The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (340 page)

Some turned and began to run, but they froze in place.

“No, no. Surely you do not think escape is possible from one who can create a cloud to cover the sun? If you want the mark of loyalty, raise your hand now and receive it.”

The rest of the crowd raised their hands, frantic. “But more of you should die before the vipers get here.” About three dozen keeled over.

“Why do the vipers keep coming?” a woman cried. “We have all obeyed! We have all taken the mark!”

“The vipers are wise, that is all,” he said. “They know who was serious and loyal and who acted only out of fear for their lives.”

The spring turned to blood, and the people near it backed away.

“Fools!” he said. “You’re all fools! Do you think a god like Nicolae Carpathia wants you as his subjects? No! He wants you dead and away from the clutches of his enemies. You are free to run now, and it is entertaining to me to see you run as fast and as frantically as you can. But let me warn you. You will not outrun the vipers. You will not reach Petra in time to save yourselves. Your bodies will lie bloated and baking in the sun until the birds have their way with your flesh. For as I leave, I take with me the shade I provided.”

The people burst from the scene, screaming and staggering madly in the sand toward Petra. The GC guards seemed apoplectic and stared as the vipers changed course to chase down the people. The spring dried up, the cloud disappeared, and dozens of chunks of bread lay in the sand.

Mac looked at Albie and Smitty and they all shook their heads, trembling. Suddenly the wonder-worker stood directly in front of the chopper. Though he did not open his mouth, Mac heard him as if he were inside the craft. “I know who you are. I know you by name. Your god is weak and your faith a sham, and your time is limited. You shall surely die.”

Mac had difficulty finding his voice. “Let’s go,” he croaked, and Abdullah started the engines. The cloud of sand blew up and then away, and as Smitty lifted off, Mac looked down to see nothing but a long stretch of undisturbed sand, dotted only by the dead who had dropped at the site. No GC. No miracle man. No platform. No bread. No vehicles.

What about the snakes? He didn’t see them either. But stretched for a quarter mile were the rest of the people, still and flat and grotesque on the desert floor, limbs splayed.

Tsion was troubled in his spirit by a deep sense of foreboding. He knew he would not be able to shepherd all the way to the Glorious Appearing every person who had arrived in Petra. And yet he believed that when they had seen the mighty and miraculous hand of God, many of the undecided would be persuaded.

Many had been; of that there was no doubt. That was what Chaim and the other elders were saying as Tsion despaired, deep in one of the caves. It was as if the Lord had told him that the rebels would not be returning—not any of them. But he didn’t know if God would slay them, as he did in the Korah rebellion in the days of Moses, or whether Antichrist would kill them after luring them into the desert with his great deception.

He looked up when Naomi hurried in from the technology and communications center and went directly to her father. She stole a glance at Tsion as she whispered in her father’s ear, and when Tsion saw the slump of his shoulders and the sad shaking of his head, he knew.

The young woman left, and her father made his way up to Chaim. Tsion leaned over. “Tell us both. I must know of this eventually anyway.”

“But, sir,” Naomi’s father said, “could you not be spared the totality of this until even one day after your triumph over the False Prophet? Why must your rejoicing be tempered?”

“I am not rejoicing, my friend. I was unable to keep the False Prophet from enticing the rebels to go their own way, no matter what I did or said. Tell me the whole of it. Spare me nothing.”

“Three of your friends from the Tribulation Force were eyewitnesses and are just now returning. They request a moment with you.”

Tsion stood. “Of course! Where are they?”

“On their way from the helipad.”

As he and Chaim neared the entrance to the cave, Mac, Albie, and Abdullah were coming in. They all embraced. The elders maintained a respectful distance as the five huddled and Mac told the story.

“You should not have attended,” Tsion said sadly.

“If we’d known what we were gonna see, we wouldn’t have,” Mac said. “But you know, sometimes us pilot types are as curious as little boys. This just mighta cured us.”

“That man was not even human,” Tsion said. “Surely he was a demonic apparition. Revelation 12 says that when Satan, who will deceive the whole world, was cast down from heaven to earth, ‘his angels were cast out with him.’ And of course it is no surprise that these people were not even recruited for the Global Community. John 10:10 says Satan wants only to steal and to kill and to destroy.”

“I have a question, Dr. Ben-Judah,” Albie said. “Is it okay not to like this? I mean, everybody’s outraged about what happened, but just when I think I have an idea what God might be up to, he lets something like this happen, and I don’t understand him at all.”

“Do not feel bad about that, my brother, unless your questioning of him makes you doubt him. He is in control. His ways are not our ways, and he sees a big picture we will not even be able to fathom this side of heaven. I too am distraught. I had so wished that some of these might run back to us, pleading that we intercede for them before God, the way the wayward children of Israel did in Old Testament times. I would have loved to pray for atonement for them or to hold up an image of a bronze snake so that those bitten could look upon it and be healed.

“But God is doing his winnowing work. He is cleansing the earth of his enemies, and he is allowing the undecided to face the consequences of their procrastination. You know as well as I do that no one in his right mind should choose against the God who can protect them against weapons of mass destruction. But here were these fools, venturing out into the desert, outside of God’s blanket of protection, and there they lie. As the apostle Paul put it, ‘O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his counselor? . . . For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things—to whom be glory for ever.’”

Mac was up before dawn, eager to get going. But as he waited for Albie and Abdullah, he was aware of a buzz throughout Petra. An announcement was going out, through an elaborate word-of-mouth system, that Tsion and Chaim were calling for everyone to assemble after they had eaten their morning manna.

Abdullah and Albie ate quickly and packed, joining Mac with the million others before the three of them were to lift off.

Chaim addressed the crowd first. “Tsion believes the Lord has told him that no more indecision reigns in the camp. You may confirm that by looking about you. Is there anyone in this place without the mark of the believer? Anyone anywhere? We will not pressure or condemn you. This is just for our information.”

Mac made a cursory pan of the people within his vision, but mostly he watched Tsion and Chaim, who waited more than ten minutes to be sure.

Then Tsion stepped forward. “The prophet Isaiah,” he said, “predicted that ‘it shall come to pass in that day that the remnant of Israel, and such as have escaped of the house of Jacob, will never again depend on him who defeated them, but will depend on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth.

“‘The remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the Mighty God. For though your people, O Israel, be as the sand of the sea, a remnant of them will return. . . .’ And of the evil ruler of this world who has tormented you, Isaiah says further, ‘It shall come to pass in that day that his burden will be taken away from your shoulder, and his yoke from your neck, and the yoke will be destroyed.’ Praise the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

“The prophet Zechariah quoted our Lord God himself, speaking of the land of Israel, that ‘two-thirds of it shall be cut off and die, but one-third shall be left in it. I will bring the one-third through the fire, will refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name and I will answer them. I will say, “This is My people.” And each one will say, “The Lord is my God.”’

“My dear friends, you remnant of Israel, this is in accord with the clear teaching of Ezekiel, chapter 37, where our barren nation is seen in the last days to be a valley of dry bones, referred to by the Lord himself as ‘the whole house of Israel. They indeed say, “Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off!”’

“But then, dear ones, God said to Ezekiel, ‘Therefore prophesy and say to them, “Thus says the Lord God: ‘Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. . . . I will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it and performed it.’”’”

It had been a long time since Rayford had done such hard physical labor. Even at Mizpe Ramon, the building of the airstrip for Operation Eagle had largely been done under his supervision but by others with heavy equipment. He was in charge of this operation too, but there was no getting around that every pair of hands was crucial.

Lionel Whalum had landed almost without incident at Gobernador Gregores. The only trouble was that the main runway had been destroyed during the war, and the Co-op had rebuilt it by duplicating it a hundred feet parallel to the original. The GC were unaware of the rebuilding or of the huge encampment of underground believers who had been harvesting wheat and trading through the Co-op ever since.

But when the destroyed runway was discarded, which Rayford’s main contact there—Luís Arturo—later told him had taken weeks to haul away, what was left was a smooth, dark depression in the ground. From the air, it looked as if the runway was still there.

Luís had spent his high school and college years in the United States and spoke fluent, though heavily accented, English. He had had enough exposure to campus ministry groups that when he returned to Argentina and suffered through the disappearances, he knew exactly what had happened. He and some friends from childhood raced to their little Catholic church, where hardly anyone was left. Their favorite priest and catechism teacher were gone too. But from literature they found in the library, they learned how to trust Christ personally. Soon they were the nucleus of the new body of believers in that area.

Luís proved to be an earnest, fast-talking man, and while he took especially to Ree Woo and was friendly and cordial to everyone, his top priority was getting the plane loaded and these men on their way again. “All we hear are rumors that the GC is polluting the Chico and that they are onto us,” he said. “I have many reasons to believe that is only the talk of the paranoid, but we cannot take chances. The time grows short anyway, so let’s move.”

He seemed to like Ree so much because, though the South Korean was the youngest and smallest member of Rayford’s crew, with the exception of George Sebastian he proved to be in the best shape of everyone—Americans and Argentineans combined.