*
The Rangers moved forward, hunched in their cloaks beneath squalls of wind and rain. While the pouring water streamed down the canopy of her helicopter, Jessica listened to her helicopter’s command channel, the terse, breathless communications of the officers. Her hands clutched the sides of the seat as reports came in of the camp coming into sight, as night-vision and infrared gear was used to carefully scan the camp and spot any sentries who dared to stick their heads out.
There weren’t many, it appeared. The camp was buttoned down against the storm.
“Coffee, General?” Jessica’s pilot produced a thermos.
“No. Thanks.” Much as she craved coffee at the moment, she was wound tightly enough as it was.
Jessica had read that Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery used to go to sleep the night before an attack, with strict orders not to be disturbed until the battle had already developed. She wondered how he managed it.
The smell of coffee filled the cockpit, activating Jessica’s salivary glands. A mild aftershock rolled up the Kiowa’s struts as commands hissed into Jessica’s earphones. The Rangers were crawling forward toward the camp under cover of the intermittent squalls. They were moving toward the machine-gun nest at the catfish farm by crawling along the base of the earth embankment, so a lightning flash wouldn’t silhouette them on the top.
“This is Badger Six,” a voice crackled. “We have secured our objective on the northwest perimeter. The guards did not resist. Repeat, no resistance.”
“Roger that, Badger Six.” Rivera’s voice.
Jessica’s breath eased from her aching lungs. One corner of the unmarried women’s camp was secure.
“Holy shit!” came Badger Six’s voice again, very excited. Jessica jerked forward in her seat as if pulled by an invisible wire. “We got fragmentation grenades here! And a couple M-16s. Do you copy that?”
“Copy that, Badger Six.” Rivera’s voice was laconic.
“These people are loaded for bear, sir!”
“No chatter on this channel, Badger Six. We copy.”
Another outpost fell in silence, then another. Then— Jessica wanted to scream out her relief— the machine-gun nest on the catfish farm.
And then the rest. The camp’s perimeter had been secured without a shot, without an alarm, without a single act of violence.
Relief sang in Jessica’s veins.
Rivera began to position his teams to cut the camps off from one another, to secure the church, the radio station, and Frankland’s house.
Jessica leaned back in her seat.
“I’d appreciate some of that coffee, soldier,” she said.
*
They will say I have committed murder. The phrases rolled through Frankland’s mind as he pushed back from the microphone. Certainly I have killed, but I have killed justly. And God will judge me in the end, as he will judge all men. I have no terror of standing before the Throne of the Almighty.
Frankland stood, stretched, felt his vertebrae crackle. His body was weary, but his mind still churned with ideas, with images. The spirit still sang in him, stirring his nerves, and he knew that it would be hours before he would sleep.
He got ready to cue the new recording, then turned up the in-studio speaker on the recording that was already playing. He waited until the older recording came to a natural pause, then Frankland turned it off and cued his testament.
“This is the Noble Frankland of the Church of the End Times.” The voice came from the battered old speakers in the room. He turned down the volume, then strolled down the hallway to where Sheryl still sat behind the desk, working briskly with her tweezers.
“Any news?” he asked.
“No.” She looked up from her work. “Rain’s slackening off, I think,” she said.
Frankland looked at his watch. It would be dawn shortly.
And then the door opened and a pair of armed men entered, rifles held across their chests, faces blackened and rain-streaked below the broad, dripping brims of their hats. “U.S. Army!” one of them said. “Nobody move!”
Frankland stared as his heart lurched into a higher gear. Caught! he thought. His rifle, his pistol, and his precious grenades were in the control room. He was helpless.
Another man entered the room, a pistol held lightly in his hand. “Colonel Rivera,” he said. “U.S. Rangers. I understand you had some trouble here?”
Frankland could only gape. He couldn’t understand how this could happen. He had guards! He had outposts! He hadn’t heard a single shot.
Black helicopters! his mind screamed. Black helicopters of Satan! They had come in the night, and he and his poor people had been caught unprepared.
Now they would all live. Live, and sin, and go to Hell. When they could have died and gone to Glory.
“You—” The word hissed from Sheryl. She stared in outrage at the colonel’s muddy boots planted on her artwork, right on the seven angels and the seven vials. “You—” She half-rose from her seat. “You’re wrecking my Apocalypse!” she shrieked.
It was only then that Frankland’s paralyzed mind recalled the double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun clipped under the desk, the shotgun that had been there all along, from well before the quake. He threw himself backward, down the hall.
The shotgun blasted out, twice. All three soldiers were caught in the broad swath of buckshot. Sheryl dropped the sawed-off, opened a desk drawer, took out a grenade, primed it, and pitched it straight out the open front door.
Frankland scuttled down the hall, on hands and knees, heading for his weapons. There was a bang outside the door. Grenade fragments whined off the station’s steel walls. Frankland grabbed the Armalite, cranked a round into the chamber, then snatched up his gun belt with its grenades and pistol. He ran down the hall again toward the front room.
“Hang on, sweetie pie!” he said. “I’m coming!”
*
The Kiowa bored into the Arkansas dawn. Jessica could hear the grinding of her teeth amplified beneath her helmet.
Somehow, late in the game after all danger should have been passed, Rivera had somehow lost control and everything had gone to hell.
Rivera was dead, apparently, along with two other Rangers. Several others were wounded by grenade fragments. After everything had been secured— the outposts, the camps, the church, Frankland’s home— there had been some last-minute screw-up at the radio station. Shots fired. Grenades thrown. And the Ranger officer on the spot had ordered return fire.
Jessica had ordered support elements aloft as soon as she heard the news. Apache gunships and Hueys to provide close support, more Hueys carrying her engineers with heavier weapons and the body armor that the Rangers lacked.
It was over by the time Jessica’s Kiowa first soared over the camp. Resistance had ended. The radio station was on fire, smoke billowing from under the metal eaves. Rangers were diving inside, braving the flames, to haul out the bodies of their comrades.
Fucking amateurs, Jessica thought. The people in the radio station had no idea of the firepower of a modern military unit, even a lightly equipped outfit like the Rangers. They’d thought it was going to be like the movies, like a Western gunfight, like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.
Instead, everyone in the radio station was probably dead within seconds after the Ranger commander had ordered his people to return fire. A kill zone. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. Just like that.
Ranger training was not for the faint-hearted. One of the exercises featured a fifteen-mile ruck march, with 100-pound field packs plus a rifle, that ended with three shots to the bulls-eye at a range of fifty meters. Compared to that, a little slog through the mud and a firefight against a few hayseeds didn’t even signify.
The Kiowa circled the camp once, then dropped onto the highway in front of the church. Jessica dived out of the vehicle and ran for the church as fast as her short legs would carry her. Then she stopped in her tracks. Put a hand in front of her right eye, then her left.
Half the vision in her left eye was gone, gone as if a black curtain had dropped across the world.