Thomas Greanias - The Promised War

He lifted his head and scanned the grove. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the brightness. He couldn't make out the strange black limbs of the golden trees. Then he realized they were rotting human limbs, blackened by the sun. The ash in the air was but flecks of charred flesh carried in the wind.

Horrified, he looked up into the branches above him and saw a half-rotten, sunken face staring at him with pecked-out eyes.

Unable to tear his eyes away, he stared back for a moment, a moan unable to take form at the back of his parched throat. All around him were thousands of corpses strung up in the trees, slits of sunlight shining through their perforated torsos, their mouths open in twisted screams.

He looked away and his throat began to convulse to vomit. But nothing came out. Once, twice, his wrung-out body seemed to constrict from the inside out like a dry, twisted rag around the tree.

This was some kind of mass grave, a grove of the dead. Except the genocidal maniacs who had done this hadn't bothered to bury the bodies, preferring to string them up instead as a warning to somebody.

Suddenly, several shadows blocked the light and he heard a voice in garbled Hebrew say something like "Clean him up."

A thin hyssop branch with narrow blue leaves was waved in front of his face and he felt the cool sprinkle of some kind of aromatic water.

The drops of water on his dry tongue only awakened his senses, and he could taste a fleck of ash.

He tried to spit it out but could manage only a dry groan as several shadows lifted him up and dragged him away from the tree and propped him up against a low stone wall, where his weak legs could barely keep him upright.

In the distance Mount Nebo lifted into the sky under the blazing sun. He blinked. By all appearances he was still somewhere in Jordan. But something didn't feel right, and it wasn't just his personal predicament. Something greater had shifted around him, and the jarring sense of reality shook him to his core.

His nightmare, he realized, had only just begun.

Deker was doused with jars of water several times over before he was dragged naked into a desert tent. The tent itself was large and austere, with only a rough-hewn table on which he saw a ceramic jug and bowl-and the contents of his explosives pack neatly laid in a row. Everything about the place seemed washed-out, as though he were looking at the world through some sepia-tinted filter.

Deker was tied to one of two posts that supported the tent. Elezar was tied to the other. His head drooped. He seemed unconscious, and Deker saw bruises and cuts. He couldn't tell if they were from the night before or new ones. Then he wondered about the spear he had pulled out of his own back as he slid uncomfortably against his post.

A blast of heat blew in as the tent flap opened wide to reveal a sea of similar tents in the sands outside. It was a sight Deker had seen before in the Palestinian refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank. The same for the haunted faces of the two young soldiers who entered and stood before him in all their muscularity.

Palestinians, he could only presume.

"Where the hell am I?" Deker demanded in English. "What did you do to those people?"

The big, strapping, swarthy guard, who carried a giant bronze sickle sword on his rope belt for effect, glanced over at his smaller, towheaded comrade, a confused look on his face, as if he didn't understand the prisoner.

Deker tried Arabic. "Who the hell are you?"

The big Palestinian answered by slamming Deker's head against the pole. Deker felt a splinter in his forehead and a trickle of blood run down his cheek.

"Who are you, spy?" the Palestinian demanded in bad Hebrew. At least, it sounded like Hebrew. "How did you sneak into our camp?"

"Say nothing, Deker."

It was Elezar come to life, a strange look on his face.

The big Palestinian moved toward the table, on which were laid Deker's BlackBerry and explosives. He picked up the BlackBerry, fascinated. "Where did you get these?"

"Toys 'R' Us," Deker replied, this time getting a firm whack on the back of the head from the other guard.

The big guard pressed some buttons and somehow accessed the music player. The music of "Learn to Fly" by the Foo Fighters blasted out, startling the guard. He dropped the BlackBerry on the table and smashed it to pieces.

Deker sighed and locked onto the water that splashed out of the ceramic pot on the table when the guard smashed the phone. Deker's mind immediately went to work on how to escape-after a drink from that pitcher. He licked his dry, parched lips. Just a drop to quench the thirst, he thought, when the flap to the tent fluttered again.

A lean, wiry, gray-bearded figure in a strange military outfit entered the tent, followed by a short, fat man in a white priestly garment whom Deker recognized as the one who had sprinkled his face with water and ash back in the death grove.

"General Bin-Nun!" the guards saluted.

Deker saw Elezar's jaw drop.

A walking piece of bronze in his sixties, this General Bin-Nun had a leathery face with hollow cheeks and wild blue eyes with a far-off gaze. A zealot, in other words. The look was typical of tribal chiefs and desert warlords in the Middle East. But Deker did not recognize the man behind the grey beard. Nor the strange body armor and scimitar sword he was sporting, which gave him the ghastly air of some Afghan warlord in a pharaoh's armor.

Elezar, however, looked like he had seen a ghost.

Deker watched as Bin-Nun walked around to the table and examined the weapons. He looked at the pieces of the smashed BlackBerry and shot an angry glance at the big guard, who looked down at the ground. Then he picked up a brick of C-4 and put it down again. He seemed particularly interested in the look and feel of the detonators.

"Send these over to Kane," Bin-Nun told the big guard in the same type of bad Hebrew the guard had used on Deker. It rang familiar enough for him to understand, but just barely, like a strange brew of ancient and modern Hebrew with an exotic, almost Egyptian accent.

The general then turned to Deker, leaning over inches from Deker's face. Deker could feel his penetrating glare linger before the general's eyes widened with the shock of recognition at the Star of David around Deker's neck. It was not a pleasant reaction.

"They are Reahns, General," the short, fat priest said. He looked like an evil cherub, the way his face sneered as he spoke. "They bear the blazing star. They belong to the cult of Molech. They bow to the same god as the calf worshipers who brought the wrath of Moses upon us."

"But they are cut like us, Phineas."

Deker, thoroughly confused now, realized they were talking about his circumcised penis. He could see Bin-Nun making some sort of mental calculation as he curiously considered his two naked prisoners.

"They must die," Phineas said, glaring at Deker. "Moses would-"

"Moses is dead," Bin-Nun said, cutting off the priest.

Deker heard the unmistakable swish of a blade and looked up to see the general bring the scimitar down, stopping at the last moment an inch above Deker's skull.

The general spoke harshly, too fast for Deker to understand.

"What's he saying?" Deker asked Elezar in English, prompting the warlord's guards to exchange confused glances. As a political officer, Elezar was fluent in the history and languages of the Middle East.

"It's ancient Hebrew," Elezar said haltingly. "He wants to know if we're for them or against them."

Deker said, "We don't even know who the hell these people are."

"These are Jews." There was a hint of fear in Elezar's voice as he looked around, a worrisome sign to Deker. "This is Joshua, the son of Nun, general of the ancient Israelite army. Somehow we have arrived at their camp in Shittim on the eve of their historic siege of Jericho more than three thousand years ago."