Brink of Chaos

  His screen showed the blinking cursor for the incoming missile.

  “Waiting for it to come into range,” Joshua called out. “Waiting …”

  The blip on the screen was closing in. The missile was getting closer.

  Joshua hit the button for the RTS-360 guidance capture system, and a laser beam blew out from under the fuselage. He read the RTS integrated control panel. It illuminated.

  Contact.

  The data-controlling laser hit the nosecone of the enemy missile.

  He waited for the reading — the terse LCD that would read either “Full Capture” or “Failed.”

  “Come on. Come on. Come on …”

  Then the message flashed on the screen. But his world rocked.

  “Failed.”

  A half second passed — but enough time for Joshua to calculate it. There was only one option now. He had to insure that his family was protected. His F-35 LV had no weapons other than the RTS, so now his only weapon was the jet itself. It was the only way to stop the bio-warhead streaking back toward his wife and son and daughter.

  “I’m going to hit it on the run. I’m intercepting,” he said.

  The tower squawked back, “Colonel, wait. We have no secondary verification that your family is at ground zero.”

  “I can’t take that chance. I’m going in.”

  Joshua lined the nose of the F-35 with a point along the intersecting trajectory of the missile on his screen. He would have to hit the warhead on the pass. With his left hand he jammed the throttle and headed to the intersection point, and with his right hand he used the side-stick controller to arc the jet toward the endgame. There was only one chance to knock that missile out of the sky. He knew what that meant. No way to bail out before the collision. He had to ride it into the point of contact. Then a fiery crash with a missile loaded with a nightmare toxin. That was the terrible best-case scenario. But at least his family would be spared.

  The blip of the missile was closing in on the intersecting vector on his screen. And so was he. Each blip approached the other. Joshua gave his final message to the control tower. “Tell Abby and the kids I love them … and …” His voice caught.

  “Tell ‘em we’ll all be together in heaven.”

  There it was. He saw it glint into view, the nosecone of the missile approaching like a flash of light. He aimed at it by leading it perfectly, gauging its superior speed to hit it on the pass-by. He banked the F-35 directly toward the oncoming warhead.

  He yelled two words.

  “Now, Lord …”

  With supersonic speed, the missile’s nosecone tore through his left wing. The missile exploded and the percussion ripped open the fuselage of the jet, spraying the toxic gas over the ravaged skin of the F-35. The jet began to spiral down, twisting at two hundred and fifty miles an hour, covered in deadly toxins.

  He reached for the release for the ejection seat. Where was it?

  In the sickening, dizzying spin toward earth, Joshua saw something, heard something, and he could only say one word at first.

  “What …”

  The tower was calling to him in his helmet. But that didn’t matter now.

  Somewhere there was a sound. Piercing. Heart-thumping. A trumpet sounding? Incredible. Unfathomable. It had the power of the sound of a cosmos being birthed.

  “Oh!” Joshua exclaimed, as a boy might say if he witnessed something awesome, as the sky seemed to fill with a golden note, like the unison of all the world’s trumpets. All around him. Thrilling, thrilling. And there was a voice above even that, and the voice had the thundering power of ten thousand oceans.

  “My dream,” he heard himself say. But it was not a dream. Not this time.

  Somehow he was outside of the F-35, watching it as if he were a spectator. The jet had no pilot, yet its canopy was still intact — the ejector seat had never activated — and it was spinning and smoking and careening farther and farther away from Joshua on its gravity-bound descent toward earth. And it kept falling. Until it hit the earth. A tiny red flash of an explosion could be seen far below.

  Joshua had never ejected. Yet he had not gone down with the jet. He was not in the debris of the crash. Or anywhere on earth.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  If he hadn’t already been transformed, he wouldn’t have understood it. While his jet plummeted to earth without a pilot, Joshua rocketed up through the atmosphere, confounding the laws of nature. Yet his mind was able to fully comprehend it. It had been changed too.

  What was happening was not a matter of science. It couldn’t be contained in the theories of man. What Joshua was seeing at that moment, and where he had found himself, had reduced all of those things of earth, the human achievements, the fanfare, the struggles for glory and power, to a pale world of shadows.

  Joshua was walking in a place that seemed warm and familiar, yet surprisingly spectacular. There was the instant experience of belonging there. This brilliant pavilion was the home of God. And Joshua was part of it. There was calmness inside. Peace. No racing heart. No sweating palms. No gut-wrenching decisions to make. Not anymore. Everything around him seemed so new, like the birth of a new world, yet not bound by the old laws of nature of the old world he had come from. There was a light more radiant than the sun and it was brightening the landscape. It seemed to be coming from a focal point in the distance. Yet it illuminated everything, while at the same time cast no shadows.

  Joshua looked around and was suddenly aware that there was a vast ocean of people all around him. Millions and millions of them. From ages past to the present. Their faces, like his, reflecting something. But he didn’t have to guess what that was, for he knew what they knew — a miraculous kind of understanding and an expectation of what would happen next. And a joy that surpassed any method of calculation or description.

  And here was the amazing thing — Joshua was able to visualize everything around him, both near and far, simultaneously, things in the closest detail and yet at the same time able to take in a bird’s-eye view of the entire assembly. Joshua laughed and shouted out in astonishment at the miracle of it. And at the fulfillment of it — God’s promise — that at just the right moment in human history the Lord of the universe would rapture — would call to Himself — every follower of the Son of God, and remove them from Planet Earth in an instant.

  Joshua looked to his left. There was a woman, no longer aged, and no longer weeping and mourning from a broken heart. She was smiling and hugging someone. Joshua looked closer. Her joy became Joshua’s. And he delighted in it as if it were his own.

  The woman he was watching had the blush of a newlywed, and she was smiling and touching the youthful face of Virgil Corland, who looked then to be only in his thirties. The former leader of the Free World was now a humble citizen of heaven.

  “I saw the glory of it,” Winnie Corland said gently as she stroked Virgil Corland’s face. “God gave me a tiny glimpse after you died, when I opened my heart to Christ that day at our brownstone condo. A snapshot of what was ahead for us. Oh, Virgil, you were so right, my dearest.”

  Virgil was beaming as he looked in her eyes. “All of the waiting. The aching joints and the endless medications. The flesh that didn’t cooperate and aged. And the trials that tested our hearts and our bodies. All that is over now.”

  Joshua refocused. There was a voice of another woman, and he recognized it immediately. The one who had taught his Sunday school class when he was a wild, reckless, wayward boy.

  “Josh-a-boy,” the voice said. And then he knew. She was the only one who had ever called him that nickname, the name that caused him to wince in embarrassment when it was mentioned in the presence of his buddies. Joshua turned to her. He had never truly thanked her for the seed she had planted in his soul. As it turned out, she had not lived long enough to see it bloom.

  Standing in front of him, the woman was now youthful and vigorous. The face bore an image that had a slight similarity to Joshua’s, the eyes, maybe. That’s what f
amily friends had always said. In the final years before her passing, Joshua had only known her as the frail, bent frame that needed a walker. There is so much to say, Joshua thought as the flood of memories rushed through his mind, of the house in Colorado with the willow tree and the woman in the apron on the front porch calling to him to come in for dinner.

  Joshua now spoke the one word that seemed to contain all of those powerful memories.

  “Mom,” Joshua called out to her. Then he added with a tender astonishment, “You were so young. I had forgotten how young you were.”

  “But you, son,” his mother said as she reached up to pat his cheek, “you were always the same boy to me.”

  Joshua put his arm around his mother and surveyed the scene. Not far away, he recognized three members of the current U.S. Supreme Court — all of them whisked away from the conference chambers in the marble court building in Washington in the middle of a heated debate over a pending case, while the rest of the astonished justices who remained behind were left to stare, slack-jawed, at the empty chairs. Joshua noticed one of them, Justice Lapham, close to him and now shaking the hand of John Jay, America’s first chief justice, who had taken up that post shortly after the nation’s founding in the eighteenth century.

  Beggars and billionaires greeted each other like long-lost brothers. Martyrs for the gospel who had been burned, beaten, ripped apart, and beheaded for their faith were now whole. Persons lost at sea, buried in avalanches, ravaged by hurricanes, killed in war and in peace time, victims of disease and hunger, builders of empires who, in paneled offices, had bowed their heads to the call of Christ, and vagabonds who had responded to tent revivals in the wilderness.

  They were all there.

  But Joshua was searching for other faces. He knew they must be there somewhere. His heart, mind, and soul told him so. His eyes kept searching. Until — right there — he told himself, there they were. He had spotted them. The three of them, calm and joyful, now almost within reach. Joshua held out his arms toward them and pulled Cal and Deborah into a crushing hug. Then he held them both at arm’s length to study their faces. “You look older a bit, but only slightly,” he mused with a smile. “And most certainly wiser!”

  Both of them laughed.

  “How proud I am of you both. You were so brave,” he added. “And faithful to the Lord, right up to the end.” Then his two grown children stepped aside. So he could take her in with his eyes, from head to foot. Abigail was standing in front of him, without a scar. Without a tear. Without a worry. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” Joshua said, gathering Abigail gently into his arms.

  “Believe what, my precious soul mate?” she asked.

  “That you could ever have been more beautiful than you were down there — and yet, here you are.”

  “I know what you did in the last moments,” she said quietly, as she pulled him close to whisper it in his ear. “To rescue us. And to protect us.” She laid her hand on his heart. “And our Lord knows it well too. There is no greater love,” she said, “than to lay down your life for another. And you did it, Joshua, for us.”

  “I had a great teacher,” Joshua said. “A great Savior.”

  Suddenly, the figure in the light, who was the light that illuminated everything, was coming closer. The multiple millions of saved souls now fell to their knees. Princes and commanders, knights and peasants, men and women of power, as well as the powerless and the forgotten of the world, all of those who had staked their souls and their eternities on the perfect blood that had been shed on an ugly, Roman cross, and who had now been gathered together from throughout the millennia, all of them were worshiping and singing to the One who had ransomed them. Their Champion. Their Lord.

  Not far away from Joshua, Abigail, Cal, and Deborah, Phil Rankowitz was kneeling with several other members of the Roundtable. Every head of every person was bowed for the same reason.

  Walking in the apex of the light, now clearly seen, was Jesus Christ, the King of Kings. And He was approaching.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  The Next Day, New Babylon, Iraq

  Alexander Coliquin was in his two-thousand-square-foot suite. He seemed oblivious to the multiple catastrophes across the globe. From the windows of the top floor of the white-stoned U.N. building, he could see palm trees swaying in the wind and the gardens stretching for a half mile out to the gated entrance.

  But his two closest associates, Deputy Secretary Ho Zhu and Bishop Dibold Kora, were transfixed in front of the wall of web TVs, clicking through screen after screen to collect the global coverage of the stunning events of the day.

  In San Francisco, a record earthquake toppled a portion of the Golden Gate Bridge on the Sausalito side and sent cars tumbling into the bay. Quakes off the eastern seaboard created a tsunami that swept into Charleston, South Carolina, and carried off more than eighteen hundred people. There were tremors in Istanbul, Moscow, Tangiers, and Wellington. In Perth, a third of the downtown towers collapsed into the sea as massive tectonic plates deep in the earth shifted violently beneath that part of Australia’s coast.

  But more amazing were the “unexplained phenomena,” as the press called it. Jet liners veering off course. Traffic jams caused by driverless cars. Judges disappearing from courtrooms. Churches vacant. People vanishing in the middle of meetings. Television anchors in Biloxi, Richmond, and Omaha evaporating during live broadcasts. Missing persons reports flooded into every metropolitan police department in every city. Those disappearances caused more than a dozen near crashes of airliners as copilots were forced to take over the planes when pilots evaporated from cockpits. An ocean liner that suddenly had no captain or first mate plowed into three other cruise ships in the Port of Miami and sank two of them. A 240-car pileup occurred on the 101 outside of Los Angeles when drivers were no longer behind their steering wheels. Financial experts on the television coverage were already predicting that a few insurance companies could go bankrupt just from the automobile collision claims alone.

  Bishop Kora spoke first, wagging his finger at the two dozen television screens. “Now the conspiracy theories will come. The fanatics. The lunatic fringe. They will call this the judgment of God …”

  “No, they won’t,” Coliquin replied effortlessly, turning from the window to address him. “The dangerous ones will call it the rapture.”

  “You will need to issue a statement,” Ho Zhu said in his usual perfunctory tone. “And if possible, announce a joint effort with President Tulrude. An international plan to restore order. She needs more help.”

  “More help?” Kora bulleted back. “It isn’t enough that you had Hewbright’s Allfone hacked and handed Tulrude that five-point economic plan on a silver platter?”

  “No, not enough,” Ho Zhu stated in a matter-of-fact tone. “She needs a boost in the polls. Hewbright is closing the gap. And Secretary Coliquin, the world needs to hear from you.”

  “Yes, a statement,” Coliquin said. “Don’t worry. I have that well in hand.”

  Two hours later, Coliquin gave an address in a live global broadcast from his new Iraq headquarters. It was covered by every Internet news agency on the planet.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began as he looked out from behind his mahogany desk directly into the camera linked to an international satellite multi-feed. His handsome face wore an expression of weighty concern. “Today we face a great quandary. So many questions abound. Natural disasters. Tragic loss of life. Why, we ask ourselves. And in the midst of it — perhaps the saddest thing of all — the death of millions of people. But we may have a partial answer. For unknown reasons, countless people have apparently, and suddenly, abandoned their homes, their places of work, their cars, and retreated to remote areas. Reports are coming in slowly that many of these people were known to be radical, fundamentalist Christian extremists, and theories are surfacing that they may have committed mass suicide in distant, wilderness areas. It may take a long time to locate and recover all the bodies. Perhaps we never will
. And we may never know all the reasons for their irrational, delusional actions. In the darkness of their confused dogma, they may have thought that the end of the world was approaching. They may have taken the last, desperate leap because of their rigid, frenzied beliefs about Jesus, thinking that they could somehow hasten His coming. And so as a result, my friends, they are gone. My heart goes out to all those who mourn today.”

  Coliquin gave a half shake of his head and pursed his lips, in a posture of sad regret.

  “But there is a light in the darkness. I have commissioned Bishop Dibold Kora, my special envoy, to commence talks with President Tulrude, in conjunction with the G-7 and the European Union and nearly a hundred international relief agencies, to commence a massive effort to meet the needs of those around the world who are suffering. Equally important,” Coliquin said, “is our global plan to complete our project for unity, the One Movement, to prevent the spread of dangerous religious ideas like the ones that seem to have caused this terrible act of self-annihilation. After all, my friends, can we truly say that we love our neighbor if we allow our neighbor to suffer under the evil spell of hateful, harmful, religious propaganda? There is a better way. And you can be confident that if we follow that way, it will lead us to a better world.”

  Israel

  The disappearance of millions of people around the world had a magnifying effect on those who had been left behind. Bart Kingston had read confirmations, which continued to pour in worldwide, that those who disappeared had indeed been Christians, and this tended to multiply exponentially the attitudes that many had already been harboring about religion, or God, or more particularly about Jesus and the book that detailed His story. Some had remained suspicious, and others seemed to consider the idea that Jesus had come to redeem the human race.

  Kingston was still in Jerusalem when it all happened. He had tried to make contact with Peter Campbell, but the man was nowhere to be found. Kingston even trudged into the Old City section, making his way through the crowds that had gathered in the streets. He had checked Campbell’s office and even his apartment.