General Nasser of the Syrian air force slammed the phone down in its cradle. “The Israelis are calling up their reserves!”
“You’re absolutely positive?” Abu Ismael demanded. “One report doesn’t necessarily—”
“Not one report. Five reports. The call has gone out. Every hour that goes by now we lose our advantage.”
Abu stalked across the war room, furious that it had come to this. Ismael hadn’t checked in for nearly two days. The last he’d heard, his son was tracking the Ark into Saudi Arabia. For all he knew he was dead. The thought sat like lead in his gut.
“Colonel Muhammed Du’ad’s men are in place around almost every target we outlined,” he said.
“It’s too early,” Nasser said. “We don’t have independent verification that the Ark is even in Jerusalem, much less that they have any mandate to retake their Temple Mount. I don’t think we would have the support from Egypt to attack without confirmation.”
“No, we wouldn’t. But we do have this mobilization of theirs—that’s confirmation that they’re concerned enough to risk war. They know that they can’t keep mobilization on this scale secret. We have far too many operatives throughout Israel. And still they do it. Why? Because they have the Ark, and they know that Ismael knew they had the Ark. They can only assume we know as well. So we do have our confirmation.”
The logic wasn’t ironclad, but the information on which wars were based rarely was. Where are you, Ismael? What do you know, my son?
“We can’t attack their air bases, Abu. What if we’re wrong?”
“Then we are wrong! Perhaps it doesn’t matter. We’ve looked for an excuse for fifty years, and now we have one. Does it really matter if the excuse is based on mistaken information? Israel can’t coexist with the Arab states. That is what matters.”
“Now you sound like your son. We’re not the Hamas. The last time we went into Israel, we came out with our tail between our legs. And they didn’t have nuclear weapons then.”
“And we didn’t have an air force to speak of then.”
“Without Egypt, we still don’t.”
Abu glanced at the man. “Don’t let the king hear you say that. Besides, we have Egypt. And we also have forty thousand armed men inside Israel’s borders, around their towns.”
“You’re forgetting that it was I who drew up this plan in the beginning. But it’s dependent on complete surprise. Something we’ve evidently lost.”
“And if we have lost it, can’t we still win?”
They had discussed it many times before, but never with true intent on the table. General Nasser sighed. “If . . . if we are absolutely sure about Egypt’s total commitment, and if . . . if the PLO proves to be more than a scattered band of poorly trained civilians, then yes, I think so. But it would require a full assault without compromise from any of our friends.”
“Exactly! And if we don’t mobilize immediately, then we will remove the option of a full assault from the table. We have to at least put our forces in a position to attack. The Israelis are doing nothing less.”
“If we mobilize, they will see it.”
“They will, but they still need time to gear up their military machine. Twenty-four hours, at least. And even then we stand a chance at a face-off. We have no choice, Nasser. We must mobilize.”
They stared at each other for a few long seconds. “Egypt will agree?”
“Yes,” Abu said. “Absolutely.”
“And Colonel Du’ad will refrain from attacking?”
“Unless we give the word,” Abu assured him.
“The plan was flawless the way I drew it up,” Nasser said, closing his eyes. “Now this. Every time an Arab belches, the Jews seem to know.” He swore. “Okay. Okay. Then we mobilize. I’ll inform the king.”
“Immediately,” Abu said.
“Immediately.”
Abu snatched up his phone and punched in a number. He waited for the answer, trying his best to ignore the surge in his pulse. A voice filled his ear.
“Yes?”
“President Al-Zeid, this is—”
“I know who you are.”
“Yes, of course. They’ve called in their reserves. We believe that we should mobilize immediately.”
Silence followed.
“Sir?”
“And Jordan?”
“They have agreed to follow our lead.”
“Then we mobilize.”
“I thought you would agree.”
The president of Egypt kept the line silent for a moment. “They have it then?”
“We think so. It’s the only reason for their action.”
“May Allah grant us mercy,” the president said and hung up.
Rebecca wiped her eyes quickly and looked at him again. Caleb was staring up at her with wide green eyes.
“Caleb?”
He blinked but didn’t answer.
She gently pushed his hair from his forehead. “Are . . . are you all right? Can you hear me?”
“Rebecca,” he said softly.
She couldn’t help what she did next. He was alive and he had just spoken her name tenderly, and for some reason this simple fact flooded her with the desire to kiss him.
So she did. On the forehead.
“Caleb, I thought I might have lost you.” She pulled back. “You scared me to death.”
Caleb smiled. “Hello, Rebecca. Did I miss something?”
She laughed, short and full of relief. “Yes. Yes, I suppose you did. You missed my heroic rescue.” The grin faded from her mouth and she looked back to the south. “You missed the Nazarene’s rescue. I think you would have been impressed.” She looked at him again.
“And you missed . . .” How could she just tell him that she had fallen madly in love with him? What if he couldn’t return that kind of love? After all, he was a Christian from the deserts of Ethiopia and she was a Jew from Jerusalem. What if she had just imagined . . .
“I love you, Rebecca.”
Her heart wanted to burst. She looked deep into his eyes. “You do?”
“I have loved you from the first time you stomped off in the desert.”
They were holding their gaze, and Rebecca could hardly stand the warmth running through her chest.
“When I tried to kiss you?”
He grinned wide. “Yes, I think that did it.”
She stared at him. Was he serious? A giggle rose to her lips and she let it out in a burst.
He laughed in a way she’d never heard from him, more of a snort than a real laugh. It only made her giggle more. This was love, wasn’t it? This embrace of silliness. She impulsively kissed him again, this time lightly and on the lips.
He turned red and she knew that she had swept him off his feet.
“Ohhh, my head,” Caleb said, touching his wound.
She quickly removed his hand. “No, it’s okay; leave it alone. It’s just a graze. We have to get some water.”
Caleb sat up and looked around.
“I felt the Nazarene’s power, Caleb,” she said.
He turned back. “You did?”
“Yes. I did.”
Caleb scrambled to his feet. “You did.” He covered his face with his hands. “Thank you, Father.”
Caleb suddenly froze. He pulled his hands down and spun to face the north. “We have to get to Jerusalem!”
The sound of cowbells reached faintly to them. Rebecca looked up the dirt road that intersected the highway. A cart was clip-clopping towards them, piloted by a man in rags.
She exchanged a glance with Caleb. “Yes, we have to get to Jerusalem.”
The cart pulled closer, and then stopped abreast of them. “Shalom,” the man said in an old crackling voice. He was a hundred if he was a day.
“Shalom,” Rebecca returned. “Do you know that there’s an Egyptian army gathered around the corner?”
The man looked to the south. “No. Is there?”
“Yes, there is. You shouldn’t be here.”
“And you? Why are you here?” The man spoke Hebrew.
Rebecca hesitated. “Where are we?”
“You are five kilometers from Eilat,” the man said and looked to the south again. “The Egyptian army, eh? Are we at war with the Egyptians?”
“No. No, I don’t think so. We’re in Israel?”
“Do I look like an Egyptian to you? Yes, we are just over the border which is around the bend where your army is gathered.”
Rebecca looked at Caleb, surprised. She must have crossed into Jordan before meeting the tank division! That’s why the drive had seemed so long. But what were Egyptian tanks doing in Jordan?
“Can you take us to Eilat, my friend?” Caleb asked.
“I just came from Eilat,” the man said.
Caleb smiled. That smile of his. The one that reached into the heart.
“But I would be happy to take you there,” the old man said, casting a last look south. “Very happy, despite losing a day’s wage.”
“You may save far more than you lose,” Rebecca said.
“As I said. Very happy,” the man replied.
An American satellite had already seen the tanks roll into Jordan, three hours before Rebecca saw them, in the dead of night. It was a little unusual, but they had been tracking the joint Saudi-Egyptian exercise for three days now, and this latest push north didn’t receive the attention it otherwise would have.
But the landscape began to change during the midmorning hours.
The movement began in the Sinai Peninsula, south of Israel—long rows of tanks rolling towards the fifty-kilometer ribbon of land known as the Gaza Strip. Thirteen hundred M-60 and M-1A1 tanks approached the border, dragging enough self-propelled artillery to flatten Tel Aviv at the push of a few buttons.
The Saudi mechanized division Rebecca had encountered pushed further north, through Jordan, along Israel’s eastern border, and was joined by a Jordanian armored division south of the Dead Sea.
Jordan had the weakest military among Israel’s neighbors, but what it lost in brute strength, it gained in geography, with the longest common border, nearly a third of which ran along the Palestinian controlled West Bank. Two hundred upgraded M-60A1 tanks rolled for this border along the West Bank. All twenty-four of Jordan’s AH-IS attack helicopters put down on three bases west of Amman, a twenty-minute flight from Jerusalem.
Syria sent three bloated mechanized divisions south into Jordan. Syria had the land power among the Arab nations, and it began to flex its muscles now. Fifteen hundred tanks, eight hundred of which were T-72s rolled south of the Golan towards Ma’ad. Two more divisions lined along the Golan itself, just beyond the border. A sixth division headed into Lebanon, towards the northern tip of Israel.
In all over six thousand tanks and twice as many APCs and launchers converged on Israel’s borders, like ants scrambling to feed at the edge of a splotch of honey. From a twenty-thousand-foot reconnaissance shot, the region looked like a ring of fire. Plumes of dust rose in the still morning air, trailing thousands of tanks, as if the desert surrounding Israel were venting like a volcano, preparing to erupt.
The Atlantic phone lines began to burn midmorning. The president of the United States canceled an appearance at the Kennedy Space Center and boarded a plane for Washington. Something was up. Something major. By all appearances the Middle East had begun to melt down without warning.
He was a new president who’d based his candidacy on domestic policy. When he was finally told by Israel’s prime minister that they had retrieved the Ark of the Covenant, and that the Arabs were taking issue, the president asked how a gold box could bring the Middle East to its knees. What, in God’s name, did a relic have to do with the Temple Mount, and for that matter how could a single plot of land the size of the White House lawn bring grown men to blows?
Ben Gurion hung up on him.
The news spread like wildfire through the IDF, and the reserves clogged all the arteries flocking to their assigned posts. Very few knew that the Arabs were gathering, and even fewer knew why. They were calling it an exercise, but the rumors were already flying through the streets. Israel raced to arm herself nonetheless, like an ant unknowingly preparing to take on an elephant.
A few isolated groups of Palestinians were discovered and arrested, but the bulk of Colonel Du’ad’s men remained hidden, watching with wide eyes, waiting for the order.
By noon the land of Israel and her neighbors had armed themselves with enough destructive power to flatten every building in all of their respective lands a hundred times over with the single strike of a match. The situation gave the term powder keg new meaning.
But the matches weren’t lighting.
Not yet.