away,” said Sharp.
Orhlon watched the door close.
“General . . . ?”
Orhlon got out of his chair, stretched like a lion exiting its cave after a long sl
eep, and moved slowly to the coffeepot. He picked out a new mug, ignoring the half-filled one he had abandoned on the table, and absently began stirring sugar into the dark liquid. Seeing the spoon in the mug sent a signal to his brain, bypassing the roadblock that momentarily held his thoughts captive. Orhlon turned back to the table and, as he sat, put aside the new mug and retrieved the old.
“No, Levi, we are well beyond verification.” He drew heavily on a newly lit cigarette. “Why would those men come here? Why would they have risked what they have risked, endured what they have endured, persisted the way they have persisted, if they didn’t believe the scroll was authentic and the message was valid? And who is after them, besides the Northern Islamic Front? Who killed their partner in New York City? No, this is no prank, no attempt for cheap publicity. Trying to verify it would just bring too many other people into the loop.”
Orhlon looked into his half-full mug of now-cold coffee, still very much in his own world.
Levi Sharp pushed his chair close to the general. They had known each other since officers’ school.
“Moishe, if this scroll is true, if these men were to find a temple . . .” Sharp was at the general’s left, his voice quiet, but strong, “the Arab nations will erupt. This could be the end, could lead to the ultimate conflict. We know how that will end, and there is no hope, not for Arab or Jew. We need to act while we still have the opportunity.”
The general continued to study the liquid in the mug.
“Yes, Levi, yes, it could be the end.” He began to swirl the liquid inside the cup, genuinely fascinated by the shape of its movement. “Not so bad for an old warhorse like me,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “But the young. It’s the young, Levi, the young whose lives weigh heavy on my heart.”
With a whiplike snap of his arm, he hurled the half-full coffee mug at the far wall and watched it explode on impact.
“Please telephone Lukas and Chaim. I will call the prime minister myself. They must come here immediately. Nothing else is more important.”
The Sacred Cipher Page 29