Ottoman Dominion Page 6

  “The Turks are not my problem, Chairman Raman,” seethed Al-Qahtani, “and the Kurds are not my problem.” He slapped his left hand against the map, obliterating most of western Iraq. “My problem is the stain of the Islamic State that controls nearly ninety-thousand square kilometers of Iraq and Syria, stretching nearly from Baghdad to the Mediterranean coast.”

  He slapped the map once more for emphasis. “Over one million Iraqis have been driven from their homes by this so-called ISIS—oil fields and refineries captured … Fallujah, Mosul overrun. And in the midst of this invasion, the farmers of the Anbar are in near revolt because the Euphrates has become a mere trickle and their farms have turned to dust. I don’t need the Turks, but I need the water they hoard behind their dams. If my Badr fighters are to turn the tide against ISIS, we need to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with the Kurdish Peshmerga, and we need to rescue the people of the west from these butchers.”

  Al-Qahtani, still clad in his battle fatigues, pushed off the desk and took one stride toward Raman, who appeared to be sinking into his chair. “Nearly half of our nation is under the control of ISIS, my brother. Baghdad will be next unless we can stop ISIS in its tracks. My respects to the Ayatollah and the other mullahs, but my first concern is saving Iraq. There will be no resurrected Persian Empire if there is no Iraq with whom you can join forces.”

  Raman’s eyes burned fiercely. Al-Qahtani reckoned he had just made an enemy. So be it. Get in line. But he was the man who would determine Iraq’s future. He turned abruptly and switched off the desk lamp, throwing the reception area into darkness. “You can show yourself out the same way you came in. And next time—if there is a next time—make an appointment.”

  The smoked glass in the door rattled as Al-Qahtani slammed it in his wake, three pairs of boots echoing down the hallway as he and his guards exited the building.

  Ambassador’s Residence, Tel Aviv

  July 22, 10:18 p.m.

  The ambassador’s study was one of the few rooms in the less-damaged south wing that was still fairly intact. The inhabitants of the room, Mullaney quickly understood, were much more damaged.

  Not only were they shell-shocked from the relentless violence that had filled so many hours of the last week, but the physical damage they had also endured had clearly drained their reserves of strength and optimism.

  US Ambassador to Israel Joseph Atticus Cleveland was stretched out on his back on a sofa to the left side of the room. He was in shirtsleeves, his suit jacket tossed haphazardly over the back of a chair, his eyes closed, a wet towel on his forehead. Over the last thirteen days, Cleveland’s motorcade had been attacked twice—once in Istanbul and then along Highway One on the route to Jerusalem when his armored limousine flipped through the air and crashed. He was not wounded during the ensuing gun battle in Israel, but he was bashed and bruised from the crash. Now his residence in Tel Aviv was a shattered, vulnerable wreck of a building and he had barely survived a brazen attack from a score of armed invaders.

  Kneeling on the floor next to her father, Palmyra Parker was valiantly acting as nurse, tending to a few scratches and cuts while the medics were caring for the most seriously wounded. But Parker looked like she had been through a war herself. Her head was a checkerboard of red, raw skin surrounded by patches of what was left of her dark and once well-coiffed hair … compliments of the same murderous thugs who had attacked the embassy and residence and who had kidnapped Parker in hopes of ransoming her for a certain metal box and the prophetic message it carried. Her white dress was ripped and soiled, as if she had been crawling through the debris of the shattered residence, and her left arm was in a makeshift sling, bloodied at the elbow.

  Normally unflappable, impeccably dressed, Ruth Hughes, the embassy’s political officer who had become Cleveland’s closest advisor on the ambassadorial staff, had the thousand-mile stare of a deer in the headlights. A pragmatic and wizened attorney who had mastered Middle Eastern politics during her twenty-five-year career with the Saudi oil behemoth Aramco, Hughes was accustomed to rough-and-tumble negotiations but not with the terror of mortal danger that she had survived twice in the last two days. Her expensive business suit rumpled but not ruined, her pearl necklace askew but still around her neck, Hughes sat on the right side of the room in a cushioned wingback chair, her hands white-knuckled on the end of the arms.

  Mullaney, Middle Eastern Regional Security Officer of the Diplomatic Security Service—the armed agents responsible for protecting American Foreign Service personnel overseas—had fired his State Department-issued Glock automatic more in the past three days than in his entire nineteen-year career with DSS. He had been involved in blazing, relentless fire fights along Highway One, in the Nitzanim Reserve when Parker was rescued from her kidnappers, in the tight streets of Old Tel Aviv, in the ancient quarter of Jabal Al Weibdeh in Amman, Jordan—where his closest friend, Tommy Hernandez, had been killed—and in the bowels of the US embassy building just eight miles south of the residence. He had a long, red welt along the right side of his head where a bullet had scraped along his scalp during the gun battle on Malan Street in Old Tel Aviv, deep body contusions from the wreck on Highway One, and a gimpy ankle from where he fell headlong down a sand dune during the gun fight in the Nitzanim Reserve.

  All of this violence was ignited when Cleveland accepted a request from Rabbi Kaplan at the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul to deliver a mysterious—and lethal—metal box and the two-hundred-year-old prophecy it protected to the Rabbinate Council at the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem. A box with kabbalah symbols hammered into its lid that a vast, heavily armed gang of Turkish terrorists had attempted to capture or steal from Cleveland and Mullaney at least five times, undeterred even though dozens of their gang had already been killed or wounded. It was a box, they had discovered, that could only be touched by its guardian—a person under the anointing and protection of the Aaronic Blessing. Any unprotected or unsuspecting person who touched the Gaon’s box would suffer an immediate and gruesome death … their hair would fall out, their tongues swell and turn black, and blood would pour from their eyes as all the organs in their bodies shut down.

  None of the others present, Mullaney realized, were sure whether the threat and power of death emanated from the box itself or from the Vilna Gaon’s second prophecy that it used to contain. None wanted to find out. And Mullaney didn’t feel any compulsion to push his luck and try it, even though he was anointed as the final guardian and was supposed to be able to touch the metal box safely.

  The box that now rested inside the leather diplomatic pouch that hung ponderously from his left hand, alongside his leg.

  Cleveland’s eyes were closed, Parker’s concentration on her father. But Hughes was looking at Mullaney wide-eyed, incredulous.

  “You brought it here?” she gasped.

  Immediately, Cleveland pushed himself up on his right elbow, Parker twisted her head in Mullaney’s direction, and all three stared at him with a mix of horror and fear. Mullaney had just brought the plague into their house.

  “Where was I going to leave it … in the embassy? With the fissures in its walls an open invitation?” asked Mullaney. “No. Too many lives have already been lost, and we still don’t fully understand what the box is about or fully comprehend what the message means or its purpose. And those murderers? If they come after anyone, I want them coming after me. No”—Mullaney shook his head—“the box stays with me.”

  All eyes were on Mullaney, but no one objected. He set the pouch down on the floor at the end of the sofa and took the chair next to Hughes as Cleveland forced himself into a sitting position.

  “I’ve assigned Pat McKeon to head up your security detail, Mr. Ambassador, and Kathie Doorley to take responsibility for security of the residence. We have staff members nailing up plywood sheets over any breaches in the outside security and I’ve asked Meyer Levinson for more contracted security—ex-IDF—to bolster our defenses. I’ll lock the box into the safe room when we’re done
here. Then we’ve got to figure out how to deal with this enemy that is right outside our gates.”

  The ambassador was shaking his head.

  “While I don’t want the box back in this house,” he said, his voice sounding as weary as his body looked, “at the moment I guess there’s little alternative. But the first thing we’ve got to do is call Secretary Townsend. He must be apoplectic by now. Brian, go lock up that box. We’ve got a call to make.”

  They crouched behind a huge air conditioning unit on the roof of a seven-story apartment building just south of the ambassador’s residence. The commander had a pair of night-vision binoculars pressed up against his eyes as he scanned the rear of the building and the sprawling, well-manicured lawns that spilled down to a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. He could clearly see the work details nailing up plywood over each of the fractures in the compound’s walls. He knew the same work would be going on throughout the complex wherever security had been breached by the earthquake and his raiders.

  He set the binoculars onto the roof and looked at his companion.

  “Stay here. Watch closely,” whispered the commander. “Call me if … when you see the American. Especially if he has that leather pouch in his hands. Ismail will watch the other side of the building.” He looked around the roof. “Make a low tent with that tarp to keep you concealed.”

  The commander turned his eyes on the disciple. “The box is in that building. We will get the box. And we will rip the heart out of that American. Do not sleep! We must not fail.”

  9

  Ankara

  July 22, 11:11 p.m.

  What felt like the blazing heat of the rising sun gathered in intensity upon his back, luring the Turk out of his sleep—until his memory came alive to recall it was the middle of the night, and there were no windows in this room.

  He opened his eyes and saw that his bed was surrounded by fog … no … smoke assaulted his nostrils with the putrid retch of decay. Fear flashed through his consciousness. He tried to roll on his back to sit up, but he was restrained as if his body were wrapped in massive coils of steel chain. He felt a whisper of breath on his right ear, a breath that contained the essence of every dead and rotting thing on earth.

  “You find time for rest? You have accomplished nothing, but still you sleep?”

  The temperature of his entire body rose steadily, perspiration soaking his armpits and down the small of his back. Still he couldn’t move or see the face that belonged to the voice. But he knew who it was. And he knew what it thought.

  The One had ensnared him in a shroud of smoke, but a smoke that did not waft away. It only grew heavier upon his skin, pressing the Turk down into his bed. He had no strength to resist. And trying to resist the One was futile … and could prove fatal. Yes, the One could bring an end to the Turk. The One could put to death this new husk the Turk inhabited. Worse, the One controlled the gate to Ghenna—the lake of damnation and fire. A place the Turk was determined to avoid. He did not entertain the thought of spending his immortality in burning agony. So he did not entertain the thought of resistance. At least not at the moment.

  “The mantle of guardian has passed,” hissed the voice of mayhem. “You failed.”

  Like thunder in the mountains, the words grew in crescendo. “The American now has the anointing, the box, and the message. You failed!”

  Long, thin, cadaver-like fingers gripped the Turk by the collar of his jubba and yanked him off the bed, bringing him face-to-face with … a riot of red, shifting clouds, some swirling maniacally, some circling in place, their ever-increasing speed creating a vortex. In the midst of the vortex pulsed malevolent yellow eyes, harbingers of mayhem, slayers of hope. The diaphanous shape of a face morphed from tortured countenance to flaming rage, a strangled voice rising from the depth of its despair.

  “All our work is at risk,” bellowed the One. The swirling, red visage floated closer to the Turk, the skin on Eroglu’s face crisping under the heat. The voice slewed into a menacing, throaty rasp. “Centuries of planning, and you have failed to do the one thing required … to keep our intentions hidden until the prophecy itself has been destroyed.

  “We turned the lust of kings to our bidding. That corrupted fool Abdullah was so fearful of losing his family’s power that we convinced him to betray his brothers, that now was the time for the sons of Ishmael to enter into covenant with the sons of Isaac. The same lust for enormous stolen wealth corrupted the soul of Rutherford who was our weapon against the Persians. With humans it is always so easy. Almost all worship at the altar of money or power … or both.

  “But now the reckoning is coming swiftly. There is no time left … you must force our plans into position. We need to strike now! While the Persians are handcuffed by ISIS and Abdullah has no weapons to rule or destroy his world. Kashani must be removed. Israel must accept the treaty. And you must unleash our weapons and seize the prize at Incirlik. Tell me, my precious servant, that all of this is happening.”

  For a heartbeat, the fingers relaxed, the scorching heat abated, and the Turk was able to draw in a breath of sulfurous rank. Hate was boiling over in his heart, where a secret lay … a secret he dared not even bring to his mind. Somehow, the box would be his. He would wield its power. And this One would serve him!

  His larynx nearly crushed, the Turk grasped for his voice. “I will deal with Kashani in the morning. His reign will end. He will end. For the next, most critical days, Prime Minister Arslan Eroglu will be interim head of the Islamic Republic of Turkey and he—I—will ensure the treaty is signed.”

  The treaty was one important part of their ultimate two-part scheme to obliterate the Mount of Olives, yet it was the most uncertain.

  After years of start-and-stop negotiations, Prime Minister Eroglu had finally hammered out an accord between Turkey and Israel that would, through pipelines under the Mediterranean, provide unlimited fresh water to Israel in exchange for unlimited natural gas to Turkey from Israel’s vast resources under the sea.

  Written into the treaty by Eroglu was a clause that permitted a Turkish consortium to build an ultra-modern shopping mall on the flank of the Mount of Olives to the east of the Temple Mount and Jerusalem’s Old City. It would be a mirror image of the soaring, outdoor Mamilla Mall that connected downtown, cosmopolitan Jerusalem with the Jaffa Gate on the western edge of the Old City.

  In the middle of a night not far in the future, this consortium, controlled by the Turk, would turn its bulldozers loose on the summit of the Mount of Olives itself. If the Israeli negotiators rejected Eroglu’s clause, there was a more desperate and devastating option. Either way, the future would be forever altered.

  Why? Because a worthless Hebrew mystic, Zechariah, claimed that a fatherless carpenter from Nazareth bodily left this earth and would one day return to the Mount of Olives as a conquering king. It was that madman Zechariah who promised that the Nazarene’s feet would land on the Mount of Olives in his triumphant return, which would inaugurate events that the Jew’s book claimed would culminate in the final conflict of good and evil on the plains of Megiddo.

  For nearly two millennia, the Turk and the evil incarnate that directed his actions had been intent on one purpose. If they could prevent the fulfillment of just one prophecy from that accursed book, then the promises and possibilities of all prophecies would be invalidated. If there was no longer any Mount of Olives, there would be no place for that illegitimate son to land. He was not coming back … would never be coming back. And they would change the end of the book. If the bulldozers did not work, they could still unleash the nuclear weapons they planned to steal from Incirlik. That was an option that would deprive the One of a vast swath of his territory. But if it achieved his goals, then so be it.

  And to accomplish that, just after midnight on July 24, the Turk’s agents would open the valves of annihilation on the people of Incirlik and pillage the B61 nuclear bombs stored on the base by NATO.

  Either way, soon the Mount of Oli
ves would no longer exist—either bulldozed into a concrete-covered shopping mall or vaporized and contaminated by one of their coveted nuclear bombs. And then the ultimate battle on the plains of Megiddo would not be the illegitimate son of Joseph leading the Jews to battle. It would be the One pouring out his nuclear wrath against any who dared try to stand against him.

  “The weapons will soon be in our hands,” wheezed The Turk, “enough pure destruction to destroy the mount and later to eliminate the Zionists, the Persians, and the Arabs, if need be. We are at the brink of ultimate victory.”

  Did he believe it? Was victory within their grasp … his grasp? After so many centuries—nearly two millennium—was the accursed light about to go out? Did he believe it? Did the embodiment of wrath, whose hand was at the Turk’s throat, believe it?

  How he would spend the rest of eternity hung in the balance.

  The yellow eyes, birthplace of mayhem, burned into the Turk’s mind.

  “Their book predicts the final battle on the plains of Megiddo,” hissed the One. “But we will use their book against them. By destroying the Mount of Olives, he will have no place to set his feet and will be unable to lead his forces against the kings of the north. We will turn that prophecy upon itself. Unleashed upon the Jew, our nuclear weapons will reverse the so-called battle of Armageddon. No army of earth or heaven will stand against us. The temple will be rebuilt, and I will stand upon its throne in all my glory. The kings and princes of the earth will bow to me. And we shall rule for all time. If …”

  The skeleton-like fingers at his neck tightened their grip. The Turk was pulled closer and the blast-furnace heat of Sheol roasted his skin. “If you do not fail again,” growled the One. “And I can promise you, my friend, that if you fail me once more, you will wail in unrelenting torment as the lake of flames consumes you for all eternity.”