Bohannon dug into one of the backpacks, hoping to find one more pair of dry wool socks. God was certainly watching over us. Who would have expected this much cold and this much water, under the Mount? Bohannon had enough camping and hiking experience to know that the woolen clothes they carried in—sweaters, pants, socks—protected them from hypothermia. Unlike cotton, which wicked away body heat, wool retained the body’s heat even when wet. They might get uncomfortable in wet wool, but at least they wouldn’t be dead.
“Thank you, God!” Bohannon exclaimed aloud as he pulled out an unused pair of socks. He closed his eyes. “God, you have been so good to us, throughout this entire journey. You have blessed us with so much favor. Thank you, Lord.”
Johnson was standing in front of Bohannon as he opened his eyes.
“How can you be so sure?”
“So sure of what, Doc?”
Johnson lowered himself and rested on his haunches. “So sure that this God of yours is listening, so sure that he will answer your prayers, or even cares about your prayers?”
The question was simple. Doc’s tone of voice was calm, not accusing. His eyes asked questions of interest. Bohannon looked hard at Doc for a moment and nodded.
Standing up, Bohannon took Johnson by the arm, grabbed his sleeping bag, and led him to the other side of the room. “Let’s not disrupt Joe’s sleep,” he said. “He needs it.”
“We all need it,” said Johnson. “I know I’m wearing out, may have already. I don’t think I can recall a time when I was this tired. Everything hurts. My bones hurt; my brain hurts. I just want to stop and sleep for a month.”
Bohannon spread his sleeping bag against the room’s far wall, and turned to Johnson. “Doc, we don’t have to do this now. It can be another—”
“No,” Johnson interrupted. “No, I don’t think there will be another time. That’s why I asked you the question. I just feel . . . I feel that I need to ask that question now. That it was important to seek an answer, now. This is the right time.”
Resting their backs against the limestone wall, Bohannon turned his head slightly to look at Johnson. “What is it, specifically, that you want to know?”
Johnson hesitated for a fraction. “Tom, how you can be so sure of something that is so unknowable? How do you know that God exists? And if God does exist, why would he be concerned about you, individually?”
Bohannon sighed, knowing his answer might not make sense. Might not be enough.
“Richard,” he said quietly, “you can’t. You can’t. It’s not possible for a man like you or me to know anything for certain about God. It doesn’t make any logical sense. Us, the finite, there is no way for us to understand the infinite. It just can’t happen. Not on our terms.”
Bohannon turned to his right and folded his legs, so he could look directly at Doc.
“All of the religions of the world are about the same thing, man reaching up and trying to understand God. Christianity is different. Christianity is God reaching down and making himself understandable to man. And inviting man into fellowship with him.
“That’s it, that’s the whole program. It’s about relationship. That’s what the Bible is about, front to back, it’s a story about relationship. God created man because he desired to have a relationship with man. And the story plays out from there. It’s a very simple theme. Man can know God, because God wants to be known.”
A scowl was forming on Johnson’s face, deepening its furrows with every passing word, an image of disappointment and bitterness. “That’s just like you Christians,” Johnson said, rancor dripping from his lips. “Nothing concrete, no real knowledge or understanding, no empirical truth upon which to hang your faith. Just God’s love. Believe in God’s love. Well, to me it’s just a shell game: ‘here it is, there it goes, where it stops, nobody knows.’ What good is that?” The last words he spat out, purging his tongue of the bile as he began to get to his feet.
Bohannon reached out, put a hand on his arm.
“Hey, give me a minute.”
Johnson’s features softened somewhat. Holding Bohannon’s gaze, he sat back down on the floor.
“When our daughter, Caitlin, was five years old, she needed to have open-heart surgery. When she was a year old, a heart specialist told us she had a hole in her heart, a big one, too big to fix at her age. By the time she was five, we had been making regular trips to the hospital emergency room for one ailment after another. Her little brother, Connor, got used to celebrating birthdays in hospital rooms. Caitlin got double pneumonia when she was five, and we could see her failing. It was time to get her heart fixed. In preparation, she had a cardiac catheterization. They found no hole in her heart. We had been praying so long for the hole in her heart to be healed, we were overjoyed. But the surgeon showed us that her heart was still damaged, one side was really enlarged. One of the heart valves was leaking badly. She needed surgery. Or . . . well . . . “We prayed with her surgeon that morning, and he told us to be patient, it would be a long surgery, eight to ten hours. A few hours later, he walked out of the operating room, shaking his head. ‘It was too easy,’ he told us. Caitlin had a bad valve, like swinging doors that were out of alignment and never closed flush. But she also had a very small hole in the wall between the chambers of her heart. The surgeon used the small hole to get access to the valve, fixed the valve, then closed the hole on his way out. A couple of hours.”
Bohannon could see he had Johnson’s full attention. “The next morning, Caitlin was up on her feet, wires and tubes and monitors hanging all over her, wandering around, asking about her breakfast. Doc, one day after major heart surgery, she’s walking around asking where her pancakes were. To me, that’s a miracle. That is God reaching down.
“Doc, God made himself known to me that day. God made himself known to Annie, and Caitlin, and to all our friends and relatives who were praying with us outside those operating room doors. And God made himself known to that surgeon, too. God made himself known to me day after day after day, long before the surgery. Every time I cried, every time I asked him why, every time Annie and I put our daughter into his hands.”
Bohannon felt that catch in his throat, that slight quiver in his chin, that moistness in his eyes that often came when he remembered God’s faithfulness to him and his family. He had lowered his head, was looking at the sleeping bag.
“I could take up hours of your time, telling you one story after another. About how God picked me up out of the newspaper business and clearly planted us at the Bowery Mission in New York City and how it saved our marriage. I could tell you about times when Annie and I stepped out in obedience, did what we both confidently believed God was asking us to do and saw miracles, things that only God could orchestrate, work out before us. Our lives are one story after another of God’s faithfulness to us. Of God manifesting his love for us, each of us individually, over and over and over again.
“You know, other people might sit here and talk to you about theology and try to convince you that God exists; somebody else might use creation, or archaeology, or the history of Jesus, or who knows what to try and convince you that God exists. I guess that would be okay.
“But, Doc, you asked me how I know. This is how I know.” Bohannon picked up his chin, ignoring the tears in his eyes and his quivering lip, and laid his heart out in front of his friend. “I know because in the darkest places of me, where I hid all my secrets, he brought me light and rescued the scared little kid who lived there. In the worst moments of my life, when fear was stampeding through my brain, he brought me a peace that was impossible to comprehend. In those times when I was ready to quit, when life was just too hard and I was desperate to escape, to run away, he came, put his arm around me, and walked alongside me.
“God is real, Doc, because he walks with me every day. Without him, I can’t breathe. I don’t know how else to explain it to you. I don’t know how to tell you, where to tell you to go, to find God. You can’t. But I can tell you one thing I know i
s true.”
Bohannon looked at his friend and prayed for him to understand.
“I know that if you truly, in your heart, ask God to come to you so that you can know him, personally, intimately, he will always answer that prayer. And he will answer it when you are most in need. That is his character. That is who he is, and he wants you to know him, too.”
Bohannon was done. He looked across at Johnson, who shook himself, then threw back his shoulders and sat more upright.
“Thanks, Tom, thanks for taking the time to share all that with me.”
Bohannon nodded, now a bit sheepish because of his vulnerability. “You’re welcome.”
“To be honest,” said Johnson, staring at his fingertips, “at this moment, I’m not sure what I think, or believe, about what you’ve told me. But you have certainly given me a new perspective, a different perspective. I promise you I will give close consideration to what you have shared with me. Thank you. I mean it, thank you.”
Johnson extended his arm and the two men shook hands, the firmness of their grip communicating the seriousness of their resolve. Now, Bohannon thought, it’s all in God’s hands.
“We better get some sleep,” said Johnson, rising. “Whatever time we’ve got left, we’ve got to make it count.”
44
Bohannon found himself on the floor, still in his sleeping bag. It was a strange dream. Everything was bouncing. A deafening roar filled his ears and filled him with a fear of being buried alive. He was somewhere in the dark, trying to find light. Then it stopped.
He looked around. In the half-light of the room, which was now filled with dust from floor to ceiling, he could see that Joe and Doc were also on the floor, also still in their sleeping bags.
“Was that an earthquake?” Johnson squeezed out of his throat, his body and mind rebelling against being awake.
“I went to grad school in California,” answered Rodriguez, “and that was no earthquake. Earthquakes, everything moves in every direction. This, something crashed, or something exploded. Either something very big and heavy just fell, or somebody just set off one heck of an explosion and shook this entire mountain.”
Bohannon pulled away his zippers, stirring up more dust storms, and slowly crawled out of his bag. “Ooww, oh, man, everything hurts.” He tried to stretch out the kinks, but each move brought more pain, to different spots. He sat down on the stone bench. His watch said 3:06, but he didn’t know if that was AM or PM. He reached over to his pack and pulled the handheld computer/GPS unit from its padded pocket.
“Hmm, it’s three in the morning,” Bohannon said, almost to himself, as Rodriguez and Johnson scrambled off the dust-laden floor. “Well, something moved this mountain, and we should be able to find out what it was.” Bohannon fired up the unit. His first stop was Google Earth, where he quickly zeroed in on Jerusalem, then the Old City, then the Temple Mount. Dependent on satellite imaging, Google Earth is about as real-time a look at the earth as any average person is going to get. Still, the images are not instantaneous, they don’t change until the next satellite pass. Bohannon didn’t expect to find any great revelation, but he checked the Temple Mount area nonetheless. With nothing visible on Google Earth, Bohannon logged into Yahoo’s home page for news bulletins. Probably still premature for . . .
There it was, popped right up to the top of the list. “The southern wall holding up the Temple Mount just collapsed,” Bohannon said out loud, speaking as he read along, “at least a large section of the southern wall. Nobody is sure yet how much damage, or if it was a natural disaster or terrorist-related. Seems it’s been raining up there for the last three days, raining heavily. The last time a portion of a wall came down, the eastern wall, it had also been raining for days. That’s all they—”
At the sound, Bohannon jumped to his feet, ready to run, internal alarms sounding. Rodriguez was also on his feet, crouched, apparently ready to ward off attack. Only Johnson appeared normal, walking briskly over to his pack. Again and again the noise demanded their attention, but Bohannon couldn’t place it, until Johnson pulled out the metal-clad, heavily padded Pelican case. The satellite phone was ringing, and vibrating, with a Richter rating of its own. With a deft smoothness that belied the concern on his face, Johnson engaged the receiver.
“Dr. Johnson here. How may I assist you?”
In spite of his overall ache, Bohannon just started to chuckle. Underground for three days, people trying to kill us, the mountain’s falling down, and he sounds like the butler.
“Yes, one moment.” Johnson turned to his left with a quizzical look. “Mr. Bohannon, sir, this call is for you.”
At first, he didn’t want to put his hand on it. Who could be on the other end? Who would be calling them, here? This was getting too weird.
Johnson, holding out the phone, wordlessly urged it in Bohannon’s direction, then firmly placed it in his hand.
Operating in a realm of unbelief, Bohannon barely squeezed out the “H” in hello, when a voice crackled from the other side of the world.
“Bohannon? This is Ethan Larsen, Winthrop’s uncle. Listen, you boys are in quite a fix. The Israeli military has squads of men coming at you from the entryway in Zechariah’s Tomb. Seems you left them a nice trail of fluorescent dots to follow. And the Northern Islamic Front has hundreds of men under the Temple Mount, prepared to protect their sacred shrines to the death. You would be in deep spit if those were your only problems. But now the southern wall of the Temple Mount has collapsed, a whole, big slab of the thing, at least a third of it. And it’s still raining, so the Israelis are havin’ conniption fits that the rest of it is going to give way.
“All of which means to tell you, son,” said General Larsen, “that you and your buddies better get out of there, pronto. Like now. Or you are going to be having company, lots of company. And they’re not coming to throw you a party. You listening to me, Bohannon?”
“Yes, sir . . . I . . .”
“Stuff it, mister. Keep your ears open. You’ve got no friends over there, and very few friends over here. Israeli media has been fed a tip that Shin Bet’s been chasing a pack of suspected terrorists who have disappeared underground into the Temple Mount area. That’s got the Jews going ape. They’ve also got a report that Israeli military found two Muslims, stabbed to death, in an area just south of the Mount. That’s got the Muslims going ape. And now everybody thinks you clowns have blown up the southern wall—you didn’t do that, did you?”
“Ah, no sir, we . . .”
“Well, that’s got everybody going ape. You listening to me, mister?”
“Yes si—”
“So you and your pals better get your sorry selves outta wherever you are, or you’re going to get squashed. You only got one problem, mister . . .”
Bohannon was as stunned by the silence as he had been by the verbal battering ram known affectionately as Uncle Ethan. There was a gap, and he didn’t know how to, or whether he should, fill it. Ethan Larsen answered the unasked question.
“You’ve got nowhere to go.”
“What?”
The tough-talking general suddenly became Winthrop’s uncle again. “Tom, you guys are virtually surrounded. Now that the wall’s come down, both the Muslims and the Israeli military are going to be pressing after you with a renewed fervor. You can’t come to the surface because, no matter where you pop up, somebody is going to pounce on you. And we can’t help you. Us, the good old USofA, there’s nothing we can do to help you. Otherwise, it would look as if we’ve put you up to it. And it would just get us in the middle of a spittin’ storm.
“I’m sorry to say it, but you boys are on your own. I wish it wasn’t so, but it is. Outside of this phone call, there is nothing I can do to help you.”
Bohannon didn’t know what to say. Uncle Ethan, he figured, had simply run out of breath.
“Son, I’ve got to ask you one favor.” The general’s voice had lost all its hard edges, all its bravado. “Keep that sat phone with you b
ut, before you get captured, er, if you’re going to get captured, destroy the phone and the handheld GPS units, anything that could be traced. I promised to protect the guy I sent Winthrop to. What are you carrying this phone in?”
Bohannon had to pick his stomach up off the floor before he could answer. He had never allowed the idea of capture to really enter into his consciousness. Now, it covered him like wet concrete. “We’ve got a metal-sided Pelican Case, padded on the inside.”
“Good, that’s perfect,” said General Larsen. “The satellite phone has a self-destruct mechanism. Turn it over and look just below where your palm rests. There’s a metal plate with clock hands on it. Push down on both ends of the plate and turn it with your thumbs. Inside is a red knob that can point to three settings—thirty, sixty, or ninety seconds. Set the knob, put the phone and the GPS units inside the Pelican case, and tightly secure the case. There will be nothing but dust in that case if anybody takes a look. You got that, Tom?”
“Yes, sir . . . you can count on us, General.” For a brief flash, Bohannon saw himself in uniform, camouflage, on a mission for his country, the military motto echoing in his brain. “There is no excuse, only responsibility.” Covering Ethan Larsen’s rear was now his responsibility. Bohannon welcomed it.
“I know I can count on you, Tom. Winthrop told me you were a man of integrity, a man he could count on. I appreciate that, it meant a lot to me then, means a lot to me now. You men take care of yourselves. I don’t know where you’re going, but I wouldn’t stay long where you are. And, Tom, I’ll be praying for you.”
Bohannon was touched.
The Sacred Cipher Page 33