The crews finish loading the equipment—titanium tanks for the SROG system. Titanium apparently is more impermeable even than stainless steel in corrosive environments. Our convoy is three trucks now instead of two, escorted by the same three Humvees.

What is it like to drive in a khamsin? Through our truck’s windshield (I remain with Rachel in six-by #2), which is caked with dust so thick that high noon feels like midnight, the ribbon of desert road, half liquid and whipped relentlessly by a foot-high stream of sandstorm grit, is virtually invisible. Stones the size of golf balls bound across the road surface and pound into our tires and mudguards.

In the cab, speech is impossible. Our “deuce-and-a-half” weighs six tons empty, nine loaded. We are buffeted like a microbus. Our driver, Hemi, wrestles the wheel gamely. How he can see the road, I have no idea.

The convoy is derailed again at Almog, south of Jericho. Migrant riots have produced a mass evacuation. Highway 90 north is closed.

We turn west toward Jerusalem. Ben-David’s plan is to take Highway 1 to 6, the Rabin Highway, and head north on this route to Haifa. But the westbound lanes are backed up for miles with inhabitants fleeing toward the coast. Our convoy struggles past Wadi Qelt and Khan al-Ahmar.

This is the West Bank. The territories. Checkpoints manned by security men of the Palestinian Authority and others by soldiers of the IDF halt our convoy over and over. We reach the outskirts of East Jerusalem at sundown in a standstill crush. It takes four hours to cross from Highway 417 at Jahalin to the Old City, a distance of less than five miles.

Through all this, Manning stays glued to Ben-David. When he’s not physically at his side, his eye remains on him. I do the same for Rachel. But while Manning’s job is to protect Ben-David from Instancer, mine is to keep watch on Rachel to shield Manning. How on edge are we? A column of vehicles is defenseless in densely packed traffic, and our convoy’s situation is worse because of the anarchy and civil disorder within the city.

Demonstrators, Israelis as well as Palestinians and migrants, apparently have run amok protesting a reduced ration of drinking water. Our convoy enters the city from the southeast, from Bethlehem via the Jericho road. Firemen are knocking down blazes in wrecked and looted storefronts; they use chemical foam instead of water. Police in riot gear have cordoned off half the city. Our vehicles snake through the bedlam, thanks only to Dana, in the lead Humvee, flashing her ID and talking smack at each checkpoint.

Our party overnights in the trucks in a neighborhood called Abu Tor outside the Old City. Time is 0130, April 30. Drivers catch what sleep they can sprawled across the bench seats in their cabs; everyone else tosses in pools of sweat atop the stretch-wrapped cargo. All night the windstorm continues unabated.