The Third Seal

by Sean Deville

“I had hoped to spare myself witnessing it. But it seems we are indeed in the End Times. You will be tested, Lilith, like never before.” The Librarian clearly didn’t know that she already had been.

  “Good bye, my friend,” Lilith said. That was the first time she had called him that. Was it even true?

  “Goodbye Lilith. I hope we will be able to speak again.” His voice suddenly sounded frail, a true reflection of his age. The line went dead.

  Lilith let the phone drop from her grasp. She sat back letting her eyes close. There was no denying the weariness she felt. Never since the training camp had she felt like this.

  She heard the gentle squeak of the office door as it was pushed wide.

  “I need some time, Father.” Just as the words escaped her lips, a faint breeze came in from the door, and she knew instantly that it wasn’t Creed who stood before her. She opened her eyes.

  “You always were the Librarian’s favourite,” Lucien said. He was leaning on the door frame, arms crossed.

  “Lucien, what are you doing here?”

  “Our cover has been blown.” He looked certain of that. When he later told her what had happened, she would agree there was no other excuse for those agents to try and scoop him up.

  “You too?” In a sense Lilith was relieved. She had convinced herself she had made some sort of mistake which had led the wolves to her door. But if they were hunting Lucien too…

  “I’m glad you’re okay, Lilith,” Lucien offered.

  “Trust me, I’m far from okay.” That was the truth wasn’t it? No point denying it, not to Lucien. If she couldn’t trust him, then she was truly alone. Despite all her training and all her strength, she knew none of that amounted to much right now. Her body still protested what Veronica had inflicted upon her. And yet that in itself wasn’t the cause of her doubt and her sense of failure. She had faltered just at the time when she was truly tested. It didn’t matter that, without the intervention of the Russians, she would have likely lasted days before finally taking her own life.

  Lilith knew she would never have exposed the secrets of her Order, and yet the temptation had caressed her soul. Despite herself, she had found the prospect worthy of consideration.

  “Whatever happens, we will get through this,” Lucien reassured. He moved into the room, closing the door behind him. “I’ve been in touch with our handler, John,” he added. “They will have a decision about our future soon. There is no denying we are under attack.”

  “I heard about the anthrax.”

  “It’s worse than that, Lilith. I think it’s finally time.” So, her suspicions were shared. The increase in demon activity had a reason after all. The Antichrist was here and would be revealing himself soon.

  36.

  Persian Gulf

  The US President was true to his word. With most of the Iranian Airforce and air defence structure destroyed through its conflict with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia it was America’s turn to enter what would turn out to initially be a turkey shoot.

  The first plan of action was complete suppression of the Iranian air defence network. This was made easier by the fact that the United States had willing and supportive allies in the region. No country rejected them air space access, believing rightly that the United States was close to going effectively insane.

  There was no denying the anger that the world’s most powerful military felt. With two nations the victim of a vicious atomic attack, those countries that could have objected stood aside, not wanting to risk atomic annihilation.

  There were two powers that could have effectively come to the defence of Iran, Russia and China. Both stood down and told the United States, through secret back channels, that so long as the conflict remained within the boundaries of Iran, there would be no objection to America’s revenge. Iran had admitted to attacking two sitting members of the UN Security Council, and in doing so had awoken the giant.

  The Saudis had sacrificed dozens of planes in their initial attacks on Iran, but it made the allied forces’ job easier than it needed to be.

  Wild Weasel is the code name given by the United States to the aircraft it uses when tasked with the suppression of enemy air defences. That was the initial mission now, to destroy what was left of Iran’s defensive radar capability. If the US could own the skies, it could act with impunity against a country that had overreached itself.

  Along with a squadron of F-35 Lightning II’s, the Wild Weasel mission was assigned to several squadrons of the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Armed with AGM-88 HARM missiles, US Airforce and Navy planes began to perform sorties over Northern Iran, hitting known targets as well as searching for the numerous Russian-bought S-400 Triumph mobile air defence platforms.

  At the same time, Tomahawk missiles from the US carrier strike group eight began hitting the most vital Iranian military and political infrastructures. The shock and awe seen in the conflicts of the two Iraq wars were nothing compared to what was unleashed against Iran. This was not intended to be the start of a ground offensive. This was to be a complete obliteration of the Iranian military from the skies. The American President had no intention of risking the lives of US soldiers and marines fighting house to house in a country with a history of religious zealotry. He had learnt the lesson of previous Presidents.

  Hell, he was a gnat’s wing away from turning the whole country into a radioactive wasteland. If not for more level-headed advice from military commanders, the American President may well have authorised the use of nuclear weapons.

  Instead, his intention was to simply bomb Iran back to the stone age. It would be surgical, precise and hopefully remove the head from the snake that would also have a heavy spiked boot brought down upon it. It would go on for days, with the goal of driving the Iranian people into revolution.

  Within two hours of the operation starting, the remnants of Iran’s air defence network were classified as being non-existent. Key figures in the Iranian high command were either dead or wounded, CIA intel guiding the bombs to where the leaders might be hiding. The religious head, the Ayatollah, they kept alive so as not to make a martyr of him. If he was to die, it needed to be at the hands of outraged Iranians. Instead, thousands of pamphlets were dropped over Tehran offering a significant financial reward to anyone involved in his arrest and trial.

  So began the second phase.

  By six o’clock in the morning 10 B-52H Stratofortress’s out of Barksdale air force base, Louisiana, were already over northern Iran. Their job was to hit the Hamadan Airbase in the Iranian Hamadan province. Each dropped seventy thousand pounds of bombs and cluster mines across the airbase and the surrounding area, effectively ruining the military infrastructure in the region. Flying at fifty thousand feet, they were all but ignored by what was left of the Iranian air defence network.

  The airbase and the western half of the city of Kabudrahang were effectively wiped from the face of the map. It wasn’t the first, and it wouldn’t be the last Iranian air base to feel the weight of America’s military prowess as the great power swept across the country hitting target after target. A minute didn’t seem to go by where some sort of explosive ordinance was not landing on the reeling country.

  By nine o’clock on the morning of the thirteenth August, satellite images showed ninety-seven strategic sites across Iran that had been completely decimated, with dozens of smaller fires from the numerous Tomahawk strikes. During all this, the Saudis had redoubled their attacks, joined by an emboldened Israel who hit specific targets of strategic interests, namely what was left of Iran’s secretive nuclear production infrastructure.

  Noticeably, the Iranian Presidential Palace and the Parliament building weren’t attacked by any nation’s air forces. Throughout the night, Tehran had been witness to rioting as some of the people rose up against the surprisingly hated theocracy that ran the country. Unfortunately, those protests were matched by those who were loyal to the regime. As bombs and missiles rained down across Iran, those riots swelled, fuelled by fear and hate,
clashing with each other and the police. A fear of American retaliation and the hatred of those who had delivered a once proud country to this sorry state of affairs led the country to almost save itself.

  By lunchtime, the parliament had been seized by a battalion of the regular Iranian army, led by a charismatic colonel who knew there was one chance for his country. The threat made by the Americans had been clear and very real. Still though, the missiles and the bombs fell, hitting industrial, power generation and communication sites. All across Iran, the lights went out and the taps ran dry.

  Within hours, the Parliament was re-seized by forces loyal to the Ayatollah. The charismatic colonel, and his senior officers, ended up swinging from lampposts.

  The message to the Iranian people became consistent. Remove and punish your leaders, or taste the atomic fire that will come from the tips of American ballistic missiles. Iran was being given a taste of what could befall it, the Americans being restrained in their response.

  There were further problems though. Firstly, the truth about the attack on the Vatican had yet to be fully revealed. An attack on the Pope is an attack on nearly a billion Catholics. The mayhem of religious wars and religious persecution hadn’t even started.

  The second problem was that, despite the advanced warning given to Russia and China, a Chinese military delegation had remained secretly behind in Tehran. On the morning the bombing started, the hotel they were in was caught in the blast wave of two Tomahawk missiles, which destroyed a whole street. Five members of the Chinese delegation were killed in the explosion. The Chinese kept quiet about the losses, and about the fact that one of those dead was the son of a very prominent and powerful member of the Chinese Communist Party. For years this party member had been promoting the virtues of finally taking the fight to the Americans militarily.

  After the death of his son, grief drove the fury of vengeance into his heart.

  37.

  Kansas, USA

  At nearly six foot five, Big Bill hadn’t succumbed to the forward head posture and bent over spine that afflicted many people who reached their seventies. He suffered with occasional back pains, but who wouldn’t with the life he’d led? Age didn’t stop him walking with his shoulders back and head held high. He attributed this to the regular weight training and the daily yoga he’d been doing for the last thirty years. When the aches and pains did afflict him, he never complained because there were people far worse than him. Even as his skin began to sag and his hair thin, he only ever portrayed a veneer of strength to the world.

  Every week, he did the same routine without fail. Some of the locals had found the idea of yoga comical when they’d first learnt that Big Bill had a thing for it, but not a one of them had dared rib him on it. Bill was a gentle giant so long as you minded your language around children and were respectful to him and the people he knew. If you crossed the line, he would be there in your face to let you know you’d better quit that nonsense. People faced with this giant in such a situation quickly learnt that an apology was the wisest decision they had available to them.

  Not everyone chose that option unfortunately, and their inevitable hospital bills reflected what Big Bill could do to the human body when he was unleashed. Every time this had occurred, a gaggle of locals were there to step forward and proclaim how Bill always acted in self-defence. That was the thing. Big Bill never hit first. If you wanted to take on Bill, he would give you one shot, and then he would ruthlessly shut that shit down. Fortunately for Bill, he’d never been arrested, helped by the fact that his deceased wife had been one of the local Sheriff’s deputies for thirty years.

  This sense of righteous certainty had manifested in early high school where he became the champion and the defender of those who struggled to defend themselves. He despised bullies, and those with a sadistic streak in them quickly learnt to stay well away from Big Bill.

  He still walked with a slight limp, the result of an old football injury from his high school days as a line-backer. At the time, they said he was good enough to go professional, his size and ruthlessness rare back in those days. But then he’d blown out his knee, the leg bending the wrong way, ending his dreams and sending his life in another direction.

  Turned out that injury spared him being called up to fight in the killing fields of Vietnam. Strange how the worst events in life sometimes turned out to be a godsend. He’d lost three good buddies in the jungles of that festering country, and now, with the benefit of the internet and countless documentaries, Bill was glad he’d never been forced to fight in that pointless war.

  He went to work on the family farm, inheriting it when his own father dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of fifty-seven. So far, Bill had been spared that particular gift in his family tree, and the local doctor was always there to tell anyone who would listen that Big Bill was built like an ox and would outlive the lot of them.

  Really, when you looked at it, Bill had little to complain about. He’d married his childhood sweetheart and raised three sons of whom he could be proud. There were no delinquents in his family, and he’d had nothing but praise for the boys turned men, even though all three of them had rejected life on the farm for the call of the city and the professions they had chosen. With the pressure he’d been receiving from the big agricultural giants that had been trying to buy him out recently, it always helped to have a lawyer in the family, his eldest a senior partner in a top Boston law firm.

  His wife had passed away last year, but there was no sadness in that. That woman had been a blessing in his life, and even though she was dead and in the ground the memory of her face could still fill him with joy. Nobody could have asked for more. The whole town, it seemed, had turned out for her funeral.

  Still, it was hard to deny that his days of working the fields were past him. That’s what his employees were for. When he’d inherited the farm, it was merely a hundred acres. Over his years of stewardship, he’d increased that tenfold, buying up neighbouring land with an honest business prowess that seemed to come naturally. He’d never done well in school, but he’d made the farm a success, providing adequately for his family and being able to put three eager young men through university. Although he had to admit, that was back in the day when getting a college degree was reasonably priced, not like it was now.

  He still kept a tight rein on the finances of the business. He might have people to harvest the crops and manage the fields, but he wasn’t going to let anyone else near the money. He paid for everything by cheque or cash, the way things were supposed to be paid for. It would be a cold day in Hell before Big Bill would engage in that deplorable practice of internet banking. The branch manager of his local bank had suggested it once, but never again. Bill wasn’t the richest patron at the bank, but he was the biggest and the loudest.

  Generally, he was well liked, but usually by people who worked for a living. Bureaucrats and pen pushers, he had little time for. He paid a fair wage and had already decided that, when the Grim Reaper finally came for him, his most loyal employees would be given equal shares of his farm. His boys were all successful in their own right, they had no need for an inheritance. His wealth would go to those who had helped him build it, his loyal staff, some who had been with him for years.

  A man like Bill could easily find decent folks who were loyal and hard working.

  In the long afternoons when he was at home, he liked nothing better than to sit out on the porch of his home to catch the cool breeze as it came out of the east. He would put the radio on, and let his mind drift with the classical music on the station he preferred, a form of meditation he had developed decades ago.

  That’s exactly where he was when one of his farm hands drove up, parking a somewhat decrepit Ford pickup at an odd angle. People knew not to disturb him at this hour unless it was important, and Bill didn’t employ idiots. To compound his woes, the flow of the music was interrupted by a breaking news report.

  “Just got this in, folks. Disturbing news out of Rome t
oday. His Holiness the Pope is reported to be in a critical condition. The Vatican has yet to say what is ailing the respected religious leader, but there are rumours…” Bill turned off the radio, rising from his chair. By the time the truck had settled and the driver was out of the cabin, Bill was already heading down the porch steps, the glass of ice tea abandoned.

  Bill knew trouble when it reared its ugly head.

  “What’s up, Carlos?” He had employed Carlos five years ago. Good man, even if he had a tendency to drink to excess in the evenings. Those days of excess were long behind Bill, alcohol a devilish elixir that had threatened to take everything.

  “There’s a problem with the wheat,” Carlos said. The man was sweating, and not because of the afternoon sun. He’d seen something that had shocked him.

  “Let’s go,” Bill said, slapping the man on the shoulder. If there was a problem with the crop, he’d need to look at it directly.

  The house he lived in was on a hill at the centre of his thousand acres. They grew mainly wheat, several of the fields presently fallow. He’d long ago accepted that the traditional ways were the best, rejecting chemicals wherever possible. A year ago, the salesman who’d tried to persuade him of the virtues of the revolutionary disease-resistant seeds had been sent away with a flea in his ear. Bill wasn’t an idiot. The seeds may well have been resistant, but only when combined with a specific, more expensive brand of pesticide. And to add insult to injury, he would have been locked in to buying seeds from that mega corporation every year. Bill wasn’t prepared for some suits from the big city to have that level of power over him.

  Carlos drove, the five minutes it took to reach the field spent in silence. Bill spoke when something needed to be said. Filling the air with meaningless pleasantries was a waste of good air, and as the truck peaked over a hill in the road, Bill saw what the problem was.

  Instead of acres of golden swaying crops, there were huge gashes of black across the landscape. This hadn’t been here the day before.