[Photo Caption: The plains of Jordan]
Saturday, September 19, 4 N.A.
Petra
As his family listened quietly, Michael Feingold, like thousands of other fathers and mothers in Petra, read the words of the prophet Hosea to his family:
Then I will go back to my place until they admit their guilt. And they will seek my face; in their misery they will earnestly seek me.
Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.[237] Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.”[238]
In accordance with the instruction of their high priest, the people of Petra cloistered together in their family tents and sought forgiveness as they recalled their individual and collective rebellion against God. They recalled their animosity to others, their vanities and chasing after things of this world, their selfish acts, their lack of trust in their God.
They remembered too, some of the many false messiahs throughout the centuries that their people had followed:[239] Simon b00000000ar Kokhba,[240] Moses of Crete,[241] Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia,[242] Sabbatai Zevi,[243] the numerous lesser false messiahs,[244] and in the late twentieth century, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.[245]
All in all, Samuel Newberg’s assessment had been correct. Many of the people of Petra had only been waiting for the word from their high priest before accepting Yeshua, Jesus, as their Messiah. Others, upon hearing the high priest’s words and reasoning and reading from the prophets, wondered only how they had missed for so long what now seemed so obvious.[246]
Abu Zanimah, Egypt
Some had come more than 1,500 miles. They flew endlessly it seemed, toward the northwest, in numberless flocks over the great continent of Africa. Stopping here to rest for the night on the eastern bank of the Gulf of Suez before continuing on in the morning, the famished creatures scavenged for whatever they could find. Soon there would be food enough, but they wouldn’t reach it if they didn’t maintain their strength for the journey.
Sunday, September 20, 4 N.A.
The Seir Mountains
Thirteen hundred and fifty meters above sea level, atop Jebel Haroun, in the Seir Mountains overlooking Petra and all that surrounds it, Dennis Kreimeyer watched in amazement as the vanguard of the UN forces swept toward him from the east and west like two massive storms. Peering through binoculars revealed only that the storms stretched on to the horizon and seemed to have no end.
[Photo Caption: The plains of Jordan]
For two days the people of Petra had confessed their sins.[247] Now as their destruction bore down upon them, the high priest issued a decree that all prayer should become a call for deliverance from the enemies gathering at their door.
By noon, Mount Seir and Petra had become an island, surrounded by the sea of their adversaries. And yet still the tide that had engulfed them stretched on forever, in the direction of Israel in the west and the Euphrates in the east. There seemed to be no end to those who came to destroy them.[248]
Babylon
Joel Felsberg and Ed Blocher hadn’t slept in fifty-two hours. So far, adrenalin and concern for those trapped in Babylon had kept them going, but even that would soon fail them. They didn’t know how many trips they’d made in and out of the city during that time; both had lost count somewhere in the middle of the first night. Whatever the number, it seemed there were always more waiting to leave, and so Felsberg and Blocher continued to come back. This time, though, the truck was only about half full and there seemed to be no one else.
“What now?” asked Blocher.
Felsberg was looking at the sky. What had been faint wisps of clouds overhead had grown and become noticeably darker. “Let’s give it a few minutes,” he said cautiously. But as the minutes passed, no one else came.
“I guess that’s it,” Felsberg said, watching the gathering storm.
Looking up, Blocher nodded and agreed, “Yep, that’s definitely it!”
“Everybody hang on,” Felsberg said, as he pulled the door shut.
In just the few seconds it took to lock the back and reach the truck’s cab, a cool stiff breeze began to blow against their faces.
An instant later, lightning flashed, hitting a distant building as Blocher stepped up on the running board and opened the passenger door. He counted the seconds to gauge its distance: “. . . three, four, fi—” Thunder struck like a cannon blast, shaking the truck. “Okay,” he said urgently, “we’re gone!”
Felsberg started the engine, and Blocher quickly buckled his seatbelt for a bumpy ride, when he was surprised to see someone in the mirror running toward them. “Wait!” he shouted as lightning flashed again.
It was a teenage girl. “Please,” she cried as she ran to the driver’s side of the truck, and the second crash of thunder reached them.
Felsberg looked out, and the girl threw back her hair, away from her forehead, and held up the back of her right hand so he could see she didn’t have the mark.
“Are there others?” he shouted as the thunder trailed off.
“No,” she answered and then changed her response to, “I don’t know.”
“Get in the other side!” he said. There was no time to open the back. Nor did he wait for her to get settled in or even for Ed Blocher to close the door before throwing the truck into gear and speeding away; already lightning had struck twice more and fire rose from a nearby building that had been hit.[249]
Amidst his concern about the storm and Joel’s driving, Blocher looked at the girl and thought about getting out the city gate. “It’ll be interesting to watch this vanishing act up close,” he said nervously.
Thus far, they had been careful not to use the same gate too often, but with the storm all around them there was no time to think about such things. They had to get out of the city fast, and so they simply headed for the closest exit. Even so, by the time they approached the city’s wall, it had become as dark as late evening.
“Joel,” Ed Blocher adjured, watching the girl beside him as they sped toward the gate, “I don’t think she’s going to disappear.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Felsberg responded, as he pressed the accelerator closer to the floor. “We’re not stopping.”
“Good idea,” Blocher concurred under his breath as they barreled through. Apparently the environmental cataclysm, which included numerous lightning strikes nearby, was sufficient to distract the guards because no one fired a shot or even tried to stop them.
Having cleared the city walls, Joel floored the gas pedal and accelerated down the straight flat road leading east from the city. In the back of the truck, the passengers held on as best they could and wondered what was going on outside.
Two minutes and nearly three miles later, the day had turned black as darkest night, with the rapid bolts of lightning creating a strobe effect all around them. Joel struggled to keep the truck on the road as the wind whipped the vehicle from side to side. Thunder formed a constant drumbeat. Then one of the beats was different and didn’t die away, but grew steadily louder.
“This is it!” Felsberg shouted as he suddenly slammed on the brakes.
They had nearly stopped when the earth beneath them began to roll like a wave and then finally buckled, heaving the truck to its side and throwing the passengers violently about.
The ground continued to shake until it seemed the truck would be torn apart. With a magnitude of 12.9, the quake was four times stronger than the one resulting from the asteroid impact that created the Chicxulub crater.[250]
Clearly the battle for the planet Earth was about to reach its zenith.
But it was not over yet.
Inside Babylon, at the epicenter of the massive quake, buildings crumbled into enormous burning heaps, ignited by lightning and fueled by natural gas pipelines. The city’s magnificent perimeter walls became insurmountable mountains of rubble, sealing all avenues of escape. Along the dry bed of the Euphrates, the earth split open like an overripe fruit, leaving a gaping chasm a hundred yards wide and a mile deep. A second crack, running eastward from the first, passed directly through the UN complex and swallowed whole the ruins of the United Nations Secretariat and General Assembly buildings. Collectively, the chasms divided the city into three huge blazing sections consumed by raging fire.[251]
The quake’s initial radius of destruction stretched for more than two thousand miles — from St. Petersburg to Somalia, from Nepal to Barcelona — collapsing buildings, devastating whole cities and crushing much of their populations. But the Babylonian quake was only the forerunner of death as it triggered major shifts of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates, causing a chain reaction that shook the Indian-Australian and Pacific plates as well.[252] Thousands of islands in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans along the borders of the plates were shaken like a child’s rattle, turning most signs of civilization to wreckage and creating massive tsunami to wash away what was left.[253] The loss of life was in the millions, and tens of millions more were injured.
Hundreds of miles from Babylon, along the route to Petra, the quake shook Christopher’s armies, knocking nearly all from their feet, but few were seriously injured. Primarily this was because they were in the open where there were no structures to collapse on them (the cause of most quake injuries), but most credited their good fortune to their solidarity against Yahweh. Their bravado would be short-lived, however, for they had not yet seen the smoke of Babylon rising in the east or heard reports of the destruction throughout the world.
Three miles southeast of Babylon, with headlights shining through the dust and dark, the overturned truck’s passenger door was slowly pushed open, revealing the only sign of life for miles. It was early afternoon, but the clouds that still rained down lightning upon the city made it appear as night. Ed Blocher shielded his eyes from the wind and dirt as he groaned in pain, attempting to climb up through the door and then down from the cab to the ground. Close behind, their teenage passenger jumped the last few feet, followed next by Joel Felsberg who, not nearly as young or agile, landed hard and immediately wished he hadn’t.
“Here,” Felsberg said, wincing and handing Blocher the keys. “Go see how bad it is back there.”
Ed Blocher took the keys and went to the back door.
“Is everyone all right in there?” he asked, yelling to be heard above the thunder. The cries from inside told him they weren’t.
“I don’t think so,” answered an adult female voice. “We’ve all been tossed about pretty badly. I think we’ve got some broken bones back here. What happened? Did we hit something?”
“An earthquake,” Blocher answered.
The woman leaned forward to see beyond the open door. “Is that the city?” she gasped, only now coming into Blocher’s view as the light of the raging fire reflected off her face.
It was a rhetorical question asked in stunned amazement, but Blocher answered anyway. “Yeah,” he said, as he helped a not-so-badly-injured man to his feet.
For a long moment the moans and talking completely ceased as those inside looked on in disbelief at the burning ruins of the capital of Christopher’s New Age.
“Now what?” asked the woman, spitting out the dust that had blown into her mouth.
From outside the back of the truck Joel Felsberg’s voice answered her question, “Now we get everyone out of the truck, and if we can, we try to get it back upright. If we can’t . . .” Felsberg stopped. He really didn’t have an alternate plan.
“If we can’t, what?” prodded Blocher as he climbed out again.
But Felsberg had something else on his mind. “Don’t you think it’s a little strange,” he shouted, leaning close to be heard, as he looked up at the black cloud covering, “that despite the clouds and the lightning, there’s been no rain?”
The fact had occurred to him earlier, but with everything else that was happening, Blocher hadn’t given it much thought. Now as he looked around, the ominous tone in Felsberg’s question brought the matter clearly into focus. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“In order for there to be lightning,” Felsberg answered, “something has to be creating a static charge in those clouds. Since it’s not raining, the movement that’s causing the static must be in and above the clouds.”
Blocher shook his head and gave Felsberg a confused look to say he still didn’t understand what he was getting at.
“We’ve got to try to get these people to shelter,” Felsberg said, still not explaining the reason for his concern.
“Most of them can’t walk, especially in this storm,” said the woman from inside the truck. “And unless you can turn the truck right side up with just the few of us that aren’t badly hurt, you’re going to have to come up with another plan.”
Felsberg looked at the sky again, shaking his head.
“What is going on, Joel?” Blocher demanded.
“I don’t claim to be an expert at interpreting either prophecy or meteorology,” Felsberg answered, “and the Bible doesn’t say exactly when it’s supposed to happen, but unless I miss my guess, we’re about to be—”
At that moment there was a muffled thud and the ground shook again. It was different than before: not even a fraction so strong as the quake, but it felt somehow localized, closer. An instant later it was followed by a second thud, and then a third. “Back in the truck!” Felsberg ordered. “Everyone pray!”
“We never stopped!” answered someone from inside.
There was another thud closer than the previous ones, and Ed Blocher turned to look for the origin of the sound. At first he saw what appeared to be a boulder, light colored and perhaps eighteen inches or two feet in diameter, rolling toward the truck. Before his eyes could fully focus on the curious sight, lightning flashed and he realized there were thousands of such boulders. They were falling from the sky.[254]
Two miles outside of Petra
Sand and dust flew in all directions as the helicopter set down near the headquarters tents of the UN encampment outside of Petra. Not waiting for the blades to stop, the helicopter’s passenger, General Rudolph Kerpelman, in charge of the UN peacekeeping forces in Israel, tapped on the window of the door with his baton to indicate to the crewman that he wanted it opened immediately.
Climbing from the chopper as the blades still rotated, Kerpelman scanned the tents, and went directly to the one with the flag and seal of the secretary general of the United Nations. The guards posted outside showed him in. Christopher was waiting for him.
“Thank you for coming, General Kerpelman,” Christopher said as the general tucked his baton beneath his left arm and saluted. “Please sit down.”
Kerpelman sat, and Christopher got right to the reason he had called him for this meeting.
“General, I’ve read your report on the large number of Jews in Jerusalem who oppose our efforts here. Is it true,” Christopher asked with a grimace, “that they are actually cutting off their own right hands to remove the mark?”
“I’m afraid so, sir,” Kerpelman answered briskly.
Christopher shook his head and sighed as if to say “poor fools,” before getting back to the immediate purpose of the meeting. “I’ve also read your recommendation for dealing with the problem.” Christopher leaned back in his chair. “I am inclined to agree with your assessment.”
General Kerpelman showed no change in his emotion, but inside he was celebrating. He hadn’t expected Christopher’s support.
“Have there been any changes since you submitted your report that would make you reconsider your recommendation?” Christopher asked.
“No, sir. In fact, in light of the upcoming action here, I believe my recommendation to be all the more sound.” Christopher’s silence urged General Kerpelman to continue. “Sir, I don’t pretend to understand exactly how all these psychic powers work, but it seems to me that if you’ve got an action taking place here, you don’t want a lot of interference coming from Jerusalem.”
Christopher seemed to be considering Kerpelman’s advice and then nodded agreement. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, General,” he said. “I want this completed by noon tomorrow, before the action at Petra begins.”
“My people can be ready in two hours,” Kerpelman assured him.
“Good!” Christopher said, and then after a pause added, “We’ve got six divisions under the leadership of General Novak at the rear of the procession coming from the Jezreel Valley. They should be reaching Jerusalem right about now. To speed things up, I’ll direct Novak to transfer command to you until you complete your mission.”
General Kerpelman nodded, then stood to attention, saluted briskly, and left the tent. “Finally!” he said under his breath, and slapped his baton in the palm of his left hand. If only he had been given permission to do this three and a half years ago when they had first occupied Israel, he thought, before the rest of them had an opportunity to go to Petra: The world would never have suffered the plagues. He knew the Jews. Growing up he had learned to hate them. As a youth he had studied the Second World War and would lie awake at night agonizing over missteps and miscalculations that had led to Hitler’s defeat. It seemed a deliciously ironic vindication of Hitler’s convictions that so many years after the defeat of the Third Reich, the UN, the very organization formed by those who defeated Germany, had finally realized the necessity of completing the work that the Reich had begun.[255]
Three miles southeast of Babylon
As hailstones two feet in diameter, each weighing a hundred pounds or more, rained down all around them, those in the truck huddled together and prayed for deliverance. Suddenly there was a loud crash and the crunch of shattered safety glass. The truck’s cab had been hit. A moment later a hailstone hit the truck’s upturned rear wheel, tearing it from the hub, separating the differential from the drive train, forcing the axle through the wheel on the ground, and driving it fourteen inches into the dirt. Two more stones demolished the cab. Additional stones rolled against the back door after striking the ground nearby.
The storm continued for another twenty minutes as various parts of the truck were pummeled, but miraculously none hit the compartment directly.
When the storm was over, Ed Blocher and Joel Felsberg and every able-bodied person in the truck had to work together to force open the back door. Even then, they could open it only about a foot and a half. Accumulated stones left only a small hole, large enough for one person to climb through. Ed Blocher was the first. As he emerged to look around, he saw the full impact. As far as he could see, the earth was covered six to eight feet deep with the massive hailstones, and the city of Babylon had become a crushed, smoldering wasteland.[256]
Eighty miles northeast of Petra
High overhead an immense murder of crows winged their way eastward above the advancing columns. Those below encamped on their way to Petra took no notice of the birds’ flight: Their eyes were drawn four hundred miles to the east, where a huge dark cloud rose from beyond the horizon. Nor did they hear the birds, for the air was full of cursing. The first reports of the destruction of Babylon and the damage to other cities from the earthquakes were being broadcast to the world.
In the concern of the moment, no one remembered the words of the second angel, who had appeared at the dedication of the UN complex two years earlier.
Jerusalem
The steel-toed combat boot found its mark squarely in the middle of the wooden front door, breaking the lock and thrusting the door open. Cautiously but quickly, two uniformed men rushed in and began to search the apartment. Proceeding from room to room, they checked under and behind furniture, in closets, and behind full-length curtains. Coming at last to the master bedroom, one slid open the closet door as the other pointed his rifle. Inside a woman stood, her face against the back wall, her eyes closed as she tried in vain to hide behind a rack of clothes.
“Get her,” said the man with the rifle. The other reached in and took hold of the woman’s hair and pulled her out as she bit her lip to keep from screaming.
“Nice,” said the first after a cursory inspection. “But let’s get a better look.” With that, he took hold of her blouse and then her bra and tore them from her body. She tried to resist, but the other man yanked her hair, pulling her head back. Tears ran down her cheeks as she attempted to cover herself — a task made all the more difficult by the fact she had no right hand.
“Works for me,” said the man pulling her hair.
“Hold this,” said the first man, as he handed his rifle to his companion.
“Hold it yourself,” the other answered as he let both their weapons drop to the carpeted floor.
Attempting to push her to the bed, she resisted, scratching the first man across his face.
Recoiling, he felt his face, and the blood on his hand revealed the extent of his wound. “You dirty slut!” he screamed as he struck her across the face and then grabbed her left hand, twisting it behind her. Taking hold of the bandaged stump of her right wrist in his other hand, he twisted both of her arms and gave a hard sharp jerk downwards, dislocating her left shoulder and making that arm useless. Her missing right hand fouled his grip and so as the woman screamed in agony, he shifted his hold and with the stump in one hand and her elbow in the other, he countered the one against the other, and with a nauseating snap, broke her right arm at the joint. Quivering with unbearable pain, she prayed she would lose consciousness as she was thrown to the bed and the two men tore off her pants and dropped their own.
Suddenly there was a flash of motion from behind, as the woman’s husband who had been hiding elsewhere in the house, ran crazed with anger into the room toward the two men. In his left — and only — hand was a large claw hammer, the only weapon he could find.
With a single stroke, he drove the claw deep into the skull of the first soldier. Then, ripping it from the man’s head, he attempted to do the same to the second, but instead hit the man’s arm raised in defense. The force of the blow knocked the soldier back, and being unable to catch himself because his pants were down around his knees, he fell to the ground and became easy prey for the relentless blows of the hammer.
Down on the floor, the adrenalin compelling him to continue bludgeoning the soldier though he was already dead, the woman’s husband nearly missed the sound of others coming into the apartment. At the last moment, he dropped the hammer and reached for one of the rifles on the floor. Not suspecting what had happened, the second pair of UN soldiers appeared at the door, and four shots rang out. The two men collapsed as their blood spilled out upon the floor.
Breathing hard and barely able to stand, the man turned his attention to his wife and didn’t notice a moment later as two more soldiers entered the apartment.
They came through the bedroom door shooting. When it was over, the woman’s husband lay with the four soldiers, dead on the floor. Unseen on the other side of the closet from where she had hidden, a stray bullet had pierced the closed door and the small body of her four-year-old daughter. The woman had been wounded in the side, but she didn’t feel it for the pain in her shoulder and arm . . . and for the pain in her heart.
As blood ran from her wound, the two soldiers completed what the first two had started, raping her, and when they were done, they put a bullet through her head.[257]
From his battle headquarters on the Mount of Olives, General Kerpelman peered through his binoculars down at the city of Jerusalem. What he saw didn’t please him, and the reports he was receiving pleased him even less. The Jews were fighting as people possessed. Though each had only one hand, even the frail and elderly had proven difficult to subdue.[258] Now as he cast his view toward the Temple, he saw three men on the pinnacle at the base of Christopher’s statue, planting explosives.
[Photo Caption: Mount of Olives seen from
Jerusalem]
“I want those men dead,” he shouted, pointing in their direction with his ever-present baton. But it was too late. Before marksmen could be dispatched, the sound of the explosion echoed in the hills around them. As Kerpelman watched in horror, knowing how upset this would make the secretary general, the statue fell to the street below and crashed in a heap.
General Kerpelman screamed irately and cursed God. His cursing had nothing to do with any belief that in doing so he would weaken Yahweh’s control of the situation. Rather he cursed, as he always had, in anger.
“Colonel,” he shouted to his second in command, “direct the artillery to target the Temple. Give our people two minutes to get out of there, and then I want that entire structure turned into a blazing crematorium! I want to smell their flesh burn!”[259]