The Last Ember (39 page)

T
he size of the cavern was no myth. The scale of the destruction raised the hair under Jonathan’s collar. Emili stood next to him, frozen. The sprawling cavern was empty, but even in its silence, the dormant bulldozers, the dozens of wheelbarrows lying on their sides, and the large blue steel hull of a crane indicated its volume of daily activity. Multiple wooden platforms swung like primitive scaffolding from the giant cavern walls. On their planks, Jonathan could see chain saws beside buckets of potsherds and broken ancient glass.

“It’s archaeological terrorism.” Emili finally spoke.

Jonathan and Emili had stepped through the door onto a narrow aluminum walkway that circled high above the cavern’s floor.

Jonathan said, pointing down at huge gashes that lined the circumference of the cavern’s wall. “They have been trying to find the tunnel that Josephus used to escape Titus’s troops.”

“And I think they found it,” Emili said, pointing at a newly excavated tunnel near the cavern floor. Beside the opening, blueprints lay strewn on a wooden table. Rubber blasting mats covered the mouth of the tunnel. Beneath the rubber, thick rows of yellow tubing extended outward, connecting to an industrial-sized floor fan.

“What’s all that equipment?” Jonathan said.

“Those rubber mats over the arch are meant to suppress the spread of debris during an explosive blast. And those tubes are hydro-excavator vacuums. Those steel debris tanks at the end will vacuum up dust and pump fresh air into the tunnel within a half-minute of a detonation.”

Two Arab men wearing UNESCO restoration jumpsuits rushed out of the arch and fastened the rubber mats to the side walls of the arch. Emili and Jonathan moved away from the ledge and back into the darkness. They watched the men rush to finish sealing the rubber mats around the sides of the mouth of the tunnel. They jogged up a wooden staircase of six flights to exit the cavern. One of the men began going back down, but the other yelled at him, pointing at his watch.

“Looks like they’re in a hurry,” Jonathan said.

“They just planted charges inside that tunnel. They are going to detonate.”

R
amat Mansour removed his blindfold. He was alone, standing outside the Temple Mount’s walls among the gnarled trunks of the Valley of Kidron’s olive groves. His memories of the last two hours—the sensation of being rushed through corridors, squinting under the bright klieg lights of a massive excavation, uncovering a Temple-era door of solid bronze—seemed like a strange string of unconnected dreams. He had been known to sleepwalk, and he hoped the entire last two hours had been one unpleasant
hulum
.

But the small wooden carton at his feet was an unwelcome reminder it was not. The box label was for Lebanese strawberries, but Mansour could guess the carton’s current contents. He lifted the top and in three neat stacks of crisp riyal notes was more Saudi Arabian currency than Ramat had ever seen. Each stack must have been a hundred bills thick, which at the local exchange rate would cover Ramat’s rent for two years, not one. But instead of consoling him, the payment confirmed the frightening importance of what Ramat had done. He had led Salah ad-Din to the hidden gate described in Flavius Josephus. He pieced together in his mind what Salah ad-Din had told the teenager at that moment of its discovery.

Mansour stood up, now carrying the carton under his arm. He walked away from the Temple Mount, across a paved road, and down a gravel path into his hometown of Silwan.
Simultaneous,
Mansour thought. He stopped walking. That is how they plan to blast through the hidden gate.
A simultaneous explosion.
In his mind, he could see the boy Ahmed and remembered the missing portion of his lower ear.
A young bomb maker.
Slowly, Mansour realized how Salah ad-Din intended to excavate through the Bronze Gate: another detonation inside the Mount would require a second explosion as a diversion.

The Western Wall Tunnel’s ticket counter, at eight a.m.
Ramat remembered. He looked at his watch: 7:56 a.m.
Four minutes.

Ramat Mansour ran back up the gravel path, jogging beneath the Moghrabi Gate. Beyond the entrance to the Western Wall plaza and its bank of X-ray machines, he could see the ticket counter to the Western Wall Tunnel tour. Teenagers from a dozen nationalities leaned against it, sitting or lying on their knapsacks.

Mansour pulled out his pocket watch: 7:57 a.m.

With his adrenaline pumping, he ran through an unattended metal detector and sprinted across the plaza, yelling,
“Ashwik qunbula!”
There is a bomb!

“Hafsik!”
echoed the hollow electrical voice of a policeman’s bullhorn behind him. And again in Arabic.
Halt or we will fire.

Mansour stopped running.

The young Israeli policeman who chased Mansour into the plaza raised his gun. He heard the word
qunbula
. As part of his training, he knew a dozen Arabic words for “explosive,” any of which were a license to fire in this political climate.

But when Mansour turned around he did not have the glazed look of a brainwashed Hamas teenager. In his right hand, he waved his Israeli passport, a coveted possession among the inhabitants of local Arab villages that entitled him and his family to full citizenship.
Why is he showing this?

“A bomb will go off there in two minutes!” he screamed in Arabic, pointing twenty feet behind at the tourist gazebo.

Not understanding a word, the officer screamed back. “Open your coat!”

“There is a bomb there!” Mansour shouted again in Arabic, pointing across the plaza.

The policeman was squinting to identify a bomb belt stuffed with nails under Ramat’s clothing.
If the bomber is confirmed, shoot to kill
. The no-warning tactic had saved dozens of lives outside street cafés of Ben Ye huda Street and shopping malls of Tel Aviv.

But something told the policeman not to fire.

“Translator!” the policeman yelled across the plaza, his gun still pointed at Mansour’s head. “I need a translator now!”

 

 

 

 

Fifty feet above them, Salah ad-Din watched the commotion in the center of the plaza. He stood behind a tinted window built into a medieval arrow slit along the southern end of the Mount’s western wall. The room was an administrative office of the Islamic museum, but its view over the plaza would allow Salah ad-Din to see the detonation of the tourist gazebo. He watched Ramat flail his arms to communicate with the Israeli policeman.

Salah ad-Din looked at his watch. One minute left.
Too much time
. If the police stopped the explosives beneath the ticket counter, the detonation beneath the Temple Mount would resonate for half a mile. An international incident. Salah ad-Din could not let that happen.
Cousin, you have done this to yourself.

He stepped away from the window and nodded to a short, fat man wearing a green argyle sweater. From a Styrofoam-lined suitcase, the man removed a long black 7.62-mm Dragunov sniper rifle with a black steel butt assembly and digital optics. As relaxed as if he were cracking the window for fresh air, the short man rested the rifle’s black repressor and front sight base on the deep stone sill. He sharpened the telescope’s viewfinder and wrote a mathematical equation on a small notepad to calculate windage and elevation variables. He adjusted the magnification from 3X to 9X, and in the crosshairs of the optic sight he was able to see the birth-mark on Ramat’s neck.

 

 

 

 

The police officer watched Ramat. “What are you trying to tell me!” he yelled. “Is there is a bomb in the plaza?”

Ramat nodded, yelling in Arabic, stabbing the air with his index finger in the direction of the tourist ticket counter.

“There, near the tourist gazebo?”

With so little warning that the officer thought for a moment it was an accident from his own gun, a bullet exploded through Mansour’s neck. Mansour gripped the bloody aperture with both hands, his eyes wide with terror, gasping through the new hole in his neck. Blood spurted out with a horrific gargling sound as his reflexes tried to gulp in air.

The officer knew immediately what had happened. “
Tzalaf !
” he yelled. Sniper!

Collapsing to his knees, Mansour found the officer kneeling next to him, putting additional pressure around his throat. But Ramat still managed to point violently at the tourist gazebo. The officer sprinted toward the gazebo, screaming at the tourists to evacuate the entire northern end of the plaza. Dozens of teenagers fled, leaving their belongings.

The officer ran back to Ramat, again pressing hands over his neck.
We are too close to the ticket counter
, Ramat’s eyes said.

“Go,” he gurgled softly. “Please.” His pocket watch lay open in his hand: 8:00 a.m.

Ramat lay alone now in the evacuated plaza. Inside the gazebo, a white light burst like a filament, its windows lit like a giant lantern, as the metal bent outward and the structure distorted and expanded, as did the last moment of Ramat’s life. A sea of shattered glass oozed forward, washing over him like a glistening wave, and he closed his eyes to a final vision of holding his son in the Gaza surf.

E
mili and Jonathan moved along the narrow walkway in the brightly lit cavern, hugging their backs to the rock wall. Jonathan looked down. It must have been a drop of five stories to the cavern floor.

Emili was photographing the site.

“Kodak moment’s over, Em. You’ve got pictures for the World Heritage Committee meeting,” Jonathan said. “Now let’s get out of—” But the sudden sound of shouted Arabic interrupted him.

At the other end of the walkway, a middle-aged Waqf guard shouted at them, pointing his Kalashnikov rifle directly at Jonathan.

“What’s he saying?” Jonathan said.

“You are a trespassing dog,” Emili said.

“The gist would have been enough,” Jonathan said, slowly raising his hands.

A low, thunderous rumble began shaking the cavern walls. Dirt sifted down from the high ceiling.

“They’ve detonated,” Emili said.

The tremor intensified, and the guard lowered his gun to grab the railing. Emili and Jonathan exchanged glances, wondering if the scaffolding was sturdy enough to handle the vibrations.
Is the Mount even sturdy enough?
Emili wondered. She knew that in the past earthquakes had swallowed tunnels and large caverns beneath the Temple Mount, and that the Israel Antiquities Authority had publicly warned that the ongoing illicit excavation could weaken the Mount structurally to the point where a minor tremor could cave in the entire Mount, swallowing the Dome of the Rock whole.

Beneath them, a cloud of debris and powdered limestone burst forth from the tunnel’s mouth. The rubber mat failed to hold, and flew into the cavern. A rolling fog of dust followed, carpeting the floor, and reaching as high as the oversized wheels of the bulldozers. The industrial fans pushed the cloud upward in a plume.

The guard raised his gun and fidgeted with his two-way radio, screaming in rapid Arabic.

“Can you still see the stairs?” Jonathan asked quietly. He glanced at the six flights of wooden stairs that led down to the cavern floor from the scaffolding.

“Jon,” Emili whispered, unable to move her eyes from the Waqf guard’s Kalashnikov, “that man has a gun pointed directly at you.”

“In a moment he won’t be able to see us,” Jonathan said. The dust cloud from the blast quickly rose toward them. Already, Emili could barely see her own shoes. “Those fans are pushing the dust up here. The bottom of the cavern is already clear. We can get to the tunnel.”

“And if the painting in Rome was right,” Emili said, coughing, “that tunnel—”

“Will lead us straight to the pool of Silwan outside the city walls,” Jonathan said. “The same route Josephus took two thousand years ago.”

The man holding the Kalashnikov was now no more than a shape in the dust cloud.

“Let’s go,” Jonathan said above the guard’s yelling. “Take a deep breath, Emili.”

If I can,
she thought, already wheezing.

They quickly moved around the aluminum walkway, and Jonathan placed Emili’s hand on the pipe railing. They switched back and forth on the stair landings until reaching the cavern floor.

Jonathan’s lungs were nearly depleted of air, and he swallowed to keep holding his breath. He knew Emili was running out of air, too. He could feel her grip weaken as he led her around the yellow hull of heavy machinery. Jonathan followed the sound of the vacuum generators, and just as he considered turning around, the dust began to clear, until it dissipated completely.

They breathed deeply inside the tunnel, hurrying past intricate Assyrian-era inscriptions that covered the walls. It pained Emili to rush past them; she knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see original First Temple-era inscriptions inside the Mount. Farther into the tunnel, the walls were jagged from the recent detonation, and the corridor smelled like burned rock.

“And that’s why they detonated here,” Jonathan said. He pointed at the massive bronze gate that had been blown off its hinges and was now lodged diagonally between the walls. Ducking beneath it, Emili’s fury at the destruction alternated with wonder as she took in the gate’s size and workmanship.

Emerging from beneath the gate, they saw elaborate reliefs covering the walls. The wall carvings portrayed open palms with fingers partially spread.

“It’s the insignia of the priestly blessing,” Emili said. “The
kohanim
used this corridor.”

They walked in silence, reminded not only of the sacredness of where they stood, but of the possibility of their imminent discovery. With each step, the reality grew closer. Jonathan’s adrenaline caused a momentary loss of skepticism.
Could this have been where the priests hid the tabernacle menorah?