“What is she singing?” Carpathia demanded.
The sound was enhanced, and Chang found himself breathless as he listened to the woman’s pitiful, labored singing. She could no longer hold up her head, but she stood wobbling, clearly woozy, struggling to sing, “. . . did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?”
The guard was joined by others, swinging the stocks of their rifles at the heads of those who bowed.
“Tell the guards to stop making a spectacle of it!” Carpathia raged. “They are playing right into these people’s hands. Let the crowd see that no matter what they do or say or sing, still their heads belong to us!”
The guillotine was readied as the woman continued to force out the lyrics, though she had long since lost the tune. As she was grabbed by guards on each side and wrestled into place, she cried out, “. . . demands my soul, my life, my all!”
The blade dropped and the crowd erupted.
“Aah!” Carpathia sighed. “Can we not see from the other side?”
“The other side, sir?” the South American potentate repeated.
“Of the blade! Of the blade! Get a camera around there! The body does not drop! It merely collapses. I want to see the head drop!”
The next several in line approached the killing machine with their palms raised. The guards kept grabbing their elbows and pulling down their arms, but the condemned kept raising them. The guards slashed at their hands with bayonets, but the people instinctively moved and mostly avoided being cut.
The guards moved in behind them and prodded them with bayonet points in the lower back. Now the camera moved around behind a man who held a safety lever with one hand and used the other to grab the hair of the victim and pull the head into place. He lowered the restraining bar onto the neck, let go of the lever, and nodded to a matronly woman. She yanked at the release cord.
The blade squealed against the guides as it dropped in a flash, and the head fell out of sight, blood erupting from the neck.
“That is more like it!” Carpathia whispered.
“We’re home free, aren’t we?” Hannah said.
Mac turned to look at her. “My plane has about enough fuel to get us to Rome. There’s a small airstrip south of there manned by Co-op people who stockpile fuel. I’m not going to feel safe until we take off from there.”
“But these people, I mean,” she said. “They’ll never reach this airport before we do, will they?”
“Not in cars.”
“What’re you saying?” George said.
“It won’t take ’em long to guess where we’re going. They won’t think we’re trying to beat ’em to the border by car.”
“Your plane hidden?”
“From auto traffic, sure. From the air? No.”
“How long would it take them to fly here?”
“Out of Kozani, in a fighter? They could beat us there.”
“Could they destroy your plane?”
“Only if they get there first.”
“How much personnel could they bring?”
“Not many if they use a small, quick plane.”
George sounded irritated. “This has been too much work to see it fail now, Mac. Let’s get it all on the table. You hoping we just show up, climb aboard, and take off?”
“That’s the only plan I’ve got,” Mac said.
“We’ve got to figure they’ll beat us there,” George said, “and decide what to do about that.”
“You want to assume the worst?”
“Of course! We have to. You think I got away from those idiots by hoping they’d let me go? Tell me about this airstrip.”
“Runs east and west. I’m at the east end, facing west.”
“If they can get a plane in there before we take off, all they have to do is get in our way.”
“Let’s get in their way first,” Mac said. “I’ll dump you guys at the plane; you get the engines warm while I drive out onto the runway and sit directly in our path. They’re going to have to be pretty crafty and flexible to avoid hitting me on landing. When we take off, we angle enough to miss the car and them, and we’re gone.”
George shook his head. “And when do you board? You’re leaving a lot to chance.”
“Leaving it to God, George. I don’t know what else to do.”
Mac’s phone buzzed. “Go, Chang.”
“They’re in a jet ten minutes from touchdown. Stefanich, the three philosophers, and a pilot. Plane does not appear to be offensively equipped, but they are heavily armed.”
“We’re closer than that,” Mac said. “We just have to beat ’em, that’s all.”
He asked Chloe if she could get any more out of the little car, but it was whining as it was, speeding along on a bad road. “When we get there, get off the road and come in on the east end.”
Mac was giving Sebastian instructions about the plane when he thought he heard the scream of jet engines in the distance. He and George rolled down their windows to listen. “That’s our clearing, Chloe! Easy!”
She whipped off the road, down into a ravine, and up the other side. The car bounced and jerked, and Mac’s head hit the ceiling. “Use your brights! I have no idea what’s out here.”
“Am I going to be able to get through those trees?” she said.
“Assume you will. Just get us there.”
Chloe hit a rocky patch that threw the car into the air. When it landed, the left rear tire blew. “Great!” she said.
“At least it’s in the back,” George said. “Stand on it!”
With the brights on, Chloe saw only uneven, rocky terrain up to a thick grove of trees. She couldn’t imagine a way through, but there was no turning back now. The left rear side was dragging from the flat as if someone had dropped an anchor. It didn’t help that Sebastian, the biggest person in the car, sat back there.
With the jet looming, Chloe wished she could kill the lights and just plow on through. But it had all come down to timing. And determination. These were the people who had killed her comrades and who would now snuff out this little surviving band of Trib Forcers without a thought.
Chloe had wanted action, to be in the thick of it. And though she would do whatever it took to get back to Buck and Kenny, she was already long past any option but recklessness. Caution, diplomacy, trickery—that was all out the window now. She had to get to that plane and they had to take off, or none of them would see the sun rise again.
She picked her way through the trees, only occasionally lifting her foot from the accelerator. The little car had front-wheel drive, a small blessing in a bad situation. Making her own path, she smacked the car against a tree first on one side, then the other, and kept going.
Now she could see Mac’s plane, but a three-wire fence was in the way. Slowing even a bit could make the car get tangled in it. She glanced at Mac, who braced himself with a palm on the ceiling. He merely nodded at the fence as if she had no choice. Chloe kept the accelerator down, and the car caught the lower wire, made the top two slip over the hood, pulled a wood post from the ground, and snapped its way through to the edge of the runway, forty feet from the plane.
Banking at the other end came the GC jet, landing lights illuminating the strip all the way to the car.
CHAPTER 12
For the first time since he had been running the point for the Tribulation Force at the palace complex, Chang wondered if he had been found out. His computer screen was suddenly ringed with a red border, meaning an outside source was testing his firewall.
He immediately switched to a screen saver that scrolled the date and time and temperature, cut all the lights in his apartment, disrobed, and jumped into bed—prepared to look as if he had been sleeping, should Figueroa or one of his minions come knocking. There was really no way of knowing what the warning meant, but David Hassid had told him he had built the security in just to alert the operator that someone was nosing around.
Maybe someone was checking to see every computer t
hat was turned on. Who knew whether the search was capable of hacking in and finding out who the mole was?
The latter didn’t seem possible, if David could be believed. He had rigged the system so elaborately that it seemed there wouldn’t be enough years left before the Glorious Appearing before someone could decode it. Chang’s mind began playing games. Perhaps Akbar had instructed Figueroa to sense every computer running, eliminate the mainframe that ran the whole place, isolate the laptops and personal computers, and do a fast door-to-door search to see what people were up to.
Chang’s computer would show no record of what he had been doing during the hours since he got back from his office. For that reason, he hoped someone would show up and check.
As he lay there in the darkness, heart galloping, Chang was frustrated at having to quit monitoring Greece. Ironic, he thought, that with all the technology God had allowed them to adapt for the cause of Christ around the world, he was suddenly left with nothing to do to help, except old-fashioned praying. He wished he could check the bugs in Carpathia’s and Akbar’s offices once more to see if the computer recording showed them giving a directive. It wouldn’t be long before someone at the highest level ran out of patience with all the hacking going on.
Chang eased out of bed and onto the cold floor, kneeling to pray for Mac and Chloe and Hannah and George. “Lord, I don’t see how they can escape now, outside your direct help. I don’t know if it’s their time to join you, and I have never assumed our thoughts were your thoughts. Everything happens in your time for your pleasure, but I pray for them and the people who love them. Whatever you do I know will prove your greatness, and I ask that I be able to know soon what it was. Also, please be with Ming as she searches for our parents, and may they be able to communicate with me somehow.”
Chang felt the urge to let Rayford know what was going on. He looked at his watch. It was well after midnight, but would the people in Petra be sleeping after all that had gone on there that day? Nothing indicated that his phone was not still secure, so he dialed.
“Out! Out!” Mac hollered as the doors flew open. “Let me over there, Chloe. I’ve got to get in the way of that jet.”
“I’ll crank ’er up,” Sebastian told Mac, “but I’m not inclined to leave without you.”
“Listen, George. You do what you have to do. Worrying about me might distract ’em long enough for you to get in the air. If that’s what it takes, I’ll see you at the Eastern Gate.”
“Don’t talk like that!”
“Don’t get emotional on me now. Get yourselves on home!”
Mac waited a beat for George to back away from the car, and when he didn’t, Mac just floored it and wobbled down the runway, in line with the jet that was just about to touch down.
Rayford was not asleep, but he had finally settled and was breathing easier, gazing at the stars through a slit in the tent. His phone indicated Chang was calling.
“Give me good news,” he said.
“I wish I could,” Chang said, “but I think the Lord just wanted me to let you know so you could pray.”
Rayford didn’t feel as glib as he sounded, but when he heard the story, he said, “God protected a million people in a fiery furnace; he can get four out of Greece.”
He slipped on his sandals and hurried to where Tsion and Chaim were to bed down. If they were sleeping, he would not wake them. It didn’t surprise him to find them awake and huddled around a computer with some of the other elders. At the keyboard was the young woman, Naomi, who had summoned him earlier.
“Tsion, a word,” Rayford said.
Dr. Ben-Judah turned, surprised. “I thought you were sleeping, as we all should be. Big day tomorrow.”
Rayford brought him up to date.
“We will pray, of course, right now. But get back to Chang and tell him the computer warning was a false alarm. Naomi has been exulting in the hundreds of pages of instructions David built into the system here, including one that allows us to check the palace computers. That is what she has been doing, and that sent Chang’s computer a warning.”
Tsion hurried back to the elders and asked them all to pray for the safety of the Tribulation Force contingent in Greece. To see a dozen and a half people immediately go to their knees for his people warmed Rayford, and he couldn’t wait to get back to Chang.
When George Sebastian’s foot hit the first step up to the plane, he heard the engines whine and then scream to life. He had not realized either of the women knew how to fly. So much the better. He squatted to pull the door up behind him, but when he turned toward the cockpit, he noticed both Chloe and Hannah strapping themselves into the back two seats. They looked as surprised as he felt.
George set his Uzi and pressed his back up against the bulkhead that separated the cabin from the cockpit. He slowly edged around to where he could peer up front to see who was there. The surprise pilot, in brown and beige Bedouin-type robes, was working from the copilot’s chair. Without turning, the man raised a hand and motioned George toward the pilot’s chair.
George pulled back and faced the women. “Who is that?”
“We thought it was you,” Chloe said.
“We’ve got to get him off here or we won’t have room for Mac. Cover me.”
Chloe unstrapped and knelt behind George with her Uzi ready. Hannah raised her weapon and stood on the arm of her seat so she could peer over George’s head into the cockpit.
Sebastian hopped into view of the copilot’s chair. Empty. “All righty then,” George said, exhaling loudly and climbing over the back of the seat to take the controls. He jammed on the earphones. “Why doesn’t God just let these guys do the flying?”
“I can do that too,” a voice said.
George jumped and saw the reflection of the man in the windshield. But when he looked to his right, the copilot’s chair was still empty. “Quit that!” George said, his pulse racing.
“Sorry.”
“Michael, I suppose.”
“Roger.”
George saw Mac and the rattling GC car struggling down the runway in the face of the oncoming jet. He wanted to ask Michael if he wouldn’t be more help riding next to Mac.
“Illuminate landing lights,” he heard.
“For takeoff?”
“Roger.”
Sebastian wasn’t about to argue. He flipped on the landing lights, which merely shone into Mac’s back window. “Should I start the taxi, angling away from Mac, like he said?”
“Stand by.”
“No?”
“Hold.”
For an instant, Mac thought the GC jet didn’t see him. He slammed on the brakes and stayed in line between the two craft. When the jet finally stopped, about fifty feet in front of him, he realized it could easily go around him. Why wasn’t Sebastian rolling? With the right angle, he could get past Mac and the GC and be in the air in seconds.
Not wanting to give the GC a chance to cut George off, Mac hit the accelerator and pulled to within ten feet of the jet. He realized someone could open the door and have a clear shot at him, but they couldn’t do much to his plane if he sabotaged their aircraft. Not wanting to give them time to think, he raced forward and lodged the front of the car under the nose of the jet, banging into the landing gear. He had raised the plane off the ground a few inches but couldn’t tell if he had done any damage.
Mac rolled down his window and leaned his torso all the way out, firing his Uzi at the tires. He was amazed how resilient they were, and he heard bullets bouncing off and hitting the fuselage and the car. Reaching farther and experimenting with angles, he finally got one of the tires to blow. But where was George? Why weren’t they advancing? Was something wrong with the plane? Sebastian just sat at the end of the runway with those lights on.
Mac expected the GC to come bounding out any second, weapons blazing. Could they not see he was the only person in the car? What were they afraid of? He was a sitting duck, lodged under their jet.
Mac tried to open the d
oor, found it hopelessly stuck, and tried getting out the other side. It too was out of shape and not moving, but he thought he sensed a little more give on that side. He lay on the front seat and pushed with his hands on the driver’s side door while pressing against the passenger door with his feet. It finally broke free and he scrambled out.
He crouched beneath the jet, Uzi trained on the door. He would take them as they came out, if they dared. Maybe they were waiting for him to make a break for his own plane or for Sebastian to come and pick him up. But opening the door for him would slow George too, and all of them would be in danger.
As he waited, locked in a bewildering standoff, Mac didn’t know what to do. Should he try to shoot through the skin of the jet and take them all out? If it was armor plated, which was likely, he would waste ammunition. Why weren’t they coming after him? And why was George still waiting?
The GC jet shut down. Now what? Nothing. No movement inside or out.
Frustrated, Mac grabbed his walkie-talkie. “Chloe or Hannah,” he whispered desperately, “come in, please.”
“Chloe here, Mac.”
“What’s going on?”
“Got me. George is at the controls.”
“What’s he doing?”
“You wanna talk to him? Here.”
“Kinda busy here, Mac. What’s up?”
“You can see what’s up! What’re you doing?”
“Waiting for clearance.”
“You’re clear! Go! Go now! Angle to your right! These guys are hung up and I’ve got one of their tires blown. They’ve shut down their engines.”
“Waiting for you, partner.”
“Don’t be silly. I’d run right into their line of fire. Go to the other end of the runway, and I’ll meet you there. But if they come after me, just keep going.”
“Yeah, I know, and you’ll see me in heaven.”
“Exactly—now quit being stupid and go!”
“I’m not being stupid, Mac. I’m obeying.”