I, Judas the 5th Gospel (28 page)

“We’ll go around,” DiSalvo said.

Angelique shook her head. “You can move in the Mato Grasso via the river or animal trails. Through the jungle? No. We’ll never come out.” She looked up. “Not in time.”

“Then we kill them,” DiSalvo said. “Captain, you take—“

“No.” Gates sat cross-legged, his weapon across his lap.

“That is an order,” DiSalvo said. “We must—“

“No.” Gates repeated. He stood up, wearily, as if he carried a burden heavier than the lives of the men waiting in ambush or his own. He let the MP-5 drop to the ground, forgotten.

“They’re mercs. Paid to kill. They won’t die for cause.” Gates pointed up at the Intruder. “That’s got to have them spooked. It’s got everyone spooked.”

Lee frowned. “What are you proposing?”

“We talk,” Gates said. He walked forward along the path, hands raised to his shoulders.

DiSalvo looked at Angelique. “What have you done to him?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. He is finding his heart.”

Gates yelled: “You can shoot me, wipe us out, but you think it’s going to make any difference? You have any idea what’s going on? You can see that thing in the sky.”

He halted, right on the edge of the kill zone. He knew where it was because it was where he would have put it. Cover both path and river. Smart.

There was no sound from the jungle or anything else for a bit.

The voice came from the right front, where the center of the ambush would be. “So tell me, mate, what the bloody hell is going on?”

“I’ve got no clue,” Gates said. “But we’re going up-river to try to find some answers. Want to come with us?”

There was no answer.

Gates spoke. “We’re going up there to find Judas. Yeah,
that
Judas. He’s got something to do with this thing.” He pointed up. “Kill us here, and you might get your money, although, you know as well as I do, you can’t trust those rich bastards. But looks like money might not be worth much soon.”

“There’s bloody headhunters around here,” the voice said.

“Yeah,” Gates said. “Saw your mate. But I think they’re protecting the man we’re going to see. So even if you let us go, our heads might end up on a stake, too. Yours might, too. But we’re going. You want to shoot us, feel free. Probably save us a lot of trouble.”

Gate signaled for the others to follow. Angelique immediately got to her feet and walked up the trail. Lee looked at DiSalvo. The muscle on the side of the Jesuit’s face twitched, and then he pointed to the right of Lee, tapping the grenades on his own combat vest. Lee nodded.

The doctor crawled into the jungle.

Gates was in the kill zone. He looked over his shoulder and felt an inappropriate wave of relief that Angelique was following him. They’d kill him. Of that he had no doubt. They were mercenaries after all and they’d been paid to kill him. But watching her walk up the trail, he knew they wouldn’t kill her. No man with a soul would. She was dirty, hair butchered, dressed in filthy fatigues, but she was luminous. It was not sexual. It was Presence.

Lee pulled the pin on the grenade, three more lined up, ready to throw into the kill line.

He pulled back his arm, ready to throw.

But he couldn’t.

The images of all those bodies lying in hospital beds, their brains dead, their bodies kept alive by machines, flooded his mind. He’d kept them alive because he’d believed in their souls, but without the machines they’d have died.

The concept froze his muscles. But it shouldn’t have. He had control. But God--

The grenade went off.

Gates whirled. Angelique raised her arms, hands empty. DiSalvo came staggering along the trail, dazed, covered in blood.

“Lee,” DiSalvo said. “He—“ the priest just shook his head. The blood wasn’t his. It was Lee’s. There wasn’t much left of the doctor.

Gates looked to left. He was surprised the mercenaries hadn’t fired. There was no sound, and he realized they were leaving, running as fast as they could. Where to, probably even they didn’t know. But they were men of action and they were taking action.

“Come on,” Gates said, taking DiSalvo’s elbow with his hand. Angelique went on the other side.

They continued above the Devil’s Fork.

Abbottabad, Pakistan

Captain Martinez went to work, one warhead at a time, taking off a single maintenance plate on each one. They were all exactly the same model, which made his job that much easier. It took twelve minutes to remove all the plates.

In that time, three more claymores went off, which meant the Pakistanis were very close. And that they were moving forward without sending men to defuse the bombs first. They were pushing forward and taking the casualties to clear the mines. Much like boys and men had been sent out to clear the minefields with their bodies and lives during the Iran-Iraq War. A war between Muslims; the result of disagreements among the various sects. Much like the Catholics and Protestants. Christians and Muslims from the Crusades forward.

Martinez went back to the first warhead. He reached in and removed the plutonium core. He tossed it to the ground. He knew it was too soon, but he already felt hot.

Core after core, he removed the guts of the warheads. Not like a surgeon, but like a butcher. Killing them.

His team was safe. He knew that. Kali would have turned back on his message. He knew the Colonel.

They’d get Daw out.

As he continued down the line, the engineer in him, trained at West Point, wondered how much cement the Pakistanis would have to pour on this place if the Intruder turned out to not quite destroy everything. How deep would they have to bury this place to keep the radiation sealed?

Contained, when what they had wanted was to spread it out.

Why?
Martinez wondered as he pulled out another core.
Why would people do that to each other?

He was feeling weak. His stomach was queasy. He staggered for a second, but then saw the bombs on the work bench. He had to do it right. He went over. As he dismantled the bombs, which were already partially dismantled, he thought of his father, who’d put him atop a pony at a carnival when he was very young. Martinez had been scared, and even though he’d worn a little cowboy hat and six shooters on each hip, he’d cried. His father had pulled him off the saddle in disgust.
You’re no son of mine.

Martinez finished the last warhead.

He picked up one of the core. He walked over in front of the unblinking eye of one of the video cameras. He waved it.

He collapsed back in a chair. He’d made a pile of weapons of mass destruction into weapons of singular destruction.

He thought of the pony and knew that he shouldn’t have been scared of it.

Space, Earth Orbit

Forster spun about the MMU after converting the seventh satellite into a Seed of the Word. Earth was below him. Massive, yet so small. He could reach out with his arms and encircle it.

He turned to his left. The hand of God was so close to the planet.

There hadn’t been any nuclear explosions in a while. He knew the physics the scientists and non-believers had been trying to throw at Wormwood. And their failure was very clear. It was coming down to smite the disbelievers and deliver the believers.

Seeing the object and the planet coming together so clearly, a sudden, startling thought occurred to Forster: why would God destroy that which he had so perfectly designed and created?

It felt as if his stomach was being stabbed by knives.

Forster gritted his teeth and jetted back to the X-37.

Only one more satellite to go.

The Very Large Array

Abaku opened the metal briefcase. He removed the tablets, placing one on a desk in the corner of the control room, and the other fifteen feet away on another desk. He checked the wireless connection.

Then he took out the thumb drive containing the Great Commission.

“Let us wait,” Sergut said. The Russian was sitting on a desk, staring out at the Array and the mountains beyond. “It is beautiful, is it not? Very much unlike Siberia, but still somehow similar.”

“Why wait?” Abaku asked.

“Until the last satellite is modified,” Sergut said.

Abaku ignored him and slid the thumb drive into his tablet. “There is no point in waiting.”

Sergut sighed. “Does there always have to be a point?”

Abaku went to a computer terminal and began scrolling through the data again, checking the alignment.

“The world is ending and you worry about numbers?” Sergut asked.

“The world is ending, but a better one is beginning,” Abaku said, his focus on the screen. “We are the instrument of God’s will.”

“So are the antennas, then,” Sergut said. “You do know one of the test subjects died, yes?”

“Salvation is not for everyone.”

“I wonder what the dividing line is,” Sergut murmured. “After all, isn’t forgiveness an absolute? We must forgive every trespass, must we not?”

Abaku looked up from the computer. “It is not for us to forgive. That is God’s provenance.”

“But again,” Sergut said, “would he not forgive all?”

“Only those who desire it,” Abaku said. “Which is why we are doing this. To give them a chance.”

“But that one test subject had a chance.”

“She must have rejected it.”

Sergut looked out the large windows to the north. Looming over that arm of seven large dishes was Wormwood. “I wonder if I am like the lizard on the road, and perhaps there will be no braking by God.”

Earth

France rejected the Final Option. Which was just like France. Always taking a different path.

Pakistan was out of it due to the fact its nuclear arsenal was, as they diplomatically explained, inaccessible at the moment. Their idea of a ‘moment,’ in this case meaning thousands of years. Privately, US officials were being bombarded with dire threats, curses, and diatribes by Pakistani officials. The fact the launch codes had been transmitted for a first strike against India prior to Captain Martinez making their warheads ‘inaccessible’ did little to mute the argument.

At the moment, most people had a much larger issue to deal with.

Russia, England, India, and China were in. The other states left with nukes: Israel and most likely North Korea didn’t have the lift capability, so they weren’t invited to the party.

ICBM silos were opened and the missiles were prepped. Submarines came to launch depth.

The human race was preparing to cast the last of its physical power into space directly at the Intruder.

Mato Grasso, The Amazon

“We’re here.”

Angelique pointed at a thin trail to the right. It followed a clear stream into thicker jungle.

“How do you know?” DiSalvo asked.

Gates let go of DiSalvo’s arm and nodded to Angelique to lead the way. She pushed onto the path, Gates right behind her. After a moment’s hesitation, DiSalvo followed.

Gates felt as though the whirlwind that had been his life was closing in. He’d thought after Afghanistan that his capacity to be appalled at what humans could do to each other had been sapped like a good tap in a vigorous maple, drained of all that was once sweet. The last few days hadn't hollowed him out, but like the empty maple, some part of him had begun to fill with something else, something that he didn't understand, but the maple would have let him know this is the way that we make the syrup. We have our roots and dirt and water and the emptiness within that begs for filling, and thus we make more of the sap. And we do it knowing that it'll be taken again. And that's how he feels: that something that he barely understands is going to be taken and then filled in with something else and he has no way to stop it.

He was not sure if it was going to be a good thing or a bad thing.

He had walked into a kill zone with his hands raised, when he could have busted the ambush from the flank, rolled up the shooters, and killed every last one of them. Instead he’d let them walk away.

He was blindly following Angelique, someone he barely knew. Just a week ago he would have demanded proof indicating this was the way to go, but now he was different.

Angelique pulled her machete from its leather sheath and began hacking at the thick jungle partially blocking the old path. Just a few days before he would have pushed to the front and cut through the heavy undergrowth himself, but now he followed, watching the sinew of the muscles in her arm flex. He imagined her face and how it would be lined with concentration and pure focus, and perhaps a heavy sheen of sweat as her body expended the last of its energy.

Gates stumbled to his knees just as Angelique broke through. She disappeared from sight and he heard her voice. “Hello.”