There was silence for almost a full minute.
“The United States,” Harrington finally announced, “will not be changing course. President Hewbright told me that he will continue his fight to keep America from joining the Global Alliance. Against all odds, it would appear.”
“Bloody tough choice for the Yanks, I would say,” Clyde responded. “Those economic sanctions are already beginning to decimate America.”
“Things could change. England could take a roundabout, disobey those sanctions, and continue trade relations with the U.S.”
Clyde’s eyes widened.
“And perhaps,” Harrington continued, “we can talk some other countries into joining us. Australia. New Zealand, perhaps. Canada—yes, definitely, I am very sure that Canada will be onboard. Who knows . . . maybe even China would start up trade again with the U.S. They’re losing a major export market to the States with these sanctions.”
The minister of defense touched the knot on his striped tie as he listened. Then he asked, “And Parliament?”
“I think they’re with me,” Harrington replied. “There’s a rising sentiment over there that our linking Great Britain to the Global Alliance was a terrible mistake. I’m expecting a vote today, rescinding our agreement to the Covenant of Unity—the so-called Treaty of Alliance. As you know, I’m heading over to Parliament shortly. I’ll sit there, on that green leather bench, ready to rise to my feet in the House of Lords and then go quickly over to the Commons on the very same issue, now that both houses are required to weigh in on this. My argument will be the same: that it is time to pull out of Alexander Colliquin’s folly—this Global Alliance that has turned into a parade of horribles.”
“Mr. Prime Minister, I have been approached by a few in our military. Top-flight generals, all of them. They are all in agreement. In view of what might happen soon—with England pulling out of the Alliance and all of that—there could be a rather nasty response from Babylon. From the Alliance. So with all that . . .”
“Yes, of course, we need to secure our defenses. Demand that the Alliance troops within our borders evacuate in twelve hours, not a minute longer.”
Clyde now looked as if there was something on his mind, something personal. “There’s another matter, Derek.”
“You can speak frankly.”
“We all think that your personal safety will be at great risk,” Clyde said in a voice that became suddenly somber. “Colliquin and his deputies will almost certainly plan a targeted hit against your office. MI6 has some intelligence that Babylon has a plan to forcibly remove the heads of state of any nation moving to leave the Alliance. In light of that, the entire cabinet feels you should relocate your offices. Just for the time being. The Isle of Guernsey might be a good choice. It’s not too far away, as you know. Middle of the English Channel. The Guernsey government has already said they would be quite happy to allow you to remain there, to function as PM in exile. Let you set up shop temporarily. Run the government from there if there is a largescale attack by the Alliance, of course. Our military believes there will be an attack. And so does our foreign secretary.”
Harrington gave a quizzical look. The bitter reality was starting to sink in even deeper. “So it really is going to come to that, is it?”
“It appears so, Prime Minister.”
“And Buckingham Palace?”
“The king is fully behind our drawing the line against the Alliance. He thinks this is a good idea. ‘Blast the Alliance,’ he said. But he wants to stay here in England if there is an invasion. ‘King and Country,’ you know.”
“I would feel rather like a dodger, leaving England . . .”
“We need you safe so you can make decisions,” Clyde said. “Continuity in our government is paramount, I think. This will get quite ugly.”
Harrington wondered about that.
Clyde cleared up the ambiguity. “I’m speaking of a blitzkrieg kind of ugly.”
PARLIAMENT HILL
Ottawa, Canada
It could well have been a scene from the British Parliament at that very moment. Except this was the Canadian Parliament instead. But it was the same issue—withdrawal from the Global Alliance. And there was the same torrent of shouts rising up from the benches occupied by the official Opposition in the House of Commons. While England’s PM was arguing to his Parliament the need for an immediate pullout by England, on the other side of the Atlantic its sister nation, Canada, grappled with the same scenario almost simultaneously.
In Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Penelope Duncan, the Speaker, desperately tried to restore order from her high-backed chair at the apex of the cathedral-sized hall. But it was rough going. The Opposition party was repeatedly bellowing, “Point of order!” The red-faced opponents of the prime minister were trying to block his ability to address the House.
Canadian prime minister Jack Laverhill had already risen up from his green upholstered chair—the traditional eleventh seat to the right of the Speaker—and was ready to address the assembly. But he knew the Madam Speaker needed to bring them into order first. This wasn’t like the usual hot-button issue, where the Speaker had to wrangle members like cats. Not this time. It was more like wrestling timber wolves.
“Order, order,” Duncan kept calling out.
But the Opposition party kept shouting her down. And then someone yelled out the word traitor.
That did it. Duncan slammed the gavel down and jumped to her feet. “Allow me to define traitor for you,” she shouted. “A traitor would be any man or woman here who would not permit the honorable prime minister to speak on a matter as critical to the survival of the sovereign nation of Canada as the one before us at this moment.”
The Opposition leader screamed, “We have already approved the treaty and it brought us into the Global Alliance two years ago. A good idea it was then, and a good idea it remains. Madam Speaker, you and the PM are now collaborating together to deny constitutional rule by dragging us through this same issue once again. The matter is settled. Let the PM retire back to 80 Wellington Street and lick his wounds. He may regret the bargain that he struck with the Global Alliance, but we don’t.”
Laverhill knew what was transpiring at that same moment in the British Parliament. He had placed an urgent call to England’s prime minister two hours earlier, and Derek Harrington had assured him it was almost a “certainty” Great Britain would withdraw itself from the Global Alliance. Now was Laverhill’s chance to try and achieve the same outcome.
The Opposition was still shouting when Laverhill began to speak. He didn’t yell. He spoke at a rhetorical decibel, but nothing more. And he kept speaking until the members of the Opposition began, one by one, to sit back down in their green-tufted chairs. Finally, only the leader of the Opposition and his deputy were still on their feet, and eventually they too eased down reluctantly into their seats.
Laverhill’s words now filled the ivory-colored chambers, all the way up to the high chandelier and all the way out to the cathedral windows and arches that lined the hall.
What man or woman here has never lived with regret? Which of us has not had to admit fault or folly or lapse of judgment? Or had to confess the commission of something much worse. Dare I say it? Dare I say the word in our current climate of opinion where the truth of God has been so trampled underfoot by the despots of Babylon and by their toadies, the popular press? Yes, I shall use that word. Who among us has not in the quiet moments of our souls needed to confess sin? Sin in our personal lives. And more pertinent here—sin in our public lives, because we failed to do what was required of us by our oath of office and by our moral call to integrity and courage.
A small core of the Opposition, ten in number, began to groan and jeer loudly at the audacity of the PM in preaching about such an archaic religious concept as sin. But the outburst didn’t last. The other three hundred and twenty-eight members shouted for them to stop, and when that happened they fell silent.
Prime Minister Laverhill cont
inued,
I confess that I sinned when I promoted the idea of the covenant with the Global Alliance and when I invited Canada to join it, because I wronged the nation I love by such an act. And I sinned when I ignored the quiet echoes in the conscience that had been implanted by God Almighty. And I sinned against God when I ignored the warnings in His prophetic Scriptures. I confess before all of you that I sinned when I allowed myself to be wooed by the promises of power and prestige from Alexander Colliquin. And, by the way, almost none of those promises were kept. Nevertheless, as a result of my grave error I shall call upon the governor general to seek a new leader to form a government. For my part, I shall not stand for election. I will devote myself instead as a private citizen to supporting the efforts of those known around the world as the Remnant. I will join their resistance against this lord of darkness coming out of Babylon and will embrace the mission of the Remnant in preparing the people of this planet for the coming kingdom of Jesus Christ.
There were audible gasps that swept across the hall. The Opposition party had expected a push against the Alliance. But they never dreamed of a resignation, let alone this kind of bizarre religious pronouncement.
As the members in the House processed their shock over the prime minister’s confession, he gave them one final directive.
Now, as my last official act before this honored body, I urge you—I plead with you—sever all ties between Canada and the Global Alliance. Cast off any dependence that Canada may have on this abomination that lurks in the palace walls of New Babylon like a predator. Withdraw from the Alliance. And do it without delay. Any hesitation now, any lack of resolve, could be our undoing.
FORTY-SEVEN
WHITE HORSE, YUKON TERRITORY
John Galligher sat at his usual security post in the small office just behind the lobby of the faux gold rush hotel, staring at the row of little monitors connected to a complex of outdoor cameras scattered across the city. All he knew was that he was waiting for the command from Ethan any day now for them to grab Chiro’s “C-Note computer”—the huge black-metal computer in the upstairs lab that Chiro kept obsessing about—and to head to their ultimate destination, wherever that would be. But until then, his job was to maintain surveillance and hope that the knock on the door from the Global Alliance the Mountie said was coming wouldn’t happen soon.
When Galligher arrived in the Yukon, he had learned from Chiro that the cameras had originally belonged to the Canadian military and had been installed as some kind of defensive security system for White Horse, perhaps because it was the capital of the Yukon Territory. But all of that was before the Canadians joined the Global Alliance. After that, the military abandoned their White Horse cadet training camps and sold the camera monitoring system to the local police. The local police chief, a Remnant sympathizer, in turn had leased the entire setup to Chiro, who had also managed to rent the huge receive-and-transmit satellite dishes the military had abandoned.
A little while later the aging police chief lost his battle with cancer, but for some reason no one had dug into the fact that Chiro and Galligher and the staff that managed the little tourist hotel still had control over the city’s video monitoring system.
That was just fine with Galligher, who was using it now for surveillance. He figured that if any adverse action were taken by the Alliance against the secret communications relay station Chiro had built, it would probably be land based. Some kind of ground attack. And it would likely be via the few major highway and street routes that ran through White Horse. So his camera surveillance would provide nice security.
Galligher didn’t know exactly what Chiro’s transmission station was supposed to accomplish, but nowadays he was trying to take orders like a good soldier, unlike his years in the FBI when he’d been a consistent maverick. Maybe he had some doubts about Ethan March’s leadership, but he was willing to believe Chiro and the others on the Roundtable like Pack McHenry when they all said the Alliance’s global communications strategy had to be countered somehow, and that this weird tech outpost in the Yukon was a necessary key to that.
But he was nearly dying from boredom. As he sat in front of the monitors, day after day, he found himself watching moms transporting their kids to and from school, delivery trucks on their routes, and occasionally, late at night, local kids drag racing on the part of the Alaska Highway that ran past the airport. The only promise of entertainment was the dogsled competition that started right there in White Horse that he could catch on his monitors. But that presumed he would still be there when the snows came. Galligher dreaded the thought.
Today, while Galligher glanced at the monitors, he was feasting on a haddock sandwich with extra creamy dill sauce. One thing he had learned about that part of the world: they had incredibly finetasting fish.
Then something caught his eye. On one of the monitors there appeared a caravan of vehicles. He zoomed in. The first two vehicles were armored troop carriers. Both of them had the Global Alliance forces logo on the side—the roaring lion with its mouth open wide and long, deadly fangs. John Galligher mused to himself, Gee, maybe someone, somewhere, way back when, should have started asking questions about the Alliance the minute they saw that logo.
Galligher thought that perhaps the troops were on maneuvers. But then he spotted the Global Alliance forces command vehicle and behind it a ZB D97 modified tank the Alliance had obtained from the Chinese, with a 100mm cannon on top and a 30mm cannon right next to it. Suddenly Galligher stopped chewing on his haddock sandwich. He was getting the feeling that a major assault might be on the menu. He tapped the emergency contact number on his Allfone. Up on the floor above him, in his digital communications center, Chiro picked up.
Galligher shouted, “Get ready for an invasion. I’m seeing Alliance military hardware chugging down the street toward our position.”
“How much time?” Chiro asked.
“They’re on the other side of town. I’d say we’ve got twenty minutes, to be on the conservative side.”
Galligher bolted out into the lobby where Bobby Robert was poring over a magazine.
“Bobby, I think things are going to start jumping.”
“What’s up?”
Galligher looked down at the hunting magazine. “That’s good,” he said pointing to it. “You shoot. That’s swell. But we’ve got a small army of Alliance forces heading our way. I think they want to rock our world. Call our local minutemen volunteers and tell them to get over here in fifteen minutes or less. If they have weapons, tell them to bring them. But they have to come here by the back way, the route along the Yukon River.”
Bobby reached under the desk, opened a cupboard, and pulled out two long-barreled Colt 45s, one in each fist. “I’ve got my shotgun and my bear rifle here in the closet too,” he said.
Galligher grinned. It appeared he had a new BFF. “That’s a great start,” he said as scenes from the movie The Alamo flashed in his head. Then Bobby lifted up his long Indian poncho shirt and revealed a massive hunting knife hanging from his belt.
“Okay,” Galligher shot back. “That makes you Jim Bowie. So I guess that makes me Davy Crockett.”
And then he had another thought, but kept that one to himself. Which makes us both dead soon.
FORTY-EIGHT
NEW BABYLON, IRAQ
Ethan realized that a miracle had just happened in the lab. As he hung there by his arms, cinched up with leather straps, he felt an electric surge of adrenaline racing through his body. Was that also a miracle? Wasn’t God the creator of adrenaline too? It was at that point that Ethan saw the whole escape plan unfold in front of him like a videotape.
So he acted out the plan and yanked himself up to an “iron cross” position like a gymnast on the rings. Then swung his legs over his head so he could use his feet to twist the straps around his ankles, thus taking some tension off of his arms and creating some slack at the wrists. He reached for a large shard of glass from the blast that was stuck into the leather strap ci
nched to his left arm. Upside down, he had to swing himself over to that strap, hold himself in place with his powerful left arm, and with his right hand carefully grab hold of the piece of glass. It wouldn’t give; it was stuck hard into the leather. Please, God, help me cut this strap.
Upside down, he gingerly yanked again at the shard of glass. Still, it didn’t give. Then he had a thought. Don’t pull, just push. So he started pushing on the glass like it was a miniature saw, back and forth, back and forth. He could then feel the leather giving way. But his arms were trembling with fatigue. He wasn’t sure he could do it.
And then some crazy memories started surfacing from somewhere.
Maybe it was the pain in his head. Or maybe he was dying. He couldn’t tell. But the memories and the images were there, filling his head. Out of the fog of his past, as real as ever, flashing before him.
He was back in his Triple-A baseball days as a struggling pitcher. That one ball game as the starting pitcher against the Yankee farm team from Scranton/Wilkes Barre. He could see the pro scouts watching him in the stands. Ethan had just thrown a fastball low and inside to the slugger of a centerfielder up to bat. The last inning with two outs and a full count. But the batter smacked a line drive to Ethan’s right side. It would have been just within his reach if in that instant Ethan had caught the speeding ball in his bare right hand. Even if he had broken a finger or two it would have been worth it—he would have won the game spectacularly, and with a no-hitter at that.
But instead he hesitated. The ball zinged past him and past the shortstop and landed perfectly with a hop past the right fielder, and the big batter made it to second base. And that started a rout. One after another, the opposing players started hitting singles and doubles and finally a home run as Ethan’s pitching style began to collapse in a series of out-of-control fastballs that were followed by failed knuckle-balls floating to the plate like birthday gifts to the batters. His chances of a baseball career died that day.