OPERATION WRATH OF GOD, Chapter 15

Copyright © 2026 Robert Ensor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.First published February 2026.The author’s moral rights have been asserted.

All Bible quotations, unless otherwise stated or referenced, are taken from the online World English Bible (WEB), which is in the public domain. It is available at the following link: https://ebible.org/eng-web/index.htm. Sometimes I paraphrase the Bible and when I do so, I reference the chapter and verse. Direct quotations from the WEB are indicated by quotation marks. English language Bibles are translated from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. I am no linguist, and I don’t know any linguists, so I have had to rely on others’ translations and romanizations of the Hebrew and Greek texts. Occasionally, I have examined the original Hebrew and Greek of the Bible, zeroing in on key words where the received English translation is debatable or misses the full meaning of the original. To clarify, the WEB refers to the Antichrist, the beasts, and the False Prophet, but makes no reference to any ‘Khan’ or ‘Lavani’, which are names for the Antichrist and the False Prophet given for the purposes of this book.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a therapist and nothing in this book should be considered medical advice. Nor should it be considered a substitute for diagnoses, prescriptions and treatments from qualified doctors. If you have symptoms, I recommend that you see a doctor to rule out anything serious and get proper care.

Chapter 15: The Second Coming

In Petra, there was a deafeningly loud thunderclap that pierced everyone to their bones. There were many vicious lightnings, jagged shards of blue electric striking the cliffs and rocks above the remnant and smiting the tanks and soldiers on the plain. There was an enemy soldier stood right in front of Moshe, not ten metres away, who locked eyes with him. The beaster took aim and was about to pull the trigger when he was directly struck by a millisecond-long flash of lightning; he cried out and was left partly charred on the floor. There was a smoky barbeque scent; it took Moshe a few seconds to realise it was from the frazzled soldier.

Then the hailstones started falling. They were boulders the size of beach balls that smashed into the earth at frightening speeds, kicking up showers of sand and rock. Rabbi Kravitz saw an Iranian soldier crushed alive by a boulder. All that remained of him was a bloody pulp. Another hailstone fell directly on top of an Iraqi soldier. He was simply flattened, his spinal cord cracked under the force and the whole man disappeared into a crater. Out in the basin, a hailstone smashed into a tank, bending its barrel. Another boulder crushed a pick-up truck’s bonnet and the legs of the driver.

The enemy soldiers were forced to try and take cover, but many of the remnant were already inside the monastery and the buildings built into the cliff faces. If the buildings had been freestanding, the boulders would have crashed through the sandstone; only Petra’s unique geology and archaeology could protect them. As it was, they felt the impacts and the tremors, but the integrity of the buildings held. Many of the remnant taking refuge in the narrows of the gorges were also spared by the cliff cover, but where the cliffs broadened out around The Treasury, the enemy was suffering. Moshe used the moment’s respite to attempt contact with his lieutenant colonels via high-frequency radio. The radio wasn’t working, probably because he was inside The Treasury. There was no longer any internet connectivity either, so no one could check what was happening in the other tombs and buildings of Petra.

The enemy were losing it. They had no place of refuge out in the basin. They were running for the cliffs, but the remnant’s soldiers gunned them down or fought them off when they tried to enter the gorges and buildings. The Olive Branch soldiers started cursing God openly and shooting at the sky. Thus the Scripture was fulfilled, ‘people blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail, for this plague was exceedingly severe.’ (Revelation 16:21).

Then the hail ceased. Most of the enemy who had threatened the remnant in the gorge were dead or wounded. Several had crushed legs and were wailing for mercy, crying out to God, for everyone knew who had sent this plague in judgement of the earth and the ways of the earth. No mercy was to be had for such as these who had taken the mark and taken up their rebellion against God in the hatred of their hearts. Moshe and his soldiers shot these wounded men and slit their throats. The IDF were able to lay down fresh mines and take up positions in the craters. Though the enemy’s ranks were thinned, and the enemy’s technical vehicles had been crushed into scrapyard shapes of smouldering steel and aluminium, and the artillery guns and trucks lay broken, twisted and impotent, and the transport vehicles were exploded husks, the tanks remained largely intact and not all of the Olive Branch infantry had been taken out. The remnant were still outnumbered at least five to one.

More enemy soldiers ran into the Siq gorge seeking cover from the hail and scrambled over the rubble towards The Treasury. The Claymores took out the front ranks with a colossal bang, leaving them writhing around wounded. But there were so many of them and their muzzles were flashing, and the bullets were kicking up the dust around Moshe and ricocheting off the red sandstone cliffs and driving through the flesh of his comrades. The IDF could not stand for long.

‘Come quickly, Jesus!’ cried Rabbi Kravitz, in deep, guttural tones.

Captain Yalom caught a bullet in the throat. He lay drowning in his own blood. The other IDF men and women fell around Moshe. He dived for cover in a crater made by a fireball. Lying in the crater, the man next to Moshe pointed up, toward the cliffs. Moshe feared a sniper, but what he saw astonished him.

A bright light shone on Moshe’s face, dazzling his eyes. Squinting into the skies above him, shading his eyes with his hand, Moshe saw the light coming from the south (Habbakuk 3:3) shining amidst the clouds of the sky, and in the centre of the light was the shape of a man. There were tall, luminous white-winged people arrayed in countless serried ranks on either side of him. Angels, Moshe realised. Amidst a world of darkness, the man among the angels in the air stood out as a bright light. ‘His splendour is like the sunrise.’ (Habbakuk 3:4).

Moshe didn’t need two guesses as to the identity of this glorious man. When they saw him, everyone knew his name.

‘Jesus.’

The angels held their positions in the heavens. Jesus descended from the sky alone. As he drew closer, and the light intensified, one could nonetheless make out his long hair, beard and white robe, and the sign of the cross in the clouds behind him. The man himself was wreathed in a kind of luminous fog, crackling with lightning. The Shekinah glory of old. It was like when he appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai. Moshe was awestruck, not terrified. He had asked for Jesus, and now he was here. The Messiah was coming to their aid, in fulfilment of his covenant.

The enemy, on the other hand, was overcome by a terrible fear. The revelation of Jesus, clearly and incontestably divine for all to see, manifestly the Messiah and the Son of God, descending from heaven shining with glory amidst the cloud of God’s glory, was the refutation of everything they believed in. Suddenly, they realised their error, and they knew he had come for them, to pour his wrath upon the apostates of the earth, and to burn the tares from among his wheat crop.

The Lord hovered above the ground, shrouded in his cloud of glory. The enemy started turning on one another, calling each other apostates and heretics and shooting each other dead. Despite the mark, some were desperately trying to curry favour with the Lord, in the hope that they might be spared. Then Jesus spoke words in an ancient tongue, possibly Aramaic – Moshe did not understand it – and the lightning smote the rocks of the clifftops, and the enemy were struck by the falling rocks, and the mountains and cliffs fell upon them, and ground their bones into the dust.

Jesus spoke more sharp, hard words. Some of Khan’s soldiers flew across the clearing and had their skulls dashed against the red cliffs.

Then the Son of Man descended. His feet touched the ground softly, soundlessly. There was a long sword in his hand. The blade shone brightly with the reflection of his glory, but it looked real, and solid, and heavy.

The surviving enemy soldiers were speechless, quaking with terror. They daren’t fire upon Jesus. Not a single man of them. They had blasphemed him in his absence but now he was here before them, not one of them dare utter a word against him or take up arms against him, for their courage had failed them, for their courage was denied them in their sins and their dedication to grievous sin. Jesus stood there a moment in holy silence, and let the terror of the enemy’s predicament sink in.

The master was back.

And they had made a personal enemy of him.

Jesus ran towards the Olive Branch soldiers. They turned, and they ran, but their mortal legs were not swift enough to deliver them from the Wrath of God, for the Lord glided over to them and fell upon them with the sword in his hand (Isaiah 30:32) and single-handedly went about the slaughter. He hacked an arm off one soldier and ran another man through with his sword. A third was crushed by a falling boulder.

An officer, seeing the futility of flight, dared to turn and confront Jesus and fire upon him. Some of his men followed suit. The bullets flew high and wide for the most part due to the quaking terror of their hands. One or two rounds were on target, but they simply passed right through his glory body.

‘You would try to slay me?’ bellowed the Christ, in a voice of such terrible thunderous rage that two Olive Branch soldiers fell dead of fright then and there.

Jesus ran the officer through with the point of his sword and cut men down like a farmer with the scythe. More of the enemy turned to face him. A sergeant threw a grenade at Jesus – in mid-air it suddenly changed course and flew back into the sergeant’s stomach at breakneck velocity. He doubled over winded, and the grenade exploded, scattering limbs and charred bits of clothing everywhere.

The remnant was too stunned to help Jesus (Isaiah 63:3). They weren’t sure if they would be harmed by proximity to this glorious figure and the shimmering haze that enveloped him. They stood, watching from a distance.

Jesus proceeded through the gorge and onto the Petra basin. The last remaining functional tank tried to fire upon him: the shell exploded in the gun barrel, killing and wounding the tank crew. Then the tank slowly rose from the ground, creaking and groaning. The 60-ton hunk of twisted metal flew across the valley and landed on a column of retreating soldiers from a height of thirty metres. Eight of the soldiers were crushed.

A hundred men were bold enough to take a stand against Yahweh. The distant whump-whump of a helictoper’s rotors could be heard. The Mi gunship hovered above Jesus, still streaming smoke. Before the weapons officer could fire a missile, the chopper was suddenly jerked from the pilot’s control. It lurched around, tilting toward the sand, and sliced through the Olive Branch infantry with its rotor blades as if they were fruit in a blender. The men’s bodies went up in puffs of pink – vaporised blood – as limbs were severed and trunks were bisected. Then the chopper’s rotors smashed into the ground and the chassis exploded against the cliff in a starburst of orange flame. The rotors and bits of metal flew in all directions, further thinning the enemy’s ranks.

Jesus went amongst the remaining infantry with his sword and the words of his mouth. When he spoke, a man’s head exploded, another was thrown up into the air at frightening speed and landed on a comrade, and a third was dashed against the red rocks. Jesus hacked away at their flesh with the long sword, the sword of judgement, and whenever any man approached Jesus the fog of glory overwhelmed him, that man’s eyeballs melted in his head and ulcers covered his face and he died coughing and howling.

When he had broken and scattered the enemy’s main force, Jesus went around stabbing the wounded who lay groaning on the field of battle. The remnant rediscovered their courage and killed the wounded enemy in the gorge, trampling them down underfoot and kicking their heads and executing them with their sidearms.

The vultures began to circle the corpses of the fallen. There was a sharp roaring noise in the sky. Moshe looked in the direction of the sound and saw what looked like a dense wake of vultures a few hundred metres ahead of it. Then he realised they weren’t birds…

The elect had arrived, flying in from the four winds of heaven, they were gathered like birds of prey to where the bodies lay, and to the Body of Christ.

It was in this state, standing alone amidst a valley of corpses surrounded by the jagged red rocks of Edom, that John found his Lord. Jesus’ white robe was so blood-soaked that it was now completely red (Isaiah 63). The Lord looked up at John, and noted his presence, but he said nothing to him as yet. There were tens of thousands of saints in the air, circling the field of corpses like a thick murder of crows. John saw his mother flying beside him in a white robe. Much as he would like to be reunited with Jesus and speak with him, the time was not right. The Lord had not yet lowered him to the ground.

Jesus levitated a few feet off the earth, and the remnant broke out from the gorges on either side of the basin like the calves from their stalls (Malachi 4:2). They leapt for joy. The Lord rose to be in the midst of the circling eagles, and he said, in clear, loud English: ‘Follow me!’

A battle cry arose, from the jubilant remnant on the ground, and from the saints, who were handed swords by the angels. Some angels flew on winged white horses amidst the clouds (Revelation 19:4).

Jesus flew off at lightning speed, leaving a cloud of swirling sand in his wake. The pressure wave buffeted them all. John felt a surge within him and flew after the Lord Jesus, who was leading the way to the north-west. ‘They break through the gate and go out. Their king passes on before them, with Yahweh at their head.’ (Micah 2:13).

The elect soared across the Araba desert, blasting through the sound barrier like a fleet of F-35 Lightning fighter jets.

***

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the resistance was enthused and emboldened by the indwelling Spirit of God. Now they knew God was not only on their side, he was in their bones. The hailstones had fallen, disproportionately crushing the armies of the beast in Jerusalem. In the chaos and confusion, the resistance was able to regroup.

Azim and Amir had been shanghaied by an Iraqi infantry colonel into guarding the Temple Mount. Because it was a fortified position with a strategic vantage point, Khan had set up his battlefield headquarters in the temple.

There had only been a small garrison of Olive Branch soldiers on the Temple Mount until the undercover operators had arrived alongside other reinforcements, including the Sacred Guard, to help with the plundering of the temple and to provide security for Khan and Lavani’s temporary HQ.

The Third Temple was a huge structure made in the image of Herod’s Second Temple, with its square lines, pillars, white stone, cedar wood and gold finials. Beyond that core structure was the priest’s courtyard where sacrifices had been performed, the women’s court, and the outer court. Each court was separated by high, crenellated stone walls. The outer court was surrounded by a large portico that looked like a rectangular version of the one in St. Peter’s square.

A massive heap of loot was piled up outside the Third Temple in the reconstructed outer court. Among the loot were replicas of The Golden Menorah, the table of shewbread and the veil, all of which Khan was planning to haul away from Jerusalem. The task of Azim, Amir and about forty other soldiers on the Temple Mount was to guard that plunder while the secret police bureaucrats came through and took inventory.

Even from the outer court, Azim and Amir could hear Khan ranting and raving inside the temple. He stormed through the Women’s Courtyard. Khan was amazingly small, much smaller than his beastbots. He was pale and looked sickly and flabby. His eyebags were ringed with purple shadows. Khan was shouting orders to everyone: ‘Go out there! Crush Jerusalem! Burn her! Kill her!’

His diatribe degenerated into cursing, insults, and finally, animalistic growling; he started foaming at the mouth and barking like a dog. He was devolving before their eyes into a subhuman mess, a bag of demons held together by pathological hatred. I guess that’s why they call him the beast, reflected Amir, as he looked on in horror.

The Sacred Guard officers and Lavani guided Khan back towards his command HQ, the inner sanctum of the temple, where that hideous idol was set up, the robotic image of Khan. Amir caught a glimpse of it through the gates, stood there with its lifeless gaze, seven feet tall in the house of God, ‘where it ought not’ (Mark 13:14) to be. Amir shuddered. Not in terror of the beast and his idol, but in terror of what Jesus would do. If he chased the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip,[i] what is he going to do to Khan and his acolytes? In an upside-down world, an idol of the devil’s puppet in the house of God was peak inversion.

At that moment, Khan barked something in Arabic at seven of his Sacred Guard. Azim looked at one of those men in profile, a Sacred Guard Lieutenant. They were about 30 metres apart.

It can’t be…

It was his brother, Ahmed. Azim felt a deep sinking in his gut. He would recognise Ahmed’s handsome face and thick ‘Saddam’ moustache anywhere. Azim quickly turned away. He was caked in dust and had a few cuts. There was dried blood on his face from the drone strike. He could work with that.

‘Quick, give me your first aid kit,’ said Azim.

Amir responded quickly. ‘What’s up? Injuries worse than you thought?’

‘No. I need a disguise. It’s my brother. Ahmed.’

Amir glanced toward the temple at the heavily armed, tough-looking men in red berets, leather boots and black paramilitary uniforms. Every one of them had an arm sash with the Olive Branch insignia. ‘He’s in the Sacred Guard?’

‘The Lieutenant.’

‘Shit!’

‘Don’t look. You’ll draw attention.’

But it was too late. Ahmed and his six comrades had been ordered to the outer court, including a tall senior officer – Amir recognised the head of the Sacred Guard, General Mansour.

As Azim hastily slapped a bandage over the left side of his face, Mansour shouted: ‘Do you need a medic?’

Azim felt utterly wretched. His attempt to prevent recognition had completely backfired by drawing attention their way. The seven Sacred Guardsmen came walking towards them.

Amir muttered a prayer, ‘Jesus, please help us to avoid detection and arrest.’

Azim’s body started shaking with nerves. The butterflies in his stomach had become pterodactyls clawing at each other’s eyes. His throat was dry. He felt the urge to cough.

‘You there! Sergeant! I asked you a question!’ demanded Mansour.

‘Sorry sir – I’ll be fine, it’s just a few cuts and bruises,’ said Amir, in his best Arabic.

‘Not you. The other one. Are you alright?’

Azim took a deep breath. He turned to face the general.

Refusing to look his brother in the eye, Azim said, ‘I’m okay, sir. Really.’

The general took a close look at him. So did his brother, Ahmed. The general was a dashing man with flecks of grey hair around his temples and a lustrous beard. Behind that propaganda poster façade lay a mountain of skulls, Amir knew. Mansour tutted at the dust on Azim’s uniform. Patted some off him.

‘You look like you’ve been blown up.’

The other Sacred Guardsmen chuckled sycophantically. After Lavani, Mansour was the most powerful man in Iraq.

‘How did that happen?’ demanded a colonel at Mansour’s elbow.

‘The rebels, sir. They set off an IED in the street.’

‘Really?? I thought we had them contained.’

‘This was a while ago.’

‘Ah. I see.’

Then the general squinted at Azim and lifted his helmet up to see the cuts and bruises. He pawed at the dressing and peeled away an edge. Azim could sense Ahmed scrutinising him closely.

‘Please, sir—'

‘Nonsense. I was a doctor, before all of this. Let me take a look.’

Then he pulled the dressing off, revealing more of Azim’s face. Azim prayed inwardly that the blood and dust would obscure his features enough to prevent his brother from identifying him. To be in the Sacred Guard, Ahmed must have taken the mark. And anyone with the mark automatically informed on persons they knew to be subversive to the state. It was involuntary, part of their AI programming.

‘Ah, there’s no wound here,’ realised the general. ‘Just a little blood from the cut on the forehead. You don’t need the dressing, lad. You’re fit for duty. This is good – we need every man we can get,’ he said, slapping Azim on the shoulder, heartily.

‘Wait, sir. I know this man!’ said Ahmed.

Azim could no longer avoid eye contact with his brother.

‘I’m sorry, sir. I do not know you,’ Azim said, as evenly as possible. He was unable to keep the quaver from his voice.

‘No, I know you….’

Ahmed squinted at Azim. Azim sensed Amir lift his SVD slightly. He was planning to shoot these seven men and go after Khan, Azim knew. Go down in a blaze of glory. A suicide mission, doomed to failure – but what a way to fail! Azim’s muscles tensed up. He steeled himself. Decided he was ready to fight to the end, even if it meant shooting his brother. The Temple Mount was a hill he was prepared to die on.

‘Where are you from?’ asked Ahmed.

‘The 11^th Infantry Division.’

‘No, I mean where did you grow up?’

‘Najaf,’ Azim lied.

‘Should we have them arrested for questioning?’ asked the general.

The brothers looked one another in the eye. And then Azim saw the flicker of recognition. The anger written across his brother’s face. The set jaw. The blazing eyes. The feeling of betrayal. He returned it in full, and let his emotions rise to the surface, where they could be seen. You are the traitor, brother. Then the look vanished from Ahmed’s face, like a passing cloud.

‘No,’ said Ahmed. ‘I thought he looked like one of my schoolfriends, but I was wrong. I don’t know him at all.’

‘Very well,’ said the general. ‘Listen up you two, I have orders for the army from Khan himself.’

The Sacred Guard general shouted the army officers over and ordered them, along with Azim and Amir, to prepare for battle in the Kidron Valley just outside the Temple Mount. As Mansour spoke, Azim looked at Ahmed, who gave him a barely perceptible nod.

While the order was passed on to the enlisted ranks by the officers, Mansour dispatched a contingent of Sacred Guard snipers to the Western Wall.

Azim and Amir marched across the outer court of the temple. Amir cast a wistful glance at the eastern gate. He knew from his Bible studies that the prophet Ezekiel (44:1–2) foretold that Yahweh would enter through the eastern gate, and then it would be sealed shut. This prophecy was fulfilled, firstly when Jesus entered Jerusalem through the east gate (Matthew 21; Mark 11; Luke 19; John 12:12–19), and then when Suleiman the Magnificent sealed it shut in the 16^th century after he was instructed to do so in a dream.

‘How did he not inform on me?’ whispered Azim. He’d held it together during the encounter, but now it was over, his hands were shaking.

‘He’s your brother,’ said Amir, as they walked across the Temple Mount.

‘He has the mark. He has no choice.’

‘God allowed man to disobey him, so he has permitted us to disobey his enemy,’ said Amir.

Azim reflected on that.

‘Why are we being sent down to the Kidron Valley?’ he asked, changing the subject.

‘Maybe Khan knows something we don’t,’ said Amir.

Joel and Aaron were sheltered from the hailstones by the Western Wall and had watched as the enemy was bombarded around them. They took the opportunity to grab swords, magazines and assault rifles from the Olive Branch corpses. Then the brothers took pot-shots at the beasters as the hailstones fell. This provided relief to the Jerusalemites, as the enemy were too preoccupied with avoiding the falling boulders to further torment the civilians.

Then the hailstones stopped falling. Hunkering behind the sandbags, Joel found himself the most senior figure there, the de facto commanding officer. All the Shin Bet were dead, only he, Aaron and six recruits were left, and most of them were young. But as he looked at their faces, he knew that every one of them had called upon Jesus’ name, and mourned his death on the cross, and received the Spirit of God, every last one of them.

‘We are already saved!’ shouted Joel. ‘The enemy can kill our bodies, but our souls will go to heaven, to await the resurrection! In truth, every one of you who has received the spirit from God and the Body of Jesus will live forever! You have nothing to fear – provided you continue in his word! Fight like David! Show these Goliaths that Israel can still produce Davids!’

It was the spark that fell among the tinderbox. The resistance fighters emerged from cover, guns blazing. At that moment, the Sacred Guard started firing upon them from the top of the Western Wall. Aaron turned to shoot at these snipers and cover the advance of his men. He was cut down by six bullets. Joel saw his brother fall, the blood on his shirt, and he screamed in fury and fired at the snipers on full automatic. The shots flew high and wide for the most part, but it made the enemy duck behind cover.

On the Temple Mount, Amir turned to witness the shooting. He couldn’t simply watch as the resistance were mown down by the Sacred Guard from higher ground. He waited for the other soldiers to run on ahead, checked no one was looking, then removed the EMPG from his backpack and fired it at the Sacred Guardsmen.

Down below, Joel’s right ear had been grazed, and he’d taken a ricochet in the forearm. A further two Stump recruits were dead. Then all six Sacred Guard shooters on the wall were hit hard in the back by the high-intensity radio waves. They all stopped firing. Two of them fell off the top of the wall. Another two bent double and went crawling around vomiting on their hands and knees.

Joel shot the two who remained standing with his rifle, and the two on their hands and knees that he could see from down below. Then the enemy opened fire on him from the direction of the plaza. A bullet smashed into his left shoulder like a sledgehammer. He lurched to cover behind some sandbags.

The enemy in the plaza stopped firing. Joel heard the dead man’s click. Another shot fired and another click. They were running out of ammo, cursing in Arabic and Farsi. The Olive Branch soldiers drew their swords and scimitars from their scabbards, the swords intended for beheadings (Revelation 20:4), torture and amputations. Joel re-emerged from cover and shot the Iranian soldier in front of him square in the chest, puncturing the lung. He fell, gasping and choking to death on his own blood. Joel shot the man behind him, who was running at them, sword drawn. The sword fell with a clatter. The next man dropped with three in the gut and one in the chest.

Then Joel acquired a new target between the sights of his M4, and heard the dead man’s click himself. He threw his weapon aside, grabbed a sword from a fallen Iraqi, and brought it to bear against his enemies, roaring like the Lion of Judah. He was going to kill as many as possible to avenge his brother Aaron. He brought the sword up to parry the enemy’s blow – a harsh clang – his wrist jarred – the enemy stumbled backwards – Joel kicked him in the knee – he buckled. Then Joel chopped the man’s head clean off with a firm backhander. He ran towards the next enemy combatant, swatted the dagger from his hand, almost severing it at the wrist, and stabbed him in the gut, roaring with fury. More enemy soldiers piled into the plaza from the street, dozens of them. As Joel was on the ground stabbing his man to death, another resistance fighter, a teenage boy called Ethud, ran on ahead of him into a crowd of enemy and started hacking away at them with his blade. Someone stabbed Ethud in the back. He staggered and received a nasty slash on his calf.

Joel rose to his feet, sprinted, and smashed into the enemy, pushing them away from the wounded boy. He found himself and Ethud surrounded by a ring of black-clad Sacred Guard with their ceremonial scimitars and daggers drawn. There were at least ten of them. Joel knew he would die, the odds were too heavy, the enemy were standing around them two deep, hissing at them. The other resistance fighters were already dead. Joel and Ethud were on their own. A fresh squad of Sacred Guard snipers had replaced the others on top of the Western Wall. They had Joel in the sights of their rifles but held their fire. They wanted to watch. They were enjoying the sport.

The ring of secret police tightened around Joel and Ethud.

 Read the next chapter here: https://www.robertensor.com/post/operation-wrath-of-god-the-rapture-the-second-coming-the-campaign-of-armageddon-and-the-kingdom-o-16

[i] John 2:14–16.