The sun was coming up on Rebecca’s right, and the border was approaching dead ahead. Caleb had not budged.
Rebecca had piloted the Jeep north, her nerves stretched to the snapping point. She’d tried to wake Caleb, but whatever drug Ismael had administered refused to release him. The use of various drugs was not uncommon in both camps, and apparently Ismael had used them before. Caleb was nearly comatose.
She had stopped the Jeep once and considered turning east, crossing into Jordan, and heading north the back way. But there was no reason for the detour—if anything it would only increase her risk, if such a thing were possible. The only way to reduce her risk was to head back the way she had come, and that hardly seemed like a reasonable alternative.
She’d headed north again, driving slowly, anticipating a checkpoint at every corner. None came. Her mind had considered every possible outcome of this drive north and every one of them ended very badly. She was headed into the mouth of the lion and Daniel slept like a baby beside her. She was Isaac, and the ram had been drugged to a stupor an hour before it was to make its lifesaving entrance.
Her tunic was damp with sweat, despite the cool night air. But two things kept her crawling north. Three things.
First, the simple fact that Jerusalem lay directly to the north. Second, going south or any other direction gave her no more nor less hope than going north. And third, Caleb had insisted they go north. True enough, he was no longer giving directions. But she knew that her only hope was somehow in him, if not in the waving of his wand like Moses over the Red Sea, then as the man she loved.
She had spent a good part of the last hour muttering prayers to God. Silly little prayers that sounded foolish in the face of her predicament. For all practical purposes, God had put her in this situation himself! She was heading north, and every turn of the tires on the blacktop groaned her insanity. And as far as she could figure, it was all God’s doing. The Nazarene’s doing.
A Muslim prayer call echoed over the hills, and Rebecca moved her foot to the brake. Where had that come from? There shouldn’t be any town anywhere near here if her geography was correct. She eased the Jeep forward at about thirty kilometers per hour. To her right, the eastern sky was orange over the Midia range. Another sound reached her ears—the clanking of metal against metal.
Tank tracks!
Rebecca slammed on the brakes and stopped in the middle of the road. A ring lingered in her ears. She held her breath and listened.
There it was again, the unmistakable sound of steel tank tracks. And beyond that, the Muslim prayer call. She spun around.
Nothing. The road was deserted.
“Caleb?” She shook him. “Please, Caleb.” His head lolled gently.
A deep-seated desperation swept through her chest. She sat immobilized behind the wheel, unable to think. The border was just ahead; she could feel it more than anything. It had taken her four hours to travel 250 kilometers, and she’d done it without meeting a single patrol. But her luck had run out. The inevitable waited.
Rebecca eased the clutch out and started the Jeep forward. She rolled another kilometer. The sound of the tank tracks hadn’t returned. Maybe, just maybe, the checkpoints were on a parallel road nearby or . . .
She’d come around a corner and the sight ahead made her jerk. Heat washed over her skull and spread down her back. The desert opened up to a wide basin. As far as she could see in either direction, hundreds of tanks lined the basin, facing north, like a huge herd of beasts. Division strength, at the very least.
She swerved on the road and then quickly pulled off, less than a hundred meters from the first tank. As many APCs and half-tracks were scattered among the M-60 tanks. Egyptian and Saudi. Thousands of soldiers crawled over the machines and leaned on their tracks. The road wound between them, without obstruction except for a single machine gun post facing Rebecca.
The Arabs had seen her already. They were staring in her direction.
Rebecca felt the first waves of panic lapping at her mind and she closed her eyes. Hold on, Rebecca. Hold on.
She opened her eyes. She’d been here before, only the last time it had been with Caleb, facing a ragtag outfit of soldiers. Now she was alone, facing a division of M-60 tanks.
One of the guards was waving her forward. He yelled something she couldn’t make out and a hundred soldiers faced her.
Her muscles refused to move. This was it. She was finally facing her death. She had found love and death in the same day.
Rebecca looked over at Caleb and swallowed. Now, facing death, she felt desperate for his power. Sorrow washed over her, and she thought she might start to cry again. Her mind skipped absurdly to a story she’d read about Jews walking innocently over a canyon cliff at Nazi gunpoint. She had wept when she’d read it, and the same sorrow filled her chest now.
“I was wrong about your God, Caleb,” she whispered. “I was wrong about the Nazarene.” The words sounded impossible on her lips.
Would you like to step off a cliff, Rebecca?
She looked up at the soldier who had his rifle pointed skyward now. A shot rang into the air and he yelled again, demanding she come forward.
A thought struck her. If Caleb had been protected by God in the desert, was it so that he could die today?
She sniffed and jammed the shifter into gear. The Jeep bounced back onto the blacktop and rolled for the tanks. Rebecca steeled herself with a set jaw.
“If your God shows up, I will follow him, Caleb,” she said through clenched teeth. “You hear me? I will follow your Christ.”
Another tear slipped from the corner of her eye. She slowed the Jeep to a crawl and continued forward. Fifty meters. Forty.
A gunshot split the air. The Jeep sagged to the right. Someone had shot her tire out.
For a brief moment Rebecca stared at the line of tanks without really seeing them. She set her jaw and climbed out without looking up. The soldier was yelling again, in a high pitch now, as if he were about to shoot her. She ignored him and rounded the vehicle. She pulled the passenger door open, shoved her arms under Caleb’s back and legs, and hauled him from the Jeep.
She faced them, with Caleb in her arms. He was too heavy to carry forty meters, despite her strength, but she no longer cared. It was a fitting end to the mad journey that had delivered her here. Caleb’s journey. They wanted her to stop, but she couldn’t stop. She had to get to Jerusalem, and Jerusalem lay beyond this line of soldiers.
Rebecca walked forward, towards the division of tanks.
The absurdity of it all struck her fullface and she had to force one leg before the other. She covered a third of the distance, and the valley seemed to have hushed for her journey. Her shoulders began to shake with a sob. She tried to hold the emotion back for a second, and then she surrendered herself to it. The tears flowed silently from her eyes like streams, dropping on the man in her arms.
She looked down into Caleb’s peaceful face and the sight made her cry harder. She lifted his head and kissed his cheek.
“Messiah, show your power to me,” she said aloud. “Jesus of Nazareth, have mercy upon me, a sinner.”
The heavens might have opened in that moment for all she knew, but to her it felt like a bucket of anguish had suddenly been dumped into her mind. It spread down her spine and into her chest and she threw her head back in a silent cry. She was facing death here with Caleb in her arms, but really she was dead already. Dead because she had rejected truth. The simple, unalterable truth that she’d denied the Messiah already. He was the Nazarene, wasn’t he?
She was suddenly crying aloud, slogging forward with this man in her arms. It was too much. She nearly lost her footing, but she hung on, wading against this sea of sorrow that flowed through her. The soldiers and tanks became a mere backdrop to her own drama.
“Dear God, forgive me,” she sobbed quietly.
Waves of warmth washed over her skin and she sobbed open-mouthed and unabashed, eyes still clenched. “Oh God! Oh Gaawwwd! Forgive me!”
It occurred to her that she might be headed in the wrong direction now, but the thought was lost to this overpowering emotion surging through her chest. This raw love. This passion born out of God’s heart. Out of the Nazarene’s heart.
The sound of sorrow swallowed her, and she thought that heaven itself was weeping with her. She leaned over and kissed Caleb’s cheek again. “I love you, Caleb. Oh, how I love you.” Perhaps she had been shot and was in heaven. Perhaps . . .
Rebecca stopped, swallowed. She looked past blurry eyes to her right. A large soldier dressed in tan desert garb was on his knees beside the road, head bent over, weeping.
Beyond him a tank stood with its huge gun aimed at the sky. The commander stared at her with long trails of tears down his cheeks.
The sound of weeping came from all sides. Rebecca turned slowly around, stunned by the sight that greeted her. By the hundreds men were lying slumped over their tanks, or kneeling on the ground, or lying in the sand, gripped by a sorrow that twisted their faces. Not a single man stood unaffected. The army of tanks had become a field of anguish. To a man the soldiers wept bitterly.
It was the Tower of Babel. It was a sea of tears, and God was parting that sea.
Rebecca turned north and walked forward as if on a cloud. This was real. She was not dead. If anything, she had come alive. She’d found a new world with new rules, and at its center was this man she had once despised. The Nazarene.
She began to cry again, and she cried for a long time, walking right past a division of tanks. With Caleb in her arms. Which might have seemed impossible because of his weight, but was clearly not impossible. The huge weapons had armor of hardened steel, but the men who commanded them had become butter. It was as if anyone who looked her way felt what she felt and ended in a puddle of tears.
Rebecca didn’t know how long she managed to walk, but the army fell behind until only her own sobbing surrounded her. Three times she staggered and set Caleb down, exhausted and numb. Three times she picked him back up and walked on, dazed and disorientated. The army was back there, beyond a bend in the road. She could hear them still, a gentle sound of sorrow. She wanted to leave the sound, find some solitude. She wanted to be alone with her new revelation and with Caleb.
Her strength finally left her altogether, and she stumbled to the side of the road only to drop Caleb in the sand at a crossroads.
He grunted and she dropped down beside him, horrified that she might have hurt him.
“Caleb? Caleb, are you okay?”
She stroked his hair and fresh tears blurred her vision.
“Oh, Caleb . . .”
His eyes fluttered open.