The War Cloud (18 page)

Jennifer wanted to cry like a baby. Instead she fixed her eyes on the long sniper rifle Randolph’s hands. “That’s a sweet Barrett M107 50 caliber. Can I hold it?”

I
t was the 91
^st
Security Forces Squadron team that reached Sachs first at the Safeguard complex. She was unconscious on
the floor under a console, her clothes, hands and hair a bloody mess. But she was breathing, and they stabilized her quickly then moved her outside.

As dawn broke over the 80-foot pyramid radar building, she blinked her eyes open into the cold light of day. It seemed like there were hundreds of soldiers, federal agents and FEMA officials on hand. News crews too, although they had been fenced off beyond the base.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“You,” said a familiar voice. “You’ll be just fine. But we’ll need to airlift you for surgery to get that bullet out of you. I got lucky. Mine passed clean through.”

She looked over to see Koz, his shoulder in a bandage. “Koz.” She paused. “Captain Li?”

Koz shook his head, clearly broken up. “Last official casualty of the D.C. attack. But it’s over, thanks to you.”

There was a shout, and a soldier ran up with a phone for Koz. “General Block, sir.”

Koz took the phone and said, “Captain Li is dead, sir. So is Marshall.”

Sachs could hear Block’s shocked voice on the other end. “You killed Marshall?”

“No, sir,” Koz said, looking at her. “She did.”

“Sachs?” Block repeated, even louder.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

There were more shouts and the snow kicked up. Sachs looked around, bewildered. Suddenly a Black Hawk chopper landed on the missile field. Her body instantly seized up in terror. Then the chopper’s big door slid open and out jumped a tall, thin African-American officer. And right behind her was Jennifer, running toward her.

“Mom!” Jennifer called. “Mom!”

Jennifer ran up to her and embraced her. Sachs cried her eyes out, kissing Jennifer all over, squeezing her until her baby could barely breathe. “Oh, baby.”

Koz had to gingerly pry them apart.

Jennifer straightened and looked over Koz once, then twice, and without disappointment. She must have seen something, because she smiled and saluted him.

Koz returned the salute, and Jennifer gave her mom a big thumbs-up, as if to say that, despite everything that had happened, America was going to be OK.

K
oz sat in the conference room of the Looking Glass plane watching the ceremonies on TV. They were raising the U.S. Constitution from t
he bowels of the earth where the National Archives once stood, and he noted how regal President Sachs looked as a large crane lifted the indestructible container with the indestructible document into the air. But to Koz it was indestructible only because it lived in the hearts of Americans like Deborah Sachs.

He was so mesmerized by the scene that he didn’t notice his new communications officer walk in. “General Kozlowski

Koz glanced over at Captain Lyndon Han, who was holding his digital tablet and pen out for a signature. Han was no Captain Li, but it wasn’t Han’s fault. Koz signed off the checklist on the tablet and handed it back.

Han nodded at the TV. “Dinner at the president’s again tonight, sir?”

“No,” Koz said, brightening. “I’m cooking.”

As he spoke his BlackBerry buzzed with a text message. Only a few people besides the president were ever allowed to get through to him up here.

“Excuse me, Captain,” he said, looking at the text.

It was from Jennifer Sachs:
R u really grilling 2nite? Count me in! : )

He stared at the text for a long minute. He could barely comprehend the tragic, terrible twist of fate that begat a new nuclear family from the ashes of a nuclear attack. He lost himself for a moment, remembering Sherry and so many others who perished in Washington. He should have been one of them, if not for Captain Li. Hell, they all would have perished were it not for Deborah Sachs.

Then his comm beeped with an FYI about a glitch in the VLF extension that he really needn’t worry about and his trance was broken.

“I better have a look at that myself,” he said, taking no glitch for granted since encountering the War Cloud.

As he rose from his chair and stood up, he looked out the compartment window and smiled. The Looking Glass plane was moving up and away above the clouds, its starboard wing reflecting the glint of a new day’s sun against clear blue skies.

THE END

A stunning technological breakthrough…

enables the Pentagon to use the sliced brain tissues of dead terrorists…

to enter their memories and effectively travel back in time
to glean priceless intel.

Now they want to send disgraced counterterrorism agent Sam Deker back to 1943 on a suicidal mission to steal a lost apocalyptic text from ruthless SS General Ludwig von Berg, the legendary Baron of the Black Order. The coded text not only predicts the end of the world but also contains the nuclear formula to do it.

And if Deker fails in the past, he will come back to a 21
^st
century ruled by the Nazis

—if he comes back at all.

Don’t miss….

THE 34
^TH
DEGREE

Summer 2011

At Bookstores Everywhere

I
t was on the Feast of the Ascension, forty days after Easter, 1943, when ent of the British Secret Service turned up at the doorstep of the Monastery of the Taborian Light and Philip knew his life as a monk was over.

Wrapped in his black cassock and hood, Philip had been on his knees with his brothers in the sanctuary, celebrating the resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, praying in eager expectation of His return. This was as he had done for more than 20 years, ever since he renounced his former ways and retired to the Monastery of the Taborian Light.

The monastery was perched atop one of the many other-worldly peaks of Meteora, the most remote and mysterious region of Greece. A thousand feet below lay the village of Kastraki, nestled in the foothills. Clinging to its gray, granite summit, undisturbed by war or petty human conflicts, the Taborian Light was an impregnable retreat where the Eastern Orthodox monks could witness the unfolding of earthly affairs below and reflect on the eternal.

Here Philip made it his ambition to lead a quiet and peaceful life, just as the Apostle Paul had instructed the original church at Thessalonika. Toward that end he had allowed his gray hair and beard to grow long and make him seem older than his fifty years. Cloaked in the humility of a monk, he tried to make himself as small a figure as possible.

But a shapeless cassock could not hide his hard physique or the alert, confident movements of his limbs. Nor could his hood completely veil his eagle-like nose and sharp features. Locals who glimpsed his face during a rare trip to the village never missed his shining, black ram-like eyes, set wide apart beneath bushy eyebrows. Their faces would darken with fear and they would scurry away. Whether they recognized him or not, they instinctively knew he was not one of them.

The sound of hurried footsteps broke Philip’s trance and his quick eyes darted up to see brother Vangelis whisper into the Archimandrite’s ear. The old monk’s face, barely visible behind his great beard and the smoky veil of burning incense, fell as he looked at Philip, and the peace that Philip had known for 20 years left him.

So the day has come, Philip thought, and with it the dread.

Philip crossed himself three times before he rose from the floor. With a silent nod he acknowledged the Archimandrite, took a deep breath and left the sanctuary.

The visitor was in the narthex, admiring a wall painting of
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
. He was dressed like a Greek peasant, and with his high forehead, long aesthetic features and beard he bore an absurd resemblance to a saint out of some Byzantine icon. But his blue eyes and fair skin betrayed him. When he spoke, it was in perfect Oxford English.

“Commander Lloyd, British Intelligence,” said the Englishman, looking him over. “You must be Philip. You’re smaller than I thought.”

That’s what most men thought. Philip lowered his hood and watched Lloyd drop back a couple of steps in fear.

“They were right, after all,” said Lloyd, marveling. “The face of a hawk and the eyes of a ram.”

Philip narrowed his eyes. “What do you want, Commander Lloyd of British Intelligence?”

“Why, the same thing the Nazis want,” Lloyd replied. “The text.”

An uneasiness Philip hadn’t felt since his early days npped his heart, and he blinked as though he failed to understand. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what—”

“The Maranatha text,” pressed Lloyd. “The one the Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonian church in the first century. The one that predicts the end of the world and the return of Christ.”

The words lifted the hair on Philip’s neck. He struggled to suppress his anxiety and keep a steady voice. “There are two letters to the Thessalonians in the Bible, Commander. In both of them Paul warns—as Jesus did—that believers are forbidden to speculate about the time of the Lord’s return. Indeed, ‘The day of the Lord shall come as a thief in the night.’”

“That a third letter probably existed is confirmed by Paul himself,” Lloyd insisted. “In what you would call his second letter to the Thessalonians, the apostle refers to further information he had taught them previously, probably in person but perhaps by letter.”

“This so-called Maranatha text to which you are referring?”

“That’s right.”

Philip looked at Lloyd, well-bred and impatient. He is as I once was, he thought, and decided to be gentle but firm. “Even if there ever were such a text, Commander, what makes British Intelligence believe it has survived the ages?”
Lloyd had a ready answer. “When Arab Muslims besieged Constantinople in the eighth century, the Byzantine Greeks defending the city were able to save themselves with a miraculous and secret weapon: a compound that burned when it came into contact with water. A substance that became known as Greek Fire. The exact formula used by the Greeks remains a mystery, but we know it included the compound naphthene palmitate. Better known as napalm.”

“Which is hardly a secret anymore,” Philip observed, “as napalm is commonplace in your bombs and flamethrowers.”

“But the Byzantine Greeks deployed it in a different and in some ways more potent form twelve hundred years ago.”

Philip shrugged. “I hardly see what Greek Fire has to do with the Maranatha text.”

“The defenders of Constantinople used Greek Fire aboard their war vessels as a missile to be hurled from a catapult. By destroying the wooden fleets of the Muslim Arabs, Greek Fire blocked the spread of Islam into Europe. Rumors swirled among the ranks of the retreating Muslims that the Byzantine Greeks had discovered the formula for their infernal fire encoded in the contents of the legendary Maranatha text. That is why seven centuries later, when Constantinople finally fell to the Turks in the fifteenth century, bands of Muslim invaders turned over every stone in the city to find it.”

“But the text, I take it, was not to be found,” Philip said guardedly.

“No. During the siege it was smuggled out of the city and returned to its original home, a secret monastic order descended from the original Thessalonian church, whose members can trace their ancestry through the laying on of hands to the Apostle Paul himself.”

“An interesting tale, Commander.”

“Yes, and I have another one for you,” Lloyd said. “This one takes place centuries later during the Greek-Turkish war in Asia Minor in 1922. An aide-de-camp to Kemal, the great warrior Hadji Azrael, the Angel of Death, shocked the empire by laying down his sword, renouncing Islam and embracing the Christian faith of his enemies.”

Philip’s heart skipped a beat. Unconsciously, his placed his left hand over the large, ornate cross that hung from his neck as Lloyd continued.

“There was a secret ceremony with the Patriarch of the Eastern Church himself, the laying on of hands, and a new name for this once sworn enemy of Greeks, this killer of Christians. Ultimately, his orders sent him to the monastic order that guards the legendary Maranatha text he once sought to destroy and he became its protector, wearing a gold cross with a sapphire omega set in the center, the very one you seem to be wearing, Philip. Or, should I say, Hadji Azrael?”

In his former days Hadji Azrael would have known exactly how to deal with a man like Commander Lloyd of British Intelligence. The Englishman would never have been heard from again. But the Way of Christ demanded mercy. And so Philip reluctantly showed his visitor to the Archimandrite’s chambers, a sparse room with a hard bed and rough-hewn table around which the three men sat on straw chairs.

The Archimandrite eyed Lloyd and fingered his black worry beads. “How did you find us, Commander Lloyd?”

“The Koutras family in Kastraki,” Lloyd explained in passable Greek. “They were hiding me from the Germans. Young Gregory knew the secret bridle path to the Taborian Light.”

The Archimandrite turned to Philip, who nodded that this was probably the case.

“I see, Commander,” said the Archimandrite. “And since when is British Intelligence so interested in spiritual things?”

“It’s Hitler’s interest that concerns us, Archimandrite. Fact is, Greek Fire changed the course of history. Hitler believes it can do so again. Only this time it’s the modern fleets of the invading Allies he wants to burn before they land on the beaches of Nazi-occupied Europe.”

Lloyd produced a document from inside his tunic. “This communiqué was intercepted between Ankara and Berlin. It’s a telegram from the German Ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, to Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop.”