Delroy took a sip of breath, feeling as though the room had suddenly constricted on him. He wanted to believe, truly he did. But the image of Terry’s casket, the unconscionable grave at Marbury, Alabama, in the family plot where Josiah Harte rested, ran through his mind. It had been raining the day they had laid his son to rest.
“The people who disappeared,” he said in a quiet voice, “were Raptured.” He wanted to continue, to pour passion into his words, but he couldn’t. His throat seemed to dry up and the words just stopped.
Cranston regarded Delroy with a flat gaze. “Raptured?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Do you want to explain that term, Chaplain?”
Delroy started to speak and couldn’t get the words out for a moment. He cleared his throat and tried again. “They were taken by God, sir.”
“Taken by God.” Cranston’s disbelief was obvious in the hollow tone of his voice, his words driving home like nails in a coffin. He unsheathed the steel of authority when he spoke again. “Did I hear you right, Chaplain?”
“Aye, sir.” Delroy sat quietly, aware of how his heart thudded inside his chest.
Cranston glanced down at the legal pad in front of him. “Chaplain Harte, you flew practically nonstop from the Mediterranean, from a ship that is involved in a major military engagement, to bring us that story?”
Delroy had to force his voice out. “Aye, sir.”
“And you told your captain this?”
“I did, sir.”
Cranston turned to Marsden. “Do you know Captain Falkirk, David?”
Marsden kept staring at Delroy. “Yes. I do. I consider him a very good and very valuable friend.”
Cranston shook his head. “Then I must admit, General, that I am confused. I know you must trust him and his judgment, otherwise you would never have wasted my time by calling me here.”
“I do trust his judgment,” Marsden said. “Captain Falkirk speaks highly of Chaplain Harte. The chaplain has had a long and distinguished career with the Navy.”
The words crashed into Delroy’s mind. For the first time he realized his career was at stake today. And he had brought them the story of the Rapture, something that he had no way of proving. Perspiration poured down his face despite the room’s cool temperature. Had he ever truly believed that? And why?
The mocking voice from the plane tore into his thoughts and wrecked his concentration. “Because a lot of people turned up missing sixteen-plus hours ago and you don’t have an answer? Oh, man, if you can’t explain it, if things don’t go the way you want them to, it must be God. Are ignorance and fear and a need for some kind of immortality what it takes to make you a believer, Chaplain Harte?”
Cranston drew lines on the legal pad. “Not to be disrespectful, General, but maybe this should have been a navy matter.”
Marsden spoke in a flat voice but didn’t take his eyes from Delroy.
“General, as you’ll recall, Admiral Royce is among the missing. In this matter, I didn’t want a stand-in. I wanted us.”
Cranston looked at Marsden, then at Mayweather. “Why us?”
“Because we represent a major bloc within the joint chiefs, General,” Mayweather said in his honey-soft voice. “When the three of us speak together on something, people listen.”
“We don’t agree on a lot of things,” Cranston said. “The case in point is the situation we need to take regarding Russia.”
“We don’t know that Russia is behind the attacks that eliminated so much of our population,” Marsden said.
“That’s bull,” Cranston said. “It can’t be anyone else. No one else has the technology.”
“You know,” Mayweather said in a patient father’s voice, “that’s what Russia is saying about us. That we must be behind the disappearances.”
Cranston waved the subject away. “That’s just a smoke screen they’re broadcasting to the rest of the world.”
“They say that’s our tactic,” Marsden pointed out. “President Fitzhugh’s declaration to the American people this morning that we would find out who attacked the United States so savagely and punish those responsible wasn’t even a thinly veiled threat.”
“Come on, General,” Cranston flared. “After what the Soviets did to the Israelis in that surprise attack fourteen months ago, how can you even doubt that Russia is behind this?”
Marsden glanced at Mayweather, then sipped from a glass of water.
Mayweather leaned back in his chair, obviously taking a very smooth handoff. Delroy doubted Cranston caught the transition. The two older generals reminded Delroy of two older deacons in Josiah Harte’s church who outmaneuvered the up-and-coming firebrands by double-teaming them so quietly they were never noticed.
“You know, General Cranston, you’re something of an accomplished tactician,” Mayweather said.
Delroy knew that was definitely an understatement. Shortly after the Russian attack on Israel and after Chaim Rosenzweig’s introduction of the chemical fertilizer that had revolutionized Israel’s place in the Middle East, Cranston had been the man to go to for the answers regarding questions about those countries. Cranston had helped negotiate the fragile peace that had existed till the Russian attack, then had helped put the conflicts back into perspective after that attack to maintain another brief period of bloodless unrest—until the Syrians had attacked Turkey.
“The accepted view of the failure of the Russian attack on Israel was because they used planes that were falling apart,” Mayweather said. “Do you really think they would have launched an attack that was doomed to fail if they had a weapon waiting in the wings that could vaporize a third of the world’s population?”
Cranston remained quiet.
“The Russian military lost a lot of men and machines in that debacle, Todd,” Marsden observed quietly. “Men and machines they could have used to defend themselves in case the United States or Great Britain or anyone else decided
