Thunder of Heaven: A Joshua Jordan Novel

  “Yes. He was taken by force by the Iranians, but he was able to escape and should be back in Israel by now. I heard that yesterday. Hopefully he’s joined up with my daughter who is over there as well. Why do you ask?”

  “Mrs. Jordan, there has been some kind of terrible disaster … during this invasion of Israel. There’s been this massive catastrophe over there … I don’t even know how to describe what I am seeing on my video feed. Do you know if your husband is all right?”

  Abigail was momentarily at a loss for words. All she could muster was one word.

  “What?”

  SIXTY-SIX

  In downtown Jerusalem thousands flooded the streets. Somber at first but chattering wildly, asking each other, “What exactly has happened?” They were getting the reports now. Accounts of the destruction of the invaders. At the moment of their near-certain destruction, when the IDF seemed on the verge of obliteration, the borderlands of Israel had exploded. Long-extinct volcanic beds had erupted as earthquakes ripped through the enemy troop lines in the Egyptian desert, in Jordan and Syria. And they were even hearing that the naval invasion off the coast of Israel had been swallowed up in a wall of water from the tremors of the earth.

  The bewildered crowds now started smiling. Hugging. Cheering.

  The minute that Nony and his wife, Sari, received word at their condo of the destruction of the invading hordes, they joined the cheering crowds in downtown Jerusalem. Deborah Jordan, Ethan March, and Esther Kinney were fast-stepping along with them, laughing and cheering with the ecstatic mob. By the time they approached Ben Yehuda Street, the whole downtown district had erupted into joyous pandemonium.

  Music blasted into the square from an open shop. Young Israeli soldiers, who still had their machine guns slung over their shoulders, danced in the streets with the bearded Orthodox. Affluent brokers grabbed hands with parents who had children in tow. Shopkeepers linked arms with Knesset legislators as they sang wildly together. The cacophony had spread to the adjoining Mesilat Yesharim and King George streets and to every other surrounding avenue. Confetti was shimmering down from the balconies where the apartment dwellers were waving flags of Israel and tossing colored streamers. Everywhere there was laughter — and tears.

  Deborah was crying and singing and laughing in the street along with Esther Kinney, and Nony and Sari. Ethan too was laughing but standing off to the side, watching it all. A young man, perhaps twenty, a Yeshiva student in a hat with the beginnings of a short scraggly beard, and a girl with him in a long skirt and a babushka on her head, were dancing with their hands in the air. They grabbed Ethan and brought him into their celebration. He humored them with a few awkward steps. Then he raised a hand to say good-bye and stepped away.

  Before long, the swirling, dancing celebration started to quiet down. Hands were being raised. The air was filled with shouts to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thanking the Lord for the greatest miracle since the parting of the Red Sea, for the most spectacular show of God’s power and sovereignty ever displayed before the eyes of the human race.

  In the crowd, a local Messianic pastor in a prayer shawl was looking skyward. His face was radiant, mouth slack, and his eyes looked deeply into an unseen place. He had the look of awe and wonderment, that in his own lifetime he had just witnessed the culmination of a divine promise. Then in a triumphant shout, he began to recite the passage from the second chapter of the first book of Samuel, verse ten. Like the twist of a telescope lens, it suddenly brought into focus the image of all that had just taken place.

  Those who contend with the LORD shall find themselves shattered;

  Against them He will thunder in the heavens.

  Then he stopped. His voice quivered. There was a catch in his voice as he recognized that the millennia of waiting would soon be over. The pastor finished the rest of the verse, with its heralding of Jesus the Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and His coming again in power.

  The LORD will judge the ends of the earth;

  And He will give strength to His king,

  And will exalt the horn of His anointed.

  Esther grabbed Deborah, pulled her aside, and they hugged. “Oh, how I wish your dad was here!”

  Deborah nodded with a look that struggled to be optimistic. Surely in the midst of such a great miracle, God would have safely delivered her father. “Esther, your husband said he was sure that the helicopter should have picked Dad up on the Golan, before the volcanoes and earthquakes, right?”

  Esther hugged her again. But there was so much that they didn’t know.

  On a sidewalk nearby, leaning against a signpost, Ethan was still trying to smile. But the fact was that Deborah had shut the door on their future together. Even when the bombs were dropping and the whole world was exploding around him; and even after that, as all of Israel was breaking into this celebration, he couldn’t shake that fact. He had gone through other relationships with women. A lot of them. Why was this so different, so difficult?

  And another thing baffled him — the stupefying way that this war had ended. He had been a flier in the U.S. Air Force. For him, battles were won or lost by superior air power or by overwhelming forces on the ground or by a winning military strategy. But this … exactly how could he explain the victory here?

  The word miracle was on everyone’s lips. They were shouting it from the rooftops. Why couldn’t he? It was as if Ethan was standing on the outside of everything, looking in, through some great, impenetrable wall of glass. It was as if he were sealed off, a silent witness to the joyous mayhem and the mass worship that surrounded him.

  Ethan found himself imprisoned in a strange state of isolation, and it rocked him to his core. If it weren’t for Deborah, a few feet away, smiling and praying aloud and singing, Ethan would have slipped away from Ben Yehuda Street and set off in the opposite direction. To where, he didn’t know.

  At Ramat David Air Base, General Shapiro had received the reconnaissance reports from every corner of Israel. He double-checked the data. It was true. At the point when the battle seemed lost, while Shapiro himself was searching for a photo of his family so he could have it close to him when the end came, that is exactly when the massive enemy invasion was decimated by simultaneous earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that had cordoned off the tiny nation and protected it. The scavenger birds, he had been told, were already flocking to the places where the carcasses of the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers lay. Yes, that too would have to be attended to. The months and months of burials for all of the enemy dead. And then there would be the cleanup of a hundred miles of destroyed military equipment and the mountains of volcanic ash that covered the boundary lands. There was already a rumor about a scientist who had suggested a theory on how to handle that. It might all be burned as a source of energy.

  Shapiro couldn’t bother with that right now. Clearly Israel had been saved. There would be plenty of time for celebration, and to ponder the unimaginable that had just occurred, but now was the time for the solemn business of assessing the damage and locating the dead. The airfield had been devastated. From Ramat David alone, Shapiro had lost thirty-two pilots, along with several of his officers who were killed in the horrendous shelling from the guns on the Jordanian side.

  Shapiro walked out to the tarmac to survey the scene. The mangled, smoldering wreckage of jets was strewn across the fields. The runway itself was pocked with deep jagged-edged bomb craters. One of the general’s aides trotted up to him. He pointed to the far end of the base where a thin column of black smoke was rising up.

  “Sir,” the aide said, “we’ve got an aircraft down out there, just had a bad landing. It’s one of ours.”

  They hopped into a Jeep and sped to the far end of the airstrip. Shapiro was expecting the worst: one more young, dead IAF pilot.

  At first, as they approached, Shapiro couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. This wasn’t an F-16 laying in a heap of smoking metal. The wreckage, he soon realized, was that of a Black
hawk helicopter. Fuel was spilling out where the tanks had been hit by projectiles.

  The general’s Jeep pulled to a stop a hundred feet away. The dented outside shell of the cabin and fuselage of the helicopter, blackened with oil and soot, looked as if it had been hit with battering rams and then sent through a blast furnace.

  His aide warned him, “Be careful, General — that fuel could ignite.”

  Shapiro nodded. “Call the fire guys, but right now we’ve got to see if there’s a live pilot in there somewhere.”

  Then they noticed something. Had the door on the pilot’s side of the twisted wreckage just moved? It moved again. Then with a grinding metallic groan, it opened.

  A hand reached out.

  Joshua Jordan tumbled out of the wrecked helicopter and onto the ground. He was blackened with oil and smoke. He slowly raised himself to a half-standing position and tried to limp away from the wreckage. His leg was soaked with blood.

  Shapiro jumped from the Jeep before his aide could restrain him. He rushed up to Joshua and grabbed him, holding him up and preventing him from collapsing.

  The general shouted out to his aide, “Get a medic here, and I mean now!”

  After the aide sprinted to the Jeep and phoned for a medivac, the general, still propping up Joshua, looked back at the smoking wreckage of the Blackhawk. From the burnt scorch marks on the helo it was clear to the general that Jordan had just come from the area of the volcanic decimation. Then the general muttered something that Joshua was too dazed and in too much pain to hear: “There is no earthly reason you should have survived that.”

  In his hotel room, Curtis Belltether was sitting on the couch. On the coffee table was a package with a mailing label and postage on it. Next to it, Belltether had laid out his notes from his interview with Pastor Peter Campbell, along with his notes from his other interviews, including the one with Alexander Coliquin. He also had a copy of his completed article entitled “The Gods of Climate.”

  The flat-screen Internet TV showed images of the ring of volcanic destruction that ran along Israel’s borders. Overhead video images showed the miles of incinerated military trucks and tanks that had been destroyed in the wake of the volcanic eruptions. Smoke and steam still rose from the volcanic cones. Belltether studied the screen. The sky-cams showed craters and caverns the size of football stadiums, which had cracked open during the earthquakes and swallowed battalion after battalion of the armies sent from Russia and its republics, and from Turkey, Sudan, and Libya.

  Belltether drummed his fingers on the coffee table as he studied the screen and then glanced down at his notes. He nervously cranked his neck back and forth. Part of him wanted to just step away and get some air, maybe forget what Pastor Peter Campbell had told him as they talked together in New York. But something much more powerful kept him reading those portions of that interview.

  He knew he didn’t really have to reread it; he had that particular interview with Campbell locked in by heart. Now, in light of everything that had happened, and the shocking images on TV, how could he ever forget? But he had to read what the pastor had said just once more, just to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

  During the interview, Campbell had been like a perpetual motion machine. He never stopped. He walked through the outer perimeter of the nuclear blast, ducking in and out of the emergency help centers that his church had provided for the homeless. Belltether was out of breath just trying to keep up. Campbell would occasionally poke his head into the portable radiation scanning tents that the government had set up. He’d thank the workers, who all seemed to know him, and he would spread some encouraging words.

  But even at that fast clip, Pastor Campbell was deep in thought as he explained it all to Belltether: “There are two great events, preludes to the final stage of the end of days. First, the rapture. Jesus Christ will take His church, and by that I mean every person who trusts in Christ as Savior. Good reason, my friend, for you to make your decision about Christ today. I truly believe it’s close. Then after the rapture, the world will experience the worst period in human history — the seven-year tribulation. At the center of it will be the Antichrist, the demonic temporary ruler of the planet who will appear to control it all.”

  Belltether was tracking. “Okay, and the second event after the rapture?”

  “Bible scholars have argued over whether this second event will happen after the rapture, or just before. It’s my judgment that it will probably happen before the rapture.”

  “So, what’s this event?”

  “I call it Ezekiel’s thunder.”

  “You’ll have to explain that one …”

  “Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament. One of God’s prophets. Chapters thirty-eight and thirty-nine. Someone called Gog is described as the leader of a nation called ‘Magog,’ which is said in the Bible to be a great land in the north. In chapter thirty-eight God tells His prophet that this nation of Magog, which seems to be a clear reference to Russia and its neighboring republics, is going to be the leader of a deadly coalition of Islamic nations. That prophecy tells us they will come against the nation of Israel in a ferocious war.”

  “Coalition of nations? Like …”

  “They’re actually named in that part of Ezekiel. You can look it up yourself. Those nations can be identified by matching them historically to their present-day counterparts. Libya today was called ‘Put’ back then. Then there’s ‘Persia’ — that’s modern-day Iran. ‘Cush’ is described in Ezekiel too. That would be Sudan today. ‘Gomer and Togarmal,’ also called ‘Beth-togarmah,’ those are the areas now in modern-day Turkey, and so is ‘Meshech.’”

  “What happens in the war?”

  “Something amazing. The enemy armies are poised to cover Israel, we are told, literally like ‘a cloud,’ they are so numerous. There’s seemingly no hope for Israel. Then God intervenes in a stunning, incredible, miraculous way. God causes so much confusion that we are told in verse twenty-one of chapter thirty-eight, that ‘every man’s sword shall be against his brother.’ In other words, in the melee created by God to protect Israel, the enemy actually helps to destroy itself, to fire on its own troops.”

  “So, where’s the big miracle?”

  “Verse twenty-two.”

  Belltether smirked. “Sorry, Reverend, I must have misplaced my Bible.”

  But as he said that, the reporter thought it odd that a memory bubbled up to the surface: that black-covered Bible that his mother gave him for this twelfth birthday. He wondered where it was. Probably in an attic somewhere or thrown away with his other middle school books.

  But Campbell wasn’t fazed by Belltether’s wisecrack. He knew verse twenty-two by heart. “Ezekiel says that God will destroy the enemies of Israel in that day by ‘great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.’ And just before that, in verse nineteen, we’re told there will be ‘great shaking in the land of Israel.’ So, Mr. Belltether, you tell me … what does that sound like to you?”

  “You’re the Bible scholar.”

  “Fire and brimstone, volcanic eruptions; shaking of the land, earthquakes. That sounds logical doesn’t it?”

  “No, actually it doesn’t. The whole thing sounds like science fiction on steroids.” That’s what the reporter said out loud, at least, but he didn’t say what he was really thinking. In a world where the Jersey coast had just been nuked and where New York barely escaped destruction itself, Belltether was ready for anything.

  Campbell smiled. “When God says He will do a thing, it doesn’t matter that He has said it through His prophet twenty-five hundred years ago. If the Lord says it will happen, then it will happen.” Then he added, “And why will God do it? The Lord makes it clear through His prophet Ezekiel. He does it all to let people like you and folks around the world know that He is God. Right there in Ezekiel chapter thirty-eight, verse twenty-three. When all the dust has settled from this miraculous rescue of Israel, the Lord speaks and says, as He does repeatedly in that part of Ezekiel: ‘Thus will
I magnify myself, and sanctify myself, and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the Lord.’ ”

  In his hotel room, Belltether finished looking at his notes from that interview and dropped them on the table. He stared out into space. A shiver ran down his back, as if a gentle breeze had unexpectedly brushed against him.

  Then he shot up from the couch and started rummaging wildly through the dresser drawers. He ran to the bedroom, and from the nightstand he retrieved a Gideon’s Bible. He thumbed around in the Old Testament until he finally stumbled on the book of Ezekiel. His hand was shaking. He found this all too incredible and was trying to calm himself. What’s the matter with you, Belltether? You act like you’re about to meet a ghost. Just read the Bible verses for yourself. Just do it.

  He sat back down with chapters thirty-eight and thirty-nine of Ezekiel opened on his lap. He read the exact verses that Campbell had cited, the prophecies of Ezekiel given two thousand five hundred years before.

  There it was, in black and white. The description of the exact nations that would come against Israel. The massive size of the invading army. The whole thing would look hopeless from Israel’s standpoint — and it would be. Belltether had received the media reports from the war front. Israel hadn’t had a chance. Their own generals were getting ready to die with their boots on because they saw absolutely no hope. But it wasn’t hopeless. The unimaginable miracle would happen. Just as the invading forces were entering across the borders, a freakish series of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes had burst through the earth’s crust, encircling the tiny country — as if someone had drawn a circle of fire around Israel, as if someone were saying, “You shall not pass.” All the details were spelled out in the prophecies of Ezekiel: “brimstone, fire, a great shaking in the land” — which is exactly what had happened in the fiery conflagration of volcanic explosions and earth-shattering quakes.