The Ezekiel Option by Joel Rosenberg

Author:Joel Rosenberg
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-03-06T03:00:00+00:00

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 - 8:12 A.M. - HIGHWAY I TO JERUSALEM

Bennett stared out the window.

Cruising up Highway 1 toward Jerusalem in a bulletproof Chevy Sub-urban, he would arrive at the King David Hotel in less than an hour.

By noon he'd be in a closed-door meeting with Israeli prime minister David Doron, despite the fact that it was the Jewish Sabbath.

He knew the first question that would come out of Doron's mouth: Was the U.S. prepared to stand by Israel militarily if Moscow pressed for war?

He just wished he had a good answer.

Bennett's thoughts inevitably tried to turn to Erin, but it was too painful. There was still no word, no leads, nothing at all to go on. He couldn't afford to let himself become emotionally paralyzed. There was too much to do.

He blinked hard and tried to refocus. He stared out the window and shook his hand in

'

wonder at all the changes the last few years had brought. Where there were once villages and farmland stretching out on either side of Highway 1, there were now oil wells as far as the eye could see. It was ugly. But with so much money pouring into the country, few Israelis seemed to care at the moment.

What a revolution Israel had been through. It had all begun in 1999 when a marine geologist working for National Geographic—the same geologist who'd located the sunken Titanic in the North Atlantic—was trolling the floor of the Mediterranean with high-tech sonar equipment near the Israeli city of Ashdod, just north of Gaza. He was looking for the shipwrecks of ancient Phoenician vessels, and he found them—two of them, in fact—dating back to 750 years before the time of Christ.

But that wasn't all.

The geologist had also stumbled upon the most spectacular energy discovery in the history of the Holy Land—enormous, hidden, under-water reserves capable of producing 30 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, every day, for decades, perhaps centuries.

Bennett could still remember the jolt of adrenaline he felt on September 15, 2000, when he'd read a startling front-page headline in the New York Times: "GAS DEPOSITS OFF ISRAEL AND GAZA OPENING VISIONS OF JOINT VENTURES."

That story was quickly followed on September 28, 2000, by another dramatic headline in the Times: "ARAFAT HAILS BIG GAS FIND OFF THE COAST OF GAZA STRIP."

And that, it turned out, was just the beginning.

Soon the Jerusalem Post, Israel's English-language daily, ran a head-line declaring, "NATURAL GAS, OIL FOUND IN DEAD SEA."

By May 4, 2004, Haaretz—one of the largest Hebrew daily news-papers in Israel— ran a story headlined "OIL VALUED AT $6 BILLION DISCOVERED EAST OF KFAR SAVA," reporting that an Israeli company had first found traces of oil at the site the previous September but that new tests were leading to a stunning new conclusion: "There could be reserves of 980 million barrels of oil at the Meged-4 well east of Kfar Sava." And maybe more.

The prospects were tantalizing. What if there was more?

With McCoy at his side, Bennett had

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