The Moses Stone (43 page)
He opened his rucksack again and pulled out the steel crowbar. He slid the point of the tool between two of the stones and levered. Nothing happened, so he switched to the opposite side and heaved on the other end. This time, it moved a fraction. Bronson repeated the process on the top and bottom, and slowly the stone began to loosen. After a couple of minutes he’d freed it up enough to permit him to ram the jimmy deep into the gap at the top of the stone and lever it out of the wall. The stone crashed to the ground with a dull thud. Bronson moved it to one side and then he and Angela peered into the hole it had left.
Disappointingly, there was another stone directly behind the one Bronson had removed.
“I think that’s the reason the probe went straight through,” he said, pointing into the hole. “That corner of the stone I’ve just shifted lined up almost exactly with the one directly behind it. Everywhere else I tried to run the wire through, it must have been hitting the face of one of the stones in the row behind.”
“Try the probe again,” Angela suggested.
This time, when Bronson slid the thin length of steel into the gaps around the stones of the inner course, it met almost no resistance and clearly entered some kind of a void.
“I’ll move another stone from the outer layer,” he said, “just to give me room to work, then take out a couple from the second course.”
With one stone already removed, shifting a second one was easy. Bronson was concerned about the security of the stones above the hole he’d made in the side of the altar, but they showed no sign of falling out. The inner layers of stones were actually easier to move, because they were slightly smaller, and Bronson quickly pulled out three of them to reveal a small open space.
“Pass me that flashlight, please,” he muttered, crouching down on his hands and knees to peer into the cavity.
“What can you see?” Angela demanded, her voice quavering with excitement. “What’s in there?”
“It looks to me like it’s empty. No, hang on—there’s something lying flat on the floor of the cavity. Give me a hand. It looks as if it’s quite heavy.”
Bronson eased the thick tablet of stone out of the hole he’d made and with Angela’s help rested it against the side of the altar. They both stood back and for a few seconds just looked at it.
“What the hell is it?” Bronson asked. “And there’s another one in there, I think.”
In less than a minute, they’d lifted out the second tablet and placed it gently beside the first one.
“That’s it,” he said, then looked back into the hole he’d made, using the beam of the flashlight to inspect it. “There’s nothing else in the cavity,” he reported, “except rubble and a lot of dust.”
They both looked intently at the two stone tablets. They were roughly oblong with square bases and rounded tops, maybe an inch thick and perhaps fifteen inches high and nine or ten inches wide. Both surfaces of each slab had been carefully inscribed, and it looked to Bronson as if the two inscriptions were probably written in Aramaic—he’d seen enough of the language lately to be fairly certain he recognized it—and appeared to be identical.
“Dust?” Angela asked after a moment, glancing at him.
“Yes. The dust of two millennia, I suppose.”
Angela pointed at the tablets. “But there’s not a speck of dust on either of these.”
Bronson looked more carefully. “Maybe I knocked it all off when I dragged them out,” he suggested. “What are they? The Aramaic could almost be some kind of a list. It looks like a series of individual lines of writing rather than a solid block of text.”
For a few seconds Angela didn’t reply, just knelt down and stared at the two tablets, the tips of her fingers gently tracing the Aramaic characters. Then she looked up at him, her face pale.
“I never thought we’d find anything like this,” she said softly. “I think these could be described as ‘the tablets of the Temple of Jerusalem and of Moses.’ It looks to me as if these could be early—really early—copies of the Decalogue.”
“The what?” Bronson noticed that Angela seemed almost to be having difficulty breathing.
“I mean the Ten Commandments, the Mosaic Covenant. The tablets God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. The covenant between God and man, the actual tablets that laid out the rules of the faith.” She paused for a few seconds, then looked at Bronson, her eyes wide, almost scared. “Forget about the
Ark
of the Covenant. We could be looking at two copies of the
Covenant
itself.”
Ark
of the Covenant. We could be looking at two copies of the
Covenant
itself.”
“Who says they’re copies?” asked Baverstock, stepping out from behind them, a pistol in his hand.
76
Angela and Bronson span round to stare at Baverstock, disbelief clouding their eyes. The light from their flashlights glinted off the barrel of the automatic he was pointing straight at them.
“I thought you were dead,” Bronson muttered.
“That was the idea. I’m sorry about this,” Baverstock said, the tone of his voice giving the lie to the words. “It might have been better if you’d both died down there in the tunnel. Don’t try to dazzle me. Shine the flashlights at the tablets, or I’ll shoot one of you right now.”
Bronson and Angela obediently lowered their hands and aimed the flashlight beams downward to illuminate the slabs they’d just recovered from the cavity in the altar. The two ancient stones seemed almost to glow in the light.
“You can’t be serious,” Angela said. “Are you really suggesting these could be the original Covenant with God that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai? You actually believe these tablets were inscribed by the hand of God?”
“Of course not. Whatever hands carved these, they were made of flesh and blood, but otherwise I’m perfectly serious. There’s no doubt that something known as the Mosaic Covenant existed, because the Israelites built the Ark to carry it around. The Ark vanished in about 600 BC when the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, but there are no traditions relating to the stones themselves. Most archaeologists assume that when the Babylonians looted the Temple they stole the Covenant as well as the Ark, but there’s nothing in the historical record to confirm this.”
Baverstock stopped talking and stared hungrily at the two slabs of stone that rested against the side of the ancient circular altar.
“So what happens now?” Angela asked. “We should take these to a museum and get them examined and authenticated.”
Baverstock’s chuckle was anything but humorous in the darkness. “I don’t think so, Angela. I’ve no intention of sharing the glory. The Silver Scroll slipped through my fingers. That’s not going to happen with these. I’m going to take them, and you’re going to die.”
“So you’re prepared to kill the two of us just for your pathetic little fifteen minutes of fame? That’s so sad, Tony.”
“It won’t just be fifteen minutes, Angela. It’ll be a lifetime of glory. And your deaths will just add a little more blood to the thousand of gallons that have already been spilt in this place over the millennia.”
The sudden beam from Baverstock’s flashlight dazzled them both, and Bronson saw the pistol in the man’s hand as he took aim.
Bronson reacted instantly. He threw his flashlight straight at Baverstock, the beam playing wildly across the rocky ground, a momentary distraction. Then he started to move. He stepped sideways, pushed Angela down onto the ground, and charged toward Baverstock.
Baverstock dodged to one side, avoiding the flying missile, and swung his weapon back to aim at his target—Angela.
Then Bronson hit him, knocking his right arm sideways just as Baverstock pulled the trigger. The bullet whined harmlessly across the ancient hilltop fort, far into the night. Bronson spun round, slightly off-balance. He reached out to grab the other man’s arm, but Baverstock dodged, took a couple of steps backward and swung his pistol and flashlight toward him.
For less than a tenth of a second Bronson stared into oblivion, looking straight down the barrel of the other man’s automatic; then he threw himself to one side, landing painfully among the sharp-edged rocks.
Baverstock started to turn, to alter his aim and fire again, but suddenly he stopped dead. His head slumped forward and he dropped his arms, the pistol and flashlight clattering to the ground. Then he clutched at his stomach, lifted his head and screamed, a high, wailing call of utter agony and despair that echoed from the surrounding rocks and stones.
Bronson grabbed his own flashlight, which had fallen nearby and was still working, and shone it at him. The pointed end of a slim steel blade was protruding grotesquely from Baverstock’s midriff. As Bronson watched, horrified, the blade moved upward, blood pouring from the gaping wound. Baverstock’s clutching fingers plucked ineffectively at the steel, more blood pouring from his hands as flesh was sliced off, and his howls of agony redoubled.
What he was seeing was so inexplicable that for perhaps two seconds Bronson simply stood there gaping. Then he ran toward the stricken man. But he never reached him.
Before Bronson had taken more than a couple of steps, the knife angled sharply upward. Baverstock’s howls were suddenly cut short and he tumbled limply to the ground. He twitched once, then lay still. Directly behind him, the unpleasantly familiar figure of Yacoub was revealed, a long-bladed knife, still dripping blood, clutched in his right hand. And looming out of the darkness behind him were his two men, each pointing a pistol straight at Bronson.
“Unfinished business,” Yacoub said shortly, kneeling to clean the blood off the blade on Baverstock’s trousers. The knife vanished inside his jacket, and he shifted the pistol to his right hand. “I thought we’d killed him in the water tunnel. Get back over there,” he said, gesturing to Bronson.
“Stay behind me, Angela,” Bronson said, as he stopped next to her and turned to face Yacoub.
“Very noble,” Yacoub chuckled. “You’ll take a bullet for her? That won’t be a problem. I’ve got plenty.”
“You said you’d let us go,” Bronson said. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve got the Silver Scroll?”
“That was before you found those stones. I heard what that man Baverstock said about them. If those two slabs of rock really are the original Mosaic Covenant, they could change the whole course of the conflict here in Israel. My comrades in Gaza will know how to make the best use of them.”
“They should be in a museum,” Angela said, her voice angry. “You shouldn’t be playing politics with relics as old and as important as these.”
Yacoub gestured irritably with his automatic pistol. “Everything in this country is to do with politics, whether you like it or not. Old or new, it doesn’t matter. Any weapon we can use, we will use. And now you can see why you’re both expendable. Nobody must ever know that those stone tablets were found here in Israel. But I will be merciful. You’ll both die quickly.”
He lifted his pistol and pointed it at Bronson.
But before he could pull the trigger, there was a muffled bang from somewhere close by, and a faintly luminous object shot up into the sky. In seconds it ignited, burning with the brilliant white-hot light of magnesium, and the darkness was instantly turned into light.
For a moment, Yacoub and his two gunmen stood rigid, as if turned to stone, staring upward.
And then, in the pitiless white light cast by the descending flare, and like spectral creatures arising from the very earth, half a dozen black-clad shapes, their faces blackened with camouflage paint, appeared less than twenty yards away, emerging from behind the low stone walls that lay to one side of the altar. Each was carrying a Galil SAR compact assault rifle.
Yacoub yelled something in Arabic, and his two men dived for what cover they could find, then opened fire on their attackers. The momentary silence was shattered by a volley of shots as his two gunmen traded fire with the armed men, the booming of their nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistols a discordant counterpoint to the flat cracks of the 5.56 millimeter rounds fired from the Galils.
The moment the flare ignited, Bronson acted. He grabbed Angela by the arm and pulled her around to the side of the ancient stone altar. They ducked down, the solid stones acting as an effective shield against any bullets that came their way.
“Keep down,” Bronson hissed, as a round cracked into one of the blocks of stone directly above their heads, sending a cascade of splinters and dust over them.
He risked a quick glance around the side of the altar. Yacoub’s two men were pinned down behind another of the low stone walls that were the dominant feature of that part of the old fort. They were snapping off shots at their attackers, but they were outnumbered and out-gunned, and Bronson knew there was only ever going to be one outcome to this encounter.
Even as he watched, one of the black-clad figures moved to out-flank them, darting around the outside of the old ruined temple, taking advantage of every scrap of cover he could find. Within twenty seconds, he had reached a position where he could see both of Yacoub’s gunmen clearly, and took careful aim with his Galil.
But he didn’t fire. Instead, he called out something in Arabic.
Yacoub’s men started at the sound of his voice, and both swung their pistols to point at him. It was their last mistake. His Galil cracked, the volley of half a dozen shots taking less than a second to fire, and the two Moroccans tumbled backward. They crashed to the rocky ground and lay still.
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