Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis revelation

Hezekiah's Tunnel was a third of a mile long, mostly under three feet wide, and in some places, under five feet high. The caretaker at the entrance had warned them that the water was knee-high today and the walk would take them about forty minutes before they exited at the Pool of Siloam. Conrad, however, told her that they would be exiting halfway through, at the point where the tunnel took an odd S-shaped course through the rock. This was where Hezekiah's Tunnel branched from the tunnel leading from the Gihon Spring to the bottom of Warren's Shaft.

The tunnel had narrowed, and the dirty water was now waist-high. Serena bumped her head against the ceiling of the tunnel, which had started to slope sharply. The water was now up to her neck.

"The ceiling is lowest here, under five feet high, and the water level highest," Conrad told her. "So you'll have to hold your breath."

He took her by the hand, and they walked forward until their heads were underwater. They walked about three feet before the tunnel ceiling started to rise and their heads surfaced.

They were in a different tunnel, the water level dropping rapidly, and they soon reached a stone platform on the edge of a giant precipice. Serena felt chilled to the bone and wrung her dripping hair like a towel to squeeze out the water. When she looked down, she saw what looked like a giant subway tunnel with wide white limestone steps descending into the depths of the earth. She said, "This looks like the grand gallery of the Great Pyramid in Egypt."

Conrad nodded. "Why do you think Solomon married all those Egyptian princesses? To gain access to the sand hydraulic technology that built the pyramids. Except what he did here was amazing. He inverted the design so that everything you know is upside down."

That's crazy, she thought. But now that he mentioned it, the tunnel made sense.

Conrad said, "You know that shaft I was telling you about under the Dome of the Rock?"

She craned her head up and saw the opening in the ceiling overhead. It appeared to go all the way up to the top of the Temple Mount. "I thought I felt a draft."

"Back when the First Temple was up there, the top of the shaft was capped with a platform on which the Ark of the Covenant could be lowered during a siege," he told her. "Here, take this."

She looked down in her palm and saw a brick of C4 explosive. "Where on earth did you get this?"

"From the driver of your Sunday-school van in Gaza," he told her. "Now climb up on my shoulders and stick this inside the mouth of the shaft. We need to close it off in case we fail to stop the Flammenschwert. Otherwise, a geyser of fire is going to incinerate that mosque."

She took his hand, put a boot on his knee, and stepped onto his shoulders until her head was inside the bottom of the shaft. She planted the C4 on the wall of the shaft and jumped back down onto the stone platform.

She said, "You gave us only twenty minutes on the fuse."

"Insurance that we close the shaft to the surface before the Flammenschwert goes off," he explained. "The important thing is to make sure the mosque is still standing on the surface. Without Arab uprisings in the streets, Gellar can't justify the disproportionate Israeli response that will ignite a wider war. Whatever happens down below here is, well, secondary."

She looked down into the great gallery below. "The King's Chamber is down at the bottom, isn't it?"

"Right." He pulled out his Glock, the one he had killed Lorenzo with, and checked the clip. "So are the globes, the Flammenschwert, and God knows what else."

With a full-blown national emergency under way, Commander Sam Deker of the Israeli Shin Bet had no trouble assembling the elite five-member counter-terrorism unit known as the Yamam. They were beneath the temple in under six minutes.

They gathered inside the top-secret Map Room, itself a national secret. The chamber looked like a flight briefing room, with theater-style seating for six in front of computer consoles and a nine-by-twenty-four-foot curved screen with 160-degree views. Each officer carried the standard M4 assault rifle with a Glock 21.45 sidearm.

"We all follow the plan used in the Taibe raid a few years ago," Deker told them. "We're to capture or kill an armed group hidden in the tunnels below us and secure a device that may be nuclear in nature before it goes off. I cannot overemphasize how grave this threat is to the Temple Mount and the very existence of Israel."

High-definition three-dimensional images of the tunnel system filled the screen. In addition to live security feeds, the computer models used military flight-simulator technology to enable virtual remote viewing around the tunnels. Gellar in particular preferred a remote hookup. Being Orthodox, he refused to walk the holy limestone tunnels himself, leaving it to impure types like Deker.

"Four security zones make up the Temple Mount in descending order: this Map Room, Solomon's Hall, the King's Chamber, and the four River Gates region. We pair in three teams of two. Team One stations itself here. Team Two stations itself in the King's Chamber and monitors access to the River Gates. Team Three patrols the tunnels. Shoot to kill anybody who is not in this room. Should you exit the tunnels alive, you will not speak of this again."

The faces he saw understood him perfectly. Yamam forces specialized in both hostage-rescue operations and offensive takeover raids against targets in civilian areas such as the Temple Mount. Most of their activities were classified, and their success was credited to other units. Most important to Deker, they answered to the civilian Israeli police forces rather than the military, although most came exclusively from Israeli special forces units.

"Let's go," Deker said.

As the unit prepared to disperse, the officer who had been paired with Deker called him over to his console. "There's something you should see, sir," he said.

Apparently, the officer had been curious enough to research the construction of the Map Room and had called up the names of the A-list experts who had consulted on the project with the Israel Antiquities Authority and the UCLA Urban Simulation Team in the United States.

The top archaeologist on the list was Conrad Yeats.

"Looks like Yeats kept or cut a tunnel or two for himself," Deker said, red-faced. "If it's not on the map, it's not on the camera. We're going to have to move out with the others."

"There's more, sir," the officer said. "The shaft plugs to secure the tunnels were manufactured by an Israeli company based at the Tefen Industrial Park. It's a subsidiary of Midas Minerals amp; Mining."

Deker frowned. "The Midas conglomerate?"

"Yes, sir. And it appears that General Gellar has an interest in the Tefen subsidiary. What does it mean?"

Deker heard a thud and turned to see two Yamam on the floor and the rest gasping for breath. He smelled almonds in the air and realized it was cyanide gas. The door to the chamber was closing from the top down, and Deker knew that anybody trapped inside would die.

"Gellar has betrayed us!" Deker shouted, and made a flying leap for it.

The Flammenschwert was gone.

Conrad stood with Serena inside the King's Chamber-an expansive vault in the shape of a perfect one-by-two rectangle, its height of forty cubits exactly half the length of its eighty-cubic floor diagonal. In the center of the stone floor stood the three globes, but the armillary globe was split open like an empty womb. On each of the chamber's four walls was a towering archway, each leading down its own tunnel.

Four tunnels, two people, little time, Conrad thought. The Flammenschwert could have been taken down any one of the four shafts.

But Serena was already ahead of him, reading the ancient Hebrew letters over the archways, trying to figure out which tunnel to take, because they'd only have one shot.