P. Deutermann - The Last Man

He turned away and continued up the hill, reaching a low ridge that was about level with the roof of the hostel building. There were some large boulders along the ridge, and he used these for cover as he worked his way back toward the fortress end of the tourist center building. From this elevation he had a clear view of the observation box. The view-ports appeared to be completely dark. He sat down on a flat rock in the shadow of an adjacent boulder and waited. Damn near every male in this country was a smoker, it seemed, so if there was someone in there, he would eventually see a match or lighter flare. Up on the hillside, the stink of the Dead Sea was less evident. He took a deep breath of the cold desert air, which was so pure he could almost taste it. A heavier jacket would not have been unwelcome, but later, when he went up the mountain, the light jacket would be more practical.

He looked over at Judith’s window again, but now it was dark. Good. He did not need her coming downstairs to check on him. Then he smiled in the darkness; the thought of that sad woman coming downstairs and knocking on a strange man’s door at night was laughable. He watched the observation box and reviewed his plan. Tomorrow she would tour him around the rest of the fortress: the terrace palace ruins, the big cisterns under the northwestern palisade walls, the siege ramp, and possibly the Roman camp to the west of the mountain. He wanted the camp to be last, because then he wanted to walk down the wadis that ran down along the west and south sides of the mountain, to see how long that took. Something scrabbled by in the sand beneath his feet, and he jerked his feet off the ground, but whatever it was disappeared. He was pretty sure that reptiles would be immobilized by this cold night air, but the scorpions were probably out hunting.

He needed to arrange the day so that he got back to the tourist center at about the same time they had returned today, three, three thirty. Get a meal, replenish water, go to bed, and get up around eleven. Maybe earlier, depending on how long the walk down the wadis took. Add a half hour because he would be climbing back up, two hours’ stay time on the top, time to get back down an hour before false dawn. So ten.

He rubbed his eyes and stared at the pillbox. He concluded that there was nobody in that thing. He was sure of it. Well, pretty sure. Last thing he needed was a guy in the box with an infrared scope nailing his ass when he left the cover of the ridge and started up the gully. He decided to wait some more, shifting his position slightly to get out of the clammy night breeze coming off the Dead Sea.

A shiver went up his back when he thought about where he was and the fantastic history of this area, going back well before the time of Christ. The Bible’s description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Pillar of Salt, the petrifaction of Lot’s disobedient wife. He stared up at the darkened rock of Masada itself and considered again the bloody story of the Jews’ heroic self-immolation on that last night. He tried to picture it: high on the mountain, the wooden walls around the western rim ablaze in the night, illuminating the scorched top half of the huge siege tower perched at the top of the ramp as it catapulted huge stones across the flaming sky; the nine hundred sixty Jews, huddled inside the wrecked palace walls, knowing that it was over, as they took their last desperate counsel. They would have been listening to the massed cheering shouts of the bloodthirsty legions as they worked themselves up into a frenzy for the coming assault, waves of hard-bitten male voices hurling Roman war cries up the mountain slopes.

The final decision to commit mass suicide was chronicled in Josephus’s history of the revolt, which in itself was an astonishing piece of writing. Josephus, a scion of the priestly Levite class, had been one of the Jewish leaders of the revolt in Galilee, but when the city he was charged to defend fell to Roman assault, he surrendered to Vespasian and saved his own life by prophesying Vespasian’s ascent to Caesar’s throne. When Nero was killed in Rome some weeks later, Vespasian’s legions proclaimed him the new emperor, and prophet Josephus had won himself a permanent new lease on life. Since there were other claimants and the prospect of a civil war, Vespasian turned over the Judaean campaign sideshow to his son Titus so that he could begin the politico-military campaign that would lead him back to Rome months later as Emperor Vespasian.

Titus allowed Josephus to join his campaign staff as an adviser, and Josephus apparently became a willing ally of the Romans, not so much to subdue his own people but to convince the Jews to end the revolt before things went too far. He was present for and participated in the siege that culminated in the catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple, and the core of the Jewish nation. He tried in vain to talk his countrymen into surrendering the city, but to no avail, and was reviled in Jewish history as a turncoat. In his later years, Josephus, now Flavius Josephus, having taken the family name of his royal sponsors, lived in Rome as a ward of the Flavian aristocracy and wrote several histories, including the one titled The Jewish Wars. Even though he had not been present at Masada, he had told the story as if he had been, writing in vivid detail about the final attack and describing the exhortations of Eleazar ben Jair, the leader of the Zealots on Masada, that death was far better than the dishonor of surrender and slavery. David knew that Josephus’s account of what the Jewish defenders thought and did up on the mountain was mostly made up, and yet his descriptions of the siege and the final Roman assault had been verified by the Yadin expedition two thousand years later. Now David was here to prove, if Adrian had been right, that even the illustrious Yadin had missed the truth.

He looked at his watch. Eleven ten. He was getting cold just sitting here and had seen no signs of life in the box. The entire tourist center was in shadow, with only the sounds of the onshore wind and the occasional cry of a night bird from the salt marshes stirring the darkness. He was about to get up when he heard the sound of a vehicle coming up from the south. He scrambled around the large boulder and crouched down beneath its overhang as an army vehicle pulled off the coast road, slotted headlamps dimmed, and drove up into the parking lots in front of the tourist center. It pulled all the way to the edge of the lot nearest the mouth of the wadi leading up behind the mountain and stopped, its engines and lights subsiding.

David waited, but nothing happened. He glanced back up at the box to see if someone would be climbing down, but there was still no movement. There was the flare of a cigarette lighter in the left front window of the truck, but no other signs of life. Twenty minutes later, as David was trying to decide how to get back down the sand slope to the fire door in the hostel, he heard another sound, this one coming from the mouth of the wadi. He crouched lower, aware that he was exposed to anyone coming down that darkened ravine. He stared hard at that darkness, then froze as a single file of soldiers emerged from the shadows, their footfalls tramping small puffs of dust. He couldn’t make out many details of their uniforms or faces in the dim starlight, but the unmistakable shape of submachine guns slung from shoulders confirmed who and what they were.

Shit, he thought. An army patrol. So this place was not unattended after all. Now the question was, where did they patrol? Did they go up on the mountain, or just into the hills around it? What were they looking for? Arab terrorists setting up some atrocity at the tourist center, or Bedouin thieves bent on making off with ancient artifacts from the mountain? When did the patrols go out? He looked at his watch again but decided not to illuminate the dial. Had to be closing in on midnight, though. Was there a relief patrol in the truck? Or had they already been inserted somewhere else?