The Brotherhood Conspiracy (50 page)

The patrol leader held up his left hand—the two men in front were stopped at a corner, the tunnel snaking a hard turn to the right. He stopped his team in its tracks, slipped past the men on point, and pressed his back against the tunnel wall, just short of the corner. The beams of their lights, the noise of their running boots, gave them away. So there was little need for silence. If there was
anyone with evil intent around the corner . . . He motioned one of his men to the opposite wall of the tunnel, dropped into a crouch, and darted his head out from cover as the soldier opposite pointed a bright beam of light down the tunnel.

Off in the distance, the curving shaft came to an abrupt end . . . a dead end.

Joe sat cross-legged in the dust of the cavern’s floor, his hand on the solid stone filling the doorway, his imagination on the other side of the stone. Somebody has been here . . . the wall is protecting something. Could it be the Tent? Could it be more? Only one way to find out. He retrieved a pickax from his backpack, raised it over his head, and drove the pointed end deep into the ancient mortar between the blocks of stone.

The clang of metal against rock—a rhythmic claxon—echoed up from the depths of the cave. The patrol leader heard it before he emerged from the left tunnel. He and his men curled through the small chamber and poured into the right shaft—two-by-two, leap-frogging down its length.

It was easier going than he expected. The mortar was intact, but degraded over the ages so that it was soft under his pick and pulled away from the stone like corn bread—falling in crumbs at his feet. Four of the stones already lay on the floor next to him; only two more and he could squeeze through the hole. But curiosity trumped expediency—Joe picked up his flashlight. He had to see what was inside.

As his light played over the space on the other side of the wall, Rodriguez figured it was about ten yards deep. But it was so wide that he couldn’t see the sides. That didn’t matter. In front of him was a wooden platform, about half the depth of the space, up against the back wall, extending to the sides beyond the point that Joe’s light illuminated. At the rear of the platform were several mounds covered in what appeared to be animal skins of some kind. The mounds also extended into the darkness on both sides. The mounds were each about four feet high and six feet wide and rounded on top. In front of the mounds, stacked
neatly, were dozens of thick, stout, long wooden poles. And running along the front of the platform were smaller rectangular objects, also wrapped in some kind of animal hide. The covering on one of the smaller objects had fallen away. As Rodriguez played his light over the surface, its carved legs glistened and reflected a deep, golden glow.

“Holy cow!”

Holding his breath, his pulse thudding against the walls of his arteries, Joe pushed his arm and his head through the small opening, throwing the light down the length of the left side of the enclosure. More mounds and poles extended into the far reaches—the space much larger than he first imagined—and ended in the distance, where he saw a huge, wooden cask. Bonded by straps—leather or metal, he couldn’t tell from this distance—holding down a massive, arched, wooden lid.

At the sight of it, Joe jumped. His head hit the top of the stone opening, he bit his tongue, and swallowed the expletive that wanted to burst from his mouth. Pulling his head out of the hole in the wall, he tested the extent of damage to his tongue with his free hand, turned around to find his pickax—and found himself looking down the barrels of too many guns in the hands of too many stone-faced Israeli soldiers.

The patrol leader approached Joe, eased him to the side of the tunnel, approached the hole in the door and shone his light into the opening. After a few, quiet moments, he turned around to face his men.

“Take him back to the surface and hold him there. No . . . wait . . . restrain him. He’s not getting away from us. Then get on the radio to General Orhlon. Tell him we have the American. And—well—just tell him we found it. Then send in the engineers.”

4:23 a.m., Tel Aviv

“Remind me never to play poker with you,” said Orhlon.

Baruk’s long, thin body was buried in the corner of a lush, chocolate-brown leather sofa tucked between the bookcases in his home library, a top secret Mossad report by his side. His shoes were off, his jacket draped over the back of a chair, his silk tie neatly folded on his desk. Baruk pulled his eyeglasses down the length of his nose and transferred the phone to his right hand. “You have money to lose?”

“Not on my salary,” said Orhlon.

“They found the Tent?”

“Actually, the American . . . the tall one, Rodriguez, found it. Using some NASA-developed gizmo. It was sealed up behind a wall, deep in a cave along the Ascent of Akkrabim.”

“The what?”

“Scorpion Pass, down in the Negev. Elie . . . he actually found it. And it appears as if it’s still intact.”

Baruk finally stirred. He swung his legs off the sofa, resting his right arm along the top of the sofa’s back. “Three thousand years old, and it was just sitting there? I never really believed it was possible. Now . . . well . . .” The prime minister took a long, deep breath. “Now is the difficult part, eh? How long before we can get it to the Temple Mount?”

The silence from the phone confirmed the difficulty of Orhlon’s task.

“Yes, sir . . . the difficult part,” he said. “It’ll probably take most of a day just to get the pieces here. We have to get a whole fleet of Krupp’s heavy haulers from Shimona down into a very rough area that is off the main road through Scorpion Pass. That will take hours in itself. We’re airlifting in a corps of rabbis, scientists, and archaeologists along with some engineers. They’ve got to figure out what we’ve got, figure out a way to get it loaded onto the trucks without destroying it—if that’s possible—and then get it back here to Jerusalem. Twelve . . . eighteen hours at a minimum. Could be more like twenty-four, who knows?”

Baruk calculated the angles and the options, weighing the possibilities in his head.

“Make it happen,” said the prime minister. “And lock down the Mount.”

4:29 a.m., Jerusalem

Major Levin walked across the flat expanse of the new Temple Mount platform and even the concrete smelled fresh. The platform, what had been completed so far by the crews from Krupp Industries, was flat and empty, except for the few trees on the northeast corner that survived the quake. That end of the platform rested on bedrock and some of it survived the destruction. The greatest damage was the gaping maw on the western side that swallowed the Dome of the Rock and the entire southern half of the thirty-five-acre Temple Mount
platform, taking with it the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Miraculously, the Western Wall itself remained standing.

Walking to the south, Levin once again checked the hand-cranked pulleys and coils of rope that stood on the precipice. Krupp’s engineers were concerned about the amount of weight the platform could support until it was completely finished, fastened to and supported by the massive Herodian walls that mostly evaded the ravages of the earthquake. So they eschewed modern steel scaffolds or any heavy machinery and reverted to more historical means of lifting material into place to repair the cracks that did exist in the walls. But it wasn’t the platform’s sturdiness that concerned Levin this night. It was the two sets of reports he was receiving on his radio.

One series of messages kept him updated on the progress of getting the Tent of Meeting prepared for transport. The second series were updated intelligence reports which hinted—strongly—of a pending attack by a disparate group of Islamic militants. Both scenarios were difficult to believe.

On the one hand, his men in the field had tracked the tall American into the desert, trapped him in a cave along the Ascent of Akkrabim, and now had in their possession what they believed were the actual pieces of the Tabernacle of Jehovah that the Israelites carried through the desert for forty years before entering the Promised Land. Levin didn’t know if what his men had under guard was, in fact, the Tent of Meeting. It would take a team of rabbis, scientists, and archaeologists to ultimately determine what had been found. Some had been airlifted to Scorpion Pass to oversee the transfer. Others were on their way to him. It didn’t really matter to Levin what was in the trucks. His job was to work with the army, secure the Mount, and have it available for the convoy when it arrived.

“Worried about the Tent?” asked Major Abner Katz of the Israeli Defense Force, Israel’s standing army of two-hundred-fifty thousand soldiers. “I’m not. It’s going to be at least twelve hours before they get here, probably more. That gives us plenty of time to prepare and be ready. And whatever they have in the trucks is what it is. What rocks me is what just came over my radio.”

Major Katz looked as if his head had been bleached. A man of normal dimensions was topped by a swept-back thicket of white-blond hair, reprised from his eyebrows to the pointed beard on his chin. His skin was pale, as though he never saw the sun. High cheekbones gave him a craggy edge.

Katz joined Levin, who was looking out over the lights of the Old City.

“What is it now?” asked Levin.

“I have a good man—IDF—who was embedded with the Northern Islamic Front for years. He just transmitted a blast . . . which means he’s on the run . . . that the Front’s entire apparatus has gone dark. No communications, no meetings. And he doesn’t know why. He’s been on the inside for a long time, trusted, part of the inner circle. But nobody in the Front told him what was going on.”

“Not a good sign,” said Levin.

“Especially for him. He’s trying to get back, but . . .”

“But it confirms everything else we’ve been hearing. Rumors and conjectures, sure, but those rumors are adding up.” Levin turned away from the view and started walking south where members of Katz’s outfit were stringing razor wire along the platform’s perimeter. “Shin Bet got information this morning from a normally reliable source that the Martyrs’ Brigade has been activating its members for days and that many of them were on the move. Now we hear that Hezbollah infiltrated the border with some of its most fierce and experienced soldiers—and has been doing so for weeks.

“I just didn’t believe it, Abe. Our border with Lebanon is solid, well guarded, heavily policed. The border crossings are some of the toughest we have, outside of Gaza. Hezbollah getting a large number of soldiers into Israel without us knowing about it? I wouldn’t have thought it possible. But, now, with all these reports? This is no coincidence. The Tent of Meeting is coming here. And, I’ll bet, so is a strong force of Islamic fighters.”