The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (103 page)

Rayford was eager to get back to the States to see Amanda. He also looked forward to some time with Hattie on the plane. He knew the work of drawing her to Christ was that of the Spirit and not his responsibility, but still he felt he should maximize every legitimate opportunity to persuade her. His problem that Saturday morning was that every fiber of his being fought against his role as pilot for Nicolae Carpathia. Everything he had read, studied, and learned under Bruce Barnes’s tutelage had convinced him and the other members of the Tribulation Force, as well as the congregation at New Hope, that Carpathia himself was the Antichrist. There were advantages to believers to have Rayford in the position he found himself, and Carpathia knew well where Rayford stood. What Nicolae did not know, of course, was that one of his other trusted employees, Cameron Williams, was now Rayford’s son-in-law and had been a believer nearly as long as Rayford.

How long could it last? Rayford wondered. Was he endangering Buck’s and Chloe’s lives? Amanda’s? His own? He knew the day would come when what Bruce referred to as “tribulation saints” would become the mortal enemies of the Antichrist. Rayford would have to choose his timing carefully. Someday, according to Bruce’s teaching, to merely have the right to buy and sell, citizens of the Global Community would have to take the “mark of the beast.” No one knew yet exactly what form this would take, but the Bible indicated it would be a mark on the forehead or on the hand. There would be no faking. The mark would somehow be specifically detectable. Those who took the mark could never repent of it. They would be lost forever. Those who did not take the mark would have to live in hiding, their lives worth nothing to the Global Community.

For now, Carpathia seemed merely amused by and impressed with Rayford. Perhaps he thought he had some connection, some insight to the opposition by keeping Rayford around. But what would happen when Carpathia discovered that Buck was not loyal and that Rayford had known all along? Worse, how long could Rayford justify in his own mind that the benefits of being able to eavesdrop and spy on Carpathia outweighed his own culpability in abetting the work of the evil one?

Rayford glanced at his watch and speed-read the rest of the paper. Hattie and her driver would be there in a few moments. Rayford felt as if he had undergone sensory overload. Any one of the traumas he had witnessed since the day the war broke out might have institutionalized a normal man during normal times. Now, it seemed, Rayford had to take everything in stride. The most heinous, horrible atrocities were part of daily life. World War III had erupted, Rayford had discovered one of his dearest friends dead, and he had heard Nicolae Carpathia give the word to destroy major cities and then announce his grief and disappointment on international television.

Rayford shook his head. He had done his job, flown his new plane, landed it thrice with Carpathia aboard, had gone to dinner with an old friend, gone to bed, had several phone conversations, rose, read his paper, and was now ready to blithely fly home to his family. What kind of a crazy world had this become? How could vestiges of normality remain in a world going to hell?

The newspaper carried the stories out of Israel, how the rabbi who had so shocked his own nation and culture and religion and people—not to mention the rest of the world—with his conclusions about the messiahship of Jesus, had suddenly gone mad. Rayford knew the truth, of course, and looked forward with great anticipation to meeting this brave saint.

Rayford knew Buck had somehow spirited him out of the country, but he didn’t know how. He would be eager to get the details. Was this what they all had to look forward to? The martyrdom of their families? Their own deaths? He knew it was. He tried to push it from his mind. The juxtaposition between the easy, daily, routine life of a jumbo-jet pilot—the Rayford Steele he was a scant two years ago—and the international political pinball he felt like today was almost more than his mind could assimilate.

The phone rang. His ride was here.

Buck was astonished at what he found at the church. Bruce had done such a good job camouflaging the shelter that Buck had almost not been able to find it again.

Alone in the cavernous place, Buck headed downstairs. He walked through the fellowship hall, down a narrow corridor, past the washrooms, and past the furnace room. He was now at the end of a hallway with no light—it would have been dark there at noon. Where was that entrance? He felt around the wall. Nothing. He moved back into the furnace room and flipped on the switch. A flashlight rested atop the furnace. He used it to find the hand-sized indentation in one of the concrete blocks on the wall. Setting himself and feeling the nagging sting in his right heel from his recent wound, he pushed with all his might, and a section of block wall slid open slightly. He stepped in and pulled it closed behind him. The flashlight illuminated a sign directly in front of him and six stair steps down: “Danger! High Voltage. Authorized Personnel Only.”

Buck smiled. That would have scared him off if he hadn’t known better. He moved down the steps and took a left. Four more steps down was a huge steel door. The sign at the landing of the stairs was duplicated on the door. Bruce had shown him, the day of the weddings, how to open that seemingly locked door.

Buck gripped the knob and turned it first right and then left. He pushed the handle in about a quarter of an inch, then back out half an inch. It seemed to free itself, but still it didn’t turn right or left. He pushed in as he turned it slightly right and then left, following a secret pattern devised by Bruce. The door swung open, and Buck faced what appeared to be a man-sized circuit-breaker box. Not even a church the size of New Hope would carry that many circuit breakers, Buck knew. And as real as all those switches were, they led to no circuits. The chassis of that box was merely another door. It opened easily and led to the hidden shelter. Bruce had done an amazing amount of work since Buck had seen it just a few months before.

Buck wondered when Bruce had had the time to get in there after hours and do all that work. No one else knew about it, not even Loretta, so it was a good thing Bruce was handy. It was vented, air-conditioned, well-lit, paneled, ceilinged, floored, and contained all the necessities. Bruce had sectioned the twenty-four-by-twenty-four-foot area into three rooms. There was a full bath and shower, a bedroom with four double bunk beds, and a larger room with a kitchenette on one end and a combination living room/study on the other. Buck was struck by the lack of claustrophobia, but he knew that with more than two people in there—and being aware of how far underground you were—it could soon become close.

Bruce had spared no expense. Everything was new. There was a freezer, a refrigerator, a microwave, a range and oven, and it seemed every spare inch possible had been converted into storage space.
Now,
Buck wondered,
what did Bruce do about connections?

Buck crawled along the carpet and looked behind a sleeper sofa. There was a bank of wireless routers that had to lead somewhere. He traced the wiring up the wall and tried to spot where it would come out in the hallway. He turned off the lights, closed the circuit-breaker door, closed the metal door, jogged up the steps, and slid the brick door shut. In a dark corner of the hallway he shined the flashlight and saw the section of conduit that led from the floor up through the ceiling. He moved back into the fellowship hall and looked out the window. From the lights in the parking lot, he could make out that the conduit went outside at the ceiling level and snaked its way up toward the steeple.

Bruce had told Buck that the reconditioned steeple had been the one vestige of the old church, the original building that had been torn down thirty years before. In the old days it actually had bells that beckoned people to church. The bells were still there, but the ropes that had once extended through a trapdoor to a spot where one of the ushers could ring them from the foyer had been cut. The steeple was now just decorative. Or was it?

Buck lugged a stepladder from a utility room up into the foyer and pushed open the trapdoor. He hoisted himself above the ceiling and found a wrought-iron ladder that led into the belfry. He climbed up near the old bells, which were covered with cobwebs and dust and soot. When he reached the section open to the air, his last step made his hair brush a web, and he felt a spider skitter through his hair. He nearly lost his balance swatting it away and trying to hang on to the flashlight and to the ladder. It was just yesterday that he had been chased across the desert, rammed, shot at, and virtually chased through flames to his freedom. He snorted. He would almost rather go through all that again than have a spider run through his hair.

Buck peeked down from the opening and looked for the conduit. It ran all the way up to the tapered part of the steeple. He reached the top of the ladder and stepped out through the opening. He was around the side of the steeple not illuminated from the ground. The old wood didn’t feel solid. His sore foot began to twitch.
Wouldn’t this be great?
he thought.
Slip off the steeple of your own church and kill yourself in the middle of the night.

Carefully surveying the area to be sure no cars were around, Buck briefly shined the flashlight at the top of where the conduit ran up the steeple. There was what appeared to be a miniature satellite dish, about two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Buck couldn’t read the tiny sticker applied to the front of it, so he stood on tiptoe and peeled it off. He stuck it in his pocket and waited until he was safely back inside the steeple, down the ladder, and through the trapdoor to the stepladder before pulling it out. It read “Donny Moore Technologies: Your Computer Doctor.”

Buck put the stepladder away and began shutting off the lights. He grabbed a concordance off the shelf in Bruce’s office and looked up the word
housetop
. Bruce’s installing that crazy mini-satellite dish made him think of a verse he once heard or read about shouting the good news from the housetop. Matthew 10:27-28 said, “Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Wasn’t it just like Bruce to take the Bible literally? Buck headed back to Loretta’s house, where he would read Bruce’s material until about six. Then he wanted to sleep until noon and be up when Amanda brought Rayford home from Mitchell Field in Milwaukee.

Would he ever cease to be amazed? As he drove the few blocks, he was struck by the difference between the two vehicles he had driven within the last twenty-four hours. This, a six-figure Range Rover with everything but a kitchen sink, and that probably still-smoldering bus he had “bought” from a man who might soon be a martyr.

More amazing, however, was that Bruce had planned so well and prepared so much before his departure. With a little technology, the Tribulation Force and its newest member, Tsion Ben-Judah, would soon be proclaiming the gospel from a hidden location and sending it via satellite and the Internet to just about anybody in the world who wanted to hear it, and to many who didn’t.

It was two-thirty in the morning, Chicago time, when Buck returned from the church and sat before Bruce’s papers on the dining room table at Loretta’s home. They read like a novel. He drank in Bruce’s Bible studies and commentary, finding his sermon notes for that very Sunday. Buck couldn’t speak publicly in that church. He was vulnerable and exposed enough already, but he could sure help Rayford put together some remarks.

Despite his years of flying, Rayford had never found a cure for jet lag, especially going east to west. His body told him it was the middle of the evening, and after a day of flying, he was ready for bed. But as the DC-10 taxied toward the gate in Milwaukee, it was noon Central Standard Time. Across the aisle from him, the beautiful and stylish Hattie Durham slept. Her long blonde hair was in a bun, and she had made a mess of her mascara trying to wipe away her tears.