He gave it to Ethan. “High-impact Kevlar riot shield. You’re going to want to hang on to this,” he added.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Joel told Joshua and Ethan to wait until he gave them the signal by flashing his headlights. As promised, the gap between the slabs of concrete had been left open. The razor wire had been unbolted from the concrete and pushed aside. They squeezed into the space, while Ethan clumsily clutched the bulletproof shield and Joshua held the wire cutters. It was almost dark.
Then the headlights flashed.
“Go time,” Joshua whispered hoarsely.
They bolted out of the space and began to run. Ethan knew he was faster than Josh, so he slowed down a bit to let him keep pace, while holding up the Kevlar shield to protect them from any shots being fired from the right, where Palestinian border guards might be watching.
As they dashed across the first twenty feet, the big floodlights were still out. Better still, no shots were fired. Then, about thirty feet in, the lights blazed on. The whole DMZ strip lit up like a department store.
At forty feet, shots rang out from the guard tower on the Palestinian side. They pinged off the rocks and stones, then started raining down on the shield.
Fifty feet from the goal line, there was a loud boom and a large chunk of dry ground exploded three feet beside them.
“Fifty caliber,” Joshua grunted as they kept up the sprint. Ethan hoped the sharpshooter wasn’t too sharp. Will this shield hold off a fifty caliber?
Ethan kept the shield high enough to guard Joshua’s upper body and head. One shot could blast his skull wide open.
Then, twenty feet from the goal line, they heard it.
Boom!
The fifty-caliber bullet struck home, punching into the center of the shield. The force knocked Ethan sideways into Joshua, and they both tumbled to the ground with the shield clattering on the hard sandy soil next to them.
Now someone on the Palestinian side began firing an automatic weapon at them. The bullets raced up the sand in a line toward them.
Ethan picked up the shield and planted it on the ground lengthwise and pulled Joshua up close. A hale of ping-pings sounded as the bullets struck the Kevlar.
“Now,” Ethan yelled when the shots stopped momentarily. But as they leaped to their feet, the floodlights shut down. The DMZ strip was plunged into shadows.
The two men ran pell-mell toward the chain-link fence. More shots were fired randomly all along the strip. Ethan worried that a stray bullet would find its mark. He wondered if they were simply going to spray the fence line with bullets, knowing that it was their destination, shooting at that spot until the two reached their goal.
So Ethan decided to take Joshua farther down the strip of sandy ground. “Don’t go to the fence yet. Keep running away from their sentry tower.” Ethan now held the rear position, keeping the shield high and slightly upward to protect Joshua who ran a few feet ahead of him. They sprinted parallel to the fence for another twenty feet. Three more bullets pinged off the shield. Ethan’s arm was getting tired. Keep holding it up. Don’t let it down.
Then the shots stopped. The two men veered toward the fence. With his wire cutters, Joshua snipped through the metal link until he had opened a space big enough for them to squeeze through.
They dropped the cutters and the shield and donned their Arab headdresses. They ran between two concrete-block houses, trying to tread as softly as they could. Somewhere a dog started barking. Ethan swore quietly under his breath.
“Don’t worry,” Joshua said. “The Lord has brought us this far.”
But Ethan was thinking something else. Like — what’s so great about where we are now? In enemy territory — crawling with assassins. Chased by the Israelis and shot at by the Palestinians. Supposedly, they were here to find refuge in a safe house, but for the life of him, Ethan could not see a safe place anywhere.
As they hit the street leading through the Palestinian suburb, trying to look calm as they strolled, a car approached with its headlights on. It slowed, training the beam on the two of them.
Ethan wished they had taken the time, before meeting up with Joel Harmon, to arm themselves. Now they were sitting ducks.
The late-model Citroen pulled up next to them. With the engine still running, the driver turned off the headlights and said, “Good evening, Colonel Jordan and friend.”
Joshua strode up to the driver’s side and reached his hand into the car to shake.
The driver was an older man with a close-cropped beard. He enthusiastically took Joshua’s hand and said, “I am Pastor Ibrahim Kalid. In Jesus’ name, I welcome you to the safety of my car and to the sanctuary of my home and to the friendship of my family.”
The men looked at each other with a shared look of surprised amusement, as they jumped in the back of the car.
Pastor Kalid turned around and grinned at Ethan but said nothing. He just kept smiling as if he was waiting for Ethan to give him a greeting, but none came. Finally, Ibrahim Kalid said to Ethan, “And I welcome you also, my friend.” As he turned his headlights back on, he added, “My wife has prepared a good meal. We must not be late.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
City of Jenin, Within the Territory of the Palestinian Authority
Anwar al-Madrassa’s route from his headquarters in Islamabad to this particular patch of former Israeli geography — now in the hands of the Palestinian Authority — had been a long and tortuous one. His reputation as a major figure of Islamic terrorism made it necessary to take a circuitous route, first in the back of a freight truck to Turkey, then into Syria, and over to Lebanon. That is where a Hezbollah cell rolled him up in a Persian rug and loaded him into a van owned by a carpet store. The van then crossed into an area of Israel now controlled by the PA.
The city of Jenin was a good choice for his new center of operations. It had been the site of bomb-making for suicide terrorists. But now they were working on something that would have been unimaginable in scope so many years before and would make the former efforts of men with their bulky explosive belts under their shirts quite obsolete.
The day after Joshua and Ethan had reached the safe house in Nablus and not far from that city, in an underground laboratory beneath the basement of a children’s clothing store, Dr. Ahlam was getting ready to demonstrate his weapon to Anwar al-Madrassa. In his younger years Ahlam had been one of Saddam Hussein’s many chemical-warfare researchers. Now he was waiting for al-Madrassa to arrive. When he finally did, Ahlam could hardly control himself.
“Such an honor, may Allah be praised!” he gushed.
But al-Madrassa was in no mood for pleasantries. He wanted to see the experiment.
Dr. Ahlam shuttled him into an adjoining room with a glass-enclosed sub-room that contained a wire cage with a dog in it, a German shepherd. Dr. Ahlam offered al-Madrassa a chair, but the chief of the al-Aqsa Jihad terror group waved it off. He stood right up to the glass. He could see everything that way.
Dr. Ahlam donned a triple-layered haz-mat suit and screwed down his protective helmet connected to an oxygen tank. He typed the password into the airlock, and the thick glass door clicked open. He entered the glass room and pushed a button to close the door behind him. Once inside, he stepped over to an iron pipe, which was closed at one end and open at the other, which extended into the wire cage.
On a table was a heavy metal tube, and Ahlam unscrewed it and removed an interior steel lining. Then he took an unusual, industrial-looking syringe and he drew out a single drop of a yellow chemical fluid from the inner container. Ahlam then connected the tip of the needle into a pin-sized hole in the closed end of the pipe, and squeezed the end of the syringe to express the single drop into the pipe.
Two seconds later, the dog gave a worrisome look, then immediately began convulsing in pain, yelping, and vomiting blood. Within ten seconds its fur and skin began to emit smoke as it burned off of the dog’s frame, falling away from its skeleton.
Dr. Ahlam looked at hi
s watch. He held up ten fingers and flashed them twice to signify the twenty minutes he would now wait.
Al-Madrassa wasn’t overly impressed. VX gas was known to have similar ghastly effects. But this little demonstration had two acts. It was the second act that he was waiting for. He strolled back and forth in front of the glass, hands behind his back.
When the twenty minutes was up, Dr. Ahlam strode up on the other side of the glass, directly in front of al-Madrassa. Then he spread out his arms dramatically, to signal his next move. With a flourish, like the impresario at the center of a miniature circus of horrors, Ahlam pointed the index finger of each hand toward his helmet.
Taking a step closer to the glass, al-Madrassa was transfixed and dropped his hands from behind his back. He stared at the chemist in the glass room.
Ahlam placed his hands on his helmet and began to screw it off the collar of his protective suit. Until the very last turn. When he was at that point, the chemist half bent a knee down as he turned the helmet one last half turn, then popped it off his suit, fully exposing his face and head to the air of the enclosed toxic room. Dr. Ahlam flashed a ghoulish grin. He then scurried up right next to the wire cage that contained the smoldering remains of the dog and placed his face against the wire, holding his hands up into the air for effect.
This was what al-Madrassa had come to see — and he was not disappointed. The implications were staggering. Whole populations of Jews, infidels, and other undesirables could now be gassed in Tel Aviv, even in Jerusalem, and almost immediately the city could be occupied without toxic effects to the Islamic conquerors who could then march in and take over. Buildings, cars, businesses, even food and water supply, would be untouched by the gas — and after twenty minutes of exposure to the air the toxin was designed to completely dissipate.
Al-Madrassa was not one to lavish praise on his deputies. After all, only Allah deserved that. But this — the triumph he had just witnessed — nearly overcame him. On the verge of tears of joy, he slowly clapped his hands together in celebration.
On the other side of the glass, Ahlam took a slow bow and threw a kiss to the terror chief who was applauding.
“Genius,” al-Madrassa whispered. “Genius.”
Now they could move to the next stage. He would talk to his missile men, after which the planning would begin. He had not forgotten the faces of the people he had planned to be his first two victims. The infidel Jordans from America. Indeed the Jordans, America’s most zealous patriots with their detestable Roundtable group and enemies of the great Islamic Jihad … they would be the perfect targets to start with.
THIRTY-NINE
Jerusalem, Temple Mount
The sun was shining, and Alexander Coliquin enjoyed the feeling of warmth on his upturned face. He was standing next to Prime Minister Sol Bensky, who had the aged chief rabbi of Jerusalem next to him. Bensky’s two main staffers, Dimi Eliud and Chad Zadok, were hovering in the background.
Because of the threat of an Islamic intifada from a few of the noncooperative Palestinian groups, the mount had to be ringed with soldiers that day for the ceremony. The security measure was a joint effort by the IDF and the blue-helmeted United Nations troops. That was more than symbolic. It was a preview of the new Jerusalem under Secretary-General Coliquin’s peace treaty with Israel. That city would be a truly international province, jointly ruled by both Israel and the U.N.
On the other hand, Coliquin had much to be happy about. Most of the Islamic clerics were on board with his treaty because of the designation of the Palestinian Authority territories within Israel as sovereign, and the international status of Jerusalem, which took it out of the exclusive grasp of the Israelis. After all, the Arab leaders felt assured that when conflicts broke out — which were certain to happen — the U.N. would side with them against Israel.
On the other hand, giving the Jews control over a portion of the Temple Mount was a sticking point, even with the wall that was being constructed to keep them entirely separate from the Muslim Dome of the Rock and from the Al Aqsa Mosque that had been on the plateau for centuries. But then the Palestinian leaders and the Arab League took comfort from the private assurances of Coliquin, though he knew they were not quite sure how he was going to be able to accomplish his audacious plan. He was glad for that.
Coliquin gave the signal and an international band struck up the Israeli national anthem.
When the music stopped, an old rabbi among twelve Jewish leaders at the ceremony watched as Sol Bensky stepped up to the raised podium laced with wireless microphones from every major news organization on the planet. He pointed down to the large cornerstone that was the star attraction for the final and most dramatic feature of the monumentally historic event.
“For two long millennia,” he said, “the Jewish people have waited for the rebuilding of their great temple. It was destroyed in AD 70 by an act of violence, during a time when the Roman Empire was at war with the Jewish people. But today,” he said, his voice ringing out from the Temple Mount and echoing down on the city of Jerusalem, “today we see the rebuilding of that temple taking place in an epoch full of promise — of peace, not war — of cooperation, not enmity — with two great faiths each agreeing to worship God side-by-side, with mutual respect on this sacred piece of ground. As in the days of Ezra, we raise our hands in praise for the construction that is taking place — and it is marvelous and wonderful in our sight.”
The twelve Jewish leaders then strode to the industrial lift that held the white stone monolith. The construction had already begun. Back-hoes and tractors had been busy in the Jewish sector of the plateau digging the foundation. Cranes had lowered the first row of stones, all but one — the cornerstone. Now the twelve men stepped back to allow the old rabbi to totter forward to the lever on the industrial lift.
And as in the days of Ezra, the old rabbi covered his eyes and wept. He did not weep with grief. He did not see this as a time that might soon be ripe for mourning, like the fig tree bearing fruit that was pleasing to the eye yet poisonous to consume. Instead, he wept for that which he believed had been fulfilled from the dark, dusty corners of time forgotten.
The rabbi pulled the green lever, and the engine of the lift began to grind and whir as the great stone was slowly tilted with hydraulic precision at the perfect angle so that it would slide down the smooth steel rollers. As it did, the cornerstone dropped into the space between the adjoining stones. A ground-shaking thud was heard when it found its resting place. But there was half an inch of space between the cornerstone and the neighboring stones.
The rabbi and his fellow Jewish historians and engineers and experts in the Talmud had disputed that fact bitterly with Sol Bensky. The engineers had told the Prime Minister that this was the most efficient method to accommodate the ceremony, as the project had been rushed by Bensky, with the first row of stones being laid in a tireless effort with contractors working around the clock. Bensky had ordered that the foundation be laid in a hurry, before any kind of uprising occurred from Palestinian protestors. The religious scholars told him that this design would require that mortar be placed around the cornerstone to fill in the space, something the ancient engineers two thousand years before had avoided, having brilliantly placed the stones of the Herodian temple in perfect symmetry without the use of mortar.
“But back then, thousands of years ago, they didn’t have the political problems that I have,” Bensky said in reply. And that was that.
The group of twelve rabbis, together with the chief rabbi, each recited a portion of Scripture and prayed over the row of mammoth white stones that were the foundation for the new global center of Jewish worship. With the foundation now laid, the rest of the construction could be finished with lightning speed. The engineers had assured Bensky of that.
But in the midst of the honored guests on the Temple Mount that day, Coliquin was not thinking about engineering details or Bensky’s political problems. He had his own agenda. As the last prayer was being recit
ed, Coliquin heard in his Allfone earpiece the chimes of an incoming message. He tapped the tiny ear bud to listen. It was the Deputy Secretary-General Ho Zhu.
“Mr. Secretary,” he reported, “I have been in personal dialogue with Faris D’Hoestra. It took some time. Many layers of protection surrounding him. But I got through and spoke with him about your desire for a meeting.”
Coliquin, in a hushed voice, asked to hear the specifics.
“D’Hoestra wanted to meet on neutral ground. I expressed your similar thoughts.”
“You’d better have done this right, Ho.”
“I said you wanted Abu Dhabi. Specifically Dubai.”
“Perfect.”
Coliquin tapped his ear bud to turn it off. It had been a very satisfying day. The U.N. secretary-general’s agenda was far bigger than some temple building on a hill in Jerusalem. And now Coliquin could see that it was getting very close to completion.
FORTY
Washington State, on the Edge of the Olympic National Forest
Two miles up the rough forest trail, Cal pulled the Land Rover to a sudden halt. He had spotted something. He got out and trotted to a large tree just to the left of the lane. After studying it and running his finger along a marking on the bark, he said, “This is it!”
Abigail was reading something on her Allfone, but she clicked it off, hopped out, and joined him. She stared at the bark where someone had carved an intricate image — the shape of a light bulb. Inside the outline, a lowercase i had been cut into the center. She asked, “What is it?”
He gave a knowing nod. “The logo of IntraTonics, the software and laser logistics company where Hashimoto used to work. Must be an inside joke. We’ve got to be close.”