Authors: Michael Byrnes
“So you see, Charlotte, the second temple certainly did exist, and we’ve found all the proof to substantiate it. The Muslims have feared this for centuries. Precisely the reason they so vehemently object to any excavation beneath the Temple Mount.” Which was a partial blessing, he thought, since Jesus’s ossuary—strategically buried here by the Essenes just beyond the temple’s sacred precincts—had remained protected for so long. “However, though all of this is very impressive”—he swept his hand in circles over his head to imply the entirety of the Temple Mount—“it is nothing compared to God’s plan. King Herod built the second temple for vanity and pride. In God’s eye, it was a mockery. Its destruction should not be lamented.”
Charlotte remained silent, still grappling with all that was happening. Cohen was a lunatic. But there was something about him that commanded respect.
They continued along until they neared the terminus, where a formidable wall sealed the tunnel’s east gateway.
“See here what the caliphs had done?” he said, pointing to the stonework. “They sealed this gate too. And on the other side they heaped up the earth and pushed it against the mount’s eastern wall. Then they buried their dead all along it. Out there”—he motioned to what lay beyond the wall—“you can see the tombs, thousands of them.”
He told her that for the same reason, the Muslims had also bricked up a second double-arched gateway still visible on the eastern wall just above the graves. The Jews called that gate the Golden Gate.
“Do you know why they block the east gates, Charlotte?”
“Enlighten me,” she sarcastically replied.
“The Jewish Messiah who is to redeem Zion is prophesied to return through the East Gate, just as Jesus did. So they eliminated the gates. And when they learned that the Chosen One would become impure by coming into contact with the dead, and thus be forbidden by God to enter the temple precincts, they constructed the graveyard.”
The heaped-up corpses made the security system sound an awful lot like voodoo, she thought.
“As you might imagine,” he continued, “the Muslims fear the destruction of their sacred shrines, because the return of the Messiah will usher in the building of the third temple—and the Messianic Age.” Then he gave a wry smile. “But what they miss is that
that
east gate”—he pointed to the bricked-up dead end—“is
not
the one to which Ezekiel refers. Ezekiel speaks of the entry gate through the temple walls on top of Temple Mount at its center...where the Dome of the Rock now stands.”
The far-off patter of automatic gunfire suddenly echoed down the tunnel and caught his attention.
Come and get him,
she thought eagerly.
The rabbi scowled when he saw her reaction. “We must move quickly,” he told his entourage.
Directing his attention to a sweeping arch that opened up on the left wall, Cohen glanced up a wide, high staircase. At the top, his men worked to remove a wooden framework that had stabilized the overhead paving stones.
The plaza on the Temple Mount’s southern end was vacant as Amit slipped past the huge circular ablutions fountain set before al-Aqsa Mosque. Seemed odd.
A harvest moon floated above Jerusalem; the air was balmy, lifelessly still.
He turned onto the wide paved walkway leading between the wispy cypress trees surrounding the Dome of the Rock’s raised platform. But he quickly ducked for cover when he saw a tall Arab coming in his direction.
As the Arab hastened under the multiarched
qanatir
and down the steps, Amit retreated along the shadowed platform wall until he rounded its corner. He watched the man continue down the path toward al-Aqsa Mosque. The man paused briefly just beyond the fountain, making Amit second-guess whether he’d properly closed the gate. Then Amit realized the Arab was simply listening to the shouting and gunfire emanating up from the Western Wall Plaza. Oddly, the guy didn’t seem at all surprised by what he was hearing. Then he calmly proceeded to al-Aqsa Mosque and disappeared inside.
Strange.
That’s when something more peculiar caught his attention.
Just beyond the olive trees on the platform’s east side, the massive paving stones gritted and scratched, and seemed to shift before his eyes.
“What in God’s name . . . ?” He moved closer.
Then, without warning, four of the pavers fell inward, disappearing into a massive hole.
Enoch raced out to the jeep parked in the plaza and retrieved the spare Kevlar vest that one of the soldiers told him would be there. He hoped to see Amit, but there was no sign of him. Where could the commander have gone?
Then he quickly moved back inside and darted forward past the flatbed. There he caught a glimpse of the two crates covered in stone that Cohen had secreted beyond the security post. No doubt the hostage had been inside one of them. The second was large enough to hold just about anything—a harbinger of doom that anguished him. An attack against the Temple Mount could easily spark World War III.
Wasting no more time, he slid on the vest, then scrambled down the metal treads and entered the first leg of the Western Wall Tunnel, the large visitors’ hall. Staying close to the wall with his Jericho pistol directed straight ahead, he surveyed the area—or at least the section he could see. Five soldiers had already been taken down, two fatally with gaping head wounds; three others sprawled on the ground with critical wounds to their exposed extremities. Straight ahead, two soldiers had just managed to break open a security door blocking the entrance to the tunnel stretching north from the hall.
The chamber had turned into a shooting gallery, filled with bullets spraying wildly in all directions, the heavy smell of gunpowder, and deafening gun blasts.
Staying low and poking his head around the wall, Enoch could see that Cohen’s men had taken secure positions throughout the hall, behind piles of stone. Ten Israelis had them hopelessly pinned down and were tightening their perimeter. Most likely, if they couldn’t take them out, they’d certainly avoid explosives down here and start using tear gas to root them out. But Cohen’s gunmen weren’t letting up and their supply of ammunition seemed limitless.
There was no sign of the rabbi here. Odds were he’d made his way deeper into the tunnel.
Now the bullets started flying in Enoch’s direction, making him drop to the floor behind a broad tool chest. But these shots hadn’t come from inside the hall—they were strays from the second wave of fighting that had just erupted beyond the breached security door.
The first soldier through the door was already lying in a pool of blood, helmet blown clear off his head. The second had taken some pounding to his chest armor but was able to stumble back for cover before anything worse happened.
Enoch had a straight sight line into the tunnel, and he saw a man in a blue jumpsuit scramble deep into the passage and up some distant steps. To chase after the guy through the narrow channel was risky . . . make that stupid. But that’s what needed to be done—fast.
Luckily, the kid who’d taken some deep bruising to the ribs had already caught the attention of three others. He was pointing to the open door.
The three smoothly dropped back from the hall and filed into the tunnel.
The barrage of bullets was riddling the huge foundation stones. And the odds of Enoch catching a few with his brain were high.
But then he had an idea.
Enoch tested the tool chest’s wheels by nudging it a few centimeters. The sturdy casters were actually quite smooth. The lumpy stone floor, however, was a problem.
There wasn’t going to be a better opportunity than this, Enoch thought.
Snapping his gun into its holster, he opened the chest’s middle drawer enough to grip his left hand around the metal frame. He pushed it forward and crab-walked behind it, angling it sideways as he emerged into the hall.
The first rounds thwumped into the casing and clanged off some tools in the top drawer.
Rolling the chest was a much bigger challenge then he’d bargained for—the thing was heavy and clumsy, jerking side to side and jostling the tools inside fiercely enough to drown out the gun blasts.
More bullets pounded through, pushing the chest back into him and sandwiching him against the mount’s cold stone base. Then a neat line strafed directly overhead, so close it tousled his hair.
He cursed.
He looked to the security door. Only three meters to go.
Shoving the thing out again, he resumed rolling his makeshift shield, clattering louder than ever. When he’d reached the door, he abandoned the metal hulk.
He unholstered his Jericho and sprinted up the tunnel.
But he quickly slowed when he saw that just up the steps where the blue-suited gunman had fled, the IDF trio was engaged in another shooting match. What confused him was that they were firing through a huge hole in the mount’s foundation.
“Holy shit,” Enoch murmured. He cautiously pressed forward.
Then something horrible happened that didn’t give the Israelis any hope for escape.
Enoch barely saw it all go down.
It started when they began screaming and throwing themselves away from the hole. A split second later, a rocket-propelled mortar came streaming out at them, hissing as it cut through the opening. When it struck the wall opposite the hole, the entire tunnel came down on top of them.
The pulsing shock wave took Enoch airborne, his body striking a wall with appalling force, and flung him over a second low wall. Suddenly he was falling into blackness. Then a cold sensation crashed over his body.
First the gunmen came up from the hole to secure the area.
Cohen came next, pleased to see that the esplanade was empty. The commotion in the Western Wall Tunnel had brilliantly diverted all attention from the Dome of the Rock. There wasn’t a soldier or policeman in sight.
The stairwell opening was situated approximately midway along the esplanade’s eastern side. In the first century, this had been the outer confine called the Courtyard of the Gentiles—a public area outside the walls of the sanctified temple complex itself.
The rabbi tried to imagine Herod’s Romanesque porticoes running along the outer wall, where, during the Passover festival, Jesus would have challenged the moneychangers for their profiteering and blasphemy. And when the holiday had passed, pagans would have refurnished the temple with their idols and resumed sacrilegious offerings on the Lord’s sacred altar.
Oh, how the temple priests had prostituted God’s most hallowed sanctuary!
It came as little surprise that God had brought destruction to Jerusalem in 70 c.e. Jesus had tried to warn the people of the Lord’s anger, the imminent doom that would befall them should they continue to break the covenant. But as they had done to Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and all others who had come before Him, the Israelites chose not to listen to Jesus. Like a dark avenger the Roman scourge came down upon the brood of vipers, the den of thieves.
Just as He had with the Babylonian exiles, for whom the prophets promised a return to this land, so too had God mercifully gathered the tribes once more in 1948. Yet even now they did not heed His message. They embraced an impotent, secular government and bowed down to Western culture. Worse yet, they had still failed to retake the Temple Mount—the Lord’s most sacred ground. In 1967, the Israeli army had an incredible opportunity to expel the Muslims during the Six-Day War, yet they lacked the faith to follow through.
“Be very careful.” The rabbi intently watched over the priestly attendants as they eased the Ark up the steps, the pair in the rear pressing the poles up above their shoulders to compensate for the sharp angle. It was imperative to keep the vessel level so as not to disturb its hallowed contents.
The rabbi turned his attention up to the Dome of the Rock. Over the three millennia since King David made Jerusalem the Israelite capital, Jews had suffered many setbacks, even expulsion from these holy lands. When God’s covenant was ignored, His punishment was without pity. But when the people abided by His laws, His blessings had been limitless.
Though the temple had been destroyed twice, its third incarnation would stand until the very end of time.
For decades, he’d dreamed of this moment. For millennia, his family had waited. So much preparation. So much sacrifice.
He was close now.
Having safely emerged from the opening, the priests stood beside the rabbi with the Ark raised up. Seconds later, Charlotte was dragged up and out of the hole.
Clasping his hands together, Cohen bowed his head and began praying. Where the true eastern gate of the temple courtyard would once have resided, he sprinkled more blood from the
mizrak.
Then he slowly made his way to the stairs leading up the dome’s platform, the procession following behind him. Once all had reassembled in front of the shrine, the seven priests stepped forward, each wearing a blue satin side pouch.
For a long moment, the rabbi glared at the Dome of the Rock, helplessly captivated by its Arabian tile work and gold-leafed cupola. Up until this day, he’d seen the building only from afar. Standing at its foot was intimidating. Then again, Jericho had once intimidated Joshua.
He motioned to the seven. In unison, each man pulled from his pouch a shofar and brought the twisted ram’s horn to his lips. Their guttural bellow filled the air.
Cohen signaled for two of the gunmen to proceed to the shrine’s south-facing double door.
The priests lifted the Ark to prepare for a grand entrance.
Then something shocking happened.
The moment the men pulled open the doors to the shrine’s darkened interior, they were immediately gunned down in a hail of bullets.
“Protect the Ark!” Cohen yelled. He motioned for them to move away from the door, to take shelter beside the shrine’s solid marble wall. “Bring her immediately!” he said to the priests handling Charlotte.
As they all scrambled for cover, the rabbi’s six remaining gunmen raided the shrine.