Fuse of Armageddon (9 page)

Silver was a large man with a beautiful mane of almost-white hair to match his distinctive name. Although he was nearing sixty, he appeared much younger, fueling tabloid gossip that he’d had discreet nips and tucks. Great tailoring hid the inevitable sags of aging. This was important. Every Sunday morning as he preached the gospel, Jonathan’s image was broadcast to millions of viewers across the world.

The doctor with the false name tag knew all of this and much more about Jonathan Silver. He knew about the six security men dispersed among the group.

“Yes,” Silver continued in the hypnotic voice that had lost no power with age, “hear the words of the vision given to John: ‘So the angel thrust his sickle into the earth and gathered the vine of the earth, and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the winepress, up to the horses’ bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs.’”

The amens and hallelujahs grew louder.

Khaled Safady raised his hand and waited respectfully for Jonathan Silver to acknowledge the question.

“In miles, how long is that river of blood?” Safady asked. He spoke with a Middle Eastern accent that no one found strange because of his assumed identity. Over the first few days of the tour, no one had yet looked at him twice or suspected where he’d been born.

“Roughly two hundred miles,” Silver answered. “Incredible, isn’t it? The blood of our enemies!”

This was the answer Safady expected, of course. It was the answer in all of Silver’s books on end-times prophecies. Although Safady was an Islamic radical, he’d spent hours and hours studying Silver’s Christian theology.
Know thy enemy.

“Incredible,” Safady agreed. He held his hand at the height of an imaginary horse’s bridle. “This high?”

“That high,” Silver confirmed. “Four and a half feet.”

“And how wide?” Safady asked.

“Twenty-five feet.” Silver’s deep voice was confident in the answer.

“Incredible,” Safady repeated. “You know, as a medical doctor, I have a rough idea of how much blood a human body holds. Has anyone calculated how many people it would take for a river with that much blood?”

While his questions had no relevance to what Safady had planned for the group, there was little time remaining before the sniper fired. He could finally afford to vent some of his anger at the people around him.

“It will take the blood of the two hundred million,” Silver said with great certainty. “The Battle of Armageddon will be a horror we can hardly comprehend.”

“Two hundred million,” Safady said. “Is that
all
the blood of all two hundred million people?”

“As I said, a horror we can hardly comprehend,” Jonathan Silver said. “But let me be quick to add, a justified horror. Both the righteous and the unrighteous will receive what they deserve.”

“But I’m a physician. I’ve seen horrible accidents. I’ve seen people die. Any wound with enough blood loss to lead to death stops the heart long before the heart can pump the body dry. How will Christ squeeze the remaining blood from the two hundred million bodies?”

“Come on,” a large-bellied man said, his arm around his wife. He spoke in a condescending tone. “With God, anything is possible.”

Some in the group echoed that with more amens. Other tourists around Safady squirmed, giving him some space, making it clear they did not want to be associated with his pointed doubts of the great Jonathan Silver.

“I’m sorry.” Safady smiled at the large-bellied man.
This will be the sniper’s victim,
he decided. He walked over and patted the man’s shoulder.
The touch of death.
“Really, I do apologize.”

The man shrugged and pulled away, apology obviously not accepted. Safady was fine with that; he’d accomplished what he wanted.

At least, so far.

Aside from the sniper here, there was also the shipping container with arms coming in from the Suez. Safady needed that part of the plan to go just as smoothly as this.

Allah be praised,
Safady thought.

Sheikh Zuweid, Egypt • 11:29 GMT


As instructed, about ten miles short of the Gaza Strip border crossing at Rafah, the Egyptian truck driver left the heavy traffic on Highway 30 and turned south toward the heart of the Sinai Peninsula. Five miles down the road was Abu-Aweigila—a camel stop of a town—and just past it a commercial dump in a set of barren hills.

He didn’t bother to gear down as he passed through Abu-Aweigila. Shortly afterward he turned onto another road that wound up through desert hills. Ancient, rattling dump trucks passed him in both directions as he geared down to a complete stop beside a semitrailer with a container on the flatbed deck. It was parked a quarter mile away from the dump, out of sight but not out of the range of the smell of the trash or the muted roar of the bulldozer moving the garbage.

The container on the other flatbed bore identical markings to the container that the crane had placed on his own flatbed trailer a few hours ago in Port Said.

To another driver, this might have seemed like a remarkable coincidence. This driver, however, valued his life. There had been whispers of Iranian money backing Hamas involvement in arms shipping, and he did not want to know what was in the container he carried, nor in the one he would be returning to Port Said.

All that mattered was uncoupling his truck from the trailer with the first container and coupling the second one in its place. And in the fastest time possible.

The dust was heavy on the truck driver’s bearded face as he struggled with the equipment. The sound of the bulldozer’s diesel engine faded from the driver’s awareness as he concentrated on unhitching the first trailer from his truck. He skinned his knuckles and cursed; this was usually a two-man job, but he’d been paid well to do it alone.

Finished uncoupling the first trailer, he climbed back into the cab and drove forward, then reversed to line up the coupling with the second trailer. It took several times in and out of the truck to get it maneuvered where he needed it, and his anxiety grew with each passing minute.

Finally he managed to couple the second trailer to his cab. With a hiss of the release of air brakes and with grinding gears, he was grateful that nothing unusual had happened by the time he reached the highway to Abu-Aweigila. The money in this was good, but he wanted to return safely to his wife and two young sons.

In the relatively sparse traffic all the way until he reached Highway 30 again, he spent as much time glancing in his rearview mirrors as he did watching the pavement in front of him. Only when he was back in the heavy eastbound traffic toward Rafah did he finally allow himself a sigh of relief.

His relief lasted only another five minutes—as long as it took for the timer on the bomb inside the new container to count down the final seconds.

For the driver, the end was a quick mercy. He died without comprehending the roar and the flash that threw the cab of the truck two hundred feet into the air.

Megiddo, Israel • 11:42 GMT


Jonathan Silver’s lecture on Megiddo had ended. As the Holy Land tourists began to shuffle toward the path that led down to the bus, Safady glanced at his watch.

Two minutes. The sniper was a minor player in this. He didn’t know why he was involved. He had been paid simply to shoot the target that Safady indicated, then disappear in the confusion. Two minutes. Then the payoff for months of intricate planning.

Safady raised his hand and called to Jonathan Silver. “I know we talked about this earlier,” he said, “but I’m trying to get something straight in my head. Because I’ve really been thinking hard about what you said about the two hundred million bodies and how it will take all of the blood from all the bodies squeezed dry.”

“Revelation tells us there is a great winepress,” Silver said, clearly irritated, “and that the blood came out of the winepress.”

“Incredible,” Safady said yet again. “All two hundred million bodies get fed through a winepress to be squeezed of their blood?”

“It’s not something I spend much time visualizing,” Silver said. “If we could move on . . .”

“Did you see the news coverage of the tsunami a few years ago?” Safady asked. “It took weeks to dispose of only thousands of bodies. How long would it take to move two hundred million bodies to and through the winepress? That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. Even at the rate of one body per second—which I think we would agree would be a mind-boggling logistical accomplishment—that would only be sixty bodies per minute, thirty-six hundred bodies per hour, and from what I’ve calculated in the last few minutes—” Safady’s brow furrowed as he briefly paused—“maybe eighty thousand bodies every day. Make it one hundred thousand bodies for even math. To squeeze blood from two hundred million dead bodies at that incredible rate would still take a minimum of two thousand days, or roughly five and a half years. Even then, I don’t think it would produce a high enough minute-by-minute volume of blood for a river four and a half feet high by twenty-five feet wide.”

“I find this very macabre,” Silver said. “We need not contemplate—“

“But earlier I heard a chorus of amens and hallelujahs when you described the two hundred million killed and all of their blood forming a river,” Safady said. He heard his voice begin to rise.
Keep control of your anger,
he reminded himself.
Take satisfaction in what you are about to inflict on these people.

He continued, forcing calm upon himself. “I heard joy as you had us contemplate the horrible deaths of liberals and gays and Arabs and Muslims who will be left behind. I find that just as macabre as wondering about God’s method of accomplishing this.”

“The unjust will pay the price,” Silver said.

“Amen!” an elderly woman shouted in Safady’s ear.

“So you’re telling me that Jesus is going to return and spend His first five and a half years supervising the logistics of squeezing dead bodies of all their blood?” Safady asked. “Is that what Revelation tells us?”

“Are you questioning the Word of God?”

“I just want to know where the river of blood comes from. If that prophecy is not accurate, what else about your prophecies is mistaken?”

“The truth is in the literal words of the Bible, young man,” Jonathan Silver said sternly. “When I hear you questioning that truth, I hear you questioning God. All the others around you hear that same lack of faith. I don’t appreciate it. I’m sure they don’t.”

The predictable applause, amens, and hallelujahs followed.

“Questioning
your
understanding of the Bible is questioning God?” Safady said, feeling the heat rise inside again.

“Enough,” Silver snapped. “Does anyone else want the tour to continue?”

More applause was directed at Silver and dark glances at Safady. These were scornful looks that gave Safady great satisfaction. Soon enough they would learn he was an Arab Muslim; soon enough they would learn to hate him much, much more. But all that hatred would be nothing compared to the hatred he had carried for them for years.

He glanced at his watch. It was almost time.

“If you will look over there,” Silver said, “you will see where the armies from the north are going to flood into the valley. Century after century of battles have been fought here. Napoleon once came and tasted defeat.”

Silver spun on the large rock that was his stage and pointed in the direction of Nazareth. “God stopped Napoleon from taking the Promised Land from the Jews, just as God will curse and strike down all those who oppose the prophecies found in His Holy Scripture.”

Silver let those words hang, as if they were an accusation directed at Safady. Others understood and nodded grimly as they stared at Safady.

In that brief silence of accusation, the sniper fired his single shot, striking down the potbellied American that Safady had chosen for a target.

6

Acco Harbor, Israel • 12:02 GMT


Quinn stood close enough to the edge of the seawall that salt spray would occasionally cool his face, a welcome sensation in the heat of early afternoon. Here, on the weekends, couples often posed for wedding photos with the fishing boats and the marina and the sea beyond. Quinn stood at this popular spot facing inland toward an enormous stone fortress.

Acco had always fascinated Mulvaney Quinn. The Muslims had managed to retake most of the Holy Land from the Christian crusaders by the early twelfth century, and here Richard the Lionheart had returned in 1191 to recapture the city from the great warrior Saladin and establish it as the capital of the pitiful remnant of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the final stronghold that would succumb a century later.

Eight hundred years had passed since the bloody battles, and a haunted lostness clung to the ancient stonework, the light sea breeze and bright sunshine incapable of banishing its melancholy. This added to the ache for Quinn—all he had to do was close his eyes to see that same breeze tugging at the hair of his five-year-old daughter as she clung to his hand and pulled him along the seawall, begging him to tell yet another story about the knights who’d roamed the hills so long before.

As he soaked in the Mediterranean vista, Quinn used his right hand to squeeze the fresh stitches beneath the gauze of his left hand. The freezing had departed, and he was using the sensation of physical pain to distract him from the pain in his soul. But better to mark the anniversary here. He’d rather think about his daughter along the seawall than think of the bloody shoe he had found in the street on that horrible day. . . .

A woman approached. A tourist, by all appearances, with the straightforwardness and unself-consciousness of an American. She wore a blue summer dress that swirled around her hips. Her shoulder-length auburn hair, slightly wide cheekbones, and a nose not quite straight had a definite allure. Men were turning heads to watch her progress.