The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

etray them as he'd been betrayed, he was too much of a man for that. But the
pain had been – still was – very real.
Israel is too small a country for secrets. It was immediately noticed that Elin
had taken up with another man, and the word had quickly made its way to Benny's
station, where men could see from the hollow look around the eyes that their
commander's spirit had been crushed. Some wondered how and when he would bounce
back, but after a week the question had changed to whether he would do so at
all. At that point, one of Zadin's squad sergeants had taken matters in hand.
Appearing at his captain's front door on a Thursday evening, he'd brought with
him Rabbi Israel Kohn. On that evening, Benjamin Zadin had rediscovered God.
More than that, he told himself, surveying the Street of the Chain in Old
Jerusalem, he knew again what it was to be a Jew. What had happened to him was
God's punishment, no more, no less. Punishment for ignoring the words of his
mother, punishment for his adultery, for the wild parties with his wife and
others, for twenty years of evil thoughts and deeds while pretending to be a
brave and upstanding commander of police and soldiers. But today he would change
all that. Today he would break the law of man to expiate his sins against the
Word of God.
It was early in the morning of what promised to be a blistering day, with a dry
easterly wind blowing in from Arabia. He had forty men arrayed behind him, all
of them armed with a mixture of automatic rifles, gas guns, and other arms that
fired 'rubber bullets' more accurately called missiles, made of ductile plastic
that could knock a grown man down, and if the marksman were very careful, stop a
heart from blunt trauma. His police were needed to allow the law to be broken –
which was not the idea that Captain Zadin's immediate superiors had in mind –
and to stop the interference of others willing to break a higher law to keep him
from his job. That was the argument Rabbi Kohn had used, after all. Whose law
was it? It was a question of metaphysics, something far too complicated for a
simple police officer. What was far simpler, as the Rabbi had explained, was the
idea that the site of Solomon's Temple was the spiritual home of Judaism and the
Jews. The site on Temple Mount had been chosen by God, and if men had disputed
that fact, it was of little account. It was time for Jews to reclaim what God
had given them. A group of ten conservative and Hasidic rabbis would today stake
out the place where the new temple would be reconstructed in precise accordance
with the Holy Scriptures. Captain Zadin had orders to prevent their march
through the Chain Gate, to stop them from doing their work, but he would ignore
those orders, and his men would do as he commanded, protecting them from the
Arabs who might be waiting with much the same intentions as he was supposed to
have.
He was surprised that the Arabs were there so early. No better than animals,
really, the people who'd killed David and Motti. His parents had told all of
their sons what it had been like to be a Jew in Palestine in the 1930s, the
attacks, the terror, the envy, the open hatred, how the British had refused to
protect those who had fought with them in North Africa – against those who had
allied themselves with the Nazis. The Jews could depend on no-one but themselves
and their God, and keeping faith with their God meant reestablishing His Temple
on the rock where Abraham had forged the covenant between his people and their