screamed.
A rock slammed him in the chest, cracking his ribs. Bia fired point-blank into the crowd.
A chorus of screams rose up.
“My husband,” shrieked a voice. “Oh my God!”
A baseball bat swung out, struck his leg. He fired twice again, before the bat smashed his arm and the gun went flying.
The screaming mob piled on him, cursing, kicking, beating.
He fell to his face, scrabbling for the gun, but a boot came down hard on his hand, crushing it. He screamed, rolled, tried to crawl under his squad car.
“Stone him! Murderer! Stone him!”
He could feel the pummeling of rocks and sticks against him, the smack of them into bone and muscle, the rain of stones on the metal and glass of the police car. Choking with pain, he managed to crawl partway under the car, but they seized his leg and hauled him back into a maelstrom of blows and kicks. Screaming in pain and terror, he curled up into a fetal position, trying to protect himself from the rain of violence. The roar of the crowd began to fade, replaced by a dull roar in his own head. The blows came, but now they were happening to someone else, someone else was taking this journey, going farther and farther away. The roar subsided into a distant murmur, and then welcoming darkness gratefully came.
AS EDDY WATCHED, THE CROWD MOILED like dogs over the place where the cop had stood only a moment before. He saw him struggle to rise, then he was gone, dragged down by the undertow of the surging, stone- throwing crowd.
The chanting died down and the crowd seemed to go slack, then drift backward. The only thing left was the policeman’s cap and a lumpy, trampled uniform.
As the mob slowly dispersed, only a kneeling woman remained, wailing, holding a bleeding man in her arms. Eddy felt a surge of panic. Why was everything so different from how he had imagined it? Why did it seem so sordid?
“This is Armageddon,” came the deep, reassuring voice of Doke. “It had to start sometime.”
Doke was right. They’d passed the point of no return. The battle was joined. God was directing their hand, and there was no second-guessing Him. Eddy felt a surge of confidence.
“Pastor?” murmured Doke. “The people need you.”
“Of course.” Eddy stepped forward, raised his hands. “My Friends in Christ! Listen!
A restless silence fell.
“I am Pastor Russell Eddy!” he cried. “I am the man who exposed the Antichrist!”
The crowd, electrified by the violence, surged toward him in waves, like the ocean reaching for the shore.
Eddy grasped Doke’s hand and raised it. “The kings, the politicians, the liberal secularists, and the humanists of this corrupt world will hide in the caves and the mountain’s rocks. They will call to the mountains and rocks, ‘
A roar filled the night and the swelling crowd surged.
Eddy turned, pointed, and thundered: “There, three miles to the east, is a fence. Beyond that fence is a cliff. Down the cliff lies Isabella. And inside Isabella is the Antichrist. He goes by the name of Gregory North Hazelius.”
The roar reverberated as shots rang out into the sky.
“Go!” Eddy cried, shaking his pointing hand. “Go as one people led by the flaming sword of Zion! Go, and find the Antichrist! Destroy him and the Beast! The battle of the great God Almighty is joined! ‘
He stepped back and the teeming throng turned and undulated eastward across the moonlit mesa, the flashlights and torches bobbing in the darkness like a thousand glowing eyes.
“Well done,” said Doke. “You really fired ‘em up.”
Still grasping Doke’s powerful arm, Eddy turned to go with them. He glanced back and glimpsed Bia, a crumpled rag in the dust—and the woman, weeping and cradling her dead husband.
The first casualties of Armageddon.
60
A FRESH-FACED BOY IN HIS EARLY twenties, Agent Miller drove Bern Wolf from the airstrip to the fenced security area in a Humvee. They passed through a series of smashed gates and pulled up in the center of the parking lot, amid a scattering of civilian cars. Everything was bathed in the harsh glow of powerful lights.
Wolf looked around. Soldiers converged at the edge of the mesa, fixing ropes to rappel down the cliffs to Isabella.
“We wait in the vehicle until called, sir,” said Miller.
“Terrific.” Wolf was sweating. He was a computer scientist, he wasn’t cut out for this kind of shit. The knot in his stomach was taut and heavy. Wolf figured to stay close to Agent Miller and his twenty-two-inch arms that could bench-press Buicks. His back and shoulders were so massive, they made the 7.62 NATO assault rifle slung under his armpit look like a kid’s plastic gun.
He watched the men working at the edge of the mesa. One by one, they roped up and jumped backward off the lip, carrying bulky packs. Even though Wolf hadn’t visited Isabella, he knew it like the back of his hand, he’d planned some of the layouts and he’d pored over the construction diagrams. He also knew the software, and the DOE had given him an envelope with all the shutdown and security codes. Turning off Isabella would not be a problem.
The problem, for him, would be getting down the three hundred feet of cliff face.
“I gotta take a piss,” he said.
“Do it next to the vehicle and hurry up, sir.”
Wolf did his business and returned.
Miller was just getting off the radio.
“Our turn, sir.”
“They’re already in?”
“No. They want you down there before they effect penetration.”
Miller nodded. “After you.”
Feeling as if every muscle in his body were resisting, Wolf hefted his pack. Despite the harsh lights, he could see an amazing number of stars overhead. The air was crisp and smelled of woodsmoke. As he walked away from the idling Humvee, he realized just how quiet the night was. The loudest sound came from the crackling power lines—clearly, Isabella was running at full power. He doubted anything was seriously wrong underground. Probably a computer glitch had crashed the communications system. Some bureaucratic hack had gone nuts and called in commandos. Maybe the scientists in the Bunker didn’t even know they were causing a furor.
Then, at the edge of audibility, he heard a couple of faint noises, like shots, then two more.
“You hear that?” he asked Miller.
“Yeah.” He paused, his head cocked. “About three miles off.”
They listened a moment longer, but there was nothing.
“Probably just an Indian shooting a coyote,” said Miller.
Wolf’s legs felt wobbly as he followed Miller to the edge of the cliffs. He’d been expecting them to lower him in a cage or something, but there was no cage to be seen.
“Sir? I’ll take your pack. We’ll lower it down after you.”
Wolf shrugged out of his pack and handed it over. “Careful, there’s a laptop in there.”
“We’ll be careful, sir. And now, could you step this way?”
“Hold on here,” Wolf said. “You don’t really expect me to . . . go down one of those ropes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How?”
“We’ll show you in a minute. Please stand there.”
