The Rapture Dialogues: Dark Dimension (The Second Coming Chronicles Book 1)

by Terry James

  Gen. Motti Hod had told Mark and his fellow pilot that their bird would make up for the small force of only 200 fighter-bombers Israel could throw into the attack. The F-4, an aircraft heretofore forbidden for sale to Israel--Mark was informed at the last moment before takeoff--was a secret that only Hod, a few other Israeli government officials, and the very top covert operations at the U.S. DOD knew about. The Israeli general told the American pilot-PND operator these facts, Hod had said, only because he wanted to impress upon Mark the absolute necessity of the success of the mission. To fail would mean that Israel might lose all 200 of its fighter-bomber force. The Arabs, particularly the Egyptians, were equipped with Mig 17s and Mig 21s. The Arab forces far outnumbered Israel’s Air Force. The French Mirage aircraft, which made up the bulk of the IAF, were formidable. But, without the advantage of surprise, and something other to help balance things a bit, Hod had told the American captain, the probable outcome of even a preemptive strike looked bleak.

  The F-4E, equipped with the technology even its operator knew next to nothing about, was meant to be that counter-balance to even things out.

  Mark knew the device was linked directly to his thought processes by the connectors within the PND. He also knew the device would--according to Gerhardt Frobe and the other scientists he had worked with--speed his thinking and reaction time to the point he could almost anticipate a full five seconds in advance of the actions of Arab pilots who would resist the attack.

  Mark was puzzled, though, about how the technology was supposed to be effective in a strafing-type run. How would it work? He was certain he could perform what was required in aerial combat. But, how could he contribute to the attack on Arab forces on the ground?

  Frobe had told him not to worry, that he would know what to do when the time came. The PND would interact through his subconscious, with technology that was so super-secret, even the operator--Mark Lansing--could not be told about its operations.

  The words replayed in his mind now while he looked into the scope, which was lit with an eerie glow, concentric rings encompassing each other that reduced to a single circle with something akin to crosshairs at its center.

  “You will be contacted, son. You must do what they ask,” the thing that called itself his father had said that night in a strange language that he had somehow understood.

  “You’re gonna be asked to do some special things for your country, son. I want you to show ‘em you’ve got what it takes,” Lyndon Johnson had said that day on the parking ramp at Randolph Air Force Base.

  What would he be asked to do that he didn’t yet know about, that he had not been told? Could the device be a nuclear-class weapon? What was the technology that was so clandestine, not even its user was privy to its secrets?

  A single F-4E, itself a bird forbidden to interact with the Israeli Air Force, expected to tip the balance in the preemptive strike meant to neuter the Arab’s air capabilities. To destroy Nasser’s air superiority, in particular…

  “Five minutes, Captain,” the Israeli pilot said over the intercom.

  “Five minutes it is, Major,” Mark acknowledged.

  Five minutes and he would know the technology’s capability, Mark thought, adjusting the scope in the manner he had been taught at Taos.

  They had left the old Jeep at the bottom of the Mount of Olives, Randall Prouse taking care to remove several sparkplug wires. If any of the many unsavory roving bands in this part of Jerusalem wanted to steal the vehicle, they would have to push it.

  Christopher Banyon looked upward as they ascended the pathway. The clouds seemed almost to be sitting atop the famous promontory where, nearly two millennia before, Jesus Christ and His disciples sometimes gathered. The spot where Christ ascended into Heaven after giving the disciples the Great Commission.

  The mount was now without the dense wooded areas of that earlier time. The trees had been cut for many uses, and, until recently, never been reseeded, or replanted. Yet, there remained ancient, gnarled olive trees and scrub brush at various levels on the rocky hills that comprised the mountain.

  A thunderous roar followed brilliant lightning somewhere above the mount’s highest point.

  “This might not be the best place to be right now,” Randall Prouse said, leading the way on the rugged, though often tourist-traveled pathway.

  He carried a rolled-up piece of canvas on his right shoulder, in anticipation of heavy rain.

  “Where do you suppose we should stop?” the minister asked, shouting to be heard above the almost continuous rumble of thunder.

  “Gessel didn’t say,” Prouse said, turning to look over his left shoulder to be heard.

  “Neither did Laura,” Christopher said.

  Susie Banyon, wedged between the two men while the three trudged upward, said something, but neither man could understand because of the thunder, which increased in volume with each step.

  The party stopped.

  They both concentrated on what Susie was saying. “I said, Gethsemane. We should go to the Garden of Gethsemane.”

  “Where Jesus prayed. Of course!” Christopher said.

  “Makes sense,” Prouse grunted. “We can’t be sure it’s the exact spot that Christ and the disciples prayed that night Jesus was taken prisoner, but, it’s the traditional site that has the approval of many scholars.”

  Christopher smiled at his friend’s clinical analysis, then followed his wife and Prouse as they hurried toward what was considered to be the place Christ had prayed before His crucifixion.

  “One thing sure,” Prouse said, while veering from the path and stepping onto and over several small boulders. “We’re alone up here today, with the war brewing, and this storm.”

  Susie Banyon thought how very wrong their big friend was. They were not alone…

  Lori’s body seemed to glow, while reflecting the amber radiance that filled the room. She stared ahead, unseeing, unaware that her mother stood not 20 feet from her.

  Laura Morgan again strained to free herself from Gessel Kirban’s grasp.

  “No, no, Laura--we must not…the Lord will intervene.”

  The scientist’s words were meant to comfort, but Laura didn’t hear them. She saw only her child, being manipulated by the devil’s machinery and by the black abomination that had moments before possessed Lori’s body.

  The things had possessed the bodies of everyone in the room, except the two of them, she thought. She glanced quickly at the faces of the 12 who wore the golden helmets, the mind-controlling headgear like that worn by her daughter.

  She watched each mouth move in unison, including Lori’s. The mouths repeated the same words over and over, in a growling chant that could not be made by a human being.

  “Destroy the Jew…kill them all…Jews must be removed…”

  Gessel relaxed his grip on the woman, satisfied that she had calmed. Laura bolted from him, and, when she knew she was free, began to run toward the elevated platform at the center of the room, where her daughter, like the rest, repeated the hate-filled directive.

  She would grab Lori, take her from the platform. Jerk from her head the hideous helmet.

  Laura suddenly felt frozen in place, and she couldn’t speak. She looked downward, able to move only her eyes. She was encapsulated by a bright, glowing mass that was alive with spectacular points of lights of every color. All fear left her in that moment of realization. She knew in that soul-lifting second, her purpose in being there was not to fight them. Her God-ordained reason for existence at that instant of mortal time was to do nothing more or less than pray.

  They descended swiftly from 21,000 feet to just under 2,000. The 15 Israeli Mirage fighters flew their assigned formations, with the F-4E at the center of the flight configuration. The groupings tightened when they reached Egyptian territory, then, three minutes later broke in various directions, to approach their assigned targets from many angles. The tactic was one designed to confuse SAM operators who might otherwise more accurately send their d
eadly missiles to their targets.

  The Phantom dropped even lower than the two Mirages that had been flying just off the tips of its wings. The Israeli pilot held the stick in a course aimed straight at the largest of the Egyptian bases. Mark Lansing, his eye sockets pressed hard against the scope’s rubber face-rest, watched while the topography in the distance moved quickly toward them. He began the count.

  “Switching to PND in five…four…three…two…one!”

  He depressed the red button on the side of the scope’s encasement, and mentally prepared for the eerie sensations the precognition neuro-diviner initially produced when activated.

  The ground moved now in slow motion within the scope’s view as he concentrated. Slower than any slow-motion film he had ever seen…

  Every stone, each raised point along the desert floor for miles in the distance, presented a vision in different colors that whirred through his brain in kaleidoscopic fashion. He saw the many Migs and other Egyptian aircraft in his increased rate of thought, his brain analyzing the targets and formulating the fail-proof attack the F-4 would make.

  Maps, timelines, weapons systems, every conceivable nuance of quality and quantity to do with the Egyptian Air Force meshed with his neuron-to-neuron synapse firing to bring forth the perfect, infallible, preemptive assault.

  Then the cerebral perfection began to disintegrate within Mark’s wildly swinging thought processes. He heard a distinctive, all-consuming chant filled with hatred, and his brain turned to enraged thoughts that made him know what he must do. He must destroy anything, everything Israeli!

  Billowing storm clouds gathered, rolled, and swept downward toward Mount Moriah, while Randall Prouse led the way up the narrow path on the Mount of Olives. Lightning flickered in jagged streaks above the darkened golden crown of the Dome of the Rock. The wind grew stronger by the second, and the archaeologist, Christopher Banyon, and Susie had to protect their faces from debris that pelted them while they neared the Garden of Gethsemane.

  They were forced to turn their backs to the violent, debris-filled wind, pausing, then moving further up the hill during brief lessening of the storm’s assault.

  “Somebody up here doesn’t like us,” the archaeologist said, trying to bolster his own resolve to keep moving.

  Christopher held his wife in a firm grip, steadying her in the unpredictable gusts that now included occasional large raindrops. A blinding flash of lightning struck tree 50 feet upward, causing the woman to scream and the men to jerk with startled convulsions.

  “Too close!” Prouse shouted to be heard above the resultant thunderclap. “It’s right over there.”

  He motioned in the direction he wanted them to follow.

  Moments later they stood in the center of the spot where tradition had it that Christ had prayed to His father just before His crucifixion.

  “Here! Between these rocks!” Prouse yelled, guiding both by their arms toward a boulder that jutted to produce an overhang.

  “We’ll be more out of the wind, here,” he said, kneeling beneath the overhang, then spreading the large canvas over the three of them just as the rain began pelting, driven hard by the wind.

  “Now what?” Prouse said. “I know Gessel said to pray--but for what, exactly?”

  Susie said without hesitation, “For the peace of Jerusalem.”

  Lori’s beautiful features were now a hideous mask of hatred beneath the golden helmet. Her mouth spoke words in an animalistic growl that was not hers, but that of the abominable creature occupying her soul.

  Her mother held immobile within the capsule of bursting, colored points of light, could do nothing other. She prayed.

  She wanted to pray that Lori be released, that the vile place, the dark forces, be removed from them. But the thoughts in her mind told her otherwise.

  “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” she heard over and over.

  Gessel Kirban, like Laura, heard the words, and he prayed for his native land, and for the ancient city where sat the holiest spot on earth for the Jew.

  Chanting grew louder within the huge, ovaled chamber, the ambient glow changing from golden amber to ruby red. The helmeted 12 seated around the curved walls began to quiver, their eyes turned upward, so that only the whites were shown.

  “All Jews must die!” Gessel Kirban heard the incantations demand in Hebrew. “Israel shall be destroyed!”

  He prayed all the harder for the peace of Jerusalem, as did Laura, whose only thought was now directed toward her desire that the perfect will of God be done.

  The American pilot now had complete control of the F4-E. The Israeli major could do nothing but go along for the violent ride, while Mark Lansing maneuvered the aircraft using only his thoughts.

  The bird rolled left from the three-plane formation, dove slightly, then shot straight up, its dual afterburners at full thrust. Mark’s eyes turned upward so that only the whites were visible. He heard only the words of the incantations, which drove his will to follow the directives from the bowels of the Taos complex.

  His Dimensional-controlled brain took the aircraft in an inverted loop. When the bird again leveled off, it trailed the two Mirage fighters who had accompanied the F-4 toward its Egyptian targets.

  “What are you doing?!” the Israeli pilot shouted from the front seat. He grabbed the stick, but it moved as if attached to nothing, no longer in commission.

  “Get back in formation, Lansing! What are you trying to do?!”

  At that moment, the Israeli heard the firing and saw the tracers of the 30-mm DEFA cannon fire strike the Mirage on the right in front of them.

  Mark heard nothing, knew nothing, except what the beings directing told him to hear and think.

  The Israeli pilot cursed and shouted into the face-mask microphone, but to no avail. He helplessly watched the Mirage, trailing thick, blue-black smoke, dive out of control toward the Egyptian desert.

  He looked back toward the flaming carnage as long as he could, hoping, praying to see the ejection seat carrying the Mirage pilot rocket from the cockpit. But, now they were too far removed from where the Israeli jet would hit the earth.

  Rashfer grasped for every cockpit control he could think of that might neutralize the madman-traitor’s ability to continue his murderous assault.

  Nothing. Everything he tried failed. Tears of frustration and outrage filled his eyes, while he continued to look, not for ways to neutralize the American’s madness, but to destroy the F-4E, and the two of them with it.

  Lightning crashed around them while they prayed. Their minds and spirits seemed at one with each other, and with a higher power, while they prayed a prayer of singular purpose: that there be peace in Jerusalem, and that God’s will be done this moment. While the elements raged above them, a calming, reassuring, though unseen force seemed to engulf the three who huddled beneath the canvas.

  Thunder sounded as if it growled words from Satan’s own lips, but they prayed on, their deepest desires lifted far above the terrible, raging storm of supernatural conflict. Laura Morgan prayed too, as did the Israeli scientist. They neither heard nor saw the tempest brewing about them, while they appealed to their Deity to fulfill His will in this profound moment of human history.

  Mark Lansing heard a far distant trumpet. Its sound grew louder, overtaking, then overwhelming the chanting that had held him in a trance from which there had been, until now, no escape.

  “Lansing! For God’s sake, man! Don’t do this!”

  Mark heard David Rashfer’s pleading. He blinked, trying to clear his head.

  “Captain! Do you hear me?!” Rashfer screamed.

  “Yes…yes, Major…I hear you…”

  “Return control to me…Now!” the Israeli demanded.

  “What have I done? What’s happened?”

  “You shot down one of our wingmen, Lansing--you’ve gone mad!”

  An emotional flood of disbelief, then self-hatred overcame him, while he came to his senses.

  “Turn the
bird over to me, Captain,” Major Rashfer again demanded.

  Mark reached to comply by pressing the red button on the PND’s casing. He froze in place before his right index finger could contact the button. His mind leapt forward, his brain taking on many thoughts at once, knowing, suddenly, and with visceral understanding, the true nature of the conflict he was created to help resolve.

  The acting director of Covert Operations for the U.S. Department of Defense lurched from his stiffened position behind the desk. He batted his eyelids, looking, in confusion, around Gerhardt Frobe’s dark office.

  Something had gone wrong, terribly wrong, he thought, rising from the swivel chair, and hurrying from the office. He walked down two corridors and into Frobe’s laboratory.

  Sweat beaded just below his thinning hairline, and on his upper lip. He mopped the perspiration with his suit pocket-handkerchief.

  Something had indeed gone wrong!

  The deal was made. It depended on the success of the mission. Everything depended upon Lansing carrying out the mission. Without that, the whole thing would collapse, upon one, Robert Cooper’s head, he thought, while pushing several buttons on the console before speaking into the phone’s mouthpiece.

  “What’s going on, Frobe? The Dimensional left, and I don’t know why.”

  He listened to the scientist’s words, his eyes shifting left and right while he considered what he was hearing.

  “They all left their subjects?” he asked with panic in his voice.

  “What’s happening down there right now?” he demanded, then listened.

  “The subjects cannot be allowed to wake up, do you understand, Frobe?! They can’t be allowed to come out from under their compliant profile!”