Reveille arrives at 0430. Our party wash with hand wipes, brush our teeth using thimble-splashes from water bottles.

The trucks roll out at 0510. Traffic is already dense with motor vehicles, many of which have apparently been in the streets all night trying to flee the city, and also with pedestrians pulling carts and wagons hauling families and their possessions. We have to shut down to keep from boiling over.

Six hours pass. Time is 1130 before we escape the warren of local streets and at last crawl onto Highway 1 West. The sun is high now. The dust storm has eased. For a mile or more, we make speed. But at Abu Ghosh, still inside the city limits, our column runs into an even more massive traffic jam. Police and emergency vehicles creep forward along the shoulders amid a chaos of honking horns, stalled and overheated cars, and ragged refugees in the hundreds, many carrying children or wheeling old folks and belongings, all tramping toward the coast on foot.

Our driver, Hemi, goes forward to investigate the holdup. I start to step out myself but the metal of the exterior door handle is so scorching from the sun that I jerk my hand back, cursing. “Stay in the cab,” calls Hemi. “Don’t be a hero.”

Manning stands on the roadside in the searing sun, packing the Zombie Killer, keeping watch over our convoy commander. Ben-David himself is on the military radio to Dana and Giora, seeking alternative routes. I check my phone for external temp: 121° F.

Hemi comes slogging back, his shirt soaked in sweat. He mounts to the cab. He’s wearing gloves on both hands. “Another water riot,” he says. Apparently mobs have attacked a convoy of tankers a few miles ahead.

We turn back for Highway 60. We will bypass Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the West Bank, and take mountain roads along the border with Jordan. “Might get a little breezy up there,” says Hemi.

Our convoy covers five miles or so, climbing all the way, with traffic thinning dramatically behind us.

The Ramallah road is as jammed as Highway 1. Dana, breaking the trail, signals for the convoy to veer right onto a bypass route. The vehicles follow in order, in second gear and then in first, onto an unpaved, single-track road that hugs on its left a parched basalt ridge and teeters on its right above the sharp, sere drop-off to the Jordanian desert.

Ten miles down the bypass one of the trucks behind us overheats. The convoy stops. As soon as the engines are shut off, the other two six-bys boil over. An hour is spent transferring coolant from one of the seawater evaporators in the cargo bays to the radiators of the trucks.