Apocalypse Burning (2 page)

“Your wife was taken?” Goose asked.

“Oui.”
There was no mistaking the pain in the man’s eyes.

“Who are you?”

“I am Jean Arnaud,” the man replied. “I am a university professor in Paris.” He named the school, but his French was so rapid Goose couldn’t understand him. “I have papers.” He reached for his shirt breast pocket with trembling hands that left bloodstains in their wake. “I was here in Sanliurfa on a sabbatical with my wife, Giselle. They took Giselle. You
must
help her.” His fingers fumbled with the pocket and barely got the papers out.

Trusting his instincts that the man was telling the truth as well as the physical evidence of the beating Jean Arnaud had obviously undergone, Goose lowered his weapon but didn’t put it away as he approached the man. If someone had kidnapped the woman, time was already working against a rescue effort. Sanliurfa, with its hodgepodge of architecture and hundreds of years of history, was a rabbit warren of hiding places.

Goose gestured to the Hummer. “Get in.”

Arnaud hesitated just for a moment.

Grabbing the man by his arm, Goose pulled Arnaud into motion. He escorted the man to the passenger side of the Hummer and shoved him into the seat.

Goose jogged around to the driver’s side, limping a little on his bad knee, and slid behind the wheel. Starting the Hummer’s engine, he tagged the communications headset he wore to open a channel, then pulled the pencil mike to the corner of his mouth.

“Base,” Goose said. “This is Phoenix Leader.”

“Base reads you five by five, Phoenix Leader,” the calm male voice responded.

“I need a com network for an immediate SAR op and access to soldiers at this twenty.” Goose gave his location, then looked over his shoulder and backed the Hummer out into the street.

“A SAR, Phoenix Leader?”

“Affirmative,” Goose replied. The call for a search-and-rescue team drew immediate attention, especially after the Syrian attack that had taken place the previous night. The city and the Rangers were still picking up the pieces from that. “The SAR target is a civilian, not one of our own.”

“Understood, Phoenix Leader. Go to two-one for your network. I’ll get a detail assembled for the SAR.”

Goose flicked the headset to channel 21 and looked at Arnaud as the Hummer rolled to a stop in the middle of the street. “Which way?”

Arnaud looked around for a moment. His face was pale and anxious. Indecision weighed heavily on him. “There.” He pointed to the right. “Giselle and I were in a little café. They ambushed us in the alley. They robbed us and took Giselle. I thought they were going to kill me.”

Maybe they thought they had,
Goose told himself, looking at the damage that Arnaud suffered. He put the Hummer into forward gear and let off the clutch, feeling another twinge of agony from his knee.

For the past few years he’d been careful with his left knee. He’d been wounded during a firefight in the first Iraq War, barely getting by on medical reports after extensive surgical repairs, because the doctors had known he was a dedicated soldier and wanted to muster out with a full pension, and because he’d always been able to handle the load. The crisis in Turkey was slowly eroding his physical ability to function. He needed rest but he wasn’t getting it. The cortisone shots he’d used in the past to block the pain weren’t working as effectively here, thanks to the continual stress and strain of constant use; even though the shots provided some relief, they didn’t help the knee heal.

“Who took your wife?” Goose asked.

Arnaud shook his head miserably. “I do not know.” He continued on in French.

“Sir, I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Goose interrupted. He spoke just enough French to order a meal from a restaurant, and the man’s rapid pace made comprehending him impossible. Goose’s mind was still whirling from all the secrets that Icarus had revealed during the past few minutes.

“I was drawn to you, First Sergeant,”
Icarus had said.
“By something greater than myself. I know that now. There’s a reason we’ve been put in each other’s path.”

Goose gripped the Hummer’s steering wheel harder. He knew how Arnaud felt, how the panic and helplessness slammed through the man. He forced himself to focus.

Shaking, Arnaud made a visible attempt to control himself. “The men, First Sergeant, they were not known to me. They are Bedouin,
oui?
Very probably traders. Scavengers.” He glanced around, half out of his seat as he craned his neck to peer into buildings and down alleys. “You can see any number of them in the city. They come. They go. Some of them take what they can from the wreckage of the city. Others bring supplies into Sanliurfa. By any other name, most of them are still looters, taking profit from the hardships the rest of us have gone through. Now they have taken my wife.”

Goose knew about the Bedouin. With the military satellite reconnaissance systems presently off-line in the Middle East, the nomadic people were a major conduit of information for the military forces currently hunkered down in Sanliurfa. The Bedouins existed as they always had, by trading and scavenging and taking whatever they could find. The Syrian assault on Turkey had proven a boon to the Bedouins, allowing them to capture prizes to own and to trade that they might never have gotten legally. According to news reports Goose had seen, several of the Bedouin tribes had started caches of war booty in the caves in the surrounding mountains.

“When was your wife taken?” Goose felt compassion run through him for this man. He hadn’t seen his own wife in months, but if anyone ever tried to harm Megan, ever tried to take her away against her will—

God took Chris.

The thought rattled through Goose’s mind, making him feel hollow and helpless, stripping away his confidence. The fact that God had taken Chris during the Rapture had been part of the message Icarus had delivered.
“Your son,”
Icarus had said in a quiet voice,
“is safe. God came and took your son up as He took all the other children.”

Goose couldn’t allow himself to believe everything Icarus had stated. If he did, he had to give up on ever seeing his five-year-old son again.

In this life.

That possibility ripped at Goose’s mind. He didn’t have a faith strong enough to allow him to accept that. He’d tried, but he couldn’t believe God would do that. Not to the point that he could give everything—his hopes and his fears—over to Him. Goose didn’t know how a person did that.

Bill Townsend, his good friend and a devout Christian who had always talked about the end times and the fact that the Rapture might happen any day, had disappeared during the anomaly. If Bill were here, Goose was certain his friend would tell him that he’d see Chris again. At the end of the seven years of Tribulation. If he wasn’t one of those who would die long before the end of that time.

But Goose couldn’t help hanging on to the possibility that all those disappearances had been man-made—or even, though the concept strained his credulity, of extraterrestrial origins—and that he could somehow find a way to reverse those disappearances and bring those people—
bring Chris
—back. God wouldn’t take his son away from him. The God Goose wanted to believe in couldn’t be capable of that kind of cruelty.

“Over there.” Arnaud pointed toward a small café and brought Goose’s focus back to the present op. “I asked the people inside the café for help, but no one would help me.”

That didn’t surprise Goose. Most people who had remained in Sanliurfa after the mass exodus that came on the heels of the SCUD missile launch had stayed because they believed they would prosper, that Turkish reinforcements would arrive at any moment—which wasn’t going to happen—and push the Syrians back. Or they simply didn’t have anywhere else to go. The ragged crowds at any local café were probably a lot more interested in avoiding trouble than in looking for it.

“Were you dealing with the Bedouin?” Goose asked, peering along the street.

“No. I did not see them until they attacked us in the alley. They were waiting for us.”

“Why did they attack you?”

Arnaud shook his head. “They robbed us. They took Giselle.” He swallowed hard. “I have heard that some of the Bedouin have been stealing European and American women from the city.” His voice broke. “I was told those Bedouin sell the women they kidnap.”

Goose had known about the white slavery problems in the area before the Syrian attack. Women serving in the armed forces—in the United Nations Peacekeeping effort as well as in the Ranger support teams—had received warnings about the issue.

“Giselle and I were trying to find someone to help us get out of the city.” He turned back to Goose and looked guilty. “For a time we believed that the combined militaries here would be able to hold off the Syrians. But after the attack last night, we could no longer hold out any such hope. I am sorry.”

Goose met the man’s gaze. “I understand.” Last night’s attacks had only continued the assaults the Syrians launched against the city. And those attacks, Goose knew, would continue to come.

Sanliurfa was a keystone for the Syrian aggression. If the Syrian military could secure this city, they could stage attacks elsewhere. Their second logical target was Diyarbakir City to the east. If that city fell, the Iraqi rebels who still fought American intervention in their country might be inspired to rise up and join with the Syrians, creating threats on two fronts for Turkey.

Sanliurfa, after time enough for the U.S. and Turkish military to shore up defenses and build an offensive line, was considered an acceptable loss by the Allied forces. In fact, the American and Turkish commands considered every soldier in the city an acceptable loss if it came to it. The military commanders of both countries as well as the United Nations feared that the Turkish-Syrian conflict—it wasn’t officially referred to as a war yet—could ignite a conflagration in the Middle East.

Throughout the history of humankind, and certainly since the creation of Israel in 1948, the Middle East had been a powder keg waiting to be touched off. With Chaim Rosenzweig’s discovery of the chemical fertilizer that had turned the Israeli deserts into lush farmlands and pulled the nation into a time of bountiful wealth, the enmity felt by the Arab countries of the Middle East toward Israel had increased.

Even Russia had felt threatened by Israel’s newfound wealth. The former Soviets had launched an attack against the country. But only minutes before the jet fighters reached their targets, the Russian aircraft fell to the ground or imploded in the sky. Like the disappearances only days ago, no one knew the cause of that event. That sudden defeat of the Russian air force had come about as mysteriously as the massive disappearances that had occurred around the globe.

Goose pulled his thoughts away from that event. Thinking about that led right back to the unsettling conversation he’d had with Icarus.
“God came and took your son up as He took all the other children.”

For a moment, Goose remembered the peace that had settled over him as he’d almost come to accept that thought. But he hadn’t been able to swallow it, and in the end that peaceful feeling had retreated. Maybe Bill Townsend could have believed that God had taken those people, but Goose couldn’t. He wouldn’t believe it, either, not until he had proof.

Goose was a good man. He believed in God as best he could, and he acknowledged Christ as his personal Savior. But Goose was also a fighter, a practical man used to meeting problems head-on, a man who resolved situations, problems, and the evils that men could do to one another. He believed more in himself and in finding a way to reverse the effects of the disappearances than he believed in divine intervention in the world.

“Phoenix Leader,” a man’s voice crackled over the headset. “This is Sergeant Clay of Echo Company. We’re responding to your SAR request.”

“Acknowledged, Sergeant,” Goose responded. Sergeant Thomas Clay of E Company was a solid soldier and a good man. “Glad to have you. How many strong are you?”

“Seven. Myself and six. Base says others are on their way here. We’re still spread out and dealing with the problems left over from last night. We’re coming from the north, closing in on your twenty.”

“Affirmative,” Goose responded. “Base, are you there?”

“Base is here.”

“Can I get a helo attached to the SAR?”

“I’ll check, Phoenix Leader.”

Goose stared along the streets. A number of alleys spread out through the area, all of them filled with hiding places. He hoped the Bedouin kidnappers hadn’t taken their prey and ducked into hiding. He wasn’t looking forward to playing cat and mouse with them in the debris-strewn streets and bombed-out buildings.

“Who are we looking for?” Clay asked.

Goose looked at Arnaud. “Have you got a picture of your wife?”

Arnaud pulled his wallet out and flipped it open. He showed Goose a picture of himself and a younger woman. “This is Giselle.”

“Her name is Giselle Arnaud,” Goose said, jerking his attention back to the alleys. “She’s French. I’m with her husband. He says she was taken by a group of Bedouins after they were robbed.” He glanced at Arnaud. “Does she speak English?”

“Mais oui,
” Arnaud answered. “She is very fluent in five languages. That is her specialty at university. She is also a teacher.”