Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages Page 15

  People watching said the wire somehow wrapped itself around the helmet. The wire never broke, and after I had stretched it as far as it would go, it flew back and came forward again like a slingshot

  and flung the helmet at me, hit me in the back of the head, and knocked me out.”

  “But here you are. And no matter how I sounded earlier, I’m glad to have you with us.”

  Of all things, that crazy story got Buck obsessing about decapitation. Losing Chloe was his main concern, of course, and he worried about her suffering. He couldn’t stand to think of her being violated, abused, tortured—he didn’t want to even consider all the possibilities. It was no consolation to know that even if she was martyred, he would see her in less than a year. What would that mean to Kenny?

  Worst of all, all he could think of was how Chloe would most likely die. Death was death and it shouldn’t make any difference, he knew. But if it came to that, if the GC made a public spectacle of her, as they certainly would, there was no way he could watch it.

  The idea of his beloved dying such an ugly, grotesque death made him ill.

  No question she would stay true to her faith to the end. He had heard stories of others, even watched as his old friend Steve Plank thumbed his nose at Carpathia and honored God before he died.

  Buck also knew that if it came to that, Chloe’s body would be new one day in heaven. But still, he was repulsed by the idea that the person most precious to him in the world might die in the worst possible way he could imagine.

  If he couldn’t push it from his mind’s eye now, how would it be if it actually happened? He sought out Rayford.

  “I’m really busy,” his father-in-law told him, “and you should be too. I’m not saying it’d take your mind off Chloe; it sure hasn’t mine. But you’d be more productive.”

  “I know, but I need a minute.”

  He told Rayford of his tormenting daydreams. To his surprise, Rayford’s lip began to quiver. His voice was thick. “I’ve been going through the same thing, Buck. I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “Really? This whole idea?”

  “Exactly. A father has a different take, you know. Imagine how you feel about Kenny. I was there when Chloe was born. Seems like yesterday she was a little red ball of squealing girl who could be comforted only by being tightly wrapped in a blanket and put on her mother’s chest. Then, to us, she was the most beautiful creature we had ever seen. We would have done anything for her, anything to protect her. That’s never changed. She’s grown up to be a beautiful woman, and somehow, even with all her injuries and disfigurements, I still see her that way.”

  “So do I.”

  “So, yes, Buck, I know what you’re thinking. We just have to be strong and try not to dwell on it. I don’t know what else to do.”

  ________

  Chang was walking Naomi to her quarters late at night. “I want to show you something on my computer tomorrow,” he said. “I discovered that the GCNN production chief’s solution to the plague of darkness was, I guess, to feel his way into the control room and find the switch that allows the international network feed to be remotely accessed by three or four of the major affiliates.”

  “Ingenious,” Naomi said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I was impressed. But I’m also excited. There is no block on my accessing it too, and I can override the affiliates with the system David Hassid had set up in New Babylon.”

  “I can’t wait to see it.”

  “It has unlimited capabilities, Naomi. When Cameron Williams gets here, we’ll work together and counteract the lies that the GC

  broadcasts, and we can do it immediately.”

  “Nothing they can do about it?”

  “Not that I can think of, short of starting a whole new network.

  They may think they have time to do that, but the end is closer than they know.”

  ________

  “So you drew the short straw, eh there, pardner?” Mac said.

  “I am sorry, Mr. McCullum,” Ree said, “but I do not

  understand that expression.”

  “Well, without getting into specifics, it means you got grunt duty.”

  They had studied the area through the periscope an hour before and determined they could get the Hummer out of the vehicle bay without being detected.

  “Driving you to the plane? No problem. I like to do it. I only wish I was flying you to Wisconsin. I have flown a Gulfstream only once before, and I liked it.”

  “If you’ve got so little experience, I’m glad you’re not flying me, know what I mean?”

  A little more than three hours later, Mac touched down in Hudson, Wisconsin, where he was met by the hulking Gustaf Zuckermandel Jr., better known as Zeke.

  “I wish you could meet everybody in Avery,” the twenty-five-year-old said. “But even the guy who drove me has already headed back. Took us an hour to drag my stuff into the underbrush.”

  Mac followed him to his cache of boxes and trunks. “You sure we want to be lugging this stuff all the way to the plane in broad daylight, Zeke?”

  “Unless you want to wait till dark, but there’s no need. This is the part of the country the GC forgot. I haven’t seen a Peacekeeper since I got here.”

  As they were loading, Mac said, “No second thoughts about leaving? You must be close to these people.”

  “Lots of second thoughts, but I figure a guy’s got to go where he’s called. I was called here, and now I’m being called there. Who woulda thought a no-account like me would ever get called anywhere?”

  “Well, you’re the best document and appearance man I ever saw, and I hear you really blossomed here.”

  “Oh, that’s not true if you want to know the actual fact, Mr.

  McCullum. Thing is, there wasn’t anything for me to do here as far as disguises and documents and such, because we flat didn’t need

  ’em. So I got real involved in the Bible studies, improved my reading and all that, and pretty soon the leader took me under his wing. I never got to teaching or preaching, but I helped out all I could. I liked it, like to stay busy. They gave me that assistant pastor title sort of as a gift.”

  “Honorary, eh?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “Well, I hope you were honored, because that really means something.”

  “I’m gonna miss everybody, but I got to tell you, I’m ready to get to Petra and just see the place. And to hook up again with Dr.

  Ben-Judah and Dr. Rosenzweig and you and all the others, well

  . . .”

  “And you’ve got a big job.”

  “You’re supposed to tell me about it.”

  ________

  Chloe more than woke up after almost four hours in the air. The drugs had worn off and she came to. And she was ravenous. An energy bar and whatever portion of shake she ingested before the Mickey kicked in had been all she’d eaten since seven the evening before she was abducted. That made it easy to pretend she was still unconscious.

  “What time is it here?” Jock’s companion said as the plane landed.

  “Coming up on noon, and I’m hungry,” Jock said. “You?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I’m going to feed the prisoner finally. Play a little good cop.

  Shoot her a little truth juice. See if we can’t get her to sing.”

  “She’s been a tough bird, hasn’t she?”

  “Tell me about it, Jess. I’d have been doing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ solo by now.”

  “What if she doesn’t flip? How long do you give it?”

  “If you can’t get to ’em somehow in the first forty-eight hours, more of the same isn’t going to be any more effective.”

  “Starvation isn’t a motivator?”

  “Would be for me, but I guess they’ve proved it with prisoners of war. The ones who can survive that first round of psychological and physical torture aren’t likely to ever break, no matter how long you keep it up.”

  As Chloe was
being carried down the jetway, Jock said, “This facility never had woman prisoners before we took it over. We’ll keep her in solitary. That’s the only real way to keep her separate from the rest of the population.”

  Chloe was laid out across the backseat of a large SUV, which she noticed had wire mesh on the windows and no locks or door handles on the inside. Jock handcuffed her anyway. “She’ll be coming to soon,” he explained. “Can’t be too careful.”

  When they stopped along the way, Chloe racked her brain for any idea of escape.

  Jock said, “I’ll get the food. You stay with her.”

  Chloe sat up. “I need to use the rest room.”

  Jock stared at her. “Seriously.”

  “I’d say.”

  “Well, I got no matron who can go with you. You’d have to use the men’s, and one of us would have to be in there with ya.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You want me to buy you one of those adult diapers?”

  “How far are we from where I can go?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  While Jock was inside, she tried to strike up a conversation with the man she had not gotten a look at until now. His mark was a 0, which meant he was from the United South American States.

  He was strikingly dark with perfect teeth. “You remind me of my husband,” she said.

  “That so?” he said.

  “Yeah, except he’s not ugly.”

  The man found that hilarious and turned to face her. “You’re funny,” he said. “Why would you want to antagonize me?”

  “You’re one of the people who are going to wind up killing me. Doesn’t look like I’m going to get to fight back, do any physical damage, so . . .”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Jock calls you Jess.”

  “Yeah. Jesse,” he said.

  “Hmm. Named after Jesus. That your real name? Jesus?” Chloe pronounced it in Spanish.

  “Matter of fact, yes, and I have a sister Maria.”

  “Is she also a Carpathianist?”

  “Of course.”

  “How disappointing that must be to your namesake.”

  Jock brought food and uncuffed her. The men tore into theirs, while Chloe sat behind the cage that separated her from the front seat. She said aloud, “Lord, thank you for this food. I pray that you will help me eat it slowly so it doesn’t make me sick, and that you will override any poisons Jock might have put in it. Give me strength to resist any efforts on the part of Jock or Jesse to get me to say anything I shouldn’t. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen.”

  ELEVEN

  “I LIKED ALBIE a lot,” Zeke said as Mac piloted them across the Atlantic. “He was a good man.”

  “You got that right, Z,” Mac said. “And for the life of me I can’t understand it, but I’m afraid he did something royally foolish to get himself killed.”

  “Doesn’t sound like him. You and Captain Steele and

  everybody used to listen to his ideas all the time.”

  “But everybody’s human. Let your guard down for a second, get overconfident, who knows? He was determined to see this lowlife he used to know, and even when he and I agreed I should go on to Petra and fly Rayford back to the States, Albie still wanted to go through with his little mission. It’s just as much my fault. Both of us thought it was something that had to get done—

  and fast. Now look where we are.”

  “Rayford said Tsion and Chaim are taking it hard.”

  “We all are. As much of this as we’ve gone through, it never gets easier. They’re planning a little service for Albie at Petra once everybody gets there from San Diego.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Oh, first wave ought to be arriving around three in the morning tomorrow. You and I got about a thirteen-hour jump on

  ’em. Once I drop you off, I got to get to Al Basrah and clear out Albie’s and my apartment, make sure we didn’t leave any clues for anybody. I’ll be taking a bigger plane from Petra ’cause I got to bring back this Otto Weser guy and his people.”

  “Captain Steele told me about him. So you’re bringing them back to Petra because of that Scripture about God’s people getting out of Babylon before God destroys it?”

  “Exactly.”

  Z sat staring at the ocean seven and a half miles below. “What must that have looked like when it was all blood?”

  “You can’t imagine.”

  “Hey, Mac, you think Rayford ought to be trusting Carpathia’s secretary?”

  “The way he tells the story, I guess. You don’t think so?”

  “I don’t trust anybody who isn’t a believer. What if she has second thoughts, sets a trap, gets you and this Otto ambushed?”

  “A pleasant thought.”

  “You said yourself, you can’t be too careful.”

  “Well,” Mac said, “we’ve got to know what’s happening in Al Hillah, and as much as possible what’s coming after that, and we don’t know how else to do it.”

  An hour later, Zeke dug through one of his bags and brought out a book. He looked self-conscious. “Something I wouldn’t even have been able to read when you knew me in Chicago.”

  “I was gonna say—”

  “But now that I’m reading better, I think I can do more things, you know, scientifically.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as I’m guessing you guys are asking me to come up with new looks and identities for a bunch of people.”

  “Right. All our old aliases and appearances have been

  compromised.”

  “Found this book in an abandoned library just across the Minnesota border. There’s all kinds of stuff in here I never even heard of before. New ways to change skin and eye color and all that. Fake scars and blemishes. How many people are we talking about?”

  “I think just five,” Mac said. “I think Ray wants getups for him and Buck and Sebastian and Smitty and me.”

  “Really? That’s it? I brought way too much stuff.”

  “What’d you bring?”

  “Everything I had left over from Chicago. GC uniforms at all levels, IDs, documents, stuff for women and men. This is going to be easy. I mean, it’ll take time, but I was afraid you’d need ten or twelve. The hardest one is going to be Mr. Sebastian, but I’ve already got an idea for him.”

  “Tell me.”

  Zeke put his book down, apparently so he could gesture with both hands. “The problem with your big people is that no matter what you do with them, you can’t make ’em smaller. You can make a small person big with padding and whatnot, but you can’t take pounds off the big ones.

  “But what I can do, see, is give George a whole new look, the look of an older man. So his size doesn’t look so threatening. It looks like it came on him from getting old, rather than from working out and military training. Might even give him a cane, glasses. Make him look like one of those old middle-aged guys who have gone to seed. Chop off that blond hair, give him a rim of white, put some lines in his face. All of a sudden instead of being a guy in his late twenties in perfect shape and huge, he’s thirty years older, slowed down by food, maybe diabetes, bad knees, bad feet, stooped a little. Add some padding around his middle, front and back, so he waddles. He’s not gonna threaten anybody.”

  “Brilliant. What do you do with me?”

  “Biggest giveaway with you is your Southern accent. Can you fake others? Can you be a Yank or a Brit?”

  “A Brit easier than a Yankee, that’s for sure.”

  “If you can be British, I can make you look that way. Tweeds and all.”

  ________

  Chloe’s guess about where she was headed was confirmed when Jock radioed ahead and the SUV was met by a phalanx of GC

  motorcycles and squad cars. They escorted the celebrated prisoner to the grounds of what had once been known as Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois.

  The place was a gothic house of horror that had been c
onverted from a state penitentiary to one of the GC’s largest international prisons. It had both male and female prisoners. In fact, the female population was second largest only to the Belgium Facility for Female Rehabilitation (Buffer).

  The first thing to hit Chloe was the crowd of media trucks jamming the entrance. Cameras pointed toward the SUV from every conceivable perch, and once the vehicle had passed, she looked back to see the crews scrambling for position in the vast courtyard.

  The yard had become legendary at Stateville during the last two and a half years. Prisoners were allowed there for only two reasons. They were herded past a gigantic bronze statue of Carpathia three times a day, where they were stopped in groups of thirty to fifty and allowed to kneel and worship, or they were in the yard to be executed. The yard had seven guillotines about thirty feet apart and positioned so that the sun baked them from dawn to dusk.

  Jock stopped the SUV just inside the yard. “Look at ’em there, sweetie,” he said. “Those blades get sharpened every night, but not a one of ’em’s ever been cleaned. No scraping, no washing, no rust inhibitors.

  “And you know those slots on each side, where the big blades slide down? Back when we were more humane, those were

  lubricated every time they were used. No more. Now the blades scrape along the sides, sometimes get hung up, get crooked, slow down. I mean, they still weigh enough that, even on a bad day, by

  the time they reach your neck, they’re gonna dig in at least three inches.

  “In the old days, a blade didn’t do its job, too bad for us. The sentence was to stick your head in there until the blade dropped. If it somehow didn’t kill you, well, you had taken your punishment.

  And don’t think that didn’t happen more than once. Lots of people walking around with severe neck wounds.

  “But now, blade doesn’t kill ya, we just hoist ’er again and let

  ’er go. Two, three times with a rusty, blood-caked blade that, like I say, is sharpened every night—that’ll do the trick.”

  About twenty feet before each guillotine stood a rickety wood table, also gray and weathered by the sun and wind. Each had two incongruous Bank of England chairs behind it, burnished redwood significantly less wind worn.