Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest Read online

  BOOK V:

  RABBI GABRIELLE IGNITES A TEMPEST

  ROGER E. HERST

  The Rabbi Gabrielle Series

  Book I: Rabbi Gabrielle’s Scandal

  Book II: A Kiss for Rabbi Gabrielle

  Book III: Rabbi Gabrielle’s Defiance

  Book IV: Rabbi Gabrielle Commits a Felony

  Book V: Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest

  See the end of this book for teasers!

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  80 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1101

  New York, New York 10011

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Roger Herst

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email [email protected].

  First Diversion Books edition June 2011.

  ISBN: 978-0-9838395-4-5(ebook)

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  Table of Contents

  Beginning Note

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Postcript

  The Rabbi Gabrielle Series

  Beginning Note

  While the characters in this story are entirely fictitious, the historical background and setting accurately reflect the time and place where the events occurred. While the story is fiction, the biblical scholarship is fact.

  Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest didn’t happen, but it may well have!

  KHIRBET QUMRAN, NEAR THE DEAD SEA

  WEST BANK OF THE JORDAN RIVER

  Night had chased away the winds, bringing to the wilderness a precarious calm. As the sun climbed from the eastern horizon over the biblical Hills of Moab where tradition says Moses was buried, long shadows crossing the rocky terrain thinned. Cliff swallows now darted through the young sky in erratic patterns, snatching up newly hatched insects for breakfast. A suggestion of heat warmed the cold igneous rock and storm blown sand. Dawn's gray light slowly gave way to a subtle mixture of browns and reds, establishing a new day upon the Judean Desert.

  A Bedouin shepherd was watching his goats graze on winter grass when a series of bright mirror flashes distracted him. He directed his eyes to the distant bursts of light, recognizing immediately a familiar silhouette of the gentle, rounded mountains where his cousin, Mumud banu-Nazeem, pastured his flock. The light came in starts and stops, matching his tribe's code by deflecting the sun's rays with quick shifts of the mirror to shape the length and intensity of a signal. He missed the first few words, but not his cousin's unique signature on an urgent message calling for help. He wanted to signal back with his mirror that he would forward this plea to others, but the sun was behind him in the wrong position.

  Instead, the young shepherd left his goats to climb a wall of volcanic rock, seeking higher ground on which to alert another kinsman farther south. Mumud banu-Nazeem's message was instantly relayed to four Bedouin camelmen guarding the northern perimeter of the tribe's winter migration. Within minutes, these powerful shepherd-warriors were mounted and caning their animals to advance at a fast trot. Simultaneously, the young shepherd's distress signal continued from one tribesman to another along a desert telegraph to the black tents of the Ta'amireh encampment.

  As tribal chieftain, Telfik banu al-Fahl knew the precise location where each of his teen-age boys pastured their flocks. Four days before, he had given Mumud banu-Nazeem his consent for a dangerous mission. Now that trouble had erupted, he regretted having put the youngster in harm's way.

  To save time mounting a rescue, Telfik dispensed with the customary coffee at the tribal council and granted Mumud's father only a few words before barking orders. Several kinsmen were instructed to gather Lee Enfield rifles and 30 rounds of ammunition for each man; others, to pack three folding tents along with coils of rappelling rope and two 5-gallon jerry cans of fuel oil.

  Only fourteen minutes after Mumud's message had arrived in the Bedouin camp, ten of his tribesmen were racing north over a desert track in a pair of Land Rovers, kicking up behind them ferocious fantails of dust. Several kilometers ahead, the camelmen had already turned from the flat desert sands into rocky terrain, driving their beasts relentlessly in the direction of their injured kinsman at Qumran.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Seven hours earlier, under a still star-bright sky, the Reverend Timothy Matternly brought night-vision binoculars to his eyes, focusing on the opposite mountainside. Only someone who knew what to look for would notice how a tarpaulin camouflaged the entrance to a cave cleaved from the dolomite and soft chalk. Occasionally, he would see a man open one of its flaps and, for a brief moment, become silhouetted by faint light from inside. Someone behind would pass buckets of dirt that were scattered widely over the escarpment. Twice during this night’s vigil, men emptied their bladders before disappearing back into the cave.

  Winter sun in the Judean Desert can be quite warm, but after nightfall, the temperature drops to a bone-chilling two degrees Celsius. Tim Matternly burrowed against cold rocks to shelter himself from the January wind seeking to penetrate his sweater, cap, and gloves, all as black as the charcoal coating his face. To fortify his resolve, he stroked the stock of a World War II carbine, a clip of 30-caliber ammunition locked below the chamber. Often during the three nights he had been observing thieves looting historical artifacts from this newly discovered cave, he would envision scenarios in which bloodshed might become necessary, reminding himself that he hadn't brought along a carbine as a fashion accessory. He knew he was departing from the bookish persona of a university professor and that his colleagues at the University of Chicago would disapprove of what he was about to do, though they might well understand his hunger to make contact with their biblical ancestors. Like his Savior, who had died for a higher purpose less than twenty-five kilometers from this very spot, Tim prepared himself to act and, if necessary, suffer the consequences.

  Coiled beside him for warmth was the squat, muscular body of Dominican priest Benoit Matteau, dean of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Bethlehem, a man known to possess eyes and ears everywhere in the Judean Desert. Nothing happened in this remote wilderness by way of archeology that he didn’t know about. Well, not exactly, because he hadn’t been privy to the initial discovery of this new cave, a mere half-kilometer from where the Dead Sea Scrolls had first been unearthed in 1947. But through his network of Bedouin informants, he learned soon enough that cave robbers were in the process of looting its treasures.

  Benoit had briefly considered sharing this information with the Israel Antiquities Authority that regulates and protects artifacts of its nation’s archeological history. But throughout his forty-one years working in the Holy Land, he had found the Israeli government annoyingly insensitive to the nuances of Christian archeology. With respect to this newly discovered cave, he was in no mood for cooperation. At sixty-eight years of age, he couldn’t afford bureaucratic delays seeking official permission to study what this new cave was certain to disgorge. He stood firmly with Reverend Matternly on the need to snatch up its treasures before thieves placed them on auction blocks in London, Geneva, New York or, God forbid, E-bay!

  Based on how dolomite walls in the original Dead Sea caves had collapsed and required extensive excavation in th
e prior half-century, Benoit and Tim knew that before anything substantial could be extracted from this cave, large amounts of dirt required displacement. Boring ventilation holes in the dolomite was backbreaking toil, especially with the hand tools needed for an operation in which secrecy was paramount. The clerics planned to wait until the looters had completed this labor-intensive toil then, as Father Benoit put it in the foul language he cultivated for the startling effect it had on laymen, "Let those bastards do the heavy lifting before we swoop in for some judicious cherry picking."

  For three nights, Benoit and Tim had been observing looters avoiding being spotted by drone aircraft of the Israel Air Force patrolling for terrorists. On this third night, the illuminated dial on Tim’s watch confirmed that in two hours the sun would rise in the east over the mountains of Moab. He listened for the telltale growl of a drone in the night sky, its high-intensity cameras missing virtually nothing. Fortunately, for the moment, there was only the gentle whistle of wind through the desert sage, a propitious time to abandon their observation post and establish a new position on the opposite mountainside above the cave entrance.

  Faint shafts of daylight had begun to penetrate the darkness as the clergymen approached the spot from which they planned to rappel down to the cave. Along with dawn's first light, came the looters who, precisely as they had done on two previous mornings, ended their night’s work and began climbing along rappelling lines secured nearby. Tim and Benoit strained to hear what language they spoke, but, much like themselves, the thieves honored the desert’s protocol of silence. The churchmen stripped off their heavy night clothing to expose beneath light camouflage tunics with multiple utility pockets stuffed with equipment. They adjusted their backpacks and strapped headlamps above stocking caps like miners in anticipation of darkness below the earth's crust. In case one or more of the looters remained inside the cave, they switched off the safeties on their weapons.

  A rising sun peeking over the hills in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan now exposed them to a new danger, for in addition to the drone aircraft above, Israeli soldiers on the ground were bound to be scanning the hills with high-powered field glasses. Their government boasted that, within minutes, attack helicopters armed with machine cannons and air-to-land missiles could cover every square kilometer of desert. Against Israeli firepower, Tim's antique carbine and Father Benoit’s 9-mm Uzi wouldn’t stand a chance. And if discovery by the Israelis was not enough, Bedouin grazing their flocks nearby were known to possess the eyesight of Peregrine falcons.

  Tim and Benoit quickly located the climbing lines the looters had hidden and redeployed them. Hand signals telegraphed when they were ready to rappel off the sandstone to the cave entrance twenty-five meters below.

  They lowered themselves along the hillside on separate lines until they flanked the entrance, where a heavy goatskin tarp stained in desert colors blended into the terrain. Tim took a series of deep breaths to steady his nerves, then readied himself to swing inside by poking the muzzle of his carbine through a slit in the curtain. By releasing his footing, he let his weight drop him through the tarp. The opening produced a shaft of intense sunlight that startled one of the looters left behind on guard. As far as Tim could see, the man was seated in the dark with a rifle on his lap when the unexpected flash of light blinded him. Tim was no more ready for combat because his carbine hung from his shoulder on a leather strap and he needed both hands to stabilize himself once inside the cave. The guard recovered a portion of his sight a moment before Tim regained his balance. Two blasts of bullets spewed from an automatic rifle he raised to spray the invader. The first slugs slammed into the cave wall beside Tim's hip; the second ripped through the tarpaulin to his right. He imagined the burning sensation of lead tearing through his vital organs and his life cascading into darkness. Were any ancient treasures, however illuminating of the past and however valuable for biblical scholarship, worth his life? The brief reflection ended with the crack of more bullets—two, three, then three more in an angry salvo.

  But they were not from the guard. Tim saw Father Benoit flying through a second slit in the tarp, his Uzi flaring. The guard—who appeared to Tim as little more than a shadow, toppled backward—but just as suddenly, the tarp slapped closed and sunlight from the desert disappeared. Sounds of scrambling filled the new darkness. Tim staggered for better footing until his boot struck a metal object, sending it spinning over the earthen floor. The beam of his headlamp suddenly circled the walls and came to rest on the earth where the looters had left a pile of black rubber tubs with rope handles commonly used to haul dirt from archeological sites.

  "Turn off that damnable light," growled Father Benoit somewhere to Tim's left. "You're a target. And don't shoot me in the dark."

  Tim switched off his headlamp and swept the ground with his foot to identify an object he had just kicked. After hitting it a second time, he bent over to touch the wooden stock of an assault rifle. "The guy's not shooting anyone now," he reported to Benoit, as he turned his light back on to examine a Chinese AK-47. "There's blood on the butt and trigger guard."

  Benoit answered in a raspy growl caused by dust particles suspended in the thick, motionless air. "Did… did you see… him?"

  "For an instant. He wore a white Bedouin kafia. He must be hiding in the cave somewhere. Thank God we didn't kill him."

  "Non, non, mon reverend," the Dominican priest exclaimed, reverting to his native French under pressure. "No Bedouin would box himself inside a cave. These people live in open spaces. Before he settled down, he made an escape route through a ventilation port. Better if we had killed him."

  "You, want… him dead?" Tim said, coughing dust deep in the throat and gagging for air.

  "Let's get out of here."

  "What?" Tim wheezed, thinking how they had fully discussed the potential perils, including something like this. "I'm not leaving until I've looked around."

  "Listen to me, Timothy," the priest said. "That Bedouin is already outside signaling his kinsmen with a mirror. In minutes, his comrades will be headed here."

  "We agreed on six hours. What's the worst that could happen?"

  "You don’t want to know. Bedouin practice only one form of vengeance, an eye for an eye. To them, the notion of fair compensation doesn't exist."

  "I don't give a damn. I expected six hours. Tell me how much time I've got."

  "Less than thirty minutes. And don't expect the rappelling lines to be in place. The first thing that guard will do is cut them."

  "We'll signal the Israelis for help." "Choose your poison. If we stay, Bedouins will dismember us organ by organ, starting with our testicles, then leave our carcasses for vultures to pick clean. Or we expose ourselves outside and let the Israeli police throw us in prison for looting. Let me remind you, mon ami, Jews treat terrorists who brutalize their wives and children with more compassion than they do traffickers in their sacred artifacts."

  "We're wasting time," Tim's voice cracked with emotion. "Go without me."

  "Thirty minutes. Not one second more. Bedouins move over the desert like gazelles. And we've still got to find a way off this mountain."

  As soon as their eyes adjusted to sunlight from the opening in the tarp, the clerics made a preliminary tour of the twenty-by-thirty-meter chamber. Headroom was insufficient for Tim, but comfortable for the shorter Benoit. Dust particles coating Tim's glasses, forced him to unhitch them from his ears and wipe the lenses with a special cloth he had brought for that purpose. Near the spot where he believed the Bedouin guard to have been sitting, they found more blood. Broken pottery shards were everywhere, making it difficult to move about without damaging them underfoot. Many of these clay pieces were painted with Aramaic lettering and crude images. As the clergymen moved away from the cave entrance, they became more dependent upon their headlamps for illumination.

  Tim's first discovery was a quartzite ossuary, turned on its side without signs of human remains. A terracotta jar, 32x12 cm, its gray-red hue similar
to those used for storing scrolls in previous Qumran caves, lay overturned as well. Benoit peered inside, but discovered nothing.

  "Too late," the priest said, shaking his head in frustration. "Too late."

  "What’s that suppose to mean?" Tim replied.

  "Thieves have beaten us to what’s here."

  "If they took everything, why post a guard?"

  "These shards will fetch thousands on the international market, if the Israelis don't catch you first."

  They next examined the walls for signs of previous inhabitants. Had this cave served primarily as a depository for scrolls like those found in the early 1950s? Or was it used for human habitation? And if people had actually dwelt here, who? Social misfits from Jerusalem or nearby Jericho? Religious zealots and ascetics? Early Christian dissidents or Jews fleeing Roman oppression?

  The high-pitched buzz of a drone aircraft flying overhead alerted them to the danger of tapping the sun's light through the open tarp. A nod from Benoit confirmed that their futures outside the cave were now little better than remaining too long inside. Once they shut the curtain, they became entirely dependent on their headlamps.

  "Twenty-six minutes," the Dominican announced, leading Tim from the cave's outer chamber into an excavated crawl space with scarcely room to slither through single file on their stomachs, dragging tethered backpacks behind. When the tunnel forked in ten meters, they agreed to increase their chances of discovery by splitting up.

  "Rendezvous here in twenty minutes sharp," Benoit said. "If I'm not back by then, don't wait for me. And, I can assure you, mon ami, I have no intention of waiting for you. If you're late, you're on your own."

  Tim crawled forward until the tunnel opened into a tiny cavern where he could kneel but not stand. No shards lay on the floor and no carvings adorned its hand-chiseled walls. For a moment, he entertained the prospect of crawling back empty-handed. But on the right wall, his headlamp captured yet another tunnel entrance, this one barely large enough to squeeze through on his stomach. It proved to be dustier than the first, but shorter, debouching into a small grotto with sufficient room to lift his head over his elbows. His fingers made immediate contact with a familiar substance—animal skins used in ancient scrolls. He adjusted his headlamp to examine a small piece of decomposed parchment and noticed that the ground was strewn with hundreds similar to it. This was exactly what he and Father Benoit had hoped to discover! Or was it? Yes, there were plenty of words written in the ancient form of the Aramaic script, but no complete scrolls. Just fragments, hundreds, no perhaps thousands, several layers thick! To his left, he discovered a small terracotta jar on its side and another upright but uncovered and empty. Had the looters already stolen scrolls found inside? In their quest for jewelry and statuary easily sold to collectors, had they left these fragments for later retrieval? Or had they simply abandoned them because they seemed unreadable?