"After that?"
"You've got the target package, Mr. President," the general reminded him. "In the next ten minutes, six thousand cruise missiles are going to turn North Korea into a sea of fire."
"Where's this chopper headed?"
"We don't know, sir."
"Where do you think it's headed?"
"Last sighting put it near South Hamgyong, Mr. President."
"What's there?"
"Nothing to speak of, sir," Stephens said. "A lot of military bases. Missile silos. A prison camp or two."
The phone rang. Stephens answered it on the first ring, listened carefully, then slammed the phone down.
"What is it?" the president asked.
"That was Vice President Trainor, sir."
"What's he got?"
"He just got off the phone with Avi Zadok in Jerusalem."
"So?"
"The Israelis have intel that puts Jon Bennett in the Yodok prison camp in South
Hamgyong," Stephens said, recounting what Trainor had told him. "They've got a special ops team going in to get him out. Prime Minister Doron wanted to give you a heads-up."
All color drained from the president's face. "You're telling me Jon Bennett is at
Yodok?" he asked Stephens.
"It appears so, Mr. President."
James looked at the digital war map on the wall of Stephens's office. He could see the
missile tracks converging on six thousand DPRK targets, including South Hamgyong.
"God help me," the president said. "What have I done?"
* * *
Bennett was stunned to see another living human being.
He was even more stunned to hear one talking with an Israeli accent, and he began to
lose his balance.
"Mr. Bennett, my name is Captain Arik Gilad. My men and I are here to rescue you.
Can you walk?"
Bennett couldn't speak, couldn't think. He grabbed the man's shoulder for support and
nodded.
Gilad's men set up a secure perimeter while Gilad helped Bennett onto a foldout
stretcher. Once he was secure, Gilad picked up the back end while one of his colleagues grabbed the front. Two more men provided cover, and they began shooting their way back
through the prison.
Breaking radio silence for the first time, Gilad ordered the Black Hawk to land on
the roof of cell block D-6. He ordered Red Knight Two to race ahead and secure the landing zone. Then Red Knight One carried Bennett through a hail of bullets up several flights of stairs, heaved him into the back of the chopper, and locked his stretcher to the floor.
Bennett turned and saw another commando being loaded onto the helicopter as well.
His colleagues were working feverishly to keep him alive. Blood was spraying
everywhere. The Black Hawk began to rise. Bennett could hear more gunfire below. He
could hear rounds slamming into the chopper's sides. Someone stuck an IV in his arm and tried to put an oxygen mask over his face. But Bennett furiously shook his head. He had something to say first, though he wasn't even sure if he could.
"Thank you, gentlemen," he said at last, his eyes blurring. "God bless you guys."
The Israeli medic working on him said something in return. Over the roar of the rotors, he couldn't hear a word. But he could read the sincerity in the young Israeli's eyes, and despite all the chaos and bloodshed around him, Bennett suddenly felt safe for the first time in days. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned to look out the window. And that's when he saw it, streaking across the horizon, leaving behind a contrail a hundred miles long. Then he saw a flash of blinding white light, and then he saw Jesus.
9:04 P.M. EST-MOUNT WEATHER COMMAND CENTER
"Ten seconds, Mr. President."
The floor manager gestured to the camera he'd be looking into while an aide touched
up his makeup and another combed his hair. In all the last-second hubbub, General
Stephens slipped James a note that read, simply, "Impact."
"Five seconds."
James nodded, folded the note, and slipped it into his suit coat pocket. "Four . . .
Three . . ." The floor manager stopped the verbal countdown and continued with hand gestures. Two . . . one . . .
James cleared his throat and began. "Good evening, my fellow Americans, and to
those joining this broadcast around the globe. My name is Lee Alexander James. For the
past several years, I served the MacPherson administration as the secretary of Homeland Security. For the last few days, I have served as the vice president, at the request of my dear friend, Bill Oaks. But tonight I am speaking to you as the president of the United States. In a moment, I will explain the terrifying series of events that has led us to this place, and me to this chair. I will explain what our federal government is doing to care for all those suffering in our midst at this hour. But first I must tell you that the United States is at war."
* * *
Mustafa Al-Hassani and Khalid Tariq watched together.
And smiled. The first that either of them had heard about the slaying of President
Oaks was less than thirty minutes before, in a news bulletin on the BBC. Now both men
hushed the buzz of the aides around them and called for the volume on the television in Al-Hassani's private office to be turned up significantly.
"Irrefutable and incontrovertible evidence of North Korea's direct and malicious
involvement in the atomic attacks against our country has come into my possession,"
James declared to a global audience that had now swelled to an estimated three billion.
"Through the brilliant and determined work of our own investigative agencies and the extraordinary assistance of governments and intelligence services around the globe, I
have no doubt that the North Korean leadership planned these attacks in the hopes of
decapitating our government and launching a takeover not only of South Korea but Japan as well. Tonight, I will lay out this evidence and the trail of terror that leads directly back to Pyongyang."
Tariq turned and looked at his leader. Al-Hassani just nodded, savoring all he was
seeing and hearing.
"But first I must tell you," James continued, "that as commander in chief, I am not waiting to act to safeguard our people from further attacks or to bring retribution to those who have declared war on our people. Operation Asian Justice is under way. At this hour, U.S. military forces—at my direction—have launched a full-scale nuclear retaliation
against the government of North Korea."
Al-Hassani reached over and gently squeezed Tariq's hand.
"Over the course of the next hour," the president explained, "I will walk you through as many details as I can. Please understand that our national security needs do not allow me to give every detail. But I want to honestly and forthrightly lay out for you as much as I can. For you deserve to know the truth. You deserve to know—"
Al-Hassani blinked once, and then again. He turned to Tariq, then back to the
television.
"What happened?" he shouted. "Where did the president go?"
* * *
Lucente's jaw dropped.
He turned to Premier Zhao, then back to the inexplicable visual on the television.
There was nothing on the screen but an empty chair. One moment the president of the
United States was making a live televised broadcast to the world. The next moment he
had vanished into thin air.
"What is this?" Zhao asked. "Some kind of joke?"
Zhao ordered his staff to change the channels, which they did, but every network
displayed the same image—a large desk, an American flag, a bookshelf, a credenza, and
an empty executive chair from which the president had been speaking just seconds
before.
"Where is he?" Zhao
demanded. "What happened to the president?"
* * *
Command Post Tango was in chaos.
Thousand of missiles and smart bombs were hitting their targets. Satellite imagery
showed that everything was on track, on schedule, obliterating the DPRK and catching
them completely off guard. But General Garrett had pandemonium on his hands. The
president of South Korea was gone. So was the commander of the ROK army. They'd
been sitting right beside him. They'd been watching President James's address together, while tracking the early minutes of the war. But no sooner had James vanished than so,
too, had the Koreans.
* * *
Dmitri Galishnikov slowly rose to his feet.
His eyes were glued to the TV. His wife was bawling. He was shaking. She was
terrified of the unknown. He was terrified by what he suddenly knew all too well.
"So," he mumbled, nearly inaudibly, "Eli was right. They were all right."
To be certain, he picked up the phone and called Miriam Gozol, his VP of marketing.
There was no answer at her home, so he tried her cell phone. Again, no answer. He called Natasha Barak at home. No answer.
He called her cell. No answer. He called every messianic believer he could think of.
None of them answered.
This was it, Galishnikov realized. Everything that Eli and Bennett and Miriam and
Natasha had been trying to tell him was true. All of it. Of this he no longer had a shred of doubt. Yeshua was the Messiah. He had come for His true followers. He had raptured His church, and Galishnikov and his wife had missed it. Nothing else explained what he'd just witnessed. They had missed it.
He collapsed to the floor and wept for mercy, for himself, for his wife, for his sons.
For he knew now with a certainty that nearly paralyzed him that for all the evil the world had just experienced, it was merely a foretaste of the evil that lay ahead.
EPILOGUE
* * *
A sense of gloom settled over them.
Galishnikov had barely slept in more than a week. Nor had his wife. Since "the
disappearances," they "hadn't stepped foot in their Medexco corporate offices in Tel Aviv even once, despite the fact that oil prices had shot past a thousand euros a barrel. They had not checked their portfolios or spoken with their accountants or financial advisors—
nor had it even occurred to them to do so—despite the fact that gold had already topped twenty-five hundred euros an ounce and most of their holdings were in gold since the
Day of Devastation the previous October. Food had lost all taste. They were subsisting on an occasional piece of fruit, a few crackers, and a sip of juice or water now and then, and only because their housekeeper, a Filipino woman who feared for their health, kept
insisting.
Locked away in their palatial stucco and glass compound overlooking the glistening
Mediterranean, they found themselves consumed with watching the news and surfing the
Web for the latest developments, talking to their sons and various family members and
friends throughout Israel and around the world as often as they could punch through on
phone lines that were often overloaded and jammed, missing dear friends like Jon and
Erin and Eli Mordechai, and studying the Scriptures deep into the night. Together, they had already read the entire New Testament through three times, from beginning to end.
On his own, Galishnikov had read it through twice more, while at the same time poring
over the prophecies of Daniel and Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Isaiah, desperately trying to
make sense of all that was happening and feverishly trying to steel himself for all that was coming. He regretted not having listened to Eli and Jon more while he'd had the
chance.
For most of his life he had dreaded attending synagogue on Shabbat, much less
listening to the rabbi read the weekly Torah portion. But now he couldn't get enough of God's Word. Indeed, it was only when he read the Bible, or when Katya read it aloud to
him, that the pervasive sense of gloom and evil all around them seemed to lift, even
momentarily, and he felt any sense of peace at all.
Yet regardless of what else he studied, he found himself continually drawn back the
words of the apostle Paul in his first letter to the believers in Yeshua gathered at
Thessalonica.
The Lord Himself will descend
from heaven with a shout,
with the voice of the archangel
and with the trumpet of God,
and the dead in Messiah will rise first.
Then we who are alive and remain
will be caught up together with them
in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,
and so we shall always be with the Lord.
Therefore, comfort one another with these words.
Was this what had just happened? Galishnikov longed to know. Had the true followers
of Yeshua HaMaschiach—Jesus the Messiah—actually been caught up with Him in the air, just as the Scriptures had foretold two thousand years earlier, just and Eli and Jon and many others like them had predicted over the past few years, and even the past few
months? At the moment the American president had disappeared on television, he had
thought so immediately, and so had Katya. They had wavered in that initial conviction in recent days, but as hard as they tried, they could come up with no other plausible
explanation.
The Internet was full of conspiracy theories and crackpot claims, saying the aliens had finally come, or that the earth had finally experienced the "invasion of the body
snatchers." Some insisted it was all a freak act of spontaneous combustion. Others insisted it was all somehow a convergence of global warming and static electricity. But none of
that rang true to Galishnikov.
To the contrary, the more he read articles and books online by evangelical Christians
and messianic Jews who had been predicting the coming "Rapture" of the Church for years, the more convinced he was that they had just lived through one of the most
dramatic moments in Bible prophecy. That meant, of course, that one day—perhaps sooner
than they realized—they would have the incredible joy and privilege of seeing Eli's face again in heaven. They would get to walk the streets of gold with Jon and Erin and Natasha Barak and so many other dear ones. And yet such thoughts both comforted and terrified him at the same time, for they also meant that new evils were rising more horrifying than any that had come before.
Then just before six o'clock on the morning of the ninth day, the unlisted phone they
kept in their home office began to ring. Galishnikov looked up from his laptop where he had spent the night studying Revelation chapter six and the coming of the "four horsemen of the apocalypse." He rubbed his bloodshot eyes and glanced at the caller ID. A shot of adrenaline suddenly coursed through his body. He picked up immediately.
"Hello?" he said, his voice raspy with fatigue.
"Is this Dmitri Galishnikov?" said a young woman who sounded nearly as tired as he.
"Yes, I am Dmitri."
"Very well, please hold for Prime Minister Doron."
Galishnikov held his breath. Why was he calling? What could this mean?
Katya suddenly tapped him on the shoulder.
"Coffee?" she whispered.
Startled, Galishnikov nodded and gratefully squeezed her hand, and then Doron was
on the line.
"Dmitri, is that you?" came the familiar voice of his old friend.
"Yes, David, it's me," he replied, too close to the prime minister for formalities, especially now. "How are you holding up?"
"Off the record?" Doron asked.
"Of course," Galishnikov said.
/> "Then I would be lying to you if I said I wasn't scared," Doron conceded. "All of our allies are gone, Dmitri. All of them. And I don't know what to do."
"I don't understand," Galishnikov said. "What do you mean all of our allies are gone?"
"I mean Mossad estimates thirty-nine world leaders are missing—and all from
countries that are our closest friends," Doron explained. "It's not just the president of the United States. It's the prime ministers of Great Britain, Canada, Australia. It's the president of South Korea and South Africa and dozens more like them all over the world."
Galishnikov felt as if someone had just kicked him in the stomach. He had been
tracking such events around the world, but he had been thinking about them in personal
terms, about friends and colleagues missing in each of those capitals, and in spiritual terms, about how everything that was happening fit into the trajectory of prophetic events the Bible described. He had not, however, been thinking in geopolitical terms about the big picture, much less in terms of how all these things would affect his own country. But
Doron was right. The Israeli leader had just gone from seeing all of his major, immediate enemies consumed by fire—and thus feeling powerful, prosperous, nearly invincible—to
seeing all of his major allies vanish into thin air. And the sense of despair in Doron's voice was palpable.
"My God," Galishnikov said finally as the reality of it all suddenly sank in anew and he wished once again Jon and Eli were around to teach him all he needed to know. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
"That's very kind, Dmitri," Doron said warmly. "And that, I confess, is why I'm calling. I'd like you to fly to Rome with me tomorrow, and then to Babylon a few days
after that. Katya can come too, if you'd like to stick together."
"I'm sure we would," Galishnikov said, "but why Rome and Babylon?"
"Salvador Lucente has called for an emergency summit," Doron explained. "He's gathering every world leader who's left to discuss how to respond to the crisis."
"What exactly are you hearing, David?" Galishnikov pressed.