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corporal assisting the leader of the opposition?"
"So I'll come without papers, and if they demand to know who I am, I'll be
deemed a vagrant."
"I will identify you as my assistant, and that will satisfy them."
Buck looked away. "I liked you more when you were less sure of yourself."
"And Cameron," Chaim said, "you are a vagrant. We all are. We are aliens in
this world, homeless if anyone is.
Buck thrust his hands deep into his pockets. He couldn't believe it. The old
man had persuaded him. He was going to leave his old friend alone overnight
with the enemy. What was the matter with him? "Micah?" was all he could say.
"You go," Chaim said. "Check in with our comrades and your family. And think
about my new name. It will come to you."
SIX
THE LATE-AFTERNOON sun made beautifully interesting shadows on the stunning
architecture at Petra.
David found a sweater and pulled it over his shoulders as he descended from
the pagan high place to one of the most remarkable cities ever built.
The various buildings, tombs, shrines, and meeting places had literally been
carved out of the striking red sandstone millennia before, and though its
early history was largely speculative, the place had become a tourist
attraction in the 1800s. David wondered how the new inhabitants of such a
surreal place would make comfortable quarters out of solid rock. Tsion taught
that God had promised food from heaven and that clothes would not wear out,
but what would substitute for insulation, inner walls, and anything resembling
modern conveniences?
The place was spread out, many of its famous edifices-the treasury of the
pharaoh, the five-
thousand-seat amphitheater, the various tombs-connected by a system of gorges
and channels dammed and rerouted by the various civilizations that had
inhabited the area.
Because David had arrived by helicopter, he had to hike down to the main level
to find the sole passageway leading in. With rock walls over three hundred
feet high in places and a trail at points fewer than seven feet across, it was
no wonder most visitors rode in on camel, donkey, or horseback. Operation
Eagle would fly in the majority of the newcomers, because a million fleeing
Israelis would be slaughtered if they had to traverse the roughly mile-long,
narrow pass on foot.
David could see why the city had been a perfect defensive location thousands
of years before.
Tsion taught that the Edomites, who inhabited it at the time of Moses, had
refused to let the
Israelites pass through. But in this world of high-tech travel, only a miracle
could protect unarmed innocents from aerial attack. Rather than a place of
refuge, David decided, without the
hand of God this place could just as easily be ideal for an ambush.
David's life was no longer about creature comforts. And he had forgotten what
leisure time was.
Until the Glorious Appearing, this would be where the action was, where
miracles would be the order of every day. David's people would inhabit this
city, and they would be preserved from illness and death, insulated against
their enemies until Messiah liberated them. If witnessing that meant making
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his bed on a slab of stone, it was a small price to pay.
David made sure his laptop had stored enough solar energy to remain charged
throughout his night in a cave. In the loneliness at the top of the only world
he knew anymore, reading Tsion's post of what he believed Antichrist was up
to, monitoring the Carpathian-fashioned news, and communicating with his
confreres would serve as David's only links to humanity.
He expected, within twenty-four hours, the first of more company than he would
know what to do with. How a million of them could be contained even in the
vast area surrounding the great rock city was a problem only God could solve.
David had learned not to wonder and question, but to watch and see.
----------
After checking in with everybody and doing his best to explain how he could
leave Dr. Rosenzweig unattended, Buck spent that evening at the King David
Hotel, watching television with Chaim's
Bible before him. He read through Micah, seeing parallels between the
Jerusalem of then and now, and he noticed the reference to Moses. Clearly the
book was a dire promise of God's judgment, but
Buck was not enough of a theologian to decipher its significance to Chaim. The
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