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Had these people really been undecided about which side they wanted to join? Any doubt about the reality of God and both His mercy and His judgment had long since been erased.
    “I’ve got a call coming in,” Chang said.
    “So do I,” Sebastian said. “Later. ”
    “Big Dog One, this is Camel Jockey.”
    “Go ahead, Smitty,” Sebastian said.
    “And, Techie, are you there?”
    “Roger,” Chang said.
    “I’ve spotted Captain Steele.”
    Enoch Dumas awoke just after seven-thirty in the morning. His musty mattress in the basement of an abandoned house in Palos Hills, Illinois, was warm where he had slept and cold where he hadn’t. And he hadn’t slept much. All night he had told himself that today was the day. He couldn’t imagine sleeping past 4 A. M., but the truth was, that was about the time he finally dozed. Eight in the morning, Central Time, would mark seven years to the minute since the signing of the covenant between Antichrist and Israel, a covenant that had been broken years earlier, but which marked the years before the Glorious Appearing of Christ.
    The Place, his little church of thirty or so down-and-outers from the inner city of Chicago, had incongruously burgeoned since they had been scattered to the suburbs with the compromising of the Tribulation Force safe house. They no longer had a central meeting place. While knowing that they should trust no newcomers, every time they got together, more were added to their number. And because they recognized the seal of the believer on the foreheads of the newcomers, Enoch knew they had not been infiltrated. They now numbered nearly a hundred. While some had been martyred, a surprising majority had eluded detection and capture, though they busied themselves every day trying to gather more converts—”getting more drowning people onto the life raft, ” Enoch called it.
    Sometimes he even found himself urging caution to passionate new believers and warning them that the enemy was constantly on the lookout, eager to devour them, to make them statistics. And yet he was often reminded, usually by one of his own flock, that there was no other choice now than to be overt in their witness.
    His favorite times were when the floor was opened and people who risked their very lives by assembling in secret would exude the joy of heaven when they spoke. He could not, nor did he want to, erase from his mind’s eye the testimony of Carmela, a fiftyish, heavyset Latina. In an abandoned laser-tag park about ten miles west of Enoch’s quarters, she had stood telling her story with tears running down her generous cheeks.
    “I once was blind but now I see is the only way I can say it,” she said. “I was blind to God, blind to Jesus, selling my body to buy drugs and food. I had left everything and everybody important to me. Before I knew it, I only cared about me and my next high. It was all about survival, kill or be killed, do what you gotta do.
    “But then one day one of you came to me. And it was her, right there. ” Carmela had pointed to an older woman, an African-American named Shaniqua. “She handed me one of the brochures, about the meetings and all, and she said, ‘Somebody loves you. ‘
    “I thought, Somebody loves me? Tell me somethin’ I don’t know! Men tryin’ to love me all day. But I knew better. Nobody loved me. Fact, they hated me. Used me.
    I meant nothin’ more to them than their next meal or their next high. Just what they meant to me. Nobody loved me since my mama, and she died when I was little.
    “I knew the brochure had to be somethin’ religious, but her saying that about somebody loving me, and her havin’ the courage to give me the brochure when she knew it was against the law… that was the only thing made me not throw it away or cuss her to her face.
    “I read it that night, and I’m glad the Bible verses were in it, ‘cause I ain’t seen no Bible for years. What got me was that it wasn’t fancy, wasn’t hard to