‘Praise the name of the Lord!’ His voice echoed around the Temple Mount. ‘Trust in the Lord Israel, for He is thy strength and thy shield. He has heard thy supplication. He has become thy salvation. Give thanks to the Lord for He is good and His steadfast love endures for ever.’
The Israelis were back.
Brigadier General Kaufmann was in the Command Centre when the news was received. He had never witnessed anything like it. Loud cheers echoed around the room and generals and sergeants had tears streaming down their cheeks. It was a memorable day amongst the many in the long battle-scarred history of the Jewish nation.
Elsewhere the war was going better than any Israeli could ever have dreamed it would. Nearly half the Egyptian Air Force had been annihilated in the first few minutes of the war. The surprise had been complete and absolute. The news came in that David had captured the Scrolls and Yossi silently thanked his God for his son’s safety, adding a prayer for Michael.
En route to the navigation turning point the two Mirages were just passing through 3000 metres when Michael’s earphones crackled.
‘Ilyushin-14, 900 metres. Cover me!’ Benny yelled. The need for radio silence had long since disappeared. Without waiting for a reply, Major Benny Shapirah rolled into the attack and dived on the unsuspecting Russian Ilyushin-14 transport.
Michael scanned the skies and then he saw him, coming out of the sun at about 6000 metres.
‘MiG-21 on your tail,’ he reported quickly.
‘Got ’im. Let him come,’ Benny replied.
Michael watched, almost mesmerised as Major Shapirah broke off the attack on the Ilyushin and allowed the MiG-21 to close on his tail. Benny slowed his aircraft, forcing the Egyptian pilot to overshoot, a manoeuvre that would not be found in any textbook on dogfighting. It required nerves of steel and Benny, one of Israel’s aces, had spent many hours perfecting it. As the hapless Egyptian shot past Benny’s Mirage, Benny loosed off three short bursts of cannon fire. Seconds later the MiG-21 disintegrated in a ball of flame as the 30mm cannon found its mark.
Michael recovered his vigilance just in time to sight the second Russian-built MiG-21 ‘Fishbed’ coming in below him and lining up for an attack on Benny’s Mirage.
‘Second Fishbed on your tail, am engaging,’ he reported nonchalantly as he rolled into the attack behind the second Egyptian. The Egyptian had made the mistake of allowing his focus to remain on his target to the exclusion of everything else. By the time the Egyptian pilot realised he wasn’t ‘clean’ it was too late. Michael held his sights on the now twisting and turning MiG until he had closed to less than 200 metres. He depressed the trigger on the joystick repeatedly, slowly and deliberately, and short bursts of cannon ripped into the fleeing Egyptian. It exploded in front of him as the cannon found the high-octane starter fuel tank that the Russian aeronautical engineers had inexplicably positioned beside the pilot’s oxygen bottle. For a moment Michael was blinded as he flew straight through the black pall of smoke.
‘Michael! On your tail!’ A third MiG had joined the fight.
Instinctively Michael broke hard right, then left, but his aircraft was already shuddering as the Egyptian’s cannon found its mark. Michael rolled, broke left again and pulled up hard in a desperate bid to shake off his pursuer. Another burst of cannon shattered the canopy, shrapnel hitting Michael in the neck. As the Mirage spun out of control, throttle still fully forward, Michael tried to reach for the ejection handle, his arm strangely heavy and unresponsive.
‘Eject, Michael! You’re hit! Eject! Eject!’
Lieutenant Michael Kaufmann never heard the message. At close to the speed of sound the Mediterranean was like a concrete wall. One of Israel’s finest young pilots had flown his last sortie.
‘General Kaufmann, could I have a word?’ The young Israeli captain’s eyes were misty. Instinctively, Yossi knew what she was about to tell him.
Jerusalem
‘I’m very sorry about Michael. Such a senseless loss,’ Giovanni sympathised. ‘It must have been very hard to deal with.’
‘Yes, even though it was nearly twenty years ago, we still miss him every day,’ Yossi said with a sad look in his eyes. ‘It has made me very determined that his life and the lives of others will not be wasted, although we don’t seem to learn much from history,’ he added ruefully. ‘Unless we stop building settlements on Palestinian land and start genuine negotiations we’re all going to be on a very slippery slope,’ Yossi said. ‘Today it’s hijacking airliners, tomorrow it might be something far more sinister.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Giovanni asked.
‘I spent a long time in military intelligence, Giovanni. It’s common knowledge that several of Israel’s enemies are keen on acquiring nuclear technology, but there is something else. Have you ever seen any of the work I’ve done on the codes in the Dead Sea Scrolls?’
‘Patrick was kind enough to give me one of your papers. I found it fascinating.’
‘Then you will have seen my analysis on the horrifying warning that is in the Omega Scroll.’
Giovanni was tempted to lay his cards on the table. He felt sure he could trust Patrick and Yossi but he held back. The Vatican would deny it all emphatically.
‘The Essenes were a very advanced and thoughtful scientific community,’ Yossi said, ‘and I believe if they saw fit to record this warning, we should take notice.’
Long after Patrick’s guests had left, Giovanni lay awake in his room overlooking the Old City’s Christian Quarter Road. Could it be that when the Romans destroyed the Essenes at Qumran, an ancient seat of scientific learning had been lost? Giovanni knew that many people would be sceptical, but he also knew many ancient civilisations were far more advanced than at first thought. The dry cell battery, he recalled, had been invented over two thousand years before it had appeared in Western civilisation. The ancient versions had been made out of a copper cylinder set in pitch with an iron rod inside and there was an example of one in the Baghdad museum, but when the Greeks and Romans developed a preference for oil, the technology had been lost. Was it possible there was a lot more to the Essenes than modern scholarship had allowed? The answer lay hidden in the Judaean desert.
BOOK FOUR
1990
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Milano
A llegra was quietly confident. She had gained her Masters with Distinction and enjoyed some notable successes assisting Professor Rosselli researching archaeological DNA. The Professor had persuaded her to take her doctorate and the moment of truth had arrived. It was now two months since she’d handed in her doctoral thesis and it seemed that a little piece of her had gone with it. Three long years of painstaking research. She had been confident during the two hour grilling by the Examination Board, although Professor Rosselli had not looked at her when she left, so she was in a bit of a quandary as to how the oral exam might have gone. When she went over her responses, she realised that perhaps a different emphasis might have been given to the mitochondrial DNA, or to the links to dendrochronology, but it was too late for that and she knocked on Professor Rosselli’s door.
‘ Avanti! S’accomodi.’
Allegra had grown used to the smell of the Professor’s pipe and it no longer bothered her, which was just as well. Somewhere in amongst the smoke and the piles of books on philosophy and science there was a desk and a person. Her mentor had his back to her, busy at the smaller computer at his side desk, trademark white hair as untidy as ever, smoke spiralling above it. He swivelled back behind his main desk to face her, a look of puzzlement in his normally mischievous eyes.