Crescent Dawn

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 tu

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.

Anger in the street remained high, but outbursts were remarkably few, and violence was averted. Within days, the tensions abated, as no one stepped forward to claim responsibility for the attacks, while the real bombers disappeared without a trace.

51

General Braxton read the CIA report without uttering a word. Only a sporadic twitching of the National Intelligence Director’s mustache revealed a hint of emotion. Across his desk, intelligence officer O’Qui

“So let me see here,” the general said in his gravelly voice. “Some nuts nearly blow up half of Jerusalem, and neither Mossad nor Shin Bet have a clue who did it? Is that the truth or is that just what the Israelis are telling us?”

“The Israelis clearly lack confidence in the investigation,” the CIA man replied. “They believe a Lebanese weapons- and drug-smuggling ring known as the Mules are at least partially responsible. The Mules have known ties to Hezbollah, so it’s possible they targeted Jerusalem in retaliation for Israel’s continued problems in Gaza. The American involved in the incident identified one of the bombers as being involved in a recent terrorist incident at an archaeological dig in Caesarea.”

“Is the American one of our agents?” Braxton asked.

“No, he’s a marine engineer with NUMA. He’s recovering from minor injuries at an Israeli Army hospital in Haifa.”

“A marine engineer? What in blazes was he doing in Jerusalem?”

“Apparently he was romantically involved with the antiquities agent who was killed in the blast. He happened to accompany her on a routine stakeout and got caught up in the fray. A good thing, it turned out, as he was the one who prevented the main cache of explosives from detonating beneath the Dome of the Rock.”

“Sir, we really dodged a bullet on that one,” O’Qui

Braxton grunted, boring his eyes into O’Qui

“We obtained a sample of the unexploded ordnance from the Israelis and confirmed in lab testing that it is in fact HMX. It was produced by a domestic manufacturer under contract with the U.S. Army,” O’Qui

“It’s our own bloody explosives?” the general thundered.

“I’m afraid so. We’ve done some digging, and it appears that the Jerusalem sample matches up with a shipment of high-grade HMX that was secretly sold to Pakistan for use in their nuclear weapons program back in the early nineties. The Pakistanis have since confirmed that a container of HMX went missing a short time thereafter. Black market operatives in the military are believed to have sold it to buyers outside the country, but no evidence of its use has emerged until this year.”

“An entire container of HMX. Unbelievable,” Braxton said.

“The container would have housed approximately eight thousand pounds of the high explosive. It accounts for significant destructive power.”

The general closed his eyes and shook his head. “I presume this attack is co

“We know that the al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo and the Yeşil Mosque in Bursa were both hit with HMX. In both cases, nobody claimed responsibility for the attacks. And no evidence was found linking the blasts to any local factions. We appear to have a similar set of circumstances in Jerusalem.”

“What of this dead Palestinian who was found in the graveyard?”

“He was a low-level artifact hunter with no known terrorist associations,” the CIA man responded. “He may have had some involvement with the discovery of the quarry, but he is not believed to have been a player in the actual attack.”

“Which takes us to the still unanswered questions of who and why.”

O’Qui

The CIA man nodded. “General, the targets have all been sites of theological importance in the Su