“Jon, get over here. Jordan just hit a military installation in the Negev!”
It was the familiar, if unusually excited, voice of Breck Hunter, a videographer and close friend with whom Feldman worked as a World News Network Middle East TV correspondent.
“What?”
“Just about an hour ago. I can see the glow in the sky from here.”
“Jordanians?”
“That's the buzz over the military radio band,” Hunter explained. “Let's get out there.”
At a relatively young thirty years of age, Feldman's crisp reporting style and disarming on-camera presence had already caught the attention of the World News Network hierarchy. It had helped net him this prestigious assignment, his first outside the U.S. Yawning, Feldman pushed up his spectacles, rubbed unfocused, pale gray eyes, and began gathering his resolve. “Okay. See if you can get us clearance. I'll pick you up in five minutes.”
Checking his clock, he was doubly glad he'd left WNN's dull Christmas Eve office party early. But his hopes for tonight's more promising U.S. embassy function, he realized, might now be jeopardized.
Journalistic instincts began taking over.
He pulled on his sneakers, stopping only long enough to swear at the wetness, grabbed his worn leather jacket from a chair and bolted out the door. Once again, he was thankful he'd slept in his clothes.
Although he'd only been on assignment here a few months, the newsman had come to learn his way around Jerusalem quite well. Firing up his rented all-terrain Land Rover, Feldman hustled away from his downtown apartment complex, heading south. The dust in the streets kicked up in turbulent swirls with his passing, the result of a severe drought that had begun long before his arrival.
He found it fascinating the way the night transformed this strange city. The bright gleaming lights misrepresented Jerusalem's antiquity, and obscured its truth. To the passing eye, the artificial illumination cast shadows, disguising the Holy City as a stable, thriving metropolis. But as Feldman knew, sadly, the reality was otherwise. Beneath Jerusalem's veil lay the ancient origins of three very proud religions with a history of violent opposition to one another. Jew, Christian and Muslim lived grudgingly side by side in segregated sections of the city amid continuing tension and distrust. Locked in an eternal struggle that dated back to before the Crusades, they competed in a three-way ideological tug-of-war over control of the city's sacred shrines.
Despite their intense political differences and animosities, the three religions were surprisingly similar. They were, after all, born of the same God, tracing their theological descent back four thousand years to one common source — Abraham, the grand patriarch. To their lasting frustration, the three faiths were inseparably commingled in the dust of Jerusalem's past, each playing an integral part in the Holy City's celebrated, historic encounters with divinity.
As Feldman picked his vehicle's way through the narrow corridors of the downtown district, he had to be careful to avoid yet another kind of religious encounter. With the calendar inching relentlessly toward the year 2000, Jerusalem was inundated with thousands of millenarian visitors. Comprised of hundreds of bizarre cults, the millenarians had burdened the intolerant city with their own peculiar brands of religious fanaticism.
Drawing near Hunter's apartment block on the outskirts of the city, Feldman at last got an unobstructed view of the horizon. Due south he spotted the red shimmer of what he assumed was the Negev disaster. Shrugging off a spell of deja vu, he rolled up to the courtyard where Hunter awaited him, video camera and travel bag in tow.
Above average in height and powerfully built, Hunter was dressed in fatigues left over from headier days covering Operation Desert Storm. A respected, hard-story video journalist, he looked at the world through alert, squinty blue eyes.
Before the Rover could slow to a halt, Hunter slung his gear into the back, slid in beside his colleague, slapped the dashboard hard twice and they barreled off toward the glowing sky.
“So what did you find out?” Feldman wondered.
“Nothing more than I told you,” the cameraman replied. “It looks like an isolated attack. Nothing else hit so far.”
“Did you confirm it was Jordanian?”
“No. But that's the intelligence read.”
Jonathan Feldman, the wordsmith of the two-man team, was athletically lanky with clean features, a long, straight nose and bright gray eyes that stood out boyishly under unkempt dark hair. Slightly older, Hunter was rugged, outdoorsy, with light hair and blond-tan complexion.
Their relaxed familiarity underscored a strong friendship they'd developed over the past year as members of a WNN field unit crew. They'd worked closely together covering some of the many millennialist movements that had sprung into prominence across the U.S.
As both reporters had soon learned, many of these millenarian sects had been in existence in America and throughout the world for decades, patiently anticipating the new millennium. But most had only come into being within the last few years.
The majority of these millenarian cults had religious orientations, ranging from the uplifting, who saw the twenty-first century as the beginning of a holy reign of Christ, to the doomsdayers, who perpetually envisioned Armageddon. Some groups were secular, others more metaphysical. Still others were merely social or political. And many remained as yet undeclared, but found the millennium an exceptional excuse to drop out and reinvent the “live-for-today” hedonism of the mythical 1960s.
From groups numbering in the thousands to single voices crying in the wilderness, there was a millennial philosophy for every inner calling, with more than 297 separate millennialist organizations currently listed on the Internet.
It had been obvious to Hunter and Feldman early on where most of the important millenarian activity would end up. Requesting to be included in WNN's Israel operation, the two men had maneuvered themselves into the Jerusalem post. It had been a timely move. With each passing day, the numbers of these cults all over the world, like so many colonies of lemmings, would reach critical mass and converge on the Holy Land. And while the greatest concentrations were clustering around Jerusalem, other famous biblical sites, such as Nazareth, Bethlehem, Mount Sinai and Megiddo, also had their advocates.
5
Somewhere in the Negev Desert, southern Israel 1:20 A.M., Saturday, December 25,1999
Three excited Japanese astronomers tore across the desert floor in hot pursuit of the fallen star. Already they'd forgotten their poor associate, who, having the least seniority, had been left behind to finish their experiments.
From their mountaintop vantage point, the men had clearly witnessed, in horror, the meteorite's collision with the research institute. They immediately set off in their car, making their way across the rugged rift of the valley floor, the huge orange glow guiding them like a beacon. Along the way, they were treated to an ongoing light show of meteors, jet fighters and helicopters crisscrossing the night sky with regularity.
Hardly a half kilometer away from their goal, however, and completely without warning, a thin, bearded, weather-beaten Bedouin in a hooded robe suddenly rose up in the beam of their headlamps, waving desperately for them to stop.
Narrowly avoiding him, the car spun out of control, rotated twice and careened to a dusty halt. The nomad, seemingly unaffected by his close call, jabbered at them excitedly in Arabic. The old man pointed alternately to the flames of the destroyed facility beyond and to a nearby gully.
The astronomers grew excited with the assumption that the Bedouin had found a piece of the meteorite. But their excitement quickly gave way to shock. As they hurried in the indicated direction, their panning flashlights revealed a nomad woman crouching over a motionless human form curled naked on its side in a fetal position.
