Mustafa Al-Hassani and Khalid Tariq watched together.
And smiled. The first that either of them had heard about the slaying of President Oaks was less than thirty minutes before, in a news bulletin on the BBC. Now both men hushed the buzz of the aides around them and called for the volume on the television in Al-Hassani’s private office to be turned up significantly.
“Irrefutable and incontrovertible evidence of North Korea’s direct and malicious involvement in the atomic attacks against our country has come into my possession,” James declared to a global audience that had now swelled to an estimated three billion. “Through the brilliant and determined work of our own investigative agencies and the extraordinary assistance of governments and intelligence services around the globe, I have no doubt that the North Korean leadership planned these attacks in the hopes of decapitating our government and launching a takeover not only of South Korea but Japan as well. Tonight, I will lay out this evidence and the trail of terror that leads directly back to Pyongyang.”
Tariq turned and looked at his leader. Al-Hassani just nodded, savoring all he was seeing and hearing.
“But first I must tell you,” James continued, “that as commander in chief, I am not waiting to act to safeguard our people from further attacks or to bring retribution to those who have declared war on our people. Operation Asian Justice is under way. At this hour, U.S. military forces — at my direction — have launched a full-scale nuclear retaliation against the government of North Korea.”
Al-Hassani reached over and gently squeezed Tariq’s hand.
“Over the course of the next hour,” the president explained, “I will walk you through as many details as I can. Please understand that our national security needs do not allow me to give every detail. But I want to honestly and forthrightly lay out for you as much as I can. For you deserve to know the truth. You deserve to know—”
Al-Hassani blinked once, and then again. He turned to Tariq, then back to the television.
“What happened?” he shouted. “Where did the president go?”
Lucente’s jaw dropped.
He turned to Premier Zhao, then back to the inexplicable visual on the television. There was nothing on the screen but an empty chair. One moment the president of the United States was making a live televised broadcast to the world. The next moment he had vanished into thin air.
“What is this?” Zhao asked. “Some kind of joke?”
Zhao ordered his staff to change the channels, which they did, but every network displayed the same image — a large desk, an American flag, a bookshelf, a credenza, and an empty executive chair from which the president had been speaking just seconds before.
“Where is he?” Zhao demanded. “What happened to the president?”
Command Post Tango was in chaos.
Thousand of missiles and smart bombs were hitting their targets. Satellite imagery showed that everything was on track, on schedule, obliterating the DPRK and catching them completely off guard. But General Garrett had pandemonium on his hands. The president of South Korea was gone. So was the commander of the ROK army. They’d been sitting right beside him. They’d been watching President James’s address together, while tracking the early minutes of the war. But no sooner had James vanished than so, too, had the Koreans.
Dmitri Galishnikov slowly rose to his feet.
His eyes were glued to the TV. His wife was bawling. He was shaking. She was terrified of the unknown. He was terrified by what he suddenly knew all too well.
“So,” he mumbled, nearly inaudibly, “Eli was right. They were all right.”
To be certain, he picked up the phone and called Miriam Gozol, his VP of marketing. There was no answer at her home, so he tried her cell phone. Again, no answer. He called Natasha Barak at home. No answer. He called her cell. No answer. He called every messianic believer he could think of. None of them answered.
This was it, Galishnikov realized. Everything that Eli and Bennett and Miriam and Natasha had been trying to tell him was true. All of it. Of this he no longer had a shred of doubt. Yeshua was the Messiah. He had come for His true followers. He had raptured His church, and Galishnikov and his wife had missed it. Nothing else explained what he’d just witnessed. They had missed it.
He collapsed to the floor and wept for mercy, for himself, for his wife, for his sons. For he knew now with a certainty that nearly paralyzed him that for all the evil the world had just experienced, it was merely a foretaste of the evil that lay ahead.
Epilogue
A sense of gloom settled over them.
Galishnikov had barely slept in more than a week. Nor had his wife. Since “the disappearances,” they hadn’t stepped foot in their Medexco corporate offices in Tel Aviv even once, despite the fact that oil prices had shot past a thousand euros a barrel. They had not checked their portfolios or spoken with their accountants or financial advisors — nor had it even occurred to them to do so — despite the fact that gold had already topped twenty-five hundred euros an ounce and most of their holdings were in gold since the Day of Devastation the previous October. Food had lost all taste. They were subsisting on an occasional piece of fruit, a few crackers, and a sip of juice or water now and then, and only because their housekeeper, a Filipino woman who feared for their health, kept insisting.
Locked away in their palatial stucco and glass compound overlooking the glistening Mediterranean, they found themselves consumed with watching the news and surfing the Web for the latest developments, talking to their sons and various family members and friends throughout Israel and around the world as often as they could punch through on phone lines that were often overloaded and jammed, missing dear friends like Jon and Erin and Eli Mordechai, and studying the Scriptures deep into the night. Together, they had already read the entire New Testament through three times, from beginning to end. On his own, Galishnikov had read it through twice more, while at the same time poring over the prophecies of Daniel and Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Isaiah, desperately trying to make sense of all that was happening and feverishly trying to steel himself for all that was coming. He regretted not having listened to Eli and Jon more while he’d had the chance.
For most of his life he had dreaded attending synagogue on Shabbat, much less listening to the rabbi read the weekly Torah portion. But now he couldn’t get enough of God’s Word. Indeed, it was only when he read the Bible, or when Katya read it aloud to him, that the pervasive sense of gloom and evil all around them seemed to lift, even momentarily, and he felt any sense of peace at all.
Yet regardless of what else he studied, he found himself continually drawn back to the words of the apostle Paul in his first letter to the believers in Yeshua gathered at Thessalonica.
The Lord Himself will descend
from heaven with a shout,
with the voice of the archangel
and with the trumpet of God,
and the dead in Messiah will rise first.
Then we who are alive and remain
will be caught up together with them
in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,
and so we shall always be with the Lord.
Therefore, comfort one another with these words.
Was this what had just happened? Galishnikov longed to know. Had the true followers of Yeshua HaMaschiach—Jesus the Messiah — actually been caught up with Him in the air, just as the Scriptures had foretold two thousand years earlier, just as Eli and Jon and many others like them had predicted over the past few years, and even the past few months? At the moment the American president had disappeared on television, he had thought so immediately, and so had Katya. They had wavered in that initial conviction in recent days, but as hard as they tried, they could come up with no other plausible explanation.