Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages Read online

  “We can’t get someone inside!”

  “Then how are we going to do this, Buck? Think, man. Think what we’d have to know before we go charging in there. Do they keep high-profile prisoners separate from the general population, and if they do, where?”

  “All right. You’ve made your point.”

  “I haven’t even started, Buck. You guys are all enamored with my military training, but you don’t know the half of it. Most of this is just common sense. Besides knowing exactly where Chloe is, we’d have to know the shortest distance in and out. We’d have to know what doors or windows might be vulnerable. We’d have to know how much firepower we’d need, and, Buck, you tell me what that means. What will determine our munitions needs?”

  “The size and strength of the doors and windows?”

  “Well, that, yeah. But it’s their personnel, buddy. How many of them are we going to run into, and what will their resources be? If you could tell me Chloe was in the northeast corner of the second floor and how many GC I’d have to get through to get there, then how many are guarding her and what kind of weapons they are toting, I might be able to plan a mission for you. Otherwise, we’re messing around, guessing, and we’re likely to get a strike mission force wiped out.”

  They reached the end of the runway and sat in the grass in the darkness. “Then how does anybody ever pull off a raid like that?”

  George cradled his weapon in his lap. “It’s never easy, but there are prerequisites, and in the good old days when people weren’t identified by a mark, you could usually get somebody into

  a place. Somebody has to have a thorough working knowledge of the building, maybe even access to the blueprint, the floor plan, the utility systems.”

  “I can’t just do nothing, George. What’re we going to do?”

  Buck saw the landing lights before he heard the roar of the Gulfstream’s engines. He signaled with a powerful flashlight that the area was clear, and within minutes the plane was down and hidden, and Rayford and Mac were disembarking.

  The four shook hands without a word; then Buck and Rayford embraced. Neither was much for showing emotion, but they held each other tight for longer than Buck could remember doing before. They loaded the Hummer, but before they got in, Mac said,

  “I feel twenty years older. Do we have to sit in a cramped space again right away?”

  “We’re in no hurry,” Rayford said. “Stretch your legs.”

  “I don’t mind getting back a little late anyway,” Buck said.

  “We’ve had no GC activity today, but they’ll be snooping around later for sure.”

  Rayford said, “You don’t suppose Chloe got them started in a whole new direction by claiming she was thirty miles from home?”

  Buck chuckled. “Hardly, but you got to hand it to her for trying. Actually, it’ll be interesting to see where they are tonight.

  That should give us an idea where they picked her up.”

  “Now you’re thinking,” George said. “It’ll also give us an idea how long it’ll take them to discover the compound and how much time we’ve got to get out of there.”

  ________

  “I really mustn’t be gone too long,” Naomi said. Chang sat with her beside a pillar that made up part of the portico in the courtyard

  of the Urn Tomb. “Now if I had someone like you who could fill in for me, I could be gone longer.”

  “But with who?” he said, and she laughed. “Seriously, though, I’m curious about your background.”

  “I love remembering, Chang, though it is also a sad story. My father was a businessman, a restauranteur. He owned several eateries in the area around Teddy Kollek Stadium. Do you know Jerusalem?”

  “No.”

  “He was honest and good and people liked him, respected him.

  That is very important in my culture.”

  “Mine too.”

  “I suppose in all cultures a person’s reputation is paramount.

  But my father took great pride in his many friends and his successful businesses. He provided well for my mother and me. He was also a devoutly religious man, and so our family was too.

  Synagogue every Sabbath. We knew the Scriptures. We loved God. I believe my father was proud of that, but not in a bad way—

  you know what I mean?”

  Chang nodded.

  “About eight years ago—this was when I was eleven—my

  mother fell ill. Cancer. Cancer of the . . . well, you’ll forgive me if I am too shy to mention it. We do not know each other well enough for me to be comfortable about it.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “She was very ill. My father was so good to her. He had the money to hire help for her, full-time help. But he would not do that. He hired part-time help, but he cut his workday in half and spent every afternoon and all night with her. He was a wonderful example to me and made me want to help even more. We loved my mother, and my father said we should consider it a privilege to

  serve her the way she had served us for so many years. He made her happy despite her pain.”

  “He seems like a wonderful man.”

  “Oh, he is, Chang. He always has been. Even before. Well, just after my twelfth birthday, my mother, she took a turn for the worse and he had to put her in the hospital. The doctors told him there was no hope. But my father did not believe in ‘no hope.’ He believed in God. He told the doctors and anyone who wanted to grieve my mother too early that we would show them—he and his little girl would show them. And how were we going to show them? We were going to pray, and God was going to work, and my mother was going to be healed.”

  Chang heard the anguish in Naomi’s voice, and then she fell silent. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can finish another time.”

  “No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s just that it does not seem so long ago now. I can finish. I want to. One night my father came home from the hospital late, and he was upset. I did not go with him on school nights, only in the afternoons. I asked him, ‘Father, what is it? Is Mother worse?’ and he said, ‘No, but she might as well be.’

  “That frightened me. He had never had a cross word with her, never said a bad thing about her, at least not in front of me. But she told him something that he said was only because of all the drugs she had been prescribed. She wept and told him that wasn’t true, that she really believed it. I said, ‘What, Father, what?’ But he burst into tears and said he had raised his voice and told her that she should stop talking nonsense.

  “‘I made her weep,’ he told me, crying, crying his eyes out.

  ‘The woman I love with all my soul, who is dying before my eyes, I upset her.’ And I said, ‘But, Father, she upset you too. What did she say?’ He said, ‘She told me, “Jesus is Messiah.” I demanded to

  know where she had heard such heresy, but she would not tell me for fear I would get someone in trouble, which I would have!’

  “I did not know what to think. I gasped when he repeated what she had said. He told me that he had told her that he would not allow me to see her again if she kept up with such nonsense, but that only made me cry. That very night we were called to the hospital, told that if we wanted to see her alive, we must come now.

  “All the way he wept and blamed himself for being cross with her. ‘I caused this!’ he said over and over. He pleaded with God to spare her, made promises to him. I had never seen him so pitiful.

  We were with her when she died. Her last words to us—and they were to us both, Chang, because she looked directly into my eyes and spoke, and then she looked at my father and said the same thing—her last words were, ‘I go to be with God. Study the prophecies. Study the prophecies.’”

  “Wow!”

  “I did not come to Jesus in the way you might think. The tidy conclusion might be that my father and I went home and studied the prophecies and came to believe the way my mother did. But it didn’t happen that way. My father was so heartbroken that he became angry with God and qu
it studying the Scriptures at all. We stopped praying. We stopped going to synagogue.

  “He still loved me and took care of me, but he tried to lose himself in his work. His friends only pitied him, because he was not the same man he had been.

  “I could not get my mother’s last words out of my head, but my father forbade me to study anything in the Bible, let alone the prophecies. I was sad, so sad, because my life had changed radically with the loss of my mother and, really, the loss of my father as I had known him. Whenever I suggested that God could

  help us or the synagogue might comfort us or we might find some answers in the Bible, he would not hear of it.

  “I was thirteen when the disappearances happened. That got everyone’s attention, even my father’s. Scared to death, we turned back to God, back to synagogue, back to the Scriptures. I began studying the prophecies, and though I was young, I couldn’t avoid seeing what Mother had seen when someone pointed them out to her. My father wouldn’t admit it, but I think he started to see it too.

  “When we heard that the renowned biblical scholar, Dr. Tsion Ben-Judah, was going to speak on international television about his conclusion about Messiah from the Bible prophecies, we watched it together. The next day everyone was talking about the trouble Dr. Ben-Judah had gotten himself into by declaring that Messiah had already come, but my dad and I were excited about more than that. He found a New Testament, and we began reading it every night.

  “When we got to the story of the Jewish man Saul, who

  became Paul, my father was overwhelmed. We read faster and faster and more and more, and we came to believe that Jesus was Messiah and that he could save us from our sins. We memorized First Corinthians 15:1-4: ‘Brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.’

  “All my father and I wanted to do was what Paul had done.

  Receive. Receive that truth by which Paul said we could be saved.

  We didn’t know what to say or do, so we just prayed and told God we believed it and wanted to receive it. It was weeks before we

  read enough and knew enough to understand what we had done and what it all meant. Father finally found in the back of the New Testament a guide to salvation that talked about accepting and believing and confessing. We studied what it called the road to salvation—all those verses that tell that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, that the wages of sin is death, but that the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

  Chang sat looking at her. “It’s always something different,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about people becoming believers, and each one is unique. I mean, they all get to the same place, but for some it was the disappearances. For you, it was your mother, really.”

  “We just can’t wait to see her again, Chang. And it won’t be long.”

  ________

  Chloe couldn’t tell whether she had actually been dozing or was just zoned out when Florence made a loud entrance about midnight. She unceremoniously poked the energy bar through the cage and let it drop. Chloe wanted to leap on it, tear it open, and gobble it down, but her pride was still working. She turned to look, but she didn’t move.

  “Dinner, honey,” Florence said. “I recommend a white wine, like tap water.”

  Chloe didn’t move until she left. She ate half the bar, which was flat and tasteless. But Chloe had always been told the greatest seasoning was hunger. She wrapped the rest, determined to save it for breakfast. But the few calories she had just ingested merely triggered her appetite. She was able to hold out for about another half hour, then ate the rest.

  Though she was still hungry, the bar had taken enough of the edge off that she was able to doze. She dreamed first of her family.

  Buck and Kenny were close enough to smell, but she couldn’t reach to hold them, to touch or kiss them. Then images danced of their horrified faces, repulsed by her. Did she have the mark? Was she hideously ugly? They grimaced and turned away.

  Chloe ran to a mirror and found herself headless. She fainted, and when she hit the floor, she woke up. She sat on the cot, her face in her hands, rocking. This was going to be harder than she had ever imagined. She would not for an instant be fooled or even tortured into giving the GC an iota of what they wanted. She just prayed that if she was not going to be sprung somehow —and she couldn’t imagine how anyone could pull that off—her execution would be quick.

  ________

  “I’ve come to a hard decision, Buck,” Rayford said. It was two o’clock in the morning in the underground compound. Rayford sat with Buck in Rayford’s quarters, where Buck would spend the night. Ming was staying at his and Chloe’s place so Kenny could be in his own bed. Sebastian and a young associate were on watch.

  “I don’t want to hear it, do I?” Buck said.

  “Probably not. But for some reason God put me in this

  position, and even though I’m biased and have almost as much vested interest as you do, I need to take leadership on this one.

  Mac is asleep. When he is fully rested, he’s going to Wisconsin to pick up Zeke. He’ll drop him in Petra to start work on our next assignment.”

  Buck hung his head. “Our next assignment is not right here?”

  “Hear me out. Mac is going to go on to clear out of Al Basrah and move to Petra. On the way I’ll have him call Otto Weser, the

  guy I told you about. He’ll be in the palace and should be able to dig up what’s going on in Al Hillah. Carpathia’s assistant knows Nicolae’s planning a meeting in Baghdad of the ten heads of state from around the world. We believe that’s when he’ll add all the other regions’ manpower to the armies he’s already marshaling in Israel.”

  “Dad, I’m sorry, but I don’t really care about anywhere but right here at the moment. It looks like everything is coming together for all kinds of activity over there, but meanwhile, we’re hanging Chloe out to dry.”

  “Buck, we’ve both been without sleep way too long. Believe me, I’ve done as much crying and praying and worrying as you have, which is—”

  “I doubt that.”

  “—exhausting. I need to rest, and so do you.”

  “Dad, I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

  “I didn’t say anything about sleeping. Get your clothes off, stretch out, put your feet up. Give your body a break even if you can’t turn your brain off. We need you sharp, Buck.”

  “You’re telling me I’m not going out with George tonight.”

  “I’m not even letting George go, Buck. Talk about somebody we don’t want to burn out. He’s got a good team that can track the GC if they show tonight. All we want to know is where they’re starting their canvasing. I’m impressed that people have already started packing, getting ready to go. Lionel’s got planes and pilots lined up. We have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

  Buck leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “I trust you, Dad, and I know you have Chloe’s and my best interests at heart. But I don’t get this. When do we start scoping out headquarters, figuring how to get in there or how to get next to somebody who would know something about the place?”

  “You and I can see how close we can get tomorrow night. If George is available, we’ll take him.”

  “But time’s wasting.”

  Rayford sat back and sighed. “Job one with me is conserving resources, and that includes human ones. Our minds tell us we have energy because we can think of nothing else, but running on adrenaline like that will wear us down quicker, make us rash, ineffective. Trust me on this, Buck. I want her out of there as much as you do, but she’s not the only person we’re accountable f
or.”

  “But I want to know as soon as the reconnaissance party knows anything about—”

  “No, now I’ve left word that we are not to be disturbed until midmorning except in an emergency.”

  “Dad!”

  “Knowing something you can’t act on right away anyway is no help. Now no more talk. Let’s get some rest.”

  ________

  Like everyone else in Petra at high noon, Chang preferred working inside. He had discovered, through much trial and error, that he was able to tap into everything in New Babylon from where he was. The problem was, all the decision makers were gone to Al Hillah. When the plan to beat them there and bug the place had fizzled, he had been assigned to come up with a way that Otto Weser could feed him information. That all depended on what hardware might have been left that could be tapped from Petra.

  Chang worried that he might have become too obvious in his interest in Naomi, wanting to spend every spare minute with her.

  He decided not to assume anything and stayed at his computer over lunchtime. He was hungry, but he could also wait for the evening manna.

  Chang was thrilled when Naomi approached shyly with a basket. “Hey, workaholic,” she said. “Don’t go starving on me.”

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Brought you some honey wafers.”

  ________

  “Hail Carpathia” had become just part of the background for Chloe by now. She guessed it was about four o’clock in the morning. She had tried to keep her ears covered as she dozed, but when she drifted off, her hands fell away. That was why she heard the door and held her breath.

  From the heavy footsteps and the jangling keys, she could tell it was Florence. What could she want? It sounded as if she was close to the cage, and Chloe smelled food. A burger with all the trimmings. And the sound of a straw, probably in a cold soft drink.

  Right then it all hit Chloe as the nectar of the gods.

  She slowly turned and in the low light saw Florence sit on the floor and lean back against the cage. Chloe rested on one elbow and let out her breath.

  “You awake?” Florence said.

  “’Fraid so.”