Brink of Chaos (32 page)

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 family 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.

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.”

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.

Kingston had planned to fly back to New York, but he had cancelled his flight. He needed to stay in Israel for the time being. First, because he had journalistic responsibility. And second, because he had to sort out some things in his own head. If that was possible. And he wasn’t sure it was.

In Tel Aviv, Ethan was now approaching Joshua’s high-rise apartment. He was so deep in thought he had momentarily forgotten which street he was on. He had to stop and look around. Then he reoriented himself. The apartment building was a half block away.

His Allfone rang. It was Rivka. She sounded subdued. “Hello, friend.”

“Hi.”

“How are you feeling? Confused, I bet.”

“Confused? That doesn’t begin to explain it. I’m a mess, Riv.”

“I know,” she said with a soft kind of regret, “I am so sorry about losing Josh.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t think straight right now. But what you said — ‘losing Josh’? I’m not sure about that … not exactly.”

“Ethan …”

“Well, did he die? Or didn’t he? What happened, really?”

“Ethan, Josh’s fighter plane was struck by a missile.”

“I’m a pilot, Rivka. I know some things about flying. The sensors
in the cockpit of Josh’s F-35 LV indicated that his body had evacuated the cabin — yet the canopy on that jet was never blown. The ejection seat was never activated. The ground crew found bits of his flight suit in the wreckage. But no signs of human remains. Not a single trace of his DNA. You explain that …”

“You know what happens when a jet explodes,” she said. There was regret in her voice, certainly, but also persistence. “Everything burns up. Everything.”

“Not everything. There’s always a human trace. Even a small one. But here, there was nothing. Zero. Zilch.”

“Okay, Ethan, I know you’re upset,” she said.

He could tell she was placating him. Maybe that was okay, but he wasn’t in the mood. Ethan was not going to let it drop. “Then what about Abby and Cal and Deborah? The IDF rounded up the terror cell that was responsible for tying them up in that school in the Negev and making them the target for the bio-warhead. But then the Israeli special ops guys located the school — you know what they found? Three empty chairs, some loose rope, and a pile of clothes. Whoosh. The rest of the Jordan family had disappeared. And then there are all those reports about the millions of other people who disappeared …”

Rivka changed topics abruptly. “I thought maybe we could catch some dinner together. Give you a chance to talk.”

“I’m talking right now,” he said, as he stood in front of Joshua’s apartment tower. “But you’re not listening.” After a pause, Ethan settled down. “Sorry. Don’t mean to make you the bad guy.”

“That’s okay. Anyway, you’re right. I’m
not
one of the bad guys. Those would be the guys who were trying to blow your head off while you were driving an armored car down the streets in Nablus.”

“Right,” Ethan replied, trying to stay focused. “And I guess I never got the chance to thank you for shooting straight and keeping me alive back there. So thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Besides, you had the tougher job. You had to play the sitting duck. Not me.”

Ethan strode up the steps to the front door of the residential tower. “Listen, I’ll get back to you. We’ll make plans, okay?” he said to Rivka,
tenderly, before they ended the call. “I want to sit down with you. Have a long talk. But only after I’ve cleared some things up in my own head first.”

They said good-bye and agreed to meet the next day.

Ethan stood at the front door of Joshua’s apartment tower and pushed the security pad. After it buzzed, he identified himself. The security guard at the desk let him in.

“Morning, Mr. March. So sorry about Colonel Jordan.”

Ethan gave a slow shrug. “Me too.”

“You would like to see, maybe, his personal effects?”

“I thought maybe I’d check out his place. I’m really not sure why I’m here.”

“I think that Colonel Jordan must have figured you out pretty well, yes?”

“Why’s that?”

“He left instructions.”

“What kind?”

“A sealed note. Left with manager. Some time ago. To be opened in the event of ‘unexplained absence or suspicious disappearance.’ His orders. So, with what happened yesterday, we decided that … hope you don’t mind, but we felt we should open the envelope.”

Ethan bristled.
Man, these guys didn’t even wait forty-eight hours
.

He waited for the rest of the story.

“So,” the desk manager said, “he left this.” And with that he handed him a small key.

“What’s this for?”

“Safety deposit box of Colonel Jordan. Here in the building. His note said to give this to you. That’s all.”

Ethan fingered the key, then asked where the box was. The desk manager led him to the second floor and into the room with the safety-deposit boxes. Ethan inserted the key and opened the little metal door. There was only one thing waiting for him. A DVD player.

The manager gave him the key to Joshua’s apartment, and Ethan walked inside with the portable video pad. It was a strange feeling, knowing that Joshua was gone. But where? That was the question. He
noticed that there was a half-filled cup of coffee on the kitchen counter that Joshua hadn’t finished. Probably fixed himself some coffee predawn, just before heading out to the airbase for what would be his last mission.

Ethan chuckled a little at that.
Hey, Josh, I thought Abby got you off coffee and onto tea
.

But the smile faded quickly as Ethan plunked down on the couch. He had never felt so utterly alone. A jumble of crazy thoughts ran through his head. For a guy who always felt he needed to control his future, Ethan was facing a bizarre, uncertain life ahead. Josh, who was not just his boss and mentor, but who had also become his friend, had just vanished into thin air. Along with his entire family. They had become a second family to him. Though he never expected things to turn out like this, especially after Deborah had broken things off.

Suddenly, Ethan was aware of the vibration of his Allfone. He plucked it out of his pocket. It was an incoming email. He touched the screen and opened it up. A text message from “Jimmy Louder.”

“Huh,” Ethan mumbled. He hadn’t heard from the Air Force captain since the aftermath of his rescue from North Korea. Ethan had the chance to greet him at South Korean HQ after the mission. But only very briefly. Then the Air Force whisked him back to the United States for debriefing and a return to his wife and kids.

But Ethan wasn’t in a mood to read it. Not now. He had something much more important to do. He waved his finger over the On tab of Joshua’s video player. The screen lit up. He touched the Forward button.

What he saw next made him jump a little.

It was Joshua’s face filling up the screen, looking straight at him.

“Ethan, if you’re looking at this right now, I’m off the planet, my friend. And you’ve been left behind. I didn’t want that for you. But that’s the way it is. I told you that I felt that the timeline was short, that Jesus would be mustering his army of followers pretty soon, that world events were rushing to a climax. So, I’m up there. And you’re still down here.”

“Whoa,” Ethan muttered. This was heavy. Ethan immediately hit
Pause on the video pad and caught his breath. He waited several minutes before he hit Resume on the control.

When Ethan started the video again, Joshua walked him through what he called the “half-time coach’s chalk-talk.” Starting with the basics, once again, about who Jesus was, why He came to earth, why He died, what His death accomplished for the sins of mankind, the proof of His divinity by rising from the grave. And how Ethan needed to confess and believe those things and personally receive the person of Christ as Savior and Lord.

Ethan had heard it all before. Ever since his “salvation event,” as Joshua called his Iranian jail experience, he would drum it into Ethan every chance he got. But now, it was different. Ethan couldn’t avoid it. Couldn’t dismiss it either. Too much had happened for him to play games. Like the miraculous disappearance of Josh and his entire family — raptured away from the earth, it seemed — just like Josh had said, the way the Bible had predicted it would happen.