The Brotherhood Conspiracy (58 page)

The gunfire was fierce in every direction, shouts of
Allahu Akbar!
and the screams of the wounded and dying. Two arms hooked under his armpits and grasped his shoulders, one on each side. The Israeli soldiers had closed ranks and were returning fire as Levin was pulled toward the center of the Temple Mount platform. As he was being dragged away from the raging firefight, he could see two things more clearly. One was a steady stream of Muslim fighters pouring onto the platform from a ragged hole of smoking concrete, surrounding and wiping out the machine gun batteries on the southern end. The other was the heavy trail of blood left behind by his dragged body.

With his hands shackled in front of him, the explosion threw Rodriguez off the hood of the truck and onto the concrete at the platform’s edge, knocking the wind out of his lungs. As he struggled to his feet and stumbled toward the front of the truck, a relentless cacophony of rapid arms fire raced across the surface of the platform. All hell had erupted and every soldier nearby was running to the sound of the guns. Except one. One of Joe’s guardians stopped short, spun around, ran back to the truck, and tossed him a set of keys. Then he was off again, following his brothers in arms.

Rodriguez removed the shackles from his legs and wrists. For a split second, he wondered what to do. Then a lethal spray of bullets clanged off the metal side of the truck. Without thinking, he jumped up into the small space between the cab and the body of the hauler. Not as exposed, he felt safer. Unsure of what attention he might attract if he took off running, or the response a running man might get from the Israeli soldiers, Rodriguez figured the best course at the moment was to stay put. And keep his head down as much as possible.

From his hiding place, he still had a clear view across the Temple Mount platform, a clear view of the vicious ferocity unleashed on the far side of the concrete slab, and a clear view of the Tent of Meeting, standing in the midst of a raging gun battle between Israeli soldiers and a small army of Muslim fighters who were pouring out from under the concrete at the far end of the platform.

4:59 a.m., On the Ashkelon Road

Bohannon’s world was a blur. . . blackness broken by sporadic slashes of light quickly left behind. Since breaking out of the snarled traffic in the city, they were speeding at a manic pace. Jerusalem’s suburbs were far behind, the Humvee racing through hills and farmland as the Jerusalem Heights fell away to the Mediterranean basin.

Both Sergeant Fischoff and the driver slipped into silence as reports came in over the radio of the battle on the Temple Mount. But there was no report from the other team. Tom found himself praying that this was good news. He was praying the prayer of the disillusioned, the prayer of the desperate.

God, I don’t know why you’ve left me. I don’t know what I did for you to punish me . . . to punish Annie . . . like this. I didn’t want this. You called me into this. I thought this was what you wanted. That you had a plan for me. So why has it all gone so wrong? Why are you letting all this happen? What have I done, that is so bad, that you would abandon me like this?

“I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

“What?” Tom lifted his head and saw that Fischoff was turned around in his seat, staring at him.

“It’s part of our holy book, too,” he said. “We got it before you did.”

Bohannon’s mind—scattered in so many directions—found it hard to focus. “What are you saying?”

Sergeant Fischoff once again swung into the space between the two front seats of the Humvee and crouched in front of Bohannon. “It’s in the book of Joshua,” he said. “Joshua was one of the greatest warriors, greatest leaders, in Jewish history. But when God first spoke to Joshua, three times he told him not to be afraid, to be strong and courageous. If Joshua wasn’t afraid, if he wasn’t feeling weak and fearful, why would God have talked to him like that?”

Bohannon stared at Fischoff.

“I looked back at you and I could tell,” said the sergeant. “You feel like God’s abandoned you. Like you don’t even know what to pray. What’s the point? Have you been listening to the radio reports?”

“Sounds like some kind of battle on the Temple Mount.”

“Yeah, and it’s not good. We’re getting hammered. And I’m afraid it might be some of my friends up there. I’m worried about them. I want to turn around and go help.”

Now the sergeant had Bohannon’s attention.

“I was in Lebanon in oh-six. We got chewed up by Hezbollah. They knew our tactics and they ripped us to shreds. Sent us running back over the border. Worst defeat I’ve ever experienced. Where was God then? When my friends were dying all around me, where was God? How could he let this happen? Why had he forsaken his people?

“I felt just like you do now. I could feel that same kind of despair about what is happening on the Temple Mount right now. But there’s one thing we need to remember. We’re not God. We don’t get to have all of life’s questions answered for us before we start. We don’t know what God’s plan is. How can we ever expect to understand God’s plan? But there is something we can understand. And that is what God has spoken to us. We have it in the Talmud. You have it in both the Old and the New Testaments.

“And when God first talked to Joshua—before Joshua ever did anything special, before he ever won any battle—God told him, ‘No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and courageous.’ ” I don’t know why either. But we don’t always get
why
. What we get is, hang in there. We’ll get your wife back, Mr. Bohannon.” Fischoff pushed himself back into his seat, facing the windshield. “Just hang in there.” He seemed to be talking to himself.

10:41 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Washington, DC

Jonathan Whitestone watched the video feed from the orbiting satellite. “You’re certain?”

“We’re getting reports from the ground as well,” said Cartwright. “Our team, and others we have in Jerusalem. There is still fierce fighting—on top of the Temple Mount and in the surrounding streets. Hezbollah and Martyr’s Brigade together. Don’t know how, but they got inside the Israeli defenses.”

“What are the Israelis doing?”

“Orhlon’s got nearly the entire army on the move. They will crush whatever opposition they find on the ground in Jerusalem,” said Cartwright. “What’s more alarming for us are the number of men and the amount of ordnance Israel is deploying to its borders with Lebanon and Syria. And half their air force is in the sky. This could get a lot worse.”

“How about the women . . . Bohannon?”

“Our birds are incoming now.”

5:10 a.m., Western Israel

They came out of the blackness over the Mediterranean, skimming the wave tops so tightly that sea spray dripped from their undercarriages. Two helicopters flashed across the coastline into a desolate area between Israel and Gaza, south of Ashkelon. They were nearly invisible.

U.S. Army Commander Browne Counsil dialed in his wide-angle helmet display—showing flight info, night vision sensors, and sight system for use with weapons—as the Boeing-Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche stealth helicopters lifted to one hundred feet and sped inland at two hundred miles an hour.

“Browne, you have any clue how we’re supposed to find this needle in a haystack?”

“Sweep the two roads, look for a brown Mazda running like a bat out of hell. Take the Ashdod Road, Pete. And no chatter unless it’s required.”

Commander Counsil banked to the right and disappeared into the night.

5:17 a.m., Jerusalem

There was no preamble or salutation.

“How many men do you have within arm’s reach that you can move right now?”

“Fifty, well-trained, heavy arms,” Posner said to his commander, General Moishe Orhlon, Israel’s defense minister.

“The Temple Mount is under attack . . . several hundred . . . Hezbollah and Martyrs’ Brigade we think. Send the men now. You too.”

“But . . . I can’t raise Shomsky. He—”

“Forget Shomsky for now. Move. Men are dying.”

5:25 a.m., On the Ashkelon Road

“I’ve been locked on for the last two minutes,” Commander Counsil said into the radio. “This is the one. Brown Mazda . . . we’ve got him. Back me up, Pete.”

Counsil was flying his Comanche sideways at sixty miles an hour, keeping pace with the small brown sedan that was tearing down the Ashkelon Road, east of Kiyrat Gat. Counsil’s visor display showed him a small bridge coming up in a mile. He turned his nose west, goosed his fourteen hundred horsepower twin turbo shafts, and rocketed ahead.

The Comanche, the Army’s latest development in the stealth arsenal of invisible power, was armed with fourteen Hellfire antitank missiles; fifty-six rockets; and a three-barreled, twenty millimeter, nose-mounted mini-gun that pumped out fifteen hundred rounds a minute. Browne Counsil had his pick of how to obliterate the bridge. He hovered, waiting, until the car rounded a distant curve. He set loose a “fire-and-forget” Hellfire missile, programmed to control its own flight to a target.

The small bridge erupted, steel, wood, and concrete flung upward by a growing fireball.

Commander Counsil watched the brown Mazda brake hard, skid sideways, and rumble onto the shoulder of the road, about twenty yards short of the smoking pile of rubble that once was a bridge.

Bright orange flashed a false dawn over the low, brown hills, then died away into darkness once again. That was all it took. The Humvee was ripping down Thirty-Eight to Ashkelon at over eighty miles an hour and was already daring the law of gravity to keep its tires on the road.

In the flash and the black, the driver was blinded. He remembered seeing a curve before the flash and, with his eyes useless, he willed himself to sense the road under his wheels, the curve in the asphalt, the shifting weight from whatever banking might be in the road surface. He failed.

The Humvee bounced, slamming down hard on its springs. “Hold on!”

In a ballet of high-speed slow motion, the left front of the truck began to fall away into some void. The left front fender caught the ground and dug into the earth, and the Humvee flipped. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they hadn’t been going so fast.
Maybe we’ll just land on the roof.
But the truck continued to rotate and hit the ground again with the front, right side of the cab, crushing the roof and doors into the passenger compartment with a force that buried the right side of the vehicle in two inches of brown dirt and clay. The Humvee sat, suspended, on its crushed right side, until the unseen hand of gravity or inertia continued its rotation and it slowly fell to its tires in an upright position.

The driver looked at his hands—still gripping the steering wheel as if he could somehow still steer them out of this wreck. He knew his left wrist was
broken from when the wheel snapped violently on the first crash. Other than that, he was in one piece, saved by the seat belt he habitually wrapped across his chest.

He looked to his right. Sergeant Fischoff was lying drunkenly against the shattered remains of the right door and window. Glass shards protruded from his scalp, and an ugly gash, pulsing blood, ran down the left side of his neck.

The driver unbuckled his seat belt, pried the fingers of his left hand off the steering wheel, rested his left wrist against his chest, and reached toward the sergeant with his right hand, grabbing the sergeant’s wrist. There was a pulse, but the sergeant was bleeding out. He wouldn’t live long like this.