Year Zero (2 page)

The wreck of Jerusalem lay before them. Unlike the Syrian cities, it was still in its death throes. Inky smoke hung above the ruins. Where gas lines had ruptured, columns of flame lanced the sky.

Ochs thumped Nathan Lee’s knee with an immense bear paw. He was elated. Nathan Lee was shocked.

“Haram,”
murmured Nathan Lee. The term was universal in this part of the world. It meant
forbidden
or
pity.
More classically, it meant tomb.

The engineer heard him. Their eyes met. For some reason he gave him a blessing. “Keep your heart pure in there.”

Nathan Lee looked away.

The ship flickered from place to place along the wracked perimeter. White tents flashed beneath them bearing Red Crosses and Red Crescents. Roofs of baby blue U.N. plastic fluttered in the rotor wash.

Abruptly the helicopter spun to earth. Ochs clutched his arm. They touched down hard near the south summit of the Mount of Olives.

No one waited to greet them. The samaritans simply dismounted into vast heat upon a road that ran above the city. You could barely see Jerusalem for the layer of black petroleum smoke. Israeli commandos in desert camouflage and berets rose up from the yellow dust to herd them to Camp 23.

The cases of body bags were off-loaded. Ochs opened one box and took several of the bags. He left the rest in the road, and led Nathan Lee away from their Trojan Horse. The trick had worked. They were in.

W
HILE
O
CHS SLEPT OFF HIS JET LAG
, Nathan Lee roamed the larger Camp 23, orienting himself, hunting down rumors, harvesting information. Sunset was only hours away.

Six days ago there had been no Camp 23. Now it lay sprawled and shapeless upon the slopes of Olivet, a Palestinian collecting point. Before the quake, locals drove up the meandering road to picnic and gaze upon their city. Now 55,000 ghosts occupied an overlook of vile black smoke. The unwashed survivors were coated white with cement dust. The lime in the cement made their eyes blood red. Their massed voices buzzed like cicadas in the heat.
Allah, Allah, Allah,
they wept. Women ululated.

They reached out with filthy hands. Nathan Lee knew better than to meet their eyes. He felt desolate. He had nothing for them. Some would be dead soon. The ground was muddy, not from rain, but from their raw sewage. Cholera was going to rampage through them. All the aid workers said so.

A team of skinny rescue rats from West Virginia loaned him two hardhats. They were gaunt. One had a broken arm in a plastic splint. They didn’t mark their calendar in days, but in hours. For them, time had started the minute the first quake hit, 171 hours ago. It was a rule of thumb that after the first 48 hours, the chances for live rescues evaporated. Their work was done. They were heading home. Nathan Lee asked for any advice.

“Don’t go down there,” one said. “Why mess with the gods?” He had a combat soldier’s contempt for the civilian. If you don’t belong, don’t be there.

His partner said, “How about the lions; you been briefed on the lions?”

“Seriously?” said Nathan Lee. It had to be an urban legend.
Here be dragons.

The man spit. “From the zoo.”

The first man said, “They found a body in the Armenian quarter. Mauled to rags. One leg missing. That means they they’ve tasted us. They’re maneaters now.”

A
T SUNSET
the smoke turned bronze.

Nathan Lee found Ochs on a cot in a tent, stripped to the waist. He’d seen pictures of the linebacker in his 400-pound bench-press days, an Adonis on steroids. Nathan Lee looked down at the wreckage of beer fat. Sweat glistened on his salt-and-pepper chest hair. “Wake up,” Nathan Lee said.

Ochs came to with a groan. The canvas and wood creaked as he pried himself from the cot.

“We made a mistake,” said Nathan Lee. “It’s too dangerous. There’s a curfew, dusk to dawn. Shoot to kill.”

“Give me a minute,” Ochs growled.

“It’s a war zone. No one’s in charge over there. They’re at each other’s throats. Hamas and the Hezbollah and the SLA and Israeli army and kibbutz militias.”

Ochs glared at him. “Suck it up, Swift. What did you expect? Nine-point-one on the Richter scale. From here to Istanbul, it’s scrambled eggs.”

“I don’t like it.”

“What’s to like?” Ochs tossed his head side to side like a boxer warming up. The vertebrae crackled. “This time tomorrow, we’ll be on our way home. Think of it as starting the college fund. Grace’s,” he added, “not yours. It’s time you moved beyond your academic ambitions.”

The unborn child had become Ochs’s hostage. Nathan Lee didn’t know how to stop it. The conspiracy between sister and brother was beginning to scare him. “You don’t need me,” he said pointblank.

“But I do,” said Ochs. “Don’t let it go to your head. You’re younger. You have abilities. Come on. We’re on the same team, slick.”

“This isn’t a bowl game,” said Nathan Lee. “We’re trespassing on history. Legends. Everything we do could alter the record. It could bend religions.”

“Since when did you find God? Anyway, you’ve got responsibilities.”

“It was you who taught me about the integrity of the site.”

“Those were the days.”

“You just want revenge,” said Nathan Lee.

“I just want money,” said Ochs. “What about you, Nathan Lee? Don’t you get lonely in there?”

They went to the mess tent. It was crowded with relief workers in various states of fatigue. They spoke a babel of languages. They were fed much better than the survivors. In place of protein bars and bottles of water, they got lamb stew and couscous and candies. Ochs made a beeline for the caffeine.

Nathan Lee went outside with his paper plate and sat on the ground. Ochs found him. “No more seesaw. It’s yes or no.”

Nathan Lee didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no. That was all Ochs needed.

A
T MOONRISE
, they cast loose of Camp 23.

They wore cotton masks, Red Cross bibs, the borrowed hardhats, and jungle boots from the Vietnam era. The soles had metal plates to protect against punji stakes. Ochs had spotted them in an Army surplus store outside of Georgetown.

In theory, the camps were locked down between dusk and dawn. But for all the razor wire and sandbags and ferocious Israeli paratroopers at the entrance, Nathan Lee had learned there was no back wall to Camp 23. The gate was all show. Nathan Lee and Ochs simply strode downhill and the camp dwindled into darkness.

They left the klieg lights and diesel generators and food lines behind. On the dark outskirts, they passed the mad and dying. Nathan Lee imagined the final circle of hell as something like this.

The hillside sloped gently, cut by terraces. Nathan Lee took the lead downwards. They carried headlamps, but did not use them. He was reminded of climbing in the Himalayas and above Chamonix with his father. Mountaineers called it an alpine start. You kicked off at night while the mountain is asleep. Other senses emerged: night vision, different kinds of hearing, a feeling for the movements underfoot. The world lost its margins, it ran loose out there. Deep joints in the earth snapped like bones. The underworld beat within your skin. That’s how it felt tonight. Ochs’s heavy footsteps drummed on the earth. Even the stars were vibrating.

Nathan Lee looked out across the top of the vile smog. The enormous white moon had finished sucking free of the distant desert. He’d never seen it so large and explicit.

“Slow down,” Ochs said.

Nathan Lee could hear him back there, laboring…downhill. That was not good. They’d barely started the night. The man sounded like horses breathing. Nathan Lee didn’t wait, but at the same time he didn’t let their spacing grow too wide.

They plunged on, lights off, Nathan Lee ahead. Ochs was clumsy. He demanded a rest. Nathan Lee made him demand it three times, then reined himself in. Ochs caught up and sat on a rock. He blamed his football knees and Nathan Lee’s pace. “I know you’re trying to wear me down. It won’t work,” he said.

They continued down through fig and pistachio groves with clusters of ripe buds. The branches of olive trees looked frozen and convulsed. Through his cotton mask, Nathan Lee could smell the blossoms glittering like Christmas tree ornaments. Their scent could not hide the smell of spoiled meat, even at this distance.

They penetrated the layer of oil smoke. The moon shrank and turned brown. Deeper, they passed through a Christian cemetery with toppled gravestones and crosses. They reached the underside of the cloud. Suddenly the walls of the Old City stood before them.

It was a different world under the canopy. Green and orange flares cut the low sky. You would see them rocket up through the black smoke, then slowly reappear from the murky heavens. By night, the gas flames resembled Biblical pillars of fire. Nathan Lee looked at Ochs and the snout of his white mask was caked with soot. He looked like a hyena nosing through the ashes.

Timeless Jerusalem lay squashed flat. Because it was built on a rising hill, they could see over the walls, into the upper neighborhoods. At first glance, the city looked fused, one single melted element. Then Nathan Lee began to discern details in the ruins. In place of streets, there were arteries, and in the arteries moved lights. Hatreds older than America were in motion. Here and there streamers of tracer bullets arced between the pancaked apartment buildings. It was every man for himself in there, militias, sects, rebels, and predators.

Nathan Lee was afraid. This wasn’t like the controlled adrenal hit you got climbing a long runout on rock or ice. It was more insidious, more consuming. And there was another difference tonight. He would have a daughter soon. For some reason, that mattered to him. His life counted for more.

In the distance, poised above the shredded skyline, the Dome of the Rock was still standing. The sight had a peculiar effect. It was an oddity of quakes in very old cities that modern structures will collapse, leaving the ancient buildings intact. The National Cathedral in Mexico City was one example, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul another. The mosque atop the Temple Mount was clearly another. The dome gleamed in the flare light like a golden moon fallen to earth.

They descended into the Kidron valley, then trekked up and reached the base of the wall. It soared above them. Hardin slapped the big, squared blocks of limestone. “We’re in the zone,” he said. “Can you feel it?”

They followed the wall to its southern edge, then skirted west, on the outside of the worst fighting. The Muslim and Jewish quarters rumbled and thundered inside the wall. No rest for the weary. They were fighting right through Armageddon. Bullets and shrapnel sizzled overhead from the platform of the Temple Mount.

After twenty minutes they reached a collapsed abbey. Not much further, they reached the end of the south wall, and took a righthand turn along the original Byzantine wall.

The suburbs were in utter collapse. Disemboweled high-rises teetered above mounds of debris. The bulldozers had not visited this part of the city yet. Every street lay buried. Instead, Nathan Lee followed slight traces that threaded between the mounds of wreckage. It was little more than a game trail. Worn by feet or paws, the path glowed faintly.

Through the archway of the Jaffa Gate, they entered the Old City itself. First they shed their disguise. Inside the walls, relief workers would just be sniper bait. Off came the Red Cross bibs and their cotton masks. Underneath his mask, Ochs had daubed his face with camouflage paint.

Modern rubble gave way to ancient. The pathways wound back and forth through the twisted devastation. There were dozens of forks in the trail. Ochs offered opinions, but always deferred to Nathan Lee’s instincts.

Nathan Lee felt at home here. He had a theory that the stranger always has an advantage in chaos. The stranger can’t lose his way, only find it. People born and raised here would naturally depend on familiar street corners and shopfronts and addresses. He had no such landmarks. Ruins were their own city, the same worldwide, old or modern. The key lay in your mind.
Begin in the beginning.
…It was a trick learned from his father, the mountain guide.

The rest he got from his mother, the ape lady. Instead of brothers or sisters, he’d grown up with baboon troops in the wild.
If you want to know a thing,
she would say,
go inside it.
She and her mountain-man husband were products of their generation, brimming with wanderlust and little Zen sayings and being real. They’d raised him to see worlds within the world.

Ochs kept stumbling. Phone lines and checkered keffiyahs tangled their feet. Blocks of limestone shifted underfoot. Twice the professor nearly speared himself on pieces of iron rod and copper pipe. He needed more frequent rests.

They passed the old and the new. Beside a squashed Toyota lay the remains of a horse stripped by predators. Minarets blocked their path like toppled rocket ships. Five-and six-story apartment buildings had dropped straight down and Nathan Lee found himself walking between small forests of TV antennae fixed atop the former roofs.

An old woman appeared from the shadows, startling them. That was the first time Nathan Lee saw Ochs’s pistol. It was a little Saturday night special. He pointed it at her. She cursed them in Russian, then wandered on.