Year Zero Read Free Page A

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