P. Deutermann - The Last Man

He could hear their steps crunching through the sand, along with an occasional clink of hardware. Hardware: Then these had to be soldiers. It had to be the Israeli patrol. Then the voices were passing above him, rising in volume and number until a short, barked command brought silence. David held his breath. Discovery? Or was the sergeant reimposing some tactical discipline? He waited, his throat and mouth dry, trying to figure out which way they were going, hoping against hope that it was up the western ravine toward the plateau that held the Roman camp. He did not want them going down the ravine and finding his tracks at the ramp. Except that he and Judith had walked that way, so maybe tracks weren’t that important. Shit!

After a few more minutes, the sounds of the patrol died away, and he relaxed again. Wait a while, he thought. Make sure they don’t double back. He yawned mightily, releasing the tension in his face. Not too long, though: You’ve got to be back in the hostel in an hour or you’ll be caught out in the moonlight. He closed his eyes and tried to regain control of his breathing.

Fifteen minutes later he jerked awake. He swore out loud and then abruptly held his breath, listening to see if anyone had heard. He couldn’t believe it: He’d gone to sleep! Yet it was incredibly comfortable down here in the warm sand. Only with a great effort did he manage to rouse himself for the trek back down the ravine to the hostel.

Thursday morning David got his wish: Judith agreed to his taking the cable car back up the mountain by himself. She seemed to be somewhat distracted, and when he left to go upstairs to catch the first cable car, she was having an animated conversation in Hebrew with the hostel manager. A group of German college kids had arrived for an overnight stay in the hostel, creating some noisy confusion around the front desk.

As he rode up in the cable car he tried to keep from yawning. He had made it back to the room by four thirty and had dropped off into a sound sleep after only a few minutes of excited speculation about what he might find once he located a way into that cistern. He had reviewed the data image on his computer before going down to meet Judith for breakfast. Whatever it was, natural or man-made, it was truly huge, and he wondered again if by some slim chance the defenders had not even known about it. He quickly discarded that notion: Water was the single most precious commodity in desert siege logistics. Someone would have had to realize that all that runoff was going somewhere. He had written down the coordinates of the image in one of his notebooks, and then, after a moment’s deliberation, he had deleted the image from the computer before leaving it unattended. That way, if his secret project was uncovered before he had time to find the cistern’s entrance, no one would know what he had found. The image on the screen, with its brightly shining edges, remained fixed in his mind even as he sat with Judith for breakfast and babbled on about spending a day in the casemate rooms.

“What is the attraction of the casemate rooms?” she had asked.

“That’s where they lived,” he replied earnestly. “The Zealots. During the siege. The palaces had been abandoned, and they’d even used some of the building materials from the palaces to reinforce the walls. The Yadin expedition found hearths, middens, and living quarters all throughout the casemate system. I want to get a feel for that.”

“I see. There is much that we do not know about the Kanna’im, your so-called Zealots. Or perhaps you do not know. There is much controversy. ”

“I thought most of the controversy was over the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

“There is plenty there as well, and far too much secrecy, especially with foreign scholars holding tight to their discoveries. The problem is that we do not know for sure who these Zealots were. Yadin calls them Kanna’im, fanatics. Others call them Sicarii, the Daggermen. More like mercenaries for hire than patriots. Political activists, agitators, Roman haters. There is even speculation that there were Essenes here.”

“My guess is,” he said, after a moment’s reflection, “that they were mostly all survivors from the end time up at Jerusalem.”

She had thought about that for a few minutes while they finished their coffee and watched the first tour buses roll into the parking lot.

“I have often wondered about that,” she said finally. “Speaking personally, not professionally, I would have expected Yadin to have found some evidence of that, some things taken from the city in its last hours. If most of the defenders here had come from Jerusalem, that is.”

He had almost stopped breathing. Had she figured it out? Was she hinting that she knew why he was really here? He watched her out of the corner of his eye as he pretended to look out the window, but there was nothing in her face to indicate that she was playing games.

“I would agree,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual, “but if they had, they would have been valuable things. This place has been exposed for two thousand years. Valuable things…”

“Yes, of course. Long gone. I have work to do. You had better go upstairs or you will miss the first cable car.”

As the gondola bumped gently into the landing dock, he told himself to put Judith Ressner out of his head. As long as she had not caught on to what he was really here for, his job now was to focus, focus, focus.

Once on the mountain he walked down the steel steps near the eastern gate into extremely bright sunlight. Twenty tourists followed him down and then collected around their guide, who launched noisily into her spiel. David walked casually away from the group, moving slowly toward the southern end of the plateau, where, in comparison with the palace ruins and the spectacular views on the north rim, there was very little to see except the badly deteriorated casemate walls. He calculated that there was about a sixty-foot net drop in elevation from the western palace down to the eastern gate, and as he walked along the eastern wall, he kept his eye out for any signs of where the water would go. There was always the chance that the collection point was in the casemate wall, and, in fact, there was one cistern shown cut into the southeastern rim on the Yadin maps, about one hundred fifty yards away from the eastern gate area. That ball had come down here, though, not to the gate, even when he released it from three different points up by the western palace walls and the remains of the Byzantine-era church.

When the tourist group moved off toward the northern palace complex, he turned around and ambled back over to the area between the eastern gate and the cable-car landing. The two young security guards who had come up on the first run were following the tourists, attracted no doubt by some of the more nubile German girls who were dressed for a day in the hot sun. David had on his sun hat and cotton khakis and was ready to get out of that direct sunlight.

To the right of the eastern gate were the remains of one of the Byzantine buildings. Not much survived: low walls, exposed foundations, and piles of rubble that were identified here and there by tour placards. Near the easternmost point in the wall system, in an area the size and general shape of a baseball diamond, there was a strangely shaped low stone wall that paralleled the casemate wall for about sixty feet and then cut in toward the center of the flat area to the right of the eastern gate complex. At the lowest point was a hollow depression that might have once been a shallow pool.

David studied the wall and the saucerlike depression. The wall did not seem to be part of a building foundation, more a curtain wall of some kind, delineating an area rather than providing security for it. There was a tourist information sign down by one end of the wall. He walked down to the sign.