Coliquin’s eyes lit up and he laughed. “Not at all. I’m a firm believer in the divine supernatural.”
“From what I can determine, this is the closest thing that history has ever seen to worldwide cooperation among all religions. You must be very proud.”
“Pride is not what I am about. It is simply the right time now for us to put aside petty differences, the things that separate us — like dogma and doctrine — so we can achieve something remarkable, like saving the planet.”
Belltether was about to light up a cigarette, but Coliquin politely asked him not to. “Hotel rules,” he said. “Also, I don’t care for smoke.”
The reporter complied. “Where are you going with this international union of religions?”
“Toward a more perfect world, a safer climate, a future for humankind that won’t spell disaster. Don’t you want that too, Mr. Belltether?”
“Sure, but I just wanna know when I buy my train ticket where it’s going to take me. I’m trying to get a fix on your destination, your ultimate goal. I’m not seeing it yet.”
“You should come to one of my orphanages or my leper colony. You’ll see what my goal is.”
Belltether said only, “Hmmm.” He jotted some notes and then added, “You know, a month ago I actually traveled to one of your Romanian orphanages, in the Village of Coplean, the one you founded after the floods there killed a bunch of families, and a lot of kids had been left homeless.”
Coliquin maintained a smile, but there was an almost imperceptible flicker of his eyelids.
“There’s a bishop in a Christian church in the village,” Belltether continued, “who had very strange things to say about you. He says he knows you and that the people in the town who tried to speak out against you had a habit of disappearing.”
Coliquin laughed. “People disappear for a lot of reasons.” But then his expression changed to a look of paternal gentleness. “A person who really tries to do good, like I’m doing, sometimes steps on the toes of those in the power structure. And then the local power structure strikes back. Hurtful things can be said. But as for those who speak lies against me … I forgive them.”
Belltether said nothing, but his pen never stopped.
Coliquin added, “In fact, the exact same thing once happened to a famous man named Jesus. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Grigori kept muttering to himself and shaking his head as the helicopter cut across Syrian airspace. They could see the troops massing on the ground below. Then they passed over several crashed fighter jets. They couldn’t tell at first who they belonged to. There were smoldering piles of smashed aircraft and trails of black smoke spiraling up from the wreckage.
Then they spotted a parachute on the ground. It was dancing and rippling in the wind. Nearby was an injured Israeli pilot, surrounded by enemy troops.
“Hey, I think that’s a downed Israeli,” Joshua cried out. “We could try to — ”
“Forget about it!” Grigori shouted. The Georgian pilot was gesturing wildly. “Lucky we don’t get shot … boom, boom … right out of sky …”
Nobody was going to debate the point. Joshua and the team had all been waiting for the first missiles to come flying. After all, they were passing through a war zone.
Grigori and his copilot checked their bearings.
“Okay. Soon be leaving Syria and crossing Israel border. Golan Heights coming up. Pickup point dead ahead. Thanks for flying Georgian Airlines.” Grigori laughed.
Now the fear was that the Israelis would blow them out of the sky. As they crossed into Israel, they saw the multiple lines of barbed-wire fence along the DMZ corridor as they followed the brown rolling hills on the Golan plateau. The barren landscape was dotted with yellow and red signs warning of land mines.
They passed over a defensive line of Israeli antiaircraft guns and makeshift bunkers where the IDF was dug in along the border. As the helicopter passed, the soldiers scrambled to their posts. Grigori pointed to the long barrel of the big gun that was being wheeled around to track them. He started swearing loudly in his mother tongue.
They waited.
But no incoming fire. Nothing.
“Thank You, God,” Joshua muttered.
“So the Georgians are friendly with Israel after all,” Cannon said with a smile.
A few miles past the last Israeli defensive outpost, they came to an open plateau surrounded by a few scruffy trees. On the ground, was an Israeli Blackhawk helicopter. The rotors were slowly idling, cutting the air. They could see a pilot in the cockpit.
Joshua peered down. “Only one pilot?”
Cannon joined in. “Looks like the newer generation, the faster ones. Doesn’t need a three-man team like the older models.”
Grigori started bringing his big helicopter down about fifty yards from the Blackhawk. When they were on the ground Grigori turned and said, “Joshua Jordan, I want you know something … that I read about you. I know all about you. You’re good man. You have big luck, okay?”
Joshua stepped up to shake his hand and his copilot’s too. Then he grabbed the hands of each of the four special-ops guys, one by one.
“I owe my life to every one of you. I’ll never forget what you did.”
Joshua had a momentary hesitation as he studied the faces of the four Americans. Was it a fear for their safety or for his own?
Jack said, “Be safe.”
“God’s speed, Colonel Jordan,” Cannon said. Then he saluted.
Joshua saluted back and then slid down from the helicopter and started jogging toward the Blackhawk.
The Georgian copter lifted straight up in a whirl of dust. By the time Joshua reached the Blackhawk, Grigori had piloted the commercial helicopter out of sight.
Joshua climbed into the open door and sat in the passenger seat. The pilot had the sun visor of his helmet down. There was a smile on his face. But something didn’t seem right. Joshua glanced behind the pilot’s seat. A tarp was spread out over something. He looked again. Two fingers of some dead man’s hand were sticking out.
When Joshua looked back, the pilot was pointing a handgun directly at Joshua’s chest.
The pilot flipped his sun visor up. Suddenly Joshua felt a queasy feeling of weightlessness and the shock of recognition as he stared at the face of the deadly assassin in the pilot’s seat.
When Atta Zimler addressed his stunned passenger, there was an oily tone of arrogance to his voice. “Good to see you again, Joshua Jordan. Sorry to leave you so abruptly last year at the train station in New York, but I had to slip away before your idiot police and FBI got any closer. You had to know I would never give up …” Zimler was enjoying himself. “… that I would come after you no matter how long it took, that I would never allow you to win. Admit it. You knew deep down it would come to this. Shortly you are going to give me your computer password to the RTS design files — which will then make me obscenely rich.”
Then Zimler gave a wave with his .45 caliber Glock 39. “So come on. Let me hear you say the words: ‘Mr. Zimler, sir, you win …’”
SIXTY-FOUR
The first third of the Russian-Islamic coalition ground troops had already poured over the northern border of Israel and were massing south of Tel Dan. Hundreds of Russian tanks, mobile missile launchers, and troop transport trucks were smashing their way toward the main highways that would take them south through the heart of Israel and on to Jerusalem. Mobs of Hezbollah gunmen had joined the invasion along the way. In other suburbs near the northern border, they had surrounded homes and hit them with unending mortar fire to help the invasion. Now the Russian and Turkish tanks were rumbling past them, and the Palestinian terror groups were screaming in delight and cheering them on till they were hoarse. The downfall of Israel was imminent.
The word in Jerusalem was that enemy troops would be at the outskirts of the city by nightfall. Thousands of the Orthodox Hasidim had swarmed to the Western Wall in the Old City section. A sea of black coats moved rhythmically in prayers f
rom the Nusach Sefard. Their prayer locks slowly bobbed as their voices cried out to God, weeping, pleading. One Rabbi broke from the prayer-book recitation. The cry of his voice was from the book of Job: “Terrors are turned upon me: they pursue my soul as the wind: and my welfare passes away like a cloud. And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold upon me.” Those were the words of his mouth, but his heart was crying out, “When, oh God, when will Your strong arm show itself?”
In the Mediterranean, the huge troop transport ships were only three miles from the beaches of Tel Aviv and the port of Haifa. The Israeli fighter jets had mounted a valiant attempt to destroy the ships, but the Russian MiGs were too many. The Israeli Air Force had been compromised by having to send their fighters simultaneously to defend all four of their borders against overwhelming forces. Now the IDF jets were arriving only sporadically, coming at the massive armada in squadrons of three. They were trying to hit the ships with missiles and were spraying their decks with machine-gun fire. But the MiGs in groups of a dozen at a time would descend on them and chase them off. Hundreds of amphibious launches, all of them crammed with soldiers from Russia, the Slavic republics, and Turkey, were ready to begin motoring from the ships to the Israeli coast. All they needed now was the go signal from the naval command.
But for some reason, that message had been delayed.
At the bottom of Syria, near the Israeli border, General Viktor Oragoff was in an armored staff vehicle at the back of the invading army. He was on his satellite phone with a group of scientists in Moscow.
When he clicked off, he turned to the major sitting next to him. “Send the message to the front immediately. We are holding our positions. No advance. Not yet. We wait …”
Turkish General Izmet in the backseat couldn’t fathom it. He leaned over the seat. “Why? We can’t afford to waste time and give the Jews more time to regroup. We have them on the ground with our boots on their necks. Wait? No, this is not good — ”
“I’m in command,” Oragoff barked. “Just fifteen minutes. Then I’ll get the word back from Moscow, and we can proceed.”
“Word about what?”
Oragoff couldn’t tell him. Not yet. The snafu he had just discussed on the phone was almost laughable, but the high command in the Kremlin insisted they had to sort out some data first, about some absurd concern that the scientists and the eggheads must have cooked up. Oragoff thought it was bunk, but he couldn’t tell that to his Turkish counterpart. So he played along with his superiors in Moscow. General Oragoff looked at his watch. If he didn’t hear back in fourteen minutes, he was giving the order for the land invasion to resume — with or without Moscow’s approval.
So, the eighty-mile-long caravan of military equipment and troops, stretching from Syria and into the north of Israel, came to a halt. The invasion forces on the Syrian side near the Golan Heights and in Jordan also stopped, waiting for General Oragoff’s order to continue the merciless attack.
The invading forces from Libya and the Sudan, which had begun rolling through the crowds of cheering Palestinians in Gaza, were about to start assaulting the perimeter of IDF military defenses around the suburbs of Jerusalem. The line of the invading Libyan-Sudanese armies stretched back through Gaza all the way to the Sinai desert on the Egyptian side. But they were also ordered to halt, waiting for General Oragoff.
The war, at least for the next few minutes, had come to a strange, eerie pause.
In Hawaii, Dr. Robert Hamilton sat in his office. He felt sick. His wife had urged him to go home after his chemo treatment. Just the day before, he had received a belated invitation that should have lifted his spirits. He was being given a small slot at the next global-warming conference in Buenos Aires to address his controversial theories. But that is not where his mind was.
Instead, it was on the most recent computer data in front of him. He pushed the pile of papers away and turned to Finley, his young assistant. Hamilton pointed at the stack of printouts. “Is this accurate?”
Finley nodded, still slack-jawed at the readings that he himself had first detected.
“Where is the center of this thing?”
“It’s so big that I can’t even isolate it.”
Hamilton picked up the phone and quickly dialed a number in Washington, D.C. He demanded to talk to the chief meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Maybe he would listen.
He was put on hold. When the secretary got back on the phone, she told him the chief was not available; he was addressing a climate convention in Chicago.
Dr. Hamilton screamed into the phone, “This is a catastrophic event! Do you understand? This is Dr. Robert Hamilton from the University of Hawaii, and I’m telling you that a disaster unparalleled in recorded history is about to take place! Do you understand what I am telling you?”
The secretary hung up.
“What about the international agencies?” Hamilton muttered to his assistant.
“Where do we start?” Finley responded.
Hamilton suddenly understood. He had tried to stay analytical, to focus, but he stammered at the prospect of what was about to happen. “With something this big, … who do we warn?”
In the Blackhawk helicopter, Atta Zimler trained his handgun on Joshua. He glanced at his watch. Then Zimler, a man in complete control, smiled at his hostage. “I have two minutes. Then we take off. Everything is precisely timed. The Iranians at the Syrian border have a nice little place prepared for you. You thought you were so clever with your clumsy escape from Tehran, but this time I’m handling things. I’m going to help them get the RTS information from you. The Iranians are amateurs. I’m not.” Zimler’s eyes lit up. “So, Joshua Jordan, the American hero, are you prepared for my brand of pain? Are you prepared to die?”
Joshua stared him in the eye. “Funny you should ask …”
“You think I’m joking?”
“No. I know you’re not. Only this time — us meeting together — is different. Yes. I am prepared to die.”
“Fine. I can accommodate you.”
“You couldn’t possibly understand.”
Zimler grinned. “Try me.”
“This time …,” Joshua began in a quiet voice, “this time I have peace with God.”
Zimler shook his head. “You’re pathetic.”
“I don’t want to die, and if given the choice, you know I’d take your life to save mine.”
“Now that’s the old Joshua Jordan I know — ”
“No, not the old person. I’ve trusted my life to Jesus Christ. Things are different now.”
“Different? Really?”
Zimler pressed the barrel of the gun against Joshua’s cheek.
“See?” Zimler said. “Nothing’s different. Nothing’s changed, Jordan. Same story. You’re the one who’s trapped. And I’m the one in control.”
Something that Abigail always used to say, a favorite phrase, flashed into his brain like a neon sign in Times Square. He bulleted back, “I’ll tell you something about control — ”
But he couldn’t finish his sentence. Something was happening. The helicopter, which was still idling on the ground, seemed to be swaying slightly. There was a rumbling noise underneath them.
Zimler pulled his handgun away but kept it trained on Joshua with one hand, while he snatched a pair of handcuffs from under the seat and tossed them on Joshua’s lap. “Put them on your wrists.” But while Zimler barked his order he gave a quick glance out the side window to see what was going on. The shimmying stopped.
“I said, put them — ”
But he didn’t finish the sentence. The big jolt came. The Blackhawk tipped crazily down on Zimler’s side at a thirty degree angle. The cockpit door on his side, which he had not yet closed, swung wide open. Zimler grabbed onto the doorframe to keep from tumbling out.
The ground rumbled and shook. The Blackhawk jolted again so suddenly that Zimler started tumbling out the open door. He was halfway out
but still hung on.
Joshua swung around and with his right foot and gave a powerful kick to Zimler’s torso, so hard that the assassin’s head whiplashed as if he were in a rear-end collision. Zimler flew through the open door and down onto the rippling, shimmying ground.
Zimler tried to stand, but Joshua could see that the ground was vibrating and shaking too violently. Then another major jolt. This time on the other side, and the helicopter swung back almost righting itself.
Between Zimler and the Blackhawk a long, craggy wound ripped open in the earth. There was a deafening thunder beneath the ground, like the groaning of something torn asunder.
The gun had fallen out of Zimler’s hand. He jumped backward to avoid the huge crevice, moving farther away from the Blackhawk. Now he was just trying to avoid the abyss that was widening in front of him.
There was a look on Zimler’s face. For a millisecond, Joshua saw it. Zimler looked down at his feet as the rumbling came again, and it was an expression of sheer terror.
The earth gave way beneath Zimler like a collapse of fragile snow, as the ground on which he was standing disintegrated. Zimler plunged headlong into the crack in the earth. As he tumbled down, his final screams were enveloped in a toxic cloud, the hot gasses from the reddish-white column of molten lava that was rising up to meet him.
Joshua jumped over to the pilot’s seat. He looked at the complex of controls in front of him. What do I do? Think, man. Remember. The cyclic. Grab the stick and get us out of here.
With one hand he pushed the throttle down to power the idling rotors up to maximum speed. Then he grabbed the cyclic stick and tried to pull the helicopter skyward. But it was all too clumsy, and while the helicopter lifted it started veering off wildly to the side. The helicopter was airborne and was gaining elevation slightly but at an extreme angle.
Joshua jacked the cyclic stick the opposite way, this time tilting the helicopter the wrong way, toward the Syrian border. But his collective control was good and he was climbing, though he had the nose of the helicopter too far down. He was remembering the finesse he needed on the stick. Slow it down. Careful, small touches. And the torque controls as well. The Blackhawk straightened, and he slowly turned it back toward Israel. He torqued the nose back up to a level position, then looked down at the earth opening below him and the rising steam and smoke.