General Hagberg was now visibly agitated. “Look, I know something about nuclear war. Yeah, sure, a nuke is apocalyptic to the city getting nuked, but a terrorist setting off bombs by hand is not a mass-destruction delivery system. Also acquiring nuclear bomb-fuel for more than fifteen or twenty bombs would be beyond the capability of today’s terrorists.”
“I can give you scenarios whereby the consequences are far worse than what you depict,” Dr. Cardiff said. “Most experts don’t expect sophisticated terrorists to focus exclusively on a single city when they set off their nukes.”
“Read,” President Raab said.
Even worse, some experts fear that a sophisticated terrorist group would spend years stealing and stockpiling enough nuclear bomb-fuel to produce six or eight terrorist nukes. Then the terrorists would not simply take out a single U.S. city but six or eight simultaneously.
Such attacks would engender so much rage and terror that one could easily imagine the victim’s retaliation going global, particularly if it were a major nuclear power such as the U.S. or the EU. The natural impulse would be to eliminate all possible nuclear-terrorist enemies and their sponsors rather than risk further attacks.
Al Qaeda even envisions detonating a nuclear device in the Yellowstone supervolcano caldera. The consequent eruption would devastate most of the United States and Canada.
Revelation 9:13–18 describes a global war in which one-third of humanity is slaughtered. Without “the extinction pulse” of nuclear weapons, such carnage would be unimaginable.
Now Dr. Cardiff interrupted their reading. “The last page,” she said, “is my gravest fear, perhaps because I spent my life in astrophysics, have worked at NASA, and am supposed to be doing something about this. Giant rocks from space are arguably the gravest threat of all and the one we do the least to prevent.”
The men returned to their paper.
But what about real star fire—fire from space, not just man-made suns? Revelation warns us that stars will hammer the earth and is filled with references to stellar fire razing the earth. Revelation 8:7–13 describes columns of fire, blazing mountains, and a flaming star striking the earth. Revelation 12:4 describes thousands of stars hurled at the earth.
Asteroids and comets are frequently cited as the number-one species-killer. That an asteroid—or perhaps a comet—helped to exterminate the dinosaurs adds credence to this theory. More resilient than Homo sapiens, dinosauria ruled their world for over 180 million years and was easily the most indestructible species ever to dominate the globe. During that reign, they endured catastrophic destruction which humankind could never have survived. Massive volcanoes and seismic events were ripping their supercontinent, Pangaea, apart. Creating our current continents and seas, these megavolcanoes and colossal plate collisions, which helped to form them, drove these newly formed landmasses halfway across the oceans. Moreover, these spectacular volcanoes wreaked havoc on the dinosaurs’ climate, flooding the dinosaurs’ atmosphere with greenhouse gases.
Even so, massive volcanoes alone could not end the dinosaurs’ reign. When the giant K-T rock hit the Yucatán coast 65 million years ago, it set the entire planet aflame and wiped these lords of evolution off the face of the earth, even exterminating those in the sea. The only dinosaurs to survive were those that dwelt in the air—those dinosaurs that today we call birds.
Species-killing asteroids and comets still seriously menace the earth. NASA estimates that at least 20,000 of these massive species-threatening objects could hit the earth, and they detect near misses continually. Unfortunately, given NASA’s lack of an asteroid-surveillance system, NASA fails to spot 25 percent of these species-menacing rocks until the last minute. Congress has mandated NASA to build and deploy surveillance systems, which would detect and alert the world to these earth-threatening rocks, but Congress has never allocated the funds to build the telescopes required to spot them. Many of these orbiting recon satellites would be inexpensive and easy to build—small six-inch-in-diameter spotting-scopes could be productively deployed in orbit. For $800 million, a system of NASA-deployed ground- and space-based telescopes could detect and chart 90 percent of these 20,000 earth-menacing asteroids and comets. Just a little smaller than the New Orleans Superdome, these rocks are defined as over 460 feet in diameter. To date, only 30 percent of them have been detected.
For $300 million, NASA could deploy a surveillance system that would detect, monitor, and chart those threatening asteroids and comets more than 1,000 feet across.
If NASA spotted and studied a true civilization-killing asteroid, they could send a probe to meet it far from earth and attach a transponder to its surface. If the signals proved it was a genuine apocalyptic threat, NASA could then mount an expedition that would deflect it from the earth’s orbit.
So far, Congress has refused to fund these spotting systems, and NASA has done little to prepare us for the killer stars Revelation 8:7–13 and 12:4 say will obliterate us.
Dr. Cardiff looked up and saw that the men were all now on the last page—from her point of view, the most interesting of all.
The financial apocalypse.
Humanity’s failure to invest money in catastrophe-prevention could ultimately be humanity’s gravest apocalyptic failing.
One of Revelation’s most devastating apocalypses is financial. In Revelation 13, “the Beast”—whom we often call “the Antichrist,” even though Revelation does not use that epithet—controls humanity by exploiting its greed and extorting a fee for all financial transactions. Avarice so obsesses people that even after the world learns that financial rapacity will plunge the money-hungry into eternal lakes of fire, humanity refuses to repent, preferring to suffer eternal hellfire than give up its dream of ephemeral riches. Even when the angels scourge humanity in Revelation 16:9–11 with plagues of sores, blood, and fire, men “blaspheme God” instead of giving up their greed. The Bible constantly condemns that vice of vices: Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden for coveting and purloining God’s apples. Judas betrays Christ for the sake of filthy lucre, and in Revelation, humankind burns eternally for its relentless rapacity.
Acquiring money to finance, produce, and sell essential goods and services is not evil but indispensable to the growth and survival of both civilizations and individuals. Creating financial schemes in which people produce nothing but profit solely off other people’s money—often violating other people’s property rights in the process—is, however, ultimately destructive. Yet such financial schemes are disproportionately responsible for the world’s debt. Global derivative debt—which for the most part is a financial house of cards—is now well over $1.4 quadrillion.
Increasingly the world’s major money markets are dedicated not to production but to spurious financial chicanery, the destructiveness of which confronts us at every turn. That the Beast of Revelation—whom we now refer to as “the Antichrist”—destroys humanity through apocalyptic avarice now seems both shockingly plausible and eerily contemporary.
The men put down their papers and looked up at her.
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Cardiff said, “Rider Number Four—the Pale Horseman of the Apocalypse—unleashes hell’s fury on earth. He embodies all the infernal horrors, which scientists now fear will hammer Homo sapiens into extinction. The Fourth Horseman’s hellish whole will be infinitely greater than the sum of his species-killing parts. The late great science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, believed that if Homo sapiens was to be obliterated, multiple apocalypses would have to hit the species within a finite time span, such as a single year. He called his hypothetical mass extinction ‘Year of the Jackpot.’ In a sense, the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse personifies Heinlein’s apocalyptic ‘Jackpot.’ A potpourri of global catastrophes, this pale rider destroys Homo sapiens synergistically, all within a surprisingly short time frame.
“That is what our supercomputer foresees, and that is what Quetzalcoatl lived through, saw, and says will return to bite us in 2012, and that is what NASA’s s
upercomputer and its PCSEG program concluded after they crunched all the data we fed in. They said our most likely scenario and end-game paralleled the catastrophes of Revelation.”
“Our supercomputer and its software program,” President Raab said, “argue that John on Patmos knew more than all our scientists put together.”
“And that we are in the Age of the Antichrist?” Bradford Chase asked.
“And you think we need Quetzalcoatl’s final prophecy to determine whether his early suspicions and our supercomputer are right?” General Hagberg asked.
“Yes,” Dr. Cardiff said, “because the apocalyptic pulse that wiped out the Toltecs could well be cyclical, its wheel now turning to our time.”
“Those chickens are returning to roost?” Bradford Chase asked.
“That’s what PCSEG argued. And we have to find those final codices,” Dr. Cardiff said, “to learn where those chickens are and what they are up to.”
“Meaning, we have to find the girls,” General Hagberg said. For once he wasn’t sneering.
Staring at them silently, Dr. Cardiff nodded her head, once, then twice.
Taking her hand, President Raab said, “We’ll find them, Cards. If we have to harrow hell for their lost souls, we will find them.”
Monica Cardiff picked up her papers and stood. She looked at President Raab a long moment.
She gave him a silent nod.
She turned to the door, and walked out the room.
PART XIX
94
Before I left Tula, I bought a yellow dog and killed it, burying it with Axe so it would guide him through the hellish nightmares of Xibalba.
I didn’t buy a dog for Sparrow, because I would be her guide. I loved her, and she had given her life for me. I would carry her heart through the Place of Fear and clear the path for her by pitting my strength against the servants of the Lords of Death.
I headed southeast out of Tula to find a mountain pass that would take me from the high Valley of Mexico down to the coast, where I could find passage on boats back to the land of my people.
From a ridge an hour’s walk from the site of the ancient city, I looked back and saw warriors also leaving the city. Aztec warriors, following the trail I had taken, were leaving—warriors famous for their endurance and prowess.
I turned my back and kept walking, not worrying about them. There was enough rage in me to fight an entire army. And determination that made me willing to defy even the Underworld’s gods. I had two treasures to safeguard: the essence of the woman I loved and the book of fate for the entire One-World.
Not even the gods would stop me. Once I carried Sparrow’s heart through Xibala, she would find eternal peace—her soul would be turned to dust and scattered in a field of maize.
I owed that to her. But I would have done it even if she had not given her life for me. I would have done it for love.
I didn’t sleep the first night. Not because I feared the pursuit but because I wasn’t tired. Angry, bitter, even empty inside, but not tired.
By the next night I was calm enough to relax after a meal I purchased from a farmer’s wife. I avoided caravans of porters. The dangers of banditry were not the same in the Aztec lands as in my own, and I didn’t want the company.
I built a fire, and for the first time I opened the book of fate and read it by the dim, flickering light.
Some of what I read was already familiar to me—at the whim of the gods, the One-World had been destroyed four times before. The first time water from the great seas rose and covered the land; then fire from the sky scorched the world; next brimstone erupting from a great fire mountain blackened the air and sky; and finally a bitter cold came from the north and spread until it encased the entire world.
What I learned from the codex was that all civilizations rise and then fall when the gods tire of them. When societies fall, the people do not fade away but turn savagely on each other as food and water become scarce.
The codex revealed that besides the periodic growth and eclipse of nations, sometimes the gods physically disrupted the entire world as they did the previous four times.
The codex was not based upon what the Tula astronomers knew, but upon the knowledge of all the ages of the people in the One-World that the god-king Quetzalcoatl had gathered in his golden city. It was the knowledge of the peoples of the One-World that had been passed down in writing and stories around the cooking fires since the world began again. The knowledge of how the fifth world would end was contained in the codex. When it would end was calculated, and a Long Count Calendar was created as a warning for when the time would come.
The Long Count Calendar was straightforward like the Calendar Round. An integral part of our daily lives, the Calendar Round told farmers when to plant, kings when to go to war, and cities when to hold festivals.
But, the long calendar was based upon catastrophic events: It began the day the world was created for the fifth time after the gods had destroyed four previous times . . . and its final date was the year when the fifth destruction would take place.
I felt a great burden, knowing that I carried with me the revelation of the fate of people not yet born or even imagined.
95
The hills rose higher, turning into a great wall of mountains that could be crossed only by a narrow path that weaved back and forth until I reached a split between the shoulders of great peaks.
The farther my steps took me up the mountains, the colder it became. When I reached the top of the pass, tiny ice particles hung in the air and bit at my bare skin like voracious mosquitoes. My hands and feet first became numb and then felt as if they had been put into a fire and scorched.
I had never experienced extreme cold before. I was not even up to the snow that caps some of the tallest mountains surrounding the valley.
The wood, which had once lined the trail, had long been consumed by the fires of previous passersby, leaving me to eat cold tortillas and lay shivering on the cold ground. Until I felt the burn of wind that carried ice and snow, I had not been able to conceive the killing force of either the Great Cold that once destroyed the One-World, nor the House of Cold in Xibalba.
I now knew why the gods had created smoking fire mountains—the fuming, blazing pits in the mountains warmed the godly heavens.
The air grew warmer as I descended down the mountain and the terrain that went from barren rock to scrub trees and finally to thick jungle. By the time I reached the coastal plains, the air was as hot as my own land and much wetter. Even though our Mayan jungles in ordinary times get as much water from the rain god as this region, most of it slipped away to cenotes. In this coastal area, there were rivers flowing to the sea.
Coming down from the mountains and onto the shores of the Great Eastern Waters, these rivers brought me to the land of the Tlaxcala.
The Tlaxcala were enemies of the Aztecs who, while not completely conquered by them, were forced to provide tribute and sacrifice victims.
I had seen the Tlaxcalan ambassador humiliated in Montezuma’s palace because the emperor was not pleased with the tribute.
When I reached the coast itself, with the incredible Great Eastern Waters laid out beyond, I heard frightening rumors: Light-skinned strangers had come on canoes the size of palaces, and the Tlaxcala had welcomed them as allies to war against the Aztecs.
The news staggered me. The invaders that the madman called Jeronimo claimed would destroy the One-World had arrived.
Going over the top of a hill, I saw the giant canoes in the bay below. Eleven ships sat in the bay, each the size of a small palace. Tlaxcalan canoes that each held a dozen men looked like mosquitoes next to a log.
I saw the warriors on land at a distance, hundreds of them, and they were truly warrior-gods capable of destroying worlds. The men wore clothes of a strange, silverlike material that glistened in the sun, the war uniforms that Jeronimo had called steel armor.
Some of them rode on giant deerlike beasts with great hooves that
could crush a man.
I watched in horror and awe as one of the warrior-gods demonstrated their divine power to headmen of the Tlaxcala by firing what Jeronimo had called a musket and killing a vulture a thousand paces away, blowing the bird apart as it was hit.
And then I saw him, the man I had spoken to in Tulúm, Jeronimo de Aguilar. I heard from a Tlaxcalan that the leader of the warrior-gods had ransomed him.
Catching my eye, Jeronimo began to taunt me. “God has dispatched angels with swords of fire to rid you pagans of its false idols!” he shouted at me.
I ran and didn’t look back.
“You can’t run from it!” he yelled.
“Xibalba!” I shouted back.
I don’t know if he understood. I don’t even know why I said it. Perhaps I wanted him to know that hell would be better than what his people would do to our land.
PART XX
96
XIBALBA
I hear my name whispered.
The darkness in the House of Gloom swaddled me like a babe.
I knew from the many tales I’ve told about this darkest of stone houses that it is a labyrinth with many traps and only one path out.
The Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, were champions of tlachco, the game played with a rubber ball on a long, narrow court. They were tricked into descending to the Underworld to play on the personal court of the Death Lords of Xibalba. The two brothers hadn’t realized that the Xibalbans would use a ball with razor-sharp obsidian blades that cut a player each time he hit it. However, the twins cleverly substituted another ball for the bladed one and went on to win the match.
The 2012 Codex Page 30
