The echoes from the shattering of the earth were as loud as the actual cleaving, and as the tanks and missiles and cannons and personnel armaments were fired in panic or from being shaken to their core, the projectiles rose vertically and eventually dropped back down onto the plunging armies. Smoke and fire rose in great belches from the colossal gorge that appeared to reach the bowels of hell. The roar of racing engines, whose drivetrains propelled steel tracks or wheels that merely spun in thin air, could not cover the screams of troops who had been just seconds from squashing their prey and now found themselves hurtling to their deaths.
Rayford and all those around him pulled their hands from their ears and thrust them out wide to keep their balance as, still on their knees, they were rocked by aftershocks. It was as if they surfed on unsolid ground as the earth slowly healed itself. The walls of the chasm came back together as the Red Sea must have millennia before, and the loose, rocky topsoil was suddenly new. The dust settled, and quietness wafted over the assembled.
Michael was gone. Chaim slowly rose and addressed the people. “As long as you are on your knees, what better time to thank the God of creation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Thank him who sits high above the heavens, above whom there is no other. Thank the One in whom there is no change, neither shadow of turning. Praise the holy One of Israel. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!”
Enoch turned out to be an incongruously named Spaniard who carried, of all things, a cheap, hardbound Bible, the kind you would find in a hotel or a pew. He too was strangely dressed, wearing expensive shoes with missing laces and no socks, khaki pants, and a tank top–type shirt. These people, Chloe decided, looked like they had raided a Salvation Army barrel.
Enoch conferred with the others, then motioned Chloe around the corner to the main entrance, where she waited while he released lock after lock. Finally the inner door was open, and Enoch crossed the shallow lobby to push open the outer door. “We have limited food supplies,” he said, as he held the door for her.
“I’m not looking for food,” she said. “I was just curious about the light.”
“We thought we were the only ones left in the city,” he said. “We run the camera just in case but are just days from shutting it down to conserve energy.”
“I have so many questions,” Chloe said.
“So do we.”
“I’m afraid I can’t say much,” she said. “I’ll understand if you choose not to, either.”
“We have nothing to hide,” Enoch said.
“What is this place?”
“It was once a currency exchange. But it adjoins the basement of an old office building that was abandoned. Since they were connected, we thought it would be safer for us to stay largely underground, especially since there was a safe standing open. We never found the combination, so we do not close it all the way, but some prefer to sleep in it.”
Enoch led Chloe through the old exchange lobby, where the curious who had eyed her through the window now shyly greeted her and stared. Just past the door and down the hall stood the huge, walk-in vault, and she had to assume this was a bank in one of its first manifestations. No currency exchange, even in Chicago, would need a vault that large.
“How many of you are there?” Chloe asked.
“As of last night, thirty-one.”
“You’re not serious.”
Enoch cocked his head and smiled. “Why would I not be?”
“What are you doing here? How did you get here?”
“Well,” he said, pushing open a door that led to a large-pillared basement room, “I’m sure that’s what my friends and I want to know from you.” She stepped in to meet everyone’s curious and wary eyes.
Rayford was on his walkie-talkie to Operation Eagle personnel. “Let’s step it up, people. I want constant rounds of chopper hops to get these people inside Petra. Building materials and miscellaneous stuff flown or carried in. We believe Carpathia made a major blunder and used our Mizpe Ramon airstrip rather than destroying it, so we can use it to take off and get back to our homelands before he finds out what happened here. No one is left to tell him, so for now he has to assume he has simply lost radio contact.
“When Micah is inside, our mission is accomplished. Good-bye and Godspeed.”
Rayford clicked off the walkie-talkie and conference-phoned Trib Force members, old and new, among the crowd. “Let’s be ready to get home and get Tsion. He’s got a speaking engagement scheduled here.”
CHAPTER 16
Chloe sat in a cheap metal folding chair surrounded by a wide-eyed mix of cross-cultural people in their twenties and thirties. She had many questions, but they insisted on asking theirs first. Clearly they were true believers, but still she prayed silently, pleading with God for peace about telling them of the Tribulation Force.
“None of you have been outside since the bombing of the city?” she said.
They shook their heads. Enoch carried the conversation. “If we come to believe it is safe, all of us will take a walk before dawn. Now tell us more.”
Chloe took a deep breath. “You vouch for everyone in here, Enoch?”
“Check our marks,” he said.
Chloe knew that was unnecessary. And she saved her two biggest revelations till last. “The spiritual mentor I have told you about is Jewish. He was a rabbi. He is Dr. Tsion Ben-Judah.”
The group sat, obviously stunned, many smiling, others shaking their heads. Finally a Latino said, “Ben-Judah lives in Chicago?”
She nodded. “And I am Chloe Steele Williams.”
Enoch leaned toward her, trembling. “And we are hungry,” he said, making the others laugh.
“You look it,” she said. “What have you been living on?”
“Canned goods and dry goods. We’ve been slowly rationing them, but they’re fast running out. If Dr. Ben-Judah is right and we have three and a half years to go, we’re not going to make it. Do you think the co-op might—”
“Send a couple back with me and I’ll load them up with enough to feed you for a month. Then we’ll figure a way you can contribute to the co-op and start trading for food and supplies.”
Several stood to volunteer. “We also want to travel,” Enoch said, “to help other people, to tell them the truth. We’re desperate for a chance to do that.”
“We ought to be able to manage it, in time,” she said. “Now tell me your story.”
Laslos Miklos had been used to an affluent lifestyle, owning a lucrative lignite-mining business in Ptolemaïs, Greece, before the disappearances. But when he and his wife became believers in Christ, his hundreds of trucks and dozens of buildings became fronts for the efforts of the Greek underground church, which became the largest in the United Carpathian States.
The Greek Jesus-followers lived on the edge of danger, but for a time it seemed Nicolae Carpathia was more interested in projecting an image of tranquillity in the region named for him than in rooting out dissidents. Laslos did not think he and his fellow believers became overconfident, but somehow one of their secret meeting places had been discovered, someone caved, and the largest assembly had been raided. Many were martyred, the rest scattered.
Laslos lost his wife to the guillotine—also his pastor and his pastor’s wife, plus dozens more adults and many teenagers. He had not been at the meeting the night of the raid and now lived with guilt. Was there something he could have done? Though he still felt the hand of God on his life, the Lord was strangely silent about his blame. Laslos was the most prominent among those who had escaped and immediately went into hiding, north of the city.
He feared that a hideout connected in any way to his business would easily be discovered. But he knew of a long-abandoned dump surrounded by mountains of debris, including soil and gravel and chunks of concrete. With the help of trusted friends, he dug himself a dirt-walled chamber where he slept during the day, far below ground and with just enough room for plumbing, a cot, and a small television. In the dead of night, when the wall
s seemed to close in on him, he would steal away to connect with other believing desperadoes, who then hooked up with clandestine members of the International Commodity Co-op, where they were supplied with food and other necessities.
From those brief, terror-filled meetings grew tiny replicas of the former underground church that had been so vibrant. Laslos and his friends shared with each other what they knew of the rest of the surviving church and passed precious messages back and forth. The few who had wireless computers and enough power downloaded and printed Tsion Ben-Judah’s daily messages and Buck Williams’s The Truth cyberzine. To Laslos these were more priceless than food and water.
The squat, heavyset, fifty-six-year-old widower retained huge, rocklike muscles from his early days of manual labor in the mines. Now he stayed out in the night for as long as he dared, keeping to side and back streets. Sleeping during the day helped keep his claustrophobia in check. More than once he found himself praying that he would wake up in heaven, reunited with his wife and other loved ones.
Late one morning he was awakened by footsteps in the gravel above his hideaway. As quietly as a man of his girth and age could manage, Laslos moved to the edge of his bed and slipped onto all fours on the wood floor. He painfully crept a few feet to where he could reach his handgun, a classic revolver he had never fired, not even on a practice range. It was, however, loaded and—he believed—in working order. A man of peace all his life, he no longer wondered whether he would shoot to kill a Global Community Peacekeeper or Morale Monitor who threatened him or any believer.
The sun cast dusty beams between the cracks of the door over the top of the chamber and the rickety wood planks leading down into the space. The door was level with the ground, and its topside had been inlaid with gravel to blend in. As Laslos stood near the bottom plank, his neck awkwardly craned, staring at the underside of the door, he cocked the revolver and held his breath. The footsteps were atop the door now, tentative, as if aware of the subtle difference between a metal surface with rigid, glued-on stones and the hard-packed but loose gravel of the real ground.
Laslos used his free hand to guide himself and started slowly up the planks, listening over the thud of his pulse for any clue to whether his intruder was alone. When he drew within inches of the door, he leaned to peer through a peephole undetectable from the other side and found himself looking from the boots to the head of a teenage boy, bare armed and wearing neither uniform nor badge nor gun.
Suddenly the boy squatted, as if studying the door. “Mr. Miklos?” he whispered.
Laslos had to calculate countless options at once. If this boy was undercover GC, Laslos had been found out. He could pretend to be fooled, open his door to the boy, and surprise him with a bullet between the eyes. But if the boy was a believer and had been directed there by one of Laslos’s friends, he should threaten the comrade with a bullet for stupidity. Either way, for some reason this lad believed Laslos was there, and he was.
He couldn’t risk slaughtering his visitor without cause. “Who goes there?” Laslos said quietly in Greek.
The boy dropped to all fours, as if overcome. “Oh, Mr. Miklos!” he rasped desperately. “I am Marcel Papadopoulos! My parents—”
“Shh!” Laslos interrupted, uncocking the weapon and tossing it down onto his bed. He unbolted the locks and grunted as he pushed up the door. “Are you alone?”
“Yes!”
“Hurry!”
The boy turned and nimbly backed down the steps. Laslos returned to refasten the locks. When he came back down, the boy was sitting in a corner on the floor, his knees pulled up. Even in the low light of the underground, the boy’s mark was plain on his forehead.
Laslos sat on the bed, realizing the gun was gone. How could he have been such a fool? “I knew your parents, of course,” he began carefully. “I knew you too, did I not?”
“Not really,” Marcel said. “I was in a different house church from my parents.”
Laslos had seen this boy with his parents occasionally, he was sure of it. “Did you not think I’d notice you took my fake pistol?”
“Oh, sir! I was just looking at it!” He held it out and Laslos wrenched it away. “It looks and feels so real, Mr. Miklos! Is it really fake?”
“Hardly. How can you be so stupid and survive on the street? What made you think I would not just grab another weapon and shoot you dead?”
“I don’t know, sir. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Who sent you?”
“The old toothless one with the car. He calls himself K.”
“I should wring his neck.”
“Don’t blame him, please, sir. He warned me not to come during the day, but I have run out of places to go. The GC is thin here with so many assigned to Israel, but they are on their way back, and there is no more grace period for taking Carpathia’s mark. I have seen people dragged off the street.”
“Your parents, weren’t they with Pastor Demetrius and—?”
“They were. And so was I. But a believer who had infiltrated the GC accused me of being an American and dragged me out, then let me go. I gave him my parents’ names, and I have been praying ever since that he got them out too. But I know they would have found me if he had.”
“He did not. We know who he is, Marcel. He also was able to get a young woman out.”
“I have met her! Tall, brown hair. Georgiana something. But she was not from our church. She found her way to one of the co-op stations. Her story was just like mine. How did this man do it?”
Laslos sighed heavily. “Frankly, he blundered with you. He used another boy’s name for you. . . .”
“Yes, I told him the only other name I knew from in there. Paulo Ganter.”
“Well, this fake GC told authorities at the prison that you were Paulo and that he was deporting you back to the United North American States. But when Ganter took the mark of loyalty, his ID checked out, and they quickly realized someone else was gone. By process of elimination, they know your name. He must have done the same with the girl. You may not have marks they can see, but you are marked young people. Fortunately your liberator was gone before they realized what he had done.”
“How I would love to thank that man. He’s American.”
“I know,” Laslos said. “I know him.”
“Could I get a message to him?”
“It could be done.”
The boy sighed and his shoulders sagged. “What am I going to do now, Mr. Miklos? I am out of options.”
“You can see there is no room for you here.”
“We could expand.”
“We? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, son. This is no way to live. You need a new look, a new identity, and you must continue to keep from being seen by the GC at all costs.”
Rayford assigned Leah and Hannah to search out the computer savvy among the Israelis. “Tell them that once they have located the computers in Petra, our man in New Babylon will contact them on-line and provide information on how to get the network up and running.”
Rayford, Albie, Mac, and George joined dozens of others to resume chopper duty, making run after run to get Israeli believers inside. Chaim was in seclusion, preparing to address the entire populace when they were settled. Buck had temporarily taken the duties David would have had: getting building and miscellaneous supplies in and organized so builders and finishers could get started. Already volunteers were passing out blankets and helping people get settled.
Rayford was nearly overwhelmed with the attitude of the Israelis. Maybe because of their faith, maybe because of the miracles, maybe because of the novelty of what they were about, they displayed cooperation and a camaraderie Rayford found unique. Considering they were uprooted from their homeland and targeted by the entire evil world system, he would not have been surprised to see manifestations of impatience and anger.
Rayford sent Abdullah bouncing over the desert in one of the most able four-wheel-drive vehicles they could recruit to rendezvous with his co-op conta
ct from Jordan. The contact was bringing in a long-range jet with room for everybody heading back to Chicago. All the co-op guy wanted in exchange for the loan of his plane was to be delivered to Crete on the Trib Force’s way to the States and to be brought back from there on their way back.
That gave Rayford the idea that they should stop in Greece to check on their brothers and sisters. Trouble was, Albie was the only one left with other-than-suspect papers. During one of his hops into Petra, Rayford phoned Lukas Miklos.
Chang noticed on his monitor evidence that his bug of the Phoenix 216 had kicked in. He couldn’t wait till the end of the workday to get back to his apartment and see what had been recorded. He switched to the GCNN feed and learned that Carpathia was already on his way back to New Babylon. Hiding his trail, Chang hacked into the encoded schedule for surprise inspections of GC personnel’s private computer systems. The encoding was so elementary he nearly laughed aloud. He discovered he was third on the list and could expect a “random” visit that evening at around 2000 hours.
His screen suddenly came alive with a flash from Figueroa’s office, and for an instant Chang thought he might have allowed himself to be caught using the office desktop for unapproved purposes. He covered his tracks with a burst of keystrokes and informed Figueroa he was coming.
Chang hurried to the office that had been David Hassid’s. Figueroa had rearranged the furniture and redecorated it within hours of moving in, and now he glided about in it as if he were the Global Community potentate himself.
“Have a seat, Wong,” he said. “Cigar?”
“Cigar? Do I look like a smoker to you? Anyway, isn’t the whole complex smoke free?”
“A director’s office is his domain,” Figueroa said, lighting up. Tiffany, who had also been Hassid’s assistant, looked up quickly from just outside the office window and scowled. Shaking her head, she left her desk and loudly slapped a switch on the wall between her office and Figueroa’s. A ventilation fan came on, sucking the blue smoke into the ceiling. “I love when she does that,” the director said, but Chang thought he looked embarrassed.