According to my new friend, more than two hundred thousand pilgrims are gathered already in camps in the Kidron Valley and on the western slopes of the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. Hundreds have perished from heat, thirst, and sickness, she says. Still the believers keep coming, driven by the mounting environmental catastrophes and the belief that the hand of the Almighty is behind them. My seatmate shows me pix of the tent city where her group will be quartered. The place looks like Andersonville. But the lady’s eyes shine.

Conditions are worse at Megiddo, she tells me, where nearly half a million have congregated in heat that hits 120° every day. I’ve already researched this in detail. Video of the site shows a tent-and-RV camp that sprawls for miles in all directions.

SEATMATE

They’ve been there, some of them, for four and half years.

I cue up for her a YouTube clip from one of Ben-David’s TED talks:

BEN-DAVID

The world doesn’t end like a Hollywood movie. We’ve been conditioned to imagine an isolated singularity, one cataclysmic calamity like the asteroid cloud that killed off the dinosaurs. The slow-motion extinction we’re witnessing now is far closer to how the process is actually unfolding. A million deaths at a time, five million, ten million. In the last fourteen days twenty million have perished. In eighteen months, a hundred and ninety million. This is how the world ends. It’s not “going to happen.” It is happening.

26

PARATROOPERS

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, our 797 is on the ground and Manning is clashing with a new antagonist.

A few minutes before landing, the aircraft’s first officer had hiked back from the cockpit to deliver a message, received on the plane’s secure radio and passed now to Manning as a handwritten note.

Manning,

Upon deplaning, you will be met by Lt. Dana Peled.

She is the operations officer of the reserve paratroop battalion

that I command. Lt. Peled will expedite your passage through Security and Customs and will transport you to my location.

B-D.

MANNING

What is this bullshit?

Manning thanks the first officer but he’s furious. He hands me the note. I can feel the heat radiating from his shoulders.

Indeed Lieutenant Peled is waiting for us at the mouth of the jetway, accompanied by a male soldier, a sergeant. She’s a tall, attractive brunette with long hair pulled tight into a bun beneath her paratrooper’s red beret. She welcomes us (the male sergeant, named Giora, has brought bottled water and trail mix) and apologizes for Major Ben-David’s absence.