by Rob Mclean
John pressed his lips together, but nodded.
“Don’t suppose you know then, that we ain’t gonna be church no more?”
“No?”
“No. We asked the gov’ment to be a community club, instead of a church, on account of that alien thing. But they held up our application.”
John frowned. “But why…?”
“And now you’re here, wantin’ us out an’ all.”
“I don’t get it.” The thrumming of helicopter blades made John squint in the direction of the morning sun. News helicopters John guessed.
“They want our land. This is good real estate worth a lot more than some back block in Utah.”
“I don’t know about whatever deal was made…”
“Not made.” The pastor interrupted by holding up his hand. “Offered.” His open hand curled closed, leaving a finger to point at John. “Not accepted.”
“I’m sorry, but it doesn’t change things today.” Although John felt sorry for the guy and his church, he had a job to do. “When the buses arrive, I’m going to have to ask you and your people to leave.
“You do what you have to. You just remember, some of these people are jus’ like me - real old. You hear me, son?”
“Yes sir.”
Father Jackson Montgomery Jones nodded with satisfaction, then turned back to his flock. John turned to see Kent, who had been standing behind.
“That’s telling him,” Kent said with a mock nod of approval. “I’ll bet he’ll be packing his bags now.”
“One day, grasshopper,” John said in his best Zen master voice, leaning on his shield, “you’ll learn that not all problems are fixed by cracking heads.”
“Yeah, right,” Kent rolled his eyes. “The perfumed piranha says that the buses will be here in fifteen.”
“You’re referring to our boss, Eloise Gant, the L.A. central divisional head?” John thought the description apt, but Kent already had an unhealthy dose of disrespect for authority and it didn’t need encouraging.
“Nah,” Kent grinned. “That would be her gopher bitch, Sammy boy. He rang to say that the buses were held up by someone our end.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” John let Kent’s jibe about Eloise’s personal assistant, Sam, go. He felt little sympathy for the surly-tempered, pampered suck-up, but if Kent wanted to incur his wrath, that was his business. “This was always going to be a practice run.”
“Yeah,” Kent replied, “by the time we get to the bottom of the list, we’ll be real slick.”
John grunted his agreement as he scanned the growing crowd of protesters. He knew the longer it took, the more their numbers would swell. This was a test case and he had no doubts that many of the crowd were from other churches, if not from different faiths. As if to confirm his suspicions, he saw a carload of turbaned Sikhs arrive.
“Okay, we’d better make a move,” John called out to his squad leaders. He figured that by the time they had made the first arrests, the buses should have arrived. If not, they would have to cuff them and hold them until they did, and he could blame Sammy and his timing.
His squads formed up, organizing themselves into tight lines behind Perspex shields and batons. They rapped on their shields with their baton and stomped their boots in unison. The intention was to show that the troops were unified and co-ordinated. It was to intimidate as many of the protesters as possible and convince them that they would be better off slipping away and going home. By the looks on some of their faces, John felt that the operation might actually work.
It was just as his lines of squaddies moved forward that John spotted Zeke. His unmistakable bleached blonde tuft and wiry frame were distinctive. If it were not for his churlish expression, he could almost pass for some sort of angelic choir boy. No wonder he had Angela and her family entranced for so long.
Zeke stood amid a mixed group towards the back of the crowd. Most wore hoodies and some wore bandanas over their mouths. Others wore masks, ranging from superheroes to the ubiquitous ‘Guy Fawkes’ masks left over from the occupy movement, but not Zeke. It was as if he wanted to be seen.
All were shouting their protests in loud, strident, angry chants that carried over the scrunching of his squad’s marching boots.
“Hell, no, we won’t go!” Zeke’s motley gang’s voices raged in unison. Their hostile hymn was taken up by more in the crowd.
John saw Father Jackson Montgomery Jones approach the group. He had his arms raised trying to douse the fire in the mob, but the Pastor had no power over them. They paid him no heed. So little, that John guessed that most, if not all of the angry young men were not from this church.
John tried to keep his eye on Zeke, but as his squads advanced, scuffles broke out. His attention was drawn to the conflict.
His troops had started their own textbook chant, “This is an illegal gathering. You are trespassing. Disperse, disperse,” as they pressed forward.
The foremost protesters sat with their arms linked. As the line of front echelon troops advanced, stepping over them, individual protesters were grabbed by their legs by the less heavily armoured, more mobile arrest squads and dragged forward to be removed. The idea wasn’t to arrest everyone, only the trouble makers and the leaders, but to drag away a few at the start would make a show for the others.
Most didn’t resist after they had been singled out, especially the older ones. They knew it was pointless and that their effort was largely a token, philosophical one more for the benefit of the watching world media, with the full knowledge that they couldn’t really prevent the eviction.
But not everyone was working from the same playbook. Some of the protesters struggled as if they were actually being dragged to Hell. They kicked, spat and cursed like the possessed. They soon found their wrists bound with a thick cable-tie.
John didn’t see who struck first; he presumed that one of the agitated swipes from a hysterical protester had connected with one of his less disciplined squaddies. He unfortunately had lots of those; many had criminal records that had been overlooked during the rush to recruit, and had a thirst for violence that made Kurt look like Gandhi. All he heard was the dull whack of a baton onto flesh and the wailing screams of the victim.
The crowd surged forward in response. Fuelled by outrage, the crowd pushed his line of troops back. The protesters broke through when his troops stumbled backwards over some protesters that hadn’t been dragged away and were still sitting.
The nearby squaddies rushed to help their fallen comrades. The protesters spilled forward with no real plan other than vengeance, with some falling on the growing pile of struggling bodies.
The squaddies nearby waded in with batons swinging. John could see that it was all getting out of hand, so he blew two sharp blasts on his whistle. It was the signal to disengage, but that was when the first of the rocks landed.
The rocks had been thrown from where Zeke and his groupies had been, but when John looked for him, Zeke had gone. The gang of hooded youths hurled hunks of masonry as fast as they could from a low brick wall they had destroyed. Either their aim was bad or they didn’t care who they hit. When John saw an elderly man with blood streaming down his face, he knew it was indiscriminate. The news crews wouldn’t care about that though. It would be the leading story.
“Get those stone throwers,” John barked to Grace.
“How, PB’s?”
“Yeah,” John nodded. A few plastic bullets should teach those pricks about doing unto others. “And gas.”
“Now you’re talking,” Grace gave him a voracious grin and ran off to the supply truck.
John knew that gas masks made you look like the faceless authority figure, but he was past caring about how they looked on the news. It was tear gas time.
The squaddies had retreated and regrouped into clusters with their shields up and interlocked for protection. At least that part of their training had sunk in.
Grace had returned from the truck with the equipment. She directed
a few of her squad to fire canisters of tear gas into the upwind corner of the church yard. At the whizzing hiss sound of the gas canisters John saw his troops scramble to put on their gas masks.
Grace had a gun trained on the rock throwers, who had picked up their work rate. One, in a Batman mask, rushed to pick up a tear gas canister.
“This is definitely better than the nightclub work,” she said as she fired. Batman had grabbed the canister and was about to throw it when her plastic bullet caught him in the abdomen. He doubled over, dropping the canister and clutching himself. The canister spewed its contents in a spiral of fumes while the rock throwers nearby coughed and cursed.
“Nice.” John nodded his satisfaction. “Now we grab ‘em and put ‘em in the sin bin.”
John slipped his gas mask on, and then grabbed his shield. With a nod to Grace and her squad, he led the charge to make the arrest.
As he moved across the churchyard, he saw that the buses had arrived. They were banked up behind a log-jam of protesters cars, but at least they could now start the deportations.
With the tear gas wafting across the battle scene, his troops, with their gas masks, now had the advantage. The fight had gone out of the protesters. Stumbling aimlessly, blinded by the gas and coughing uncontrollably, most were happy to be helped away from the war zone.
Except for the group of stone throwers up ahead, who were also blinded by the tear gas, it was now just a mopping up exercise.
He had almost congratulated himself on not stuffing things up too much and keeping a lid on it all when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a flickering, flaming bottle flying towards him.
“Shields up,” he bellowed to his squad.
He got his own shield up just as the projectile hit.
Suddenly he was engulfed in a fireball. It filled his world with heat as it curled around his shield, cutting off the outside world.
His shield was a blazing wall of flames, but it had protected him from the attack. After the fireball had died down, leaving his shield a melting mess, he saw that some of his crew had not been as quick with their shields. Some were on fire and were rolling about on the ground to smother the flames. Others had their shields up and were busy banding together to form a collective protection while others tried to beat the flames out.
John searched out the direction that the Molotov had come from, but he could see no-one. Whoever had thrown it had slipped away during the chaos.
His arrest team regrouped and cautiously advanced on their targets. They kept a wary eye on the sky as they crept forward. The tear gas had made the stone throwers biddable and compliant. None resisted as they were cuffed and led away.
“Our friend isn’t here,” Grace said. Her uniform had burnt patches where the flaming gasoline had splashed onto her, otherwise John was glad to see that she was okay.
“No, but he was here, wasn’t he? You saw him before didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t there when I was shooting the PBs,” Grace shook her head, “otherwise I’d have lined him up first.”
“You don’t suppose he was the one who threw the Molotov?”
“Who knows?” she shrugged. “We might get lucky and have it on video, but I wouldn’t bank on it.”
“We can ask his friends, but I doubt they’ll give us much.”
“Unless we do some deal, you know offer to drop the charges?”
“I don’t think the company’s going to be pressing charges – bad publicity.” John watched the stone throwers being loaded into the arrest wagons as he spoke.
“Yeah, but they don’t know that, do they?” Grace jabbed a finger. “We’ll talk to them before we hand ‘em over to the cops.
“Sure.” John could see that Grace liked the idea of getting something stick on the slippery Zeke as much as he did.
“This time I get to be the bad cop,” she said with the same smile she had before she shot the stone thrower.
*
They managed to get a couple of the gang to admit that Zeke had been part of their group. They intimidated a nervous, seventeen year old kid from a nice Lutheran church in San Bernardino to the point of puking until he named Zeke as one of their organizers. It was all unofficial and wouldn’t stand in a regular court of law, but it was put in his report. Hopefully it would make it a bit harder for Zeke to get up to mischief in the future. It all gave John a satisfying reaffirmation of his opinion of Zeke.
Later that night, as he was drifting off to sleep, John replayed the events of the day. He remembered the fireball and how close he had come to being seriously hurt. All that had saved him from serious burns was his shield.
His eyes snapped open when he remembered the dream he had where Zeke had morphed into a dragon and spat fire at him.
Chapter 32
Bloodied and beaten American captives sat in the harsh Saudi Arabian sun. The servicemen and women were cuffed and lined up ready for inspection.
Vice Admiral Karl Schultz could see by the pain etched into the faces of his fellow countrymen that they had been treated badly. Anger seethed through him but he kept it bottled away. He knew his own position amongst the Saudi militia was an honorary one and that honour could easily be revoked.
“A splendid day for jihad, is it not?” the suave Lieutenant-Colonel Haziz said from behind his mirrored Ray-Bans.
The casual attitude the Lieutenant-Colonel showed towards the suffering of his captives further fuelled the Admiral’s anger.
“We need these people,” the Admiral tried to mimic the same calmness.
“They are not people,” Haziz cast a lazy wave towards the group sweltering like cattle in the sun, then reading the shocked expression on the Admiral’s face, added, “they have no faith, no God. They are little more than animals.”
The Admiral wanted to shout out his protests, but he could understand why he had that opinion. Instead, he forced himself to speak calmly. “But they are highly trained and skilful animals that can operate the weapon systems.”
“Which is why we must encourage them to faith.” Haziz flashed a white toothed smile.
The Admiral had gone over the files of the captives, as had the Saudis. They had taken aside the few Muslim Americans early on and had given them the option of joining them. None had refused the offer and now they were part of the ‘defenders of the faith’ that guarded their former countrymen.
The rest of the Americans were a mixture of Christians and atheists, with a smattering of other faiths. It was this group that sat before them today in the harsh sun.
“Some of these people,” The Admiral smiled politely as he stressed his point, “already have a faith.”
“A false faith in false Gods. Now is the time for them to submit to the one true God, Allah.” He extended a slender finger to the sky to underscore his point.
The Admiral nodded as he contemplated his next words. He could agree with him about the eastern religions. He saw the Hindus, Buddhists and Taoist as a confusing grab-bag of strange rituals, but at least they believed in some sort of God. Compared to them the atheists were as incomprehensible as the alien. How could they even exist without some sort of God?
“I don’t care what you do with the others, but the Christians and the Jews…”
“Are different?”
“We all have the same beginnings.”
“But then the blessed Muhammad showed the world the right path.”
The Admiral shook his head. “Look, I don’t want to dwell on our differences. That way leads to division and that weakens us in the face of our common enemy.”
“Yes, we should be united,” the Lieutenant-Colonel agreed. “When your people submit to Islam, we will be fully united.”
“I don’t see that happening,” he said flatly.
The Admiral knew that he was risking his own life. He had seen what happened to the captives of the extreme militant Muslins. He hoped that the Lieutenant Colonel’s education had moderated his views, but capturing an Am
erican Air-Force base was definitely extreme.
“I don’t know about the rest of them,” the Admiral cast his hand at the sweltering captives, “but I, for one, won’t be renouncing my God to fight for yours.”
The Admiral saw anger flash in the eyes of the Saudi soldier. He was not accustomed to being defied.
“Don’t think we can’t fight this Dijjal without you,” Haziz cautioned.
“What you don’t know is that before the attack on the spaceship, before Cairo was nuked and before I came here, I had split the fleet into those that have faith and those who don’t.”
“Why would you do that? Did you foresee all this?”
“I had a feeling it might come to this, but I didn’t do it overtly. Just made it look like a training exercise.”
“I see,” the Lieutenant-Colonel nodded. “Very wise, but what does it have to do with today’s proceedings?”
“Those ships, those assets are loyal to me.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Haziz’s eyes widened as he contemplated the possibilities.
“Without those people,” the Admiral gestured to the forlorn captives before them, “you don’t get my full cooperation and you don’t get my fleet.”
“You presume to blackmail me?” A tight grimace matched his cold eyes.
“Just telling it straight.”
“May I remind you that you’re alive because you have shown your commitment to the fight against the Dajjal,” he said as his jaw clenched.
“Because of my faith,” the Admiral said.
That fact that he hoped the redemption he might gain by the attack could counter his infidelity was a bigger part of the motivation didn’t make it a lie. In his mind, it was his faith in a God that would eventually punish him for his lustful ways that drove all his actions.
Haziz said nothing. The Admiral could see that he was weighing up his words.
“Look, you’re asking us to do the same thing as the AntiChrist is demanding of you, to give up your religion.” The Admiral saw the Lieutenant Colonel’s features soften with understanding. “You can’t expect us to do the very thing that you’re fighting against, can you?”