Crescent Dawn (Dirk Pitt 21)

“Don’t blow early,” he muttered under his breath as he held the light to the wall.

He quickly searched the plastic explosives for additional fuzes, not realizing the quantity of HMX in front of him was enough to level a skyscraper. Finding only the one fuze, he grabbed hold of it and yanked it from the wall. The fuze, with its associated detonator caps, slipped freely from the HMX. With the blasting device dangling in his hand, Dirk took off running back down the tunnel.

He soon reached the now-dark and empty rectangular chamber, where he was thankful to see by her absence that Sophie had heeded his directions to flee. He stopped for a moment and hurled the fuze assembly against the far wall of the chamber

, then dashed into the tunnel. With a sense of relief and fading adrenaline, he stepped into the main chamber, the pain in his head renewing its friendship. He made his way across the dark cavern, noticing for the first time that the body of the Palestinian was no longer there.

Squeezing through the entry tunnel, he welcomed the fresh air outside by sucking in several deep breaths, then glanced around for Sophie. Not spotting her or her light, he flicked off his own lantern momentarily, then called out her name. Neither her light nor her voice responded.

Then a sick feeling suddenly hit Dirk like a blow to the belly. The mosque. Sophie had said that the Dome and the mosque would be destroyed. There must be a second set of explosives for the mosque, and Sophie was inside trying to deactivate it.

Dirk shot back through the passageway like an arrow. Inside the main cavern, there were three small tunnels bored into the hillside to the left of the Dome tunnel. Dirk raced to the entrance of each, shouting out Sophie’s name down the dark corridors. At the entrance to the last tunnel, he heard a garbled reply, and recognized her silky voice calling from the distance. He immediately burst into the tunnel, running at a sprint through the chiseled corridor.

He’d taken only a few steps when he heard a popping noise in the distance, like a short string of firecrackers exploding. It was the detonators that he had pulled free beneath the Dome, now igniting harmlessly in the rectangle chamber.

Dirk’s heart pounded like a sledgehammer as he realized the second cache would detonate at any second.

“Sophie . . . get out of there . . . now!” he shouted between pounding breaths.

Ahead in the tunnel he could see a faint glimmer of light, and he knew he was getting closer. Then he heard another series of pops, and he dove to the floor with an agonized heart.

The explosion shook the ground like an earthquake, accompanied by an earsplitting boom. Seconds later, the expanding force of exploding gasses burst through the tunnel with a roaring gust, blowing a shower of dust and rock in front of it. Dirk felt his body lift off the ground and slam into the wall, knocking the breath out of him. Hammered by rock and buried in a blanket of choking dust, he felt the world around him once again turn to black.

49

SAM HAD BEEN STANDING WITH HIS BACK TO THE HILLSIDE, examining the dead Palestinian, when Dirk briefly emerged from the passageway in search of Sophie. Hearing someone else call Sophie’s name, the antiquities agent wheeled around in time to catch a glimpse of Dirk’s lantern disappearing back into the passageway. Sam once more pulled out his phone and tried calling Sophie, then crept slowly up the hill.

He was only a few yards from the quarry entrance when the cache of explosives detonated. From his vantage, it was little more than a muffled bang followed by a slight rumble beneath his feet. Seconds later, a plume of smoke and dust came pouring out of the small passageway.

He approached the entrance and found a discarded lantern in the bushes while waiting for the air to clear. Turning on the lamp, he stepped cautiously through the passageway. He was stunned as he stepped into the main cavern, shocked that a huge quarry existed unrecorded beneath the Temple Mount.

The air was still thick with smoke and dust, and Sam kept a sleeve to his nose as he surveyed the interior. He poked a head into each of the four tunnels, hesitating at the last one, which spewed a heavy plume, and then he suddenly heard the clattering sound of rock on rock echoing from within.

Proceeding slowly into the tunnel, he detected the glow of another light far down the corridor. Accelerating his pace, he encountered a pile of debris shaken from the walls by the blast. Stepping carefully past the rubble, he moved farther into the depths of the hillside. The dark tunnel straightened for several yards, and Sam could suddenly see the lantern burning brightly ahead.

A nervous sweat poured down his face as he coughed away the dust that caked his nasal passages. Making his way past a jagged boulder, he staggered out of the tunnel and into a large chamber illuminated by the lantern set on a fallen rock. The chamber resembled an underground gravel pit, with mounds of rocks piled on the floor throughout. A large, irregular hole had been eaten out of the ceiling just over the worst of the debris, the handiwork of the blast. A thick white haze still hung over everything, obscuring visibility despite the light.

From the opposite side of the chamber, Sam detected a faint movement.

“Sophie?” he called, reaching uneasily for the grip of his handgun.

Like an apparition, a figure appeared through the haze. With a brief sense of relief, Sam recognized Dirk emerging from the gloom. The relief faded when he saw that Dirk held the limp body of Sophie in his arms.

“Is she all right?” he asked quietly.

Sam tentatively stepped closer, observing that Dirk had covered her head and torso with a light jacket. It was then that he noticed Sophie’s dangling limbs appeared misshapen and coated with a thick layer of blood and dust.

He looked up at Dirk for an explanation and immediately shivered. Any hope for Sophie’s well-being was immediately extinguished by Dirk’s ragged appearance. Dirk stood staring at him with a battered and bloodied face, his eyes lost and soulless. The life seemed to be crushed out of him, and Sam knew at once that Sophie was dead.

50

THE EXPLOSION BENEATH THE HARAM ASH-SHARIF WAS nearly suppressed before the smoke even cleared. The Dome of the Rock had been Maria’s primary target, and it was there that she had planted the bulk of the explosives. But they went undetonated, rendered harmless when Dirk pulled out the blasting caps. It was a second, smaller cache, planted beneath the al-Aqsa Mosque, that did explode, though ultimately with minimal effect.

The ground beneath the eighth-century mosque shook and its windows rattled, but no fireballs erupted from the earth to consume it. Seconds before the explosives detonated, Sophie had removed a large block of them and tossed them down the tunnel before attempting to remove the fuzes in the remaining material. The diminished blast did little more than crack the foundation of a fountain behind the mosque. The Haram’s Palestinian caretakers initially took little note, believing the explosion came from another part of Jerusalem.

Inside the quarry, Sam Levine had been fast to act. Police and paramedics arrived quickly, treating Dirk while removing Sophie’s body to the morgue. Shin Bet security agents were equally prompt. The quarry was thoroughly searched, and the remaining explosives carefully secured and removed. The entire complex was then sealed off before the proprietors of Haram ash-Sharif even realized what had happened.

News of the attempted attack quickly spread through Jerusalem, creating an uproar. Local Muslims decried the assault, while the city’s Jews were horrified at the potential desecration of the Temple Mount. Each faction blamed the other, and tempers soared on all sides. Publicly defensive while privately tightening security around the city, the Israeli government quietly brought Jerusalem’s Muslim leaders to the quarry, where they jointly agreed to permanently barricade the site against future intrusion.