The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (390 page)

Chang was, in fact, monitoring the world. He had seemed to catch his second wind. He knew he should be in bed, but who could sleep at a time like this? He sat at his computer, staring at the reports coming in from all over the world about people, especially Jews, putting their faith in Jesus Christ as their Messiah. Tens of thousands every few minutes were totaling in the millions now, and Chang had the feeling it wouldn’t stop until the Glorious Appearing. There were to be signs in the heavens before that, and more were prophesied to come to Christ.

Rayford and Chaim got the news about Buck from Sebastian a few minutes later. Rayford didn’t know what to feel. He knew Buck was fine, better than he had ever been, and that he would see him soon. But he hated the thought that the young man, the father of Rayford’s grandson and the husband of his daughter, had suffered so. Rayford had lost many friends and loved ones, none so close as his daughter and now son-in-law. But in the past he had somehow been able to come to terms with the losses, to tell himself it was the price of war, the inevitable result of what they had been called to do.

It was not so easy now, not when it struck so close to home. He called Mac.

The clouds parted and the moon shone brightly, all the way to the Dead Sea, directly beneath Mac.

“I’m not gonna lie to you, Ray. Yeah, it looks like Buck came to a rough end. But he was doing what he wanted to do. He worked at it, trained for it, and if you remember the first reports we got from him, he and Tsion got done what they hoped to.”

“How’s the resistance?”

“’Bout finished. Unity’s got ’em pushed into the Temple Mount, and it’s clear the GC has hardly scratched the surface of their resources yet. They could take the whole city anytime they wanted.”

“You’re heading back, I assume.”

“Not all the way,” Mac said. “I want to see what happens on the Petra perimeter from the air. Then I want to head back up to Buseirah and see how that plays out.”

“You know I’d give anything to be there with you.”

“Holy mackerel! You see that, Ray?”

“I see it. I’ll let you go. Time to watch the show.”

A cloud had now covered the moon. It was bright and nearly full and had been highlighting the dancing clouds. Suddenly, it had seemed to disappear, as if someone had turned it out like a light. Rayford knew the moon merely reflected the sun anyway, thus it was the sun—far below the horizon now—that had lost its light. The sky was pitch.

Rayford asked Chaim to douse all the lights.

“We will see nothing, Captain,” Chaim said. “Nonetheless, the better to see what is coming.”

Once the lights were off, Rayford could tell Chaim stood by the window only by the sound of his voice.

Rayford said, “Have you ever seen blackness so thick?”

“I have seen many wonders in the last seven years,” Chaim said. “This is like seeing nothing. But the mere anticipation it engenders causes a buzz from the top of my head to the soles of my shoes.”

Lightning ripped through the sky, and Rayford was stunned to see the clouds briefly again. “I think I saw a shooting star,” he said. “I love those.”

“That was more than a shooting star,” Chaim said, “which, as you know, is not really a star anyway. What you saw was truly a falling star, maybe a meteor. Soon stars and meteors will fall, but you will only hear them. Isaiah foretold that the stars of heaven and their constellations would not give their light. The sun will be darkened and the moon will not shine.

“God is saying, ‘I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; I will halt the arrogance of the proud, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.

“‘I will shake the heavens, and the earth will move out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts and in the day of His fierce anger.

“‘Everyone will flee to his own land. Everyone who is found will be thrust through, and everyone who is captured will fall by the sword.’”

Rayford shook his head. “There’s another difference between us, Chaim. I’ve never been able to memorize like that.”

“What else have I to do, Rayford? As I say, I was thrust into this position, and the teacher became the student. My former protégé, Dr. Ben-Judah, would not hear of my giving short shrift to the Scriptures. He discipled me, pushed me, grounded me in them. Most of all, God gave me a love for His Word. Now there is nothing I would rather do than study it every spare moment and commit as much of it as possible to memory.”

Enoch’s people leaped to their feet and cried out when the early afternoon sun disappeared from the suburban Chicago sky. Though he knew it was coming, Enoch himself was spooked when the light of day turned into the darkest night and the temperature immediately dropped.

He heard a roaring, whistling sound and thought of the cliché that people always used when recounting a tornado: “It sounded like a freight train.” Well, this sounded like a plane about to crash. They were close enough to the airport that it could have been, but Enoch did not recall hearing a jet.

Something was coming, and it was getting closer.

“Don’t be afraid!” Enoch called out, but he couldn’t hide the fear in his own voice. “This was prophesied. We just talked about it. It’s all part of God’s plan.”

But when whatever was falling finally crashed into the main road on the other side of the mall, there was no stopping the gathering from bolting to take a look. Enoch jogged along behind them, grateful for the light-sensitive streetlights that began popping on all over. A meteor about three feet in diameter had bored a ten-foot-wide hole twenty feet deep in the road.

And here came another.

People screamed and scattered, but Enoch held his ground. “I believe we’re protected!” he said. “None of the judgments from heaven harmed God’s people! We bear His mark, His seal! He will protect us!”

But his body of believers had taken flight. Enoch smiled. He would chide them tomorrow when all were unscathed. How strange it seemed to be walking around in midnight darkness early in the afternoon. The next meteorite, which Enoch guessed was twice the size of the first, obliterated one of the former anchor stores in the deserted mall. It caused such an explosion he had to cover his ears. While he truly believed he would not be hurt, he found himself ducking and expecting debris to crack him on the head.

Enoch ran back to where he had met with the people, but he was alone now. He sat on a concrete bench and watched the show. Mostly he listened. Had he been a caveman, he would have believed the sky was falling, that the stars would all eventually hit the earth.

If anything, the rate of incoming reports of Jewish people turning to the Messiah increased dramatically over the next half hour. Chang beckoned Naomi to his side and sat with his arm around her waist as she stood. They couldn’t decide what was more entertaining—the myriad camera feeds from all over the dark world, or the racing meter giving evidence of the fulfilling of the prophecy that a third of the Jewish remnant would come to believe in Jesus as their Messiah by the time of the end.

Chang could only think back to the horrific scenes he had monitored when Carpathia was at the height of his murderous fury against the Jews. He had had them rounded up, put in death camps, starved, tortured, beaten, humiliated with psychological warfare—you name it. That any survived was a miracle. That many became believers was something else.

“This is sure different from the last time Jesus came,” Naomi said. “Besides that we weren’t ready, it happened in the twinkling of an eye. Apparently God’s going to play this one out for all it’s worth.”

Mac had the strangest sensation. He had been trained to fly by instruments, of course, but still he found it disconcerting to see nothing above. And the only light on the ground was man-produced. Gradually he picked up boat lights, lights on other planes, headlights of cars and trucks and military vehicles. He heard the scream of falling meteorites over the usually deafening
thwock-thwock-thwock
of the blades and even heard the explosions when they blasted the earth. That was new. Mac had never been able to hear anything inside the chopper cockpit, especially with his earphones on.

Now, even above the cacophony of GC aviators demanding to know what was going on, the earth resounded with the wrath of God, with the literal falling of the heavens. A meteor at least ten feet in diameter fell within a hundred feet of Mac’s helicopter. His lights picked it up, and he followed it until it hit a building, sending a shower of fire and sparks into the air. He had no idea what the building might have been, but it gave him pause. Was he protected from these free-falling monsters of stone or metal? Even a small one would demolish a chopper, and now they began to fall all around him. People on the ground, particularly Unity Army troops, had to be terrified. Mac wondered how many wished they could change their marks of loyalty now.