Ben David made visual contact with his fellow paratroopers. They'd be on the ground inside soon and it was time for a weapons check. He double-checked his own M-4 carbine 5.56-mm machine gun with laser scope, and his 9-mm Glock side arm. He clicked the safeties off both, and adjusted his night-vision goggles. The others followed suit. Then he checked his altimeter again and strained to see something — anything — through the heavy rain and fog. A moment later, there it was.
"I can see it," he shouted into his headset. "I can see the Dome straight ahead."
Even Akiva Ben David had to admit it, at least to himself. He'd certainly never admit it out loud. But it was an empirical fact. Qubbat al-Sakhra— known in English as the Dome of the Rock — was an awe-inspiring sight, even to the founder and leader of the Temple Mount Battalion. With its hand-painted cobalt blue tiles and stunning twenty-four-carat golden roof— all lit up by powerful spotlights — the splendor of the Dome simply wasn't in dispute. Islam's third-holiest site, together with the Al Aqsa mosque, was breathtaking, even when seen through the greenish haze of night-vision goggles
But that was hardly the point. It didn't matter to Ben David that the site claimed by a billion Muslims worldwide was supposed to be the exact place where Mohammed was taken up to heaven to meet with Allah. They were simply wrong.
The Muslims could believe whatever they wanted. But theirs was a false religion. Theirs was a false god. And they were occupying sacred ground, Jewish ground. That didn't mean their architecture wasn't sublime. It was, especially from this angle.
What the Muslims thought or believed or preached didn't matter to Ben David. What mattered was liberating the Temple Mount and ending its desecration at the hands of Islamic invaders. What mattered was ushering in the triumphant arrival of the coming Jewish Messiah. What mattered was forcing the hand of God.
Soon his feet would touch down on the site where King David's son Solomon built the first Temple, nearly three thousand years ago. The Babylonians, of course, had destroyed the Temple in 586 b.c.e. But that didn't stop the Jews from rebuilding it in the exact same location. Construction of the second Jewish Temple began in 520 b.c.e. and came to completion around 20 b.c.e., during the reign of King Herod. The Romans, of course, had destroyed it in the year 70—and the city of Jerusalem as well — burning the Temple to the ground and not leaving one stone standing upon another. For two thousand years, the Jews had been scattered around the globe, without a home and without a Temple. But no more. Now they were home. And it was time to rebuild.
This, he told himself, was Jewish ground. This was holy ground — the most coveted thirty-five acres on the face of the earth. And the most dangerous.
Every few years, ever since the Israelis seized control of the Temple Mount during the Six Day War of 1967, teams of Jewish zealots, worried that the Israeli government might be persuaded to give away part or all of the Old City of Jerusalem in the name of peace, had tried to seize the Temple Mount and blow up the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. On March 10, 1983, twenty-nine Jewish terrorists armed with machine guns, grenades, and dynamite scaled the walls of the Temple Mount, stormed the grounds, and were stopped by security forces only at the very last minute. One of the most dramatic attempts occurred in January of 1984 when a team armed with hundreds of pounds of dynamite, grenades, and mortars again scaled the walls, sprinted for the Dome, and very nearly accomplished their mission.
Much to the disappointment of Akiva Ben David and his followers, however, the zealots were spotted by Arab guards and an alert unit of the Israeli Border Patrol. They were captured, arrested, and eventually convicted in an Israeli court of law. The government tried to make an example of them, hoping to send the message that any attacks on Muslim holy sites would be dealt with severely. It was a pretty simple calculation, after all. Someday, some militant Jewish sect might actually succeed in blowing up the Dome of the Rock in the name of building the Third Jewish Temple. But in so doing, they would be unleashing the wrath of a billion Muslims and two dozen heavily armed Islamic nations, not to mention the entire world.
It was a volatile situation, to say the least. The head of the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service, once sent a confidential letter to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak warning that an extremist strike on the Temple Mount would likely lead to an "all-out war" and "unleash destructive forces that would imperil Israel's existence." It was a letter passed along to every Israeli prime minister since.
Nothing held the power to trigger an apocalyptic holy war so quickly as failing to protect those thirty-five sacred acres. It was no wonder, therefore, that the Israeli police forces vowed to protect the Temple Mount at all costs.
But tonight, Akiva Ben David had found a weak link in the armor.
One of the phones on Ziegler's desk rang.
Startled, Bennett grabbed the phone. Maybe it was his mother. It wasn't.
"Jonathan, it's me, Dmitri," whispered an exhausted Galishnikov.
"What's going on?"
He could hear Sa'id in the background, talking heatedly on another phone.
"You need to hear it straight from Ibrahim. Only him. How fast can you be here?"
"I don't know. I just woke up — I need a shower, a shave—"
"No, no, you don't understand — we need you here in five minutes — no more."
The line went dead. Bennett wasn't used to taking orders from Dmitri Galishnikov. But this time he didn't seem to have a choice.
TWENTY-FIVE
The first bullet sliced past his head.
It missed by inches. A second shot ripped through his parachute — then a third, and a fourth. The ground was coming up fast. He had to concentrate. He had to choose.
"Shlomo Six under fire, we're under fire — move, now — go, go, go."
Akiva Ben David was shouting as he twisted his head from side to side, trying to see who was firing at him through sheets of rain. He only had a few seconds before he smashed down on the stones below. If he wasn't dead by the time he hit the ground, he'd soon be a sitting duck for sure — covered with a parachute, tangled up in cords, exposed and out in the open, a good thirty or forty yards from his target.
He cursed his ground units for not being in position already. He cursed himself for having trained them so poorly. Fools. How badly did they want this to happen? They knew what was at stake. Weren 't they ready to make history? Where the heck were they?
Then he saw the shooter. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a guard sprinting from the northeast corner. Ben David lifted his M-4 carbine, aimed the laser scope, centered the red dot, and squeezed off two rounds, one after the other. The guard dropped instantly, landing in a pool of his own blood.
Now the entire Temple Mount erupted in a ferocious gun battle. Everyone was shooting. Tracer bullets whizzed back and forth across through the cold night air. Security horns began blasting. Sirens could be heard approaching from every direction. The entire operation was a matter of split-second timing. Ben David figured they had less than fifteen minutes, and that was his best-case scenario. In that time they had to take out the guards already sta tioned on the Mount, hold off the reinforcements, and rig the two buildings for detonation.
He'd played the scene over and over again in his mind's eye for years, and vivid images now flashed before him. He could see the stunning Byzantine architecture of the Dome, built by Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik in the year 692. He could see the somber black dome of Al Aqsa, started by Abdul Malik ibn Marwan, completed by his son Al-Walid in the year 705, recon structed in the year 1035, then refurbished during the Second World War. He could see the backpacks stuffed with C4 explosives positioned strategically in and around the structures.