The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (119 page)

Rayford covered his eyes briefly. “God,” he prayed silently, “all I can do is trust you and follow my instincts. I believe this man is sincere. If he’s not, keep me from saying anything I shouldn’t. If he is sincere, I don’t want to keep from telling him what he needs to know. You’ve been so overt, so clear with Buck and Tsion. Couldn’t you give me a sign? Anything that would assure me I’m doing the right thing?”

Rayford looked uncertainly into Mac’s eyes, dimly illuminated by the glow from the control panel. For the moment, God seemed silent. He had not made a habit of speaking directly to Rayford, though Rayford had enjoyed his share of answers to prayer. There was no turning back now. While he sensed no divine green light, neither did he sense a red or even a yellow. Knowing the outcome could be a result of his own foolishness, he realized he had nothing to lose.

“Mac, I’m gonna tell you my whole story and everything I feel about what’s happened, about Nicolae, and about what is to come. But before I do, I need you to tell me what Carpathia knows, if you know, about whether Hattie or Amanda were really expected in Baghdad tonight.”

Mac sighed and looked away, and Rayford’s heart fell. Clearly he was about to hear something he’d rather not hear.

“Well, Ray, the truth is Carpathia knows Hattie is still in the States. She got as far as Boston, but his sources tell him she boarded a nonstop to Denver before the earthquake hit.”

“To Denver? I thought that’s where she had come from.”

“It was. That’s where her family is. Nobody knows why she went back.”

Rayford’s voice caught in his throat. “And Amanda?”

“Carpathia’s people tell him she was on a Pan-Con heavy out of Boston that should have been on the ground in Baghdad before the quake hit. It had lost a little time over the Atlantic for some reason, but the last he knew, it was in Iraqi airspace.”

Rayford dropped his head and fought for composure. “So, it’s underground somewhere,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I have seen it at the airport?”

“I don’t know,” Mac said. “Maybe it was completely swallowed by the desert. But all the other planes monitored by Baghdad tower have been accounted for, so that doesn’t seem likely.”

“There’s still hope then,” Rayford said. “Maybe that pilot was far enough behind schedule that he was still in the air and just stayed there until everything stopped moving and he could find a spot to put down.”

“Maybe,” Mac said, but Rayford detected flatness in his voice. Clearly, Mac was dubious.

“I won’t stop looking until I know.” Mac nodded, and Rayford sensed something more. “Mac, what are you not telling me?” Mac looked down and shook his head. “Listen to me, Mac. I’ve already hinted what I think of Carpathia. That’s a huge risk for me. I don’t know where your true loyalties lie, and I’m about to tell you more than I should tell anyone that I wouldn’t trust with my life. If you know something about Amanda that I need to know, you’ve got to tell me.”

Mac drew a hesitant breath. “You really don’t want to know. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

“Is she dead?”

“Probably,” he said. “I honestly don’t know that, and I don’t think Carpathia does either. But this is worse than that, Rayford. This is worse than her being dead.”

Getting into the garage at the wreckage of Loretta’s home seemed impossible even for two grown men. It had been attached to the house and somehow appeared the least damaged. There was no basement under the garage area, thus not far for its cement slab and foundation to go. When the roof had fallen in, the sectioned doors had been so heavily compressed that their panels had overlapped by several inches. One door was angled at least two feet off track, pointing to the right. The other was off track about half that much and pointed in the other direction. There was no budging them. All Buck and Tsion could do was start hacking through them. In their normal state, the wood doors might easily have been cracked through, but now they sat with a huge section of roof and eaves jamming them awkwardly down to concrete, which rested two feet below the surface.

To Buck, every whack at the wood with his ax felt as if he were crashing steel against steel. With both hands at the bottom of the handle and swinging with all his might, the best he could do was chip tiny pieces with each blow. This was a quality door, made only more solid by the crush of nature.

Buck was exhausted. Only nervous energy and grief held in check kept him going. With every swing of the ax, his desire grew to find Chloe. He knew the odds were against him, but he believed he could face her loss if he knew anything for sure. He went from hoping and praying that he would find her alive to that he would simply find her in a state that proved she died relatively painlessly. It wouldn’t be long, he feared, before he would be praying that he find her regardless.

Tsion Ben-Judah was in good shape for his age. Up until he had gone into hiding, he had worked out every day. He had told Buck that though he had never been an athlete, he knew that the health of his scholar’s mind depended also on the health of his body. Tsion was keeping up his end of the task, whaling away at the door in various spots, testing for any weakness that would allow him to drive through it more quickly. He was panting and sweating, yet still he tried to talk while he worked.

“Cameron, you do not expect to find Chloe’s car in here anyway, do you?”

“No.”

“And if you do not, from that you will conclude that she somehow escaped?”

“That’s my hope.”

“So this is a process of elimination?”

“That’s right.”

“As soon as we have established that her car is not here, Cameron, let us try to salvage whatever we can from the house.”

“Like what?”

“Foodstuffs. Your clothes. Did you say you had already cleared your bedroom area?”

“Yes, but I didn’t see the closet or its contents. It can’t be far.”

“And the chest of drawers? Surely you have clothes in there.”

“Good idea,” Buck said.

Between the two axes and their resounding
thwack
s against the garage door, Buck heard something else. He stopped swinging and held up a hand to stop Tsion. The older man leaned on his ax to catch his breath, and Buck recognized the
thump-thump-thump
of helicopter blades. It grew so loud and close that Buck assumed it was two or three choppers. But when he caught sight of the craft, he was astounded to see it was just one, big as a bus. The only other he’d seen like it was in the Holy Land during an air attack years before.

But this one, setting down just a hundred or so yards away, resembled those old gray-and-black Israeli transport choppers only in size. This was sparkling white and appeared to have just come off the assembly line. It carried the huge insignia of the Global Community.

“Do you believe this?” Buck asked.

“What do you make of it?” Tsion said.

“No idea. I just hope they’re not looking for you.”

“Frankly, Cameron, I think I have become a very low priority to the GC all of a sudden, don’t you?”

“We’ll find out soon enough. Come on.”

They dropped their axes and crept back to the upturned pavement that had served as Loretta’s street not that many hours before. Through a gouge in that fortress they saw the GC copter settle next to a toppled utility pole. A high-tension wire snapped and crackled on the ground while at least a dozen GC emergency workers piled out of the aircraft. The leader communicated on a walkie-talkie, and within seconds power was cut to the area and the sparking line fell dead. The leader directed a wire cutter to snip the other lines that led to the power pole.

Two uniformed officers carried a large circular metal framework from the helicopter, and technicians quickly jury-rigged a connection that fastened it to one end of the now bare pole. Meanwhile, others used a massive earth drill to dig a new hole for the pole. A water tank and fast-setting concrete mixer dumped a solution in the hole, and a portable pulley was anchored on four sides by two officers putting their entire weight on its metal feet at each corner. The rest maneuvered the quickly refashioned pole into position. It was drawn up to a forty-five degree angle, and three officers bent low to slide its bottom end into the hole. The pulley tightened and straightened the pole, which dropped fast and deep, sending the excess concrete solution shooting up the sides of the pole.

Within seconds, everything was reloaded into the helicopter and the GC team lifted off. In fewer than five minutes, a utility pole that had borne both electrical power and telephone lines had been transformed.

Buck turned to Tsion. “Do you realize what we just saw?”

“Unbelievable,” Tsion said. “It is now a cell tower, is it not?”

“It is. It’s lower than it should be, but it will do the trick. Somebody believes that keeping the cell areas functioning is more important than electricity or telephone wires.”

Buck pulled his phone from his pocket. It showed full power and full range, at least in the shadow of that new tower. “I wonder,” he said, “how long it will be before enough towers are up to allow us to call anywhere again.”

Tsion had started back toward the garage. Buck caught up with him. “It cannot be long,” Tsion said. “Carpathia must have crews like this working around the clock all over the world.”

“We better get heading back soon,” Mac said.

“Oh sure,” Rayford said. “I’m going to let you take me back to Carpathia and his safe shelter before you tell me something about my own wife that I’ll hate worse than knowing she’s dead?”

“Ray, please don’t make me say any more. I said too much already. I can’t corroborate any of this stuff, and I don’t trust Carpathia.”

“Just tell me,” Rayford said.

“But if you respond the way I would, you won’t want to talk about what I want to talk about.”

Rayford had nearly forgotten. And Mac was right. The prospect of bad news about his wife had made him obsess over it to the exclusion of anything else important enough to talk about.

“Mac, I give you my word I’ll answer any question you have and talk about anything you want. But you must tell me anything you know about Amanda.”

Mac still seemed reluctant. “Well, for one thing, I do know that that Pan-Con heavy would not have had enough fuel to go looking for somewhere else to land. If the quake happened before they touched down and it became obvious to the pilot he couldn’t land at Baghdad, he wouldn’t have had a whole lot farther to go.”

“So that’s good news, Mac. Since I didn’t find the plane at Baghdad, it has to be somewhere relatively close by. I’ll keep looking. Meanwhile, tell me what you know.”

“All right, Ray. I don’t guess we’re at any point in history where it makes sense to play games. If this doesn’t convince you I’m not one of Carpathia’s spies, nothing will. If it gets back that I quoted him to you, I’m a dead man. So regardless of what you think of this or how you react to it or what you might want to say to him about it, you can’t ever let on. Understand?”

“Yes, yes! Now what?”

Mac took a breath but, maddeningly, said nothing. Rayford was about to explode. “I gotta get out of this cockpit,” Mac said finally, unbuckling himself. “Go on, Ray. Get out. Don’t make me climb over you.”

Mac was out of his seat and standing between his and Rayford’s, bent low to keep from knocking his head on the ceiling of the Plexiglas bubble. Rayford unstrapped himself and popped the door open, jumping down into the sand. He was through begging. He simply determined he would not let Mac back in that chopper until he told him whatever it was he needed to know.

Mac stood there, hands thrust deep into his pants pockets. Light from the full moon highlighted the reddish-blond hair, the craggy features, and the freckles on his weathered face. He looked like a man on his way to the gallows.

Mac suddenly stepped forward and put both palms on the side of the chopper. His head hung low. Finally, he raised it and turned to face Rayford. “All right, here it is. Don’t forget you made me tell you. . . . Carpathia talks about Amanda like he knows her.”

Rayford grimaced and held his hands out, palms up. He shrugged. “He does know her. So what?”