Year Zero Read Free Page B

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.
    “Where did you get that thing?” Nathan Lee whispered.
    “We should stop her,” said Ochs. “She’ll give us away.”
    “She’s crazy. Didn’t you see her eyes?”
    “You’re taking us in circles,” Ochs snarled. Low on blood sugar, jet-lagged, he was becoming dangerous.
    Nathan Lee held up a hand for quiet.
    Ochs pushed him, then he heard—or felt—it, too.
    The vibrations traveled up the long bones in Nathan Lee’s legs. The ruins were trembling. Someone was approaching, a patrol or gang or militia. Killers. Night angels. Their footsteps shocked the earth.
    Nathan Lee wasted no time calculating their distance. He started up a hillside of mangled debris,