The Last Day (3 page)

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 déjà 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

T
hree 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.

6

Somewhere south of Jerusalem, Israel 1:42
A.M
., Saturday, December 25,1999

I
n the convoluted topography of southern Israel, there were few direct highways to anywhere. And although the research institute was only about seventy-five kilometers due south of Jerusalem, Hunter and Feldman had to take a roundabout route. The first legs went quickly with Feldman's aggressive driving.

“So, you still thinkin’ of quitting WNN when all this is over?” Hunter rehashed a dead topic.

Feldman smiled, turned and raised an eyebrow at his friend. “Hey, if you'll recall, ‘quitting’ isn't exactly the operative word here. My contract ends when this millennium story's over.”

Hunter shook his head, knowing better. “Hell, Bollinger told me he's asked you to be a part of our East Coast special assignments crew. Party time, man! We'd kick some ass together back in New York!”

‘Tempting,” Feldman said, laughing at his friend's enthusiasm, “but I can't pass up this deal in Washington—a chance to cover a presidential election. An opportunity to do some really serious reporting. WNN's too crazy for me. You know I'm too conservative to make it in show-biz news.”

Hunter shrugged his big shoulders. “I just hate to see us break up a good team. It's been fun.”

Feldman nodded his agreement. “Yeah, it's been great working with you, Breck. I'm going to miss you and all the gang. Hard to believe I'm coming up on my last day.”

As they zigzagged south, the terrain became increasingly rugged, the vegetation sparse. In the crisp, clear night air, the reporters could make out the beginnings of the scabrous Negev Mountains, massive sandstone formations thrust up in ever-higher, primeval slabs. Soon, they had to exit the transit highway at a small desert kibbutz town marked “Dehmoena” on the map, but spelled “Dimona” on the road sign. A common situation in this country, which has no uniform rules of spelling. Hunter and Feldman were used to these inconsistencies, but regardless, the beacon of the glowing fires told them this was the place.

Concealed on three sides by a box canyon and sunken slightly, the remains of the installation were virtually impossible to see from any angle but due east. And at ground level, even that angle was unsatisfying. Particularly since the Israeli military, which was everywhere, was ensuring that bystanders kept their distance. The two journalists were not surprised to see more than a hundred vagabond millenarians drawn to the disaster.

“Shit, we're not going to get anything from way out here,” Hunter fumed, watching the Israelis holding the curious onlookers well away from the front gate area.

“No,” Feldman concurred.

“And the militia will never let media through.” Hunter spoke from experience.

“Especially if this is a covert military facility,” Feldman added. “But we have to try.”

Hunter nodded in agreement. “Why don't you see what you can learn from some of these onlookers while I check out the equipment. Then we'll drive up to the front gate and talk with the field commander.”

One group of about twenty men and women appeared as though they'd been there awhile. Next to their old faded-blue school bus, they had a small camp stove with a blackened pot of coffee perking. Feldman walked up and introduced himself to a scraggy-bearded man in worn blue jeans and sandals, seated on the ground with an old U.S. army blanket around him. Despite his bedraggled appearance, the man had a ready, pleasant smile, and he responded in German-accented but excellent English.

“Fredrich Vilhousen, from Hamburg,” he said.

“Tourist or pilgrim?” Feldman began with his standard millenarian entrée.

“We are Sentries of the Dominion,” Vilhousen explained, “one of the largest new orders in Europe.”

Feldman had never heard of them.

“We've been in Tangiers and are traveling to Jerusalem to meet up with our main group for the Arrival. We are called to make ready His Way, and to His purpose—”

“Sorry, Fredrich”—Feldman had no interest in yet another take on the Second Coming—“right now my only concern is to learn more about the air strike here. Did you see it happen?”

“Air strike?” The German looked puzzled. “No air strike! It was the Hammer of God, the First Sign!”

Feldman started to nod and back away.

“It was no air strike,” the millenarian insisted. “We see it come out of the eastern sky, a bright burning star, and it light up the whole desert. And then it strike this laboratory of evil. Righteous, man!”

A missile, then,
Feldman concluded to himself.
Probably a cruise missile. So how did the Jordanians get ahold of one of those?

“Okay, thanks. And, uh, good luck with the Arrival and all.” Feldman was not a particularly cynical person, at least not as bad as Hunter. But the past months of evangelical barking had jaded him somewhat. Now that he was on to something far more meaty, he wasn't about to muck up this story by giving it a millenarian spin. He took one last look at the Sentries of the Dominion and turned to go. They were all so alike, these millenarians. Yet each different. At least this group seemed a bit more subdued than most. Of the thirty-some-odd sects he'd reported on, he least liked the hell and damnation crowd. The doomsdayers. Zealots whom Feldman found less man sane and more than scary.

While generally lumped into the millenarian classification, too, these doomsday militants, Feldman realized, weren't certifiable millenarians. To be precise, as Feldman had discovered through thorough research on the subject, true millenarianism included only those who subscribed literally to the New Testament Book of Revelation, chapter twenty. This scripture proclaimed that Christ would return, physically, to subdue Satan and rule on earth in peace, harmony and happiness for a thousand years.

And of these true millenarians, there were further sub-classifications: the postmillennial optimists, who held that Christ would bring peace on earth at the Last Day through His Church. And the premillennial pessimists, who believed peace would come only through a decisive battle between the forces of Christ and the forces of Satan.

While also adhering to the Book of Revelation, the doomsdayers—or “Apocalyptics,” as they were more accurately called—tended to see the millennium not as a beginning but as an end. Their vision was one of earthly annihilation in which all who did not subscribe verbatim to their narrow interpretations of scripture would perish miserably in hellfire. The faithful, on the other hand, would be escorted triumphantly and corporally to heaven by Christ Himself. These were generalizations on all accounts, of course, because there was a broad spectrum of ideologies at work. Feldman had come across many subtle distinctions separating the different eschatologies— those formal branches of theology that dealt with the end of the world and/or the Second Coming.

Leaving the Sentries of the Dominion to their millennium preparations, Feldman returned to the Rover, where Hunter was fitting a video camera with a fresh battery.

“What they saw strike the research center sounds like either the righteous hand of God or maybe a Tomahawk cruise missile,” Feldman reported.

Hunter smiled thinly and grunted.

“So now,” Feldman proposed, “what say we try the direct approach, shall we?” And they headed over to the main gate for a chat with the presiding officer.

“It doesn't look like they're letting anyone but military personnel through,” Feldman remarked as they approached, observing the clot of spectators at the entry area.

As the reporters worked their way toward the front of the crowd, they noticed an IDF guard rousting a millenarian from behind the temporary barricades. The unfortunate man had crept undetected to the perimeter and had sneaked a snapshot of the inferno through the chain link fence.

If anything, a photograph from the vicinity of the fence was actually worse than one taken farther back, due to the proximity of the tall protective embankments surrounding the institute inside. Nevertheless, the intolerant guard confiscated the man's camera, smashing it on the ground with the butt of his rifle before rudely ejecting the trespasser.

Hunter prudently lowered the video camera from his shoulder and the two newsmen slunk quietly back into the crowd. They decided to retreat to a hillside to see if a telescopic shot might work. It didn't. The facility had been cleverly placed. There was simply no vantage point anywhere around that could afford them a view of the ruins. The two were about to pack it in when, through his video camera zoom lens, Hunter noticed a small line of vehicles approaching along one of the access roads. Zooming in even closer, he identified in the orange light of the flaming ruins six wide-bodied, Jeep-like Humvees and two Land Rovers carrying more Israeli militia and technical support personnel.