Thomas Greanias - The Promised War

Deker didn't see Phineas and suspected the priest had decided to contribute to the work of the troops in cleansing Jericho for its sins.

The Kenites, meanwhile, were lighting up bronze bowls with oil for the passing troops to dip their torches into so they could burn whatever was left of Jericho.

Deker stepped through the puddles of blood in the market square and headed toward Rahab's to make sure she was safe. Then he noticed a team of Judeans with a small battering ram heading toward a door in the city wall that he hadn't noticed before. It had a red cord hanging outside.

"Wait!" he yelled and raced to the door. "What are you doing?"

"Rahab the harlot and her family are to be spared," the commanding officer replied. He looked a bit like Salmon, and Deker guessed he might be a cousin.

"This isn't Rahab's house," Deker told them.

"But it's in the city wall."

"Her house is in the slums about fifty cubits ahead. A four-story villa overlooking a small square. You can't miss it."

"Then what's this?"

Deker stared at the red cord and shouted, "I think it's a trap!"

Sure enough, upon closer examination he saw a crude charcoal drawing on the wood.

A black dove.

"Stand guard out here," he ordered the troops. "I'm going inside. You'll block this door with carts and crates if you have to, but nobody comes out. If I don't return by the count of five hundred, see that it burns with the rest of this city to the ground."

He looked around to make sure the Judeans understood. They did, but clearly thought he was crazy and in no shape in his blood-soaked uniform to do much damage to anything as he unsheathed his sword.

"A sword may not slay this enemy," a voice said. "You may need this."

Deker turned to see old Kane step forward with his latest invention: an ancient Molotov cocktail. He held the jug with a fuse in one hand and a torch in the other.

Deker handed his sword to one of the troops and took the bomb and the torch. "A final gift to send me off, Kane? You shouldn't have."

Kane smiled proudly. Deker was actually going to miss the old warrior.

Deker didn't know why, exactly, he was so sure that he wasn't going to be walking out of the door he was about to enter. But he was sure.

"Salmon is with Rahab and her family," he told Kane with emphasis. "I've told these troops where they are. See to it that they get safely outside the city before Bin-Nun torches it."

Kane nodded. "Do your worst."

Deker opened the door, slipped inside and closed it. He immediately heard the thuds and scrapes of carts and crates stacking up behind him. Then he turned and saw the secret fail-safe to Jericho that Hamas had been hiding all along.

The shadow army.

Ever since Deker had heard about Jericho's shadow army, he imagined something supernatural, like demons or, more likely, some superstition. Never did he expect it to be the city's living dead.

Inside the dark tunnel, Deker immediately knew he was in the presence of thousands of bodies. The damp, rank air hung heavy with the putrid smell of rotting flesh, human waste and desperation. Now he understood why Rahab's brother Ram had refused to even speak of it. If the soldiers packed inside the upper fortress walls represented a ring of strength, then whatever rotted inside these lower city walls represented a ring of death.

Deker held up his torch to see just what exactly he was smelling. The flickering light reflected a sea of bloodshot eyes staring from pinched, pallid faces: men, women, children, even animals. This was where Hamas had crammed Jericho's sick and diseased, here inside the thick lower city walls.

What kind of defense was this? he wondered as he walked among the dying inside the city walls. These were no soldiers of Jericho. They had no swords, no weapons of any kind, not even food. They were sick and infirm. How could they save Jericho when Hamas had condemned them to die when the walls collapsed on top of them?

Then he understood. It was all clear now.

Hamas had packed the walls with the diseased in case they did fall. Then these veritable zombies could escape to infect the Israelite troops. The troops, in turn, would infect their families. And that would be the end of the Hebrews.

This shadow army was Jericho's fail-safe that would ensure victory even in defeat. Much like Israel's fail-safe that he had sacrificed his own life to protect.

Deker covered his nose and mouth. Cholera, hepatitis B and C, jaundice, dysentery, leprosy-it was all here, and then some, plainly visible on the drawn and blemished faces. And rising above the coughs and hacks of the TB-infected was a madman laughing somewhere down the narrow corridor.

Deker could recognize that condescending laugh anywhere.

Elezar.

Deker knew that he was never going to leave these walls now, never going to see Rahab again. Not if he was to save Israel. He had to entertain Elezar long enough for the Israelites to turn the tunnels into a furnace worthy of Molech and burn them all alive before anyone could escape.

There was a doorway at the end of the section, leading to another beyond. Guarding the doorway were two ghastly-looking Reahn guards who kept the civilian sick at bay. But they didn't block him from entering the next compartment. It was as if he had been expected.

As soon as he stepped through the door, he felt a blow to his gut and doubled over as Elezar withdrew a bloody dagger from his stomach. Deker began to cough up blood.

"Welcome back, Deker," said Elezar's voice from the shadows.

Deker noticed the white salt all over the floor where his drops of blood had begun to splatter. The salt might have been stored there and cleared out, he thought, but something about it felt familiar and threw him off. He slid some of it aside with his boot and saw the flash of color. There was some kind of mosaic in the floor.

A sense of vertigo hit him and the walls seemed to bend before his eyes. As he regained his balance, he saw Elezar emerge from the shadows, laughing louder than ever.

"You did it, Deker!" he said in mock congratulation. "You finally broke."

Any other day Deker could have taken Elezar. But with the cheap stab, Elezar now had the upper hand. Overwhelmed and losing blood, Deker pulled out his Molotov incendiary.

"Your plan has failed, Elezar. Bin-Nun is going to torch the city. And I'm going to burn us all inside this furnace of death. Jericho is doomed, the future of Israel secured."

"It's Israel you have doomed, Deker, and the future of Palestine you have secured once and for all. You've just blown the Israeli fail-safe, the secret of the Tehown, the tunnel of chaos the Jews hoped to use to kill us Arabs and save themselves."

Bits of brick began to fall from the ceiling, and inside, the walls were heating up like an oven as the Israelites began to burn the city to the ground.

But Elezar beamed in triumph.

"You think you are with me in the walls of ancient Jericho 3,500 years ago, Deker. But we're not really here. We're back in a safe house in Jericho. You're strapped to a chair with a fiber-optic line sewn into your skull, and I'm pumping light waves into your brain as I interrogate you."

Deker felt the sweat coming down his face in the heat. "You're crazy! You were the one who spent days convincing me that we were in 1400 BC. You're the one who lost his mind."

"You're a fool, Deker," Elezar said. "This was all a simulation designed to break you, the bad Jew, into revealing the secret fail-safe. It has been such a simple task to guide you to this point, using your brain's own imagery to reconstruct everything about ancient Jericho along the lines of the Temple Mount to help us find the city's fail-safe and lead us to what you already knew deep inside your head."