He checked the map again, just to confirm his suspicions: he was walking into a dead end and would have to retrace his steps in order to inspect the entire boundary wall. Even then, there was one section that, according to the map, would be forever out of reach, a short section that lay on the other side of the wall he had just seen, and which was enclosed in a kind of triangular shape by a second wall extending to the north. On the other hand, if it was inaccessible to him he would have to assume it had also been inaccessible to the author of the inscription.
Farooq shrugged and continued forward, playing the beam of his torch over the entire surface of the wall from the base to the very top. He reached the wall junction, scanned along the north wall as well, and checked all around the two oblong stone structures.
Disappointed, he turned and retraced his steps. There was no sign of Mahmoud or Salim, but he knew they would have had a much larger section of wall to inspect than the area he had studied. He could hear them talking somewhere in the darkness, and strode along the wall, playing his torch over the stones as he headed towards where they had to be.
Again, the stones in the wall presented an entirely featureless aspect.
Not for the first time, Farooq began to doubt Khaled’s assumptions and beliefs. By any standards, they were exploring the chamber, the hypogeum, that lay below the lost temple of the Jews, just as Khaled had deduced from the decoded inscription, but they’d found absolutely nothing.
And then another thought struck him as he walked towards the dancing torch beams of the other two men. From what he knew of the building of the Noble Sanctuary, it had been done largely as a single piece of engineering by Herod when he built the four huge retaining walls around the natural rocky outcrop, filled in many of the voids, and then laid a flat artificial surface over the whole area, upon which he then erected the restored Jewish Temple. That implied, at least to Farooq, that the various walls and chambers below the temple would have been inaccessible from that period — from the start of the first millennium onwards. And if that were the case, then how could anyone in the mediaeval period, or in fact at any other time, have got inside to create an inscription?
Suddenly, he was convinced that they were just wasting their time.
‘Anything?’ he asked as he reached the other two men.
‘Nothing at all,’ Salim replied. ‘We haven’t seen a single mark on any of these stones that wasn’t made by a stonemason, as far as we can tell. Are you sure we’re looking in the right place?’
Farooq smiled in the darkness.
‘No, my friend,’ he said softly, ‘I am not. But we’ll finish the job, so that we can report back to Khaled.’
They continued around the southern side of the interior wall, examining every vertical surface, and then the eastern side as well. But it all appeared virtually identicaclass="underline" heavy blocks of plain-dressed stone, devoid of any markings.
‘A waste of time,’ Mahmoud said, as they slowly retraced their steps.
40
Chris Bronson didn’t speak or understand Arabic beyond a dozen or so words, but as he stood in total blackness just inside the Western Wall Tunnel peering in through the open doorway, he believed that he understood the mood of the two or three men he could hear walking around inside the void.
They didn’t sound happy. In fact, they sounded hacked off and frustrated, which almost certainly meant that they hadn’t found what they were looking for.
And now they were heading his way. Back towards the open doorway.
Bronson straightened up and began to move backwards and to the side, to get out of view. But as soon as he did so, his left foot kicked one of the padlocks lying on the ground, the noise a dull but entirely audible thud.
Immediately, a torch beam speared through the open doorway into the Western Wall Tunnel. The light caught Bronson’s arm and shoulder as he moved sideways, and almost instantly destroyed his night vision. The light was followed in under a second by two shots — a ‘double tap’ — the technique used by professional soldiers the world over. The sound of the gunfire was deafening in the confined space.
By the time the shots were fired, Bronson was already out of view of the doorway, but the copper-jacketed bullets slammed into the solid stone wall on the other side of the tunnel and instantly ricocheted, hot shards of lead and copper flying in all directions, one carving a shallow furrow across his forehead.
As he started running, he could hear his feet thudding on the rock floor and his blood pounding in his ears. His torch beam was dancing across the walls and floors because now he absolutely needed to see where he was going. As he ran Bronson wondered if the firing had been a panic reaction to his presence, or if the shooter had expected the bullets to ricochet from the stone and hopefully injure him.
What he needed was somewhere to hide, because if he kept running down the straight section of the tunnel, they’d be able to cut him down the moment they stepped out from the void.
An archway beckoned on the right-hand side, and he dodged through it, swinging the torch beam around to get an idea of where he was, before extinguishing the light. Leaving the torch switched on would simply advertise his presence. He stood as motionless as he could, trying to steady his ragged breathing.
A moment later, the darkness of the tunnel was torn apart by the beams from three powerful torches as his pursuers stepped through the gateway and attempted to seek him out.
Bronson’s brief inspection had revealed a space perhaps twenty feet square, with stone walls, ceiling and floor, and entirely empty. As a place to hide, it was far from ideal. But there was nowhere else he could go. He was trapped.
It all depended on what the three men — and he was now certain because of the torch beams that there were at least three of them — decided to do next.
He heard quiet voices echoing along the tunnel, while the three torch beams continued to illuminate the passage outside Bronson’s temporary refuge. Suddenly, two of the torches were extinguished. The third continued to shine up the tunnel, but at a slightly changed angle, illuminating the wall closest to his refuge rather than the entire width of the tunnel. By doing that, the man with the torch was ensuring that his two companions, who Bronson guessed would already be making their way silently towards him, would not cast shadows that would give away their position.
He calculated he had perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds before the armed men would reach the entrance to the chamber. But he also realized something else. The moment the men stepped through the doorway, the light from the tunnel would be of no further help to them and they would be effectively blind as they moved towards him. They would have to then use their own torches both to see where they were going and to locate him.
That gave him a tiny window of opportunity — at least a chance to save his life and walk away — and that was a chance he was going to take.
Bronson crouched down and felt around on the floor. In a structure made entirely from stone there must, he rationalized, be the odd pebble or chipping or something. His probing fingers closed around a small piece of stone, about the size of a marble. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
He heard a faint shuffling sound from somewhere in the tunnel outside, very close. Then another torch beam snapped on, the light shining through the archway, and moving left and right as the man holding it did his best to see inside the chamber.
Then the light was extinguished, leaving only the original torch beam shining. That meant that one or perhaps both of the men outside were about to come in and look for him.