Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (12 page)

Eleven Bedouin were active around their
tents, one looking back at Itamar through his own binoculars.

When Gabby was given the field glasses, she
said, "They don't look friendly."

"They probably aren't. They're armed," Itamar
said. "I would imagine that's meant to send us a signal."

The corporal confessed that their numbers
made him uncomfortable. Eleven against three was a decided
disadvantage, though in the event of trouble, they could radio for
support from an Israeli infantry platoon operating in the vicinity.
But given the rugged terrain soldiers might not make it in time to
be of help.

"When we enter the cave, keep a close watch,"
Itamar told the corporal. "I'll take a walkie-talkie, but I don't
expect good reception inside. If these guys make any hostile moves,
call or come get me and inform your commanding officer immediately.
Don't wait until it's too late. Remember, Bedouin believe the cave
belongs to them, not us. And they just may be right about
that."

Previous investigators from the Antiquities
Authority had stabilized the crude rappelling lines along the
mountainside leading to the cave's entrance. Assured that this was
not Gabby's first rock-climbing experience, Itamar took the lead,
but carefully monitored her progress and offered encouragement. He
was relieved to see that her overall athleticism made it easy for
her to handle the rappelling requirements. Good coordination. Good
upper body strength and balance. No apparent signs of panic.

The traffickers' tarp remained over the
cave's entrance, but once inside, Itamar secured its flap to the
cave wall, flooding the darkness with sunlight. The smell of burnt
oil lingered in the dust saturated air. Gabby and Itamar strapped
filters over their mouths and mounted halogen headlamps on their
foreheads. The entryway was crammed with equipment belonging to
archeologists from Itamar's agency, the first and only civilians to
have entered the cave after the army. The looters' rubber buckets
for transporting dirt were now stacked out-of-the-way along the
southern wall, neatly stuffed one inside the other. Two canvas
sacks filled with trawls and brushes rested beside a portable table
used for maps and diagrams. Gabby recognized rectangular sifting
trays archeologists used to screen for small artifacts hidden in
excavated earth. Several shovels and small picks were left leaning
against the eastern wall.

Itamar stepped beside Gabby, attaching a
tether to her backpack for dragging, and said, "My people are
extremely cautious about damaging a site, even if it's already been
badly spoiled by previous excavators. Under normal rules of the
road, nothing is done on site without approval from a committee of
experts. Here, for secrecy, we must be a bit more flexible. Once
word of this discovery leaks, I'll be deluged with requests to work
here. No matter that the place has already been trashed. For
budding archaeologists, hope springs eternal. They invariably
believe they'll find artifacts overlooked by their
predecessors."

"I feel privileged," Gabby said after her
survey of the main cavern. She closed her eyes to imagine her
ancestors and breathed deeply, trapping the filtered air in her
lungs. When she started to breathe again, dust particles lodged in
her throat, forcing a hacking cough.

Itamar lifted his breathing mask to say, "We
found a narrow opening in the rear that leads through two crawl
tunnels, and above one, a ventilation hole to the outside. It was
recently enlarged. Because the police found blood nearby, they
think the wounded Bedouin escaped through it. Unfortunately, he
didn't get far." As he surveyed the cavern, he said, "We hoped to
discover jars for storing scrolls, containers like those found in
other caves. The looters left only two empty ossuaries, two empty
jugs, and many terracotta shards. Thieves always get the first
pickings."

"Are you sure the cave wasn't looted many
years before?" Gabby asked, adjusting her mask to ease her
breathing.

"Good question," he replied. "Treasure
hunters could have robbed this cave centuries ago and removed the
best antiquities. All we know for certain is that people have been
here recently and it's doubtful they would spill blood for a cave
already picked clean by robbers years before. I'll learn more if
artifacts turn up in the London or New York antiquities market." He
pointed to a tunnel entrance in the rear. "That conduit forks in
eighty meters, leading to interior chambers A and B. Care to crawl
a bit? We found one empty quartzite ossuaries in Chamber A and
another near the entrance here. There were seven parchment
fragments in Chamber B."

She nodded affirmatively.

"Switch on your headlamp. Want to lead or
follow?" asked Itamar.

That brought a smile producing playful
dimples under Gabby's mask. "What kind of a question is that for
someone with a Type A personality? Follow me!"

The tunnel was tighter than she anticipated and, for
a few minutes, she suffered acute claustrophobia. Ahead, there was
nothing but a murky darkness; behind, the reassuring sound of
Itamar's breathing. So oppressive was this confinement that she
considered signaling her need to retreat to the entrance chamber
where there was room to stand in natural sunlight. But could she
seriously entertain withdrawing after having begged Itamar to bring
her here? To pull out now, she knew, would trigger a lifetime of
regret.

After an additional ten meters, Itamar's hand
grasped her ankle to stop her from crawling forward. She rotated
her head to look back and viewed his fingers curled into an O, a
signal asking how she was doing. By twisting on her hip she was
able to slip her hand behind to return the O, signaling that she
was doing fine, which, she admitted to herself, she definitely
wasn't. A moment later, she resumed crawling forward.

Itamar had given no indication which fork to
choose. She paused for his instruction, but none came. The
bristling of walkie-talkie static suddenly echoed in the confined
space. Itamar wrestled with the radio strapped to his belt, and
eventually maneuvered it near his lips. "Say again," she heard him
repeat several times in Hebrew, obviously frustrated with the poor
reception. There was a voice from one of the Israeli soldiers at
the other end, but his words were muffled. Several times, Itamar
sought clarification without success.

Between gasps for breath, he spoke to Gabby.
"The soldiers are trying to tell me something. Could be trouble
with the Bedouin. I must head back to the entrance. Want to
come?"

To pull out because she was frightened to be
alone in a suffocating enclosure, or fearful of what unfriendly
Bedouin might do, was tempting. All her instincts told her to
follow Itamar. But that, she knew, was nothing but raw fear, not
the controlled rationality she aspired to achieve. Mastering her
emotions was something she knew how to will and, at the moment, she
lacked no determination to see this adventure through. She lifted
her mask to say, "No."

"Okay. I'll be back as soon as I make
contact. We may have to evacuate fast, so be ready." The beam from
Itamar's light immediately faded as he inched backward toward the
tunnel entrance.

Where the path forked, she paused to choose a
direction. Since there was no compelling reason to go either left
or right, she simply left it to habit. In a situation like this,
right-handed people usually swerve to the right while left-handed
people, the left. She pressed on in the direction of Chamber B,
suddenly imagining that, outside, the Bedouin had launched an
attack against the three Israeli soldiers, joined now by Itamar.
She strained to hear shots, but heard nothing but the eerie silence
of the cave. Time seemed to compress. She couldn't tell whether she
was moving through a long tunnel very fast or a short tunnel very
slowly. The dust seemed to be swirling with greater intensity and
breathing became more difficult. Was this simply because her heart
was beating faster? Next, a nagging thought caused her to wonder
why she was here in the first place. Qumran was a long way from the
comfortable library at the Oriental Museum in Chicago. But did
library research ever approach treading upon the very path of
history?

Her doubts left her when she discovered a
tunnel feeding into a vault large enough to lift herself on her
elbows, a small improvement that conferred a modest measure of
comfort. In her imagination, she conjured up this tomblike cavity
as the burial site of an Egyptian pharaoh, cluttered with gold
statuary and earthen bowls. But what she actually saw was nothing
of the kind. The chamber was little more than an enlargement of the
tunnel, with an earthen floor and a chiseled sandstone ceiling. She
circled her head to let the beam from the lamp flood the empty
cavern, then crept forward on her knees to make contact with
something from the past, but all remnants of previous human
presence had been removed. Everything except…

It was lodged in a small outcrop of
sandstone. She squinted, circled her head to refocus the light,
then crawled forward to discover not an artifact from the distant
past but an object from the immediate present, something mundane
and utterly common in the twenty-first century.

"No, no," she muttered to herself, clenching
the object in her fingers and bringing it forward under her
headlamp for closer inspection. A PLASTIC ZIPLOC SANDWICH BAG!

She contracted into herself, acknowledging
that somebody not from the first century but very recently had left
this telltale item behind. And it wasn't one of Itamar's
archeologists or a soldier because she knew exactly who. She often
accused Tim of suffering from a sandwich bag obsession. He made a
habit of storing a fresh box of Ziplocs in his car, employed for
carrying sweets or dried fruit, but more often for loose change,
personal notes, and trinkets. Similar sandwich bags filled with
pencils and pens were in every drawer of his desk. It was a rare
moment when one or more was not stuffed in his pockets, and showed
up when she took his shirts and pants to the laundry. And no fewer
than two unopened boxes of reserve Ziplocs sat on the pantry shelf
in their Chicago kitchen and at least one in the Ussishkin Street
apartment.

She speculated that Tim had probably pulled
several from a backpack and inadvertently left one behind. Being so
ordinary, inspectors from Itamar's Authority and the army had
simply ignored it. This, she told herself, was her first clue to
what Tim meant by the discovery of a lifetime. She stuffed the
Ziploc in her breast pocket, then hesitated as the implications of
removing it weighed upon her. By taking evidence of Tim's presence
here, was she now conspiring with him in the theft of state
property? A small thing, but with huge ramifications. In the
leisure of academic life, people would relish debating subjects
like this. But in a dusty, claustrophobic cave with the possibility
of hostile Bedouin outside, there was no time for such a measured
approach. The Ziploc remained in her pocket as she rotated on her
knees inching back through the tunnel, then turned right at the
fork to follow the second conduit where Tim might have left more
bags behind. But Chamber A, somewhat larger than Chamber B,
provided no additional signs of human presence.

The crawlspace enlarged as she made her way
toward the cave's entrance and blessed sunlight. Itamar had just
dropped back into the entry chamber when she arrived.

"What's wrong outside?" she inquired as she
accepted his help lifting her from her knees.

"Nothing serious," he said. "The corporal
learned that Bedouin are here to bury their tribesman, just as you
suggested. Apparently, Major Zabronski returned his body to their
camp and now they want to give the fellow a dignified burial. These
people don't have designated burial grounds like other Arabs and
usually put their dead to rest where they died so their souls may
ascend to Allah where their life ended, linking life and death
seamlessly according to the Divine will."

Gabby was brushing dust from her face and
hands, when Itamar said, "Well, that solves at least one mystery,
doesn't it?"

"What do you mean?" she asked, thinking that
he somehow knew about the Ziploc bag. Perhaps he had had it planted
there for her to find!

"The dead Bedouin's name was Mumud
banu-Nazeem."

"Who did it?" Gabby asked, deflecting her
worry over Tim onto the Bedouin.

"That's for Zabronski to figure out," he said
with a dismissive sigh. "Thank God, I don't have to deal with
things like this. By the way, did you come across anything
interesting?"

She knew he would eventually ask and had
prepared a lie. "No. Your people left the place
spick-and-span."

***

As they approached Jerusalem in the Agency's
vehicle, Gabby fell silent, gazing out of the passenger window,
consumed by thoughts of Tim. It was only when they neared Ussishkin
Street that Itamar broke into her reverie by remarking, "You were a
good sport today. Most women I know wouldn't have much fun under
those conditions."

"I can't say I did. I didn't see much, but
somehow I felt close to my ancestors. And who in the twenty-first
century gets a chance to reach back two thousand years and visit
their predecessors?"

"You love this stuff, don't you?"

"And you don't?"

Outside the apartment, tension had returned
to Itamar's face and he spoke in short nervous bursts. "Only a
handful of officials and four of my staff know about the cave. I
must report to my bosses what happened at Qumran and, as soon as I
do, I'm toast at the Agency. My enemies will soon be dancing at my
funeral. I've got no more than a week to find some answers and I'm
counting on your cooperation. I had to pull strings for you to see
the cave today, Gabrielle, but I don't work free. You're holding
back."