The Caleb Collection Read online

  Rebecca set up the satellite phone thirty minutes later and made contact with the monastery. According to Samuel, Avraham was positive he’d heard the sniper on his morning round at about eight. But a further search had proven fruitless. Otherwise, all was quiet—at least as far as security went.

  Zakkai had found a chamber under the root cellar. The professor got on the line, excited. He told her about finding Caleb’s old room and their methodical search. And then he told her about the letter, and Rebecca had to sit down.

  “It actually says that?”

  “Yes, it says that. Where the brine meets with the oil—that is where we will find the Ark.”

  “So we definitely need Caleb then. Unfortunately he’s still one step ahead of us.”

  “When will you have him?”

  “Soon. Have you made contact with my father?”

  “We’re scheduled to call in the morning.”

  Rebecca cut the connection. Zakkai could smell the Ark. Imagine! The thought sent a thrill up her spine. Everything her father had worked for; everything she had lived for; everything her mother and her baby sister had died for—it just might finally be in their reach.

  Rebecca laid out her bedroll at the base of the huge rock and told Michael she’d wake him in three hours.

  She stared at the stars and begged God for his redemption, as she did every night. That redemption would be found in the Messiah’s coming went without saying. Any true Jew knew that, even if most Israelis did not. The Messiah’s coming meant rebuilding the Temple.

  And if the Temple was rebuilt? Then she would find a handsome young man who didn’t mind being married to a woman with her past and make lots of children. A whole flock of little Israelites.

  She turned in her blankets and began to picture that man. But she fell asleep before his face was fully formed.

  And then suddenly she was awake. Her eyes peeled wide and her heart slamming in her chest. She had heard something that didn’t belong.

  She held her breath, listening intently. Her handgun was at her head— the Glock. Safety on or off? Off.

  There it was again, a scraping, like a branch on a rock. Except for the few trees by the mudhole, there were no branches here! And even if there were, there was no breeze to move them.

  The sound came again and fire spread through Rebecca’s veins. She moved on instinct. She palmed the gun, rolled from her bed, and came to her knees at the base of the towering boulder. Without a break in her movement she slid silently around the boulder and flattened her back to its cool surface. She took her first long slow breath and willed her heart to slow its pounding.

  For a few moments the night was silent again. She guessed they’d been resting at least two hours by the crescent moon which now sat on the horizon. It cast just enough light to turn the salt flats a dull gray.

  Whap!

  Rebecca blinked. The sound registered—the sound of a bullet spitting into the ground. Or a body. A silenced rifle!

  Michael!

  She spun around the rock.

  Whap! Whap!

  The rocks forty meters across the clearing momentarily brightened with two silenced muzzle flashes. Rebecca stared in unbelief at the bedroll three meters from her own. A low groan rose through the air; the bedroll moved. Michael was still alive.

  Rebecca dropped to a crouch, prepared to run out to him.

  The sniper was intentionally luring her, she knew. He’d seen her escape too quickly for a shot and now had wounded one in the hopes of bringing out the other.

  Michael began to push himself up.

  “Down!” Rebecca whispered urgently.

  Whap!

  Michael dropped to his chest like a sack of rocks.

  Rebecca yanked herself back, fighting off panic. She closed her eyes and breathed steadily. Easy, Rebecca, this is Golan. This is the West Bank. This is what you were trained to do. How could the sniper have followed them? And why?

  It didn’t matter. She had to kill this man now before he did any more damage. And how do you kill a deadly sniper hidden in a position of advantage?

  You don’t.

  You save the camels before he kills them, if he hasn’t already. Without a camel her mission would be over and she would be dead.

  There was a saying the Mossad commander who’d trained her IDF special forces team had drilled home: Extreme, excessive force creates confusion; confusion creates mistakes; mistakes determine battles. The politicians might favor gradualism, but the military did not.

  It took Rebecca only a few seconds to settle on her course of action. Her decision was a matter of instinct, not reasoning. Five years in the field had taught her to trust her instincts, like a man trusts his pulse.

  She rechecked her safety, rolled her head as a matter of habit, and bolted from her cover. The nine-millimeter Glock held eight rounds and she methodically fired six of them at the sniper’s flash point while in a full sprint. Only an idiot wouldn’t seek refuge from the barrage. The sniper might be deranged but he was clearly no idiot.

  The camels were already scrambling to their feet in the echoes of the unsilenced gunfire when Rebecca reached them. She turned the gun on the camel closest to the sniper and put a round in its head.

  Boom!

  The camel toppled to the ground, dead. The other screeched and bolted past her, out of the enclave. She had one round left.

  Rebecca dropped behind the fallen camel and the sniper’s bullets came, smack, smack, smack, smack, plowing into the carcass.

  “You’re dead now, Jew!” a voice screamed in Arabic.

  Michael’s pack sat on the animal’s hip, in better position than she could’ve hoped for. She reached up, slipped her hand into the pack, felt the familiar ball of cold steel, and pulled out a grenade.

  This Jew has a little gift for you, my dear neighbor.

  Rebecca crouched behind the beast, pumped her last round at the rocks hiding the sniper, hurled the grenade, and sprinted after the fleeing camel without waiting.

  She’d taken five long strides when the night shattered with a bellowing explosion that rocked the ground. Four more steps and she was around a boulder, tearing after her own camel.

  You see what it means to mess with an Israeli soldier in the night?

  Rebecca ran for five hundred meters, weaving on the flat to spoil any aim the sniper might have in the moonlight. A single unsilenced pistol shot rang out over the desert—the Arab was telling her that he was still alive.

  The sniper was alive and Michael was dead. She didn’t allow the thought to linger. The Mossad had a saying: There was a time to mourn, a time to kill and there was a time to survive. Now it was the time to survive.

  It took her twenty minutes to close the gap to her camel, another ten to coax it into her hands and mount it. A predicament that should have presented itself to her earlier now filled her with a small horror.

  The satellite phone was in Michael’s pack, back at the oasis. Not that she could have taken it out with the sniper bearing down—but she could have killed her camel and not his. It was a mistake.

  Mistakes determine battles.

  She’d had no choice but to shoot one of the camels—she couldn’t chase down both, and she couldn’t take a chance that the sniper might take one. He had his own mount, of course, but handing him another one broke with basic military doctrine. Putting the sniper on foot in this desert would be as good as killing him.

  Forty minutes later her reasoning proved itself. She stumbled upon a dying horse one kilometer to the northwest of the rocks as she circled in a wide berth. It was still twitching. The pig had ridden his animal to death.

  Rebecca reluctantly dismounted and cut its throat. Now the sniper was on foot. And she was without a communications link to the others.

  They would hold the monastery for a week before retreating, as they had agreed, should communications be cut. The thought of heading further into the desert alone sent a shiver through Rebecca’s bones. But she had no choice.


  She couldn’t just hop over to the monastery for reinforcements, and they couldn’t send a search team into this abyss of salt.

  She wouldn’t need a week, of course. She’d have Caleb in a day.

  An hour later she picked up the twin trails of the caravan headed north. A tremor still lingered in her bones as she turned her camel onto the trail. Now it is time to mourn, she thought. But she didn’t feel like mourning. She felt like going back and killing. Or being killed.

  But that wasn’t her mission. Roughly four hours ahead in the night there was a man named Caleb who held the key to Israel’s future.

  He was her mission.

  15

  Ismael sat on top of a boulder thirty meters above the salt flats, eyes closed, slowly rubbing his temples. It had taken him less than five minutes to understand his predicament. He was stranded in the desert without a mount.

  It had taken him another hour to make the first call to his father on the sat phone, only to reach an answering machine. He had waited three more hours without a callback. All the while Rebecca Solomon extended her lead.

  He’d replayed the attack a hundred times in his mind’s eye, each time telling himself that his failure wasn’t due to his own mistake, but her good fortune. She had somehow managed to wake. She had moved with surprising speed, caught him off guard with her mindless attack, and then escaped. A brilliant maneuver, he couldn’t deny. But just the same, it was her fortune that had awoken her.

  He’d found the horse dead. She had slit its throat and headed north.

  The sat phone burped beside him and he snatched up the receiver.

  “Yes.”

  “Good evening, Ismael. So you’re alive. That’s a good start.”

  “She’s better than I thought. I need a Jeep flown in to me,” he said. “She’s headed north on a camel.”

  “A Jeep?” Abu’s voice tightened. “Where are you?”

  “In the desert. You can triangulate my position from the call—”

  “I know I can triangulate your position from the call. That’s not the point. The point is you’ve allowed yourself to become stranded in the middle of the Ethiopian desert. She should have been dead days ago!”

  “She’s better than that!”

  “What happened?” Abu demanded.

  Ismael told him in broad terms.

  Abu took a deep breath on the other end. “Okay, Ismael, now you will listen to me. No more games. You will do exactly as I say. I don’t know any better fighter than you, but now we are past fighting to soldiering, and there is no better soldier than me. Do you hear me?”

  “You are threatening me?”

  “I am trying to help you, you fool! And in case you don’t see it clearly, you need my help.”

  Ismael blinked in the dark. Abu could be a man of terrifying fury if pushed too far. He knew because he’d pushed too far on more than one occasion and still had the scars to prove it.

  “Well, I’m stranded in the hottest desert this side of hell. Yes, I suppose that I do need your help. Either way I will kill her.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you will. But this isn’t simply about one woman.”

  “Do you already forget your other son?”

  Abu remained silent and Ismael knew he had crossed the line with the stupid accusation. He was thinking about apologizing when his father spoke again.

  “How much food do you have?”

  “I have a whole camel—enough meat for a week if it doesn’t spoil. I’m at a spring.”

  “It’s been two days and the Israelis are still at the monastery,” Abu said. “Why? Have they found something? In the end, Rebecca Solomon may be the least of our problems. Do you understand this, Ismael?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “We will do this my way now. I will call you tomorrow at noon.”

  Abu cut the connection and Ismael lay back on the rock. We will see, Father. We will do this your way only if it means killing Rebecca Solomon.

  David Ben Solomon stood on the Temple Mount early in the morning. He stared down at several hundred Jews already wandering in the courtyard below—stray souls draped in black and white, nodding at a foundation that was at best erected by Herod, not King Solomon as many supposed. No, the original Temple had been behind him, under the Dome of the Rock. But the Jews seemed satisfied to touch a few remaining stones at the base while the Muslims paraded around on top, as if they owned the whole Mount. For all practical purposes they did.

  Ahead of Solomon lay the Old City of Jerusalem, surrounded by the old wall, roughly a thousand meters squared. They had divided the city into four quarters: the Muslim to his right, the Christian adjacent that, the Armenian next to the Christian, and the Jewish below him—four pieces to a square puzzle. Of all these, only the Jewish truly belonged. Until Israel realized that, the puzzle would remain unsolved. Peace would elude them all.

  “Come, Messiah. Come quickly.” Solomon turned his back to the Old City and looked across the Mount. Since that day in the war of 1967, when he himself had marched through the golden gate with the very first Jews and stood on the Mount, the de facto policy had been that, although Jews could visit the Mount, they could not turn it into a place of prayer. And the rabbis had agreed because of their belief that the Mount was too sacred for the unpurified Jew. What would happen if a man stepped over the Holy of Holies and prayed without purifying himself first, they asked.

  There is no Holy of Holies! Solomon argued. Which is why we must build it.

  Unfortunately, common sense had fled the leaders. Rather than redeem a holy place now defiled, they preferred to turn it over to Muslims to further desecrate! It was the fear of guns and bloodshed speaking, not the fear of God.

  Three weeks ago a young woman of twenty had been arrested for closing her eyes on the Mount. The Muslim Waqf accused her of praying. She was thrown in prison for a day by the Israeli police, themselves afraid to confront the Muslim guards. So now the police had joined the rabbis and the Knesset in playing this silly game. Absurd.

  Meanwhile, the Muslims flocked to the Temple Mount, their Haram al-Sharif as they called it, thousands at a time, treading over a Holy of Holies that did not exist. Israel might technically possess sovereignty of the Mount, but the Muslims possessed its soul.

  Solomon glanced at the huge gold dome. He would never forgive himself for not blowing it up then, when he had the chance in 1967.

  His phone vibrated in his robe pocket. He always wore traditional clothing on his visits—it helped take him back to the ancient days. But he didn’t mind bringing a little technology with him either—it helped connect him with the future.

  He walked briskly for the gate. Several Muslim Waqf guards watched him carefully as they always did; they wouldn’t stand for his use of a cell phone. As far as they were concerned, atom bombs could be concealed in cell phones, and he was the kind of person who would use an atom bomb.

  Solomon flipped the phone open as soon as he passed the gate. “Hello.”

  “David!” It was Zakkai and his voice was strained. “We’ve found something, David.”

  Solomon looked around and ducked into an enclave which would offer him some semblance of privacy. “What do you mean something?” The air suddenly felt too heavy to breathe. “You found . . . it?”

  “No. But we found Caleb’s old room under the root cellar. It hasn’t been touched in fifteen years, since the monastery was originally destroyed. And in the wall above his bed we found a letter, hidden by Father Matthew.” Zakkai paused, as if the moment deserved some recognition.

  “Yes, go on. What kind of letter?”

  The archaeologist explained in detail. He read the letter twice.

  “So it means that the Ark is there!” Solomon said.

  “I think so, David. I do.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last night. The Ark is hidden in this monastery—we can hardly doubt that now.”

  “And where is Rebecca? She hasn’t found C
aleb?”

  “Not that we know. She made contact last night. They believe Caleb was picked up by some travelers headed north. But they’re closing in. She seemed confident that they would have him very soon.”

  “So. The letter is saying that the Ark is somewhere where the oil and the brine mix. There’s no way to make sense of that without Caleb?”

  “It sounds like a riddle. We’re open to any thoughts, but it makes no sense to anyone here. Don’t worry, Father Matthew would never have been so cryptic unless he was sure Caleb would understand.”

  Solomon took a deep breath. He felt as though a small bomb had been dropped in his skull. They were actually going to find it and honestly he could hardly stand the thought.

  “You know what this means, David?” Zakkai said. “This means you’d better start making preparations. You know we’ve had a visitor—if the Arabs even think we’re onto something, we may have difficulty transporting whatever we find over the sea. Have you talked to our friend?”

  “Not yet. I will now. Don’t worry, my dear archaeologist, you find our lost treasure and I will make sure it gets to Jerusalem. If we’re lucky, Rebecca has already eliminated our visitor. Dear God, I pray she has. In the meantime we must maintain absolute security. I don’t have to tell you how important this is.”

  “No, you don’t.” Zakkai paused. “It’s nearly impossible to believe, David.”

  “Yes, it is. But you haven’t found it yet. You’ve found a piece of paper which will do nothing for our people.”

  Zakkai cleared his throat. “You’re right. We’ll call the moment we hear from Rebecca.”

  “Please do.”

  Solomon closed the phone. He walked out onto the path and struck for the street, busy now with pedestrians. They looked dreamlike now, hustling through another day, pretending to be Jewish in a country which had already sold its soul.

  Your soul lies hidden in a monastery, fifteen hundred kilometers away. And my daughter is closing in.

  It was time to begin softening the political ground. Solomon shook his head, hoping against hope that they were not being led down a path to an empty hole. Either way they had crossed the threshold now. The Knesset had to be warned. He would begin at the top.