The War Cloud (20 page)

“See you in Valhalla, Ulrich. You, too, Hadji Azrael.”

Finding himself at his enemy’s mercy, Philip rose to his full height and looked up. “It is true I once answered the call of the muezzin to prayer as a child, that I have made the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, that I once lived by the sword of Allah. But now I serve the Lord Jesus Christ in the order of the Taborian Light.”

“The last of a dying order, I might add,” Von Berg said. “And you’ll fare no better than your brothers. Where is your precious Jesus to save you now?”

Philip stared at the burning cigarette above. Realizing that he was about to die, he resolved to depart this earth in a manner worthy of his calling. He must not allow a moment of personal weakness to blemish the cause of Christ. Nor must his hatred of this evil man keep him from extending the Lord’s forgiveness. “Oh, He is coming soon, Baron von Berg. You need not worry about that. His reward is with Him and He will give to everyone according to what he has done. He will repay you for your wickedness. But if you repent now, He will forgive you.”

“Is that so?” Von Berg smiled as his fingers dangled the cigarette. “You should have kept the vengeful faith of your former life, Hadji Azrael. Because if you had, the Maranatha text might be yours. Now it’s mine.”

Philip watched in horror as the Baron dropped the cigarette into the crypt. The flicker of light grew larger and larger until it bounced off the wall and scattered its tiny, glowing ashes across the floor. For a moment they seemed to melt into the darkness with no effect. Then a sudden flicker of light exploded into a burst of fire, illuminating the horrified faces of the Archimandrite and the brethren. A second later the inferno engulfed them all like the flames of hell.

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T
he Dome of the Rock mosque rose like the moon behind the towering wall that surrounded the Temple Mount. Sam Deker cleared the top of the wall and dropped into the gardens below, a wraith in the night. He glanced at the illuminated hands of his Krav Maga watch. Seven minutes to three. He had told Stern fourteen minutes back at the van. He had used up six. Time was running out.

Deker reached into his combat pack and pulled out a brick of C-4. He had enough bricks to take out half of the 35-acre complex. If he had any doubts about this mission, now was the moment to turn back. He slipped the C-4 back into his pack and moved through the maze of trees and shrubs.

The Temple Mount was the most contested religious site in the world. For Muslims the eight-sided, golden-capped Dome of the Rock mosque protected the “noble rock” that they believed to be the foundation stone of the earth and the place from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.

But religious Jews believed the rock was the place from which God gathered the dust to create the first man, Adam, as well as the site of King Solomon’s Temple. According to Jewish prophecy it was also where a new temple would be bu—once the Dome of the Rock was gone. Many of these Jews, like Deker’s fanatical superior officer Uri Elezar, refused to set foot on such holy ground.

None of this was a problem for Deker. He could care less. Deker had been recruited by Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, precisely because he was a secular American Jew who had served with the U.S. Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan as a demolitions officer. Who better to protect the Temple Mount, he was told, than a 26-year-old who specialized in the destruction of major structures and equally offended both sides of the religious divide?

Deker followed the route he had planned well in advance, timing his steps with the movements of the Palestinian security guards of the Islamic Waqf, or religious trust.

For almost a thousand years the Waqf had served as the protectors of the Temple Mount, even after Israeli captured Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Such was their status as the true guardians of Islam—and allegedly above the petty political interests of the modern Palestinian Authority, which claimed it had sovereignty over the site.

Deker, however, knew the Waqf to be as political as any Muslim organization; it simply saw the Arab-Israeli struggle in terms of centuries, not decades. So far as the Waqf was concerned, Israel’s resurrection as a modern state in 1948 after 3,000 years of exile was but a foul blot on the long scroll of history. Israel, meanwhile, decided it best to prevent unnecessary provocations by its own more zealous citizens. So not only did it allow the Waqf to continue to manage the Temple Mount, it even enforced a controversial ban on Jewish prayers there.

When Deker finally reached the east wall of the Dome of the Rock mosque, he pressed his back against the blue ceramic tiles of the outer wall. He peered around the corner. A Waqf guard was making his way across the vast plaza toward the other mosque on the Mount, the silver-capped Al Aqsa. Deker waited until the guard passed under the “ma’avzin” arches and disappeared down the steps to the lower plaza. Then without hesitation he darted across the colonnaded entrance of the mosque and ducked inside.

The Waqf officer in charge that night was rounding one of the titanic marble columns that supported the dome 20 meters overhead when Deker entered the mosque. The Palestinian managed to grab his radio, but before he could engage the device to transmit even a sound Deker gave him a chop to the throat. He crumpled to the floor.

Deker made sure the guard still had a pulse before he turned to his right and followed the plush ruby carpet to the steps that led down to a cave dedicated to King Solomon. A relic of the Crusades, the cave had been carved out by the Order of the Knights Templar after they had converted the Dome of the Rock into their Templum Domini, or “Temple of our Lord.”

Medieval maps marked the cave as the “center of the world,” and the “well of souls” beneath it was said to have one time served as the resting place of the legendary lost Ark of Covenant. According to the ancient biblical account, the sacred Ark—an ornate box made of shittah wood and coated with gold—contained the original Ten Commandments, the tablets that God gave to Moses at Mount Sinai as the ancient Israelites wandered the desert in search of the Promised Land. Deker thought God—Yahweh to the Israelites—should have simply given Moses a map. It would have saved the Israelites 40 years and countless lives.

But the Knights Templar couldt hold the Temple Mount for long. A few years later it was back in the hands of the Muslim Waqf, where it had remained that past millennium.

Recently, the Waqf had quietly begun a massive subterranean tunneling operation. The IDF feared that the Waqf was on the verge of discovering an ancient network of chambers and corridors deep beneath the mount that predated even the First and Second Jewish Temples. The front door to that network was none other than the well of souls beneath the Dome of the Rock.

Adjan Husseini, the Palestinian head of the Waqf in Jerusalem, was kneeling face down in prayer when Deker entered the cave. At the sound of Deker’s footsteps, he lifted his head and started at the sight of the C-4 brick Deker removed from his pack.

Looking Husseini in the eye, Deker held the brick up and said, “Boom.”

“Commander Deker.” Husseini rose to his feet. “Go ahead. Take the shot.”

Deker put the C-4 brick back into his pack and took out his BlackBerry. Draping one arm around Husseini’s neck, he extended the other and snapped a photo with his phone’s camera. He then emailed it to Colonel Elezar.

“It’s time-stamped,” Deker said, putting the phone away. “I copied you, too.”

But Husseini, eyes wide, was staring at the explosives and blinking LED displays inside Deker’s open pack, catching on that the C-4 charges were real. “You could have blown us all to bits!”

Deker said, “I promised you that I would expose loopholes in your security in the hopes you’d finally relent and let us put up the electronic surveillance net.”

“So you can spy on us.”

“So we can better defend the Dome of the Rock from the ultra-Orthodox Jews who want to destroy it so that they can erect a Third Temple. Or from radical Palestinians who would pin the blame on Orthodox Jews. You’ve seen the intel. The threat’s real and it’s imminent.”

Husseini said nothing for a moment. A hole in the six-foot rock ceiling allowed a shaft of light from the mosque above to illuminate several small altars and prayer niches around the chamber. Deker could see Husseini’s eyes study him with bitter resentment through the haze of incense and flickering candlelight.

“You knew from the start that we’d never agree to Israeli surveillance,” Husseini said. “Yet you proceeded to pull this dangerous stunt only to humiliate us.”

Husseini was baiting him now, stalling. Deker sensed a trap and realized he had no idea where the Waqf guards outside were at the moment. He thought of Stern back at the van. It was time to leave.

“This security test isn’t nearly as dangerous as the weapons cache you’ve been stockpiling in the southeast corner under Solomon’s Stables,” Deker said.

Surprise registered on Husseini’s face, although Deker wasn’t sure if it was real or manufactured by the man.

“Oh, yes, we know about that,” Deker told him. “And that tunnel you’ve been digging right under this cave. If anyone is going to start the fire, it’s going to be you.”

Husseini picked up a bronze candelabra and brought it down heavily onto the floor’s marble slab. It gave out a hollow thud, revealing the existence of a lower chamber known as the Well of Souls. His face was an unreadable mask again.

“Is that really your concern here tonight, Commander Deker? Or are you afraid we might find something that Israel has been hiding from the world? Wise men have long believed that a cosmic portal exists here, a tunnel through space and time that leads to Paradise.”

Deker paused. “Or maybe it’s the gate to hell.”

Husseini was angry now. The expression of his face didn’t show it, and his voice was steady and subdued. But his words were bitter and sharp.

“You think you’re so special, Deker, better than the rest of us. That you’re the human pin in a live grenade, standing alone between old Arabs like me and Jews like your Colonel Elezar. But know this: the Jews won’t stop until they have destroyed the dome above us. Armageddon is inevitable. It’s a time bomb that will go off. You can’t stop it. Just like you couldn’t prevent your girlfriend from blowing herself up with an explosive made by your own hands.”

Deker felt the world give way under his feet at the thought of his Rachel. But he stood firm, emotionless in his expression, and turned to face Husseini, who picked up a ceremonial washbowl with a candle from the altar.

“I’m told it looked something like this,” Husseini said, stroking the red and black ceramic pattern. “You and your IDF masters intended to assassinate a Hamas militant inside the home of a Palestinian government official. But by some mystery known only to Allah, your bowl ended up in the hands of your beloved as she prepared to light her Shabbat candles to celebrate the first night of the Passover at the Western Wall. Mercifully, she perished the instant you hit your remote detonator. News reports said the six injured Jews around her took several hours to die.”

In that second, Deker wanted to reach out and rip out Husseini’s throat. And he would have, if he didn’t know that’s exactly what Husseini wanted him to attempt.

“The grief must torment you every waking hour and haunt you in your sleep,” Husseini went on, the corners of his mouth turning into a slight smile at having gotten even the suppression of a reaction out of him. “Perhaps that’s why you can’t leave this place. To you it was always a holy pile of rubbish, but to her it was her faith and life. Now it’s her tombstone and you are a ghost stumbling in the graveyard of history. But it’s impossible to bring her back. We can’t change the past any more than we can change the future.”

“That hasn’t stopped you from trying.” Deker produced a pottery shard he had found in an open trench at the base of the eastern wall. He pointed it like a dagger at Husseini’s chest. “Your bulldozers are destroying ancient First and Second Temple artifacts. As if you can erase Israel from history.”

Husseini’s eyes flickered in fear for the first time that night as he looked at the shard in Deker’s hand, clenched so tight that Deker didn’t know he had cut himself until he felt a trickle of blood through his fingers. The Palestinian seemed to realize he had pushed Deker too far, but he stood defiant.