OPERATION WRATH OF GOD, Chapter 7

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 7: The Belly of The Beast

‘Let me do the talking,’ said Azim, concealing his terror and rage.

He slowed down as the soldier stepped forward and waved at him to stop.

The jeep creaked to a halt. The ancient brakes squeaked.

Azim lowered his window manually; electronic windows were a sci fi pipe dream when this piece of junk rattled off the assembly line. But the soldier went to the passenger side window and tapped on it. Damn. Amir saluted and proceeded to lower his window.

‘Show your Security ID’s!’ the soldier barked in Arabic, when the window was halfway down. He was in his early forties, with a salt and pepper beard, a dark, baleful gaze and sleepless purple-ringed eyes. He wore the black beret of the Iraqi Army and the three stripes on his shoulders marked him out as a sergeant. Not a man you wanted to meet in a dark alley at night. Or a military checkpoint. Or anywhere, really.

Hillier’s Arabic was not great, but he understood the sergeant’s simple command. Both men presented their hands. The massive robot came over silently; its movements were almost humanlike. It was huge, and dark, and looked like a giant version of the dictator, Khan. In reality, like most tyrants, Khan was a short man, a little over five foot tall. The giant robotic statues were obviously a form of overcompensation, part and parcel of his Napoleon complex. The height was also intended to intimidate. It was working.

The eyes of the beastbot leaned down and stared at them. This was the scan for Khan’s mark, or Security ID. The yellow eyes of the bot were eerily empty. Looking into them, Azim experienced what was known as the ‘uncanny valley’: the feeling of weirdness you get when looking at a robotic facsimile of human life, without the presence of a soul. It didn’t help that the likeness gazing at him was that of the worst tyrant in history, the Antichrist himself. Azim’s left hand became clammy on the wheel, which he was gripping very tightly.

A green light flashed behind the robot’s eyes. It straightened up and said, ‘all clear’, to the sergeant.

‘Where are you headed?’ the sergeant asked them.

‘To Babylon.’

‘Why?’

‘Additional security. For the leader’s upcoming address.’

This did not raise the sergeant’s suspicions. He knew about the speech, and other soldiers must have passed this way before them.

‘Why do you not have a military vehicle?’

‘Our Humvee broke down in the desert. We had to requisition this one off a goatherd, or risk being late.’

The soldier thought about that. This was not unheard of, especially during the chaos of the seal and trumpet judgements a few years back.

‘What were you doing in the desert?’

‘We were reassigned from the border,’ said Azim, as per the cover story. Their supposed regiment was stationed at the border, and personnel from that regiment had been transferred to help with security for the speech.

Suddenly, the sergeant looked at Hillier with narrowed eyes.

‘Why are you so quiet?’ he asked.

Without missing a beat, Hillier said, ‘I’m shy.’

‘Shy??’ The sergeant glared at him.

Hillier nodded coolly. Compared to SEAL hazing, this was nothing.

The sergeant burst into harsh, borderline hysterical laughter. Taking their cues from the NCO, his men followed suit, nervously. The beastbot was not programmed with a sense of humour. It remained utterly still.

‘You may go,’ the sergeant said, waving them on.

They all saluted one another. Azim said shukran (thanks), and drove off. Both operators looked at each other and breathed a sigh of relief. Azim relaxed his hands on the wheel.

***

After another hour on the backroads, when Azim and Amir were a few miles from the edge of Babylon, and the morning sun was burning through a thin haze, the jeep approached another military checkpoint. This one was significantly more involved. There were four soldiers, their technical vehicle, a beastbot and a hovering quadcopter drone, armed with a machine gun.

Azim’s grip tightened again. His hands were white on the wheel.

‘Here we go…’ said Hillier.

Azim remained grimly silent. He’d known in advance that as they approached Babylon and hit the larger roads, the security would be more intense. But if this went sideways, and they were rumbled, it was difficult to foresee an outcome in which they survived.

The rust-bucket jeep squeaked to a stop. Azim and Amir saluted. The soldiers returned their salutes. Azim wound the window down, slowly.

‘Salaam alaikum,’ he said, forcing a smile.

‘Walaikum salaam. Show your Security ID,’ said the sergeant, tensely. He was lean and gaunt, with haunted eyes. That man has killed a lot of innocents, Azim thought to himself. And by the look of that vacant gaze, he had become numb to unjustified violence.

The beastbot waltzed over silently with its awkward loping gait, trailing its long black robes behind it. Again, there were few outward signs that this was a robot, the technology was so advanced; it looked like a real, very tall, very formidable man, who perhaps suffered from stiff joints. Fortunately, the robot and all the enemy soldiers had approached from the driver’s side of the car. The side the EMPG was facing.

The beastbot completed its scan. Then it did something unusual. It commanded Azim in Arabic: ‘take your hands off the wheel.’ Azim, being fluent, complied quickly. The idea was to test his obedience. Anyone with the real mark would automatically obey, because the nanomachines would cut in and commandeer the motor nerves, but thankfully Amir was able to adequately mimic this reflexive response. Then the beastbot told him to raise his hands. Again, he swiftly complied.

Leaning down, the beastbot looked straight at Hillier and told him: ‘do not raise your hands’. The command, issued in Iraqi dialect Arabic, was so linguistically similar to the bot’s previous order to Azim (except the negative laa), that Hillier instinctively raised his hands. The bot’s gaze froze. The Iraqi soldiers glared. Azim’s eyes widened. Hillier groaned. In that moment, he knew he had somehow misinterpreted the command, and someone who had genuinely taken the mark, and subordinated their will to Khan, would not even be capable of such errors. They were rumbled.

The beastbot reacted first, straightening up and aiming his gun barrel squarely at Amir’s head. There was a slight delay as the algorithm calculated whether immediate execution was commensurate with the rules of engagement. Amir knew that beastbots were better shots than the average soldier. They didn’t waver or tremble, their arms never got tired, and human error was removed from the equation. The other soldiers took another second to even begin to aim their assault rifles.Thinking quickly, Amir pushed the button on the remote control inside his pocket.

The beastbot instantly collapsed face first in the sand. The drone dropped ten metres and crash-landed. The radio waves from the EMP also affected Azim and the soldiers. Azim had suspected that if and when Hillier pushed the button, he’d be taking one for the team, since the EPMG in the footwell behind him, aimed at someone standing beside his window. He was hit by a wave of pain and nausea and felt disorientated. He knew the soldiers would, too, only more so, since they were more directly in the EPMG’s line of fire. The Iraqi sergeant doubled over in pain. Azim forced himself to thrust the driver’s side door open, hitting the sergeant in the head. The other two soldiers lowered their weapons. One started vomiting.

Hillier, on the passenger’s side, was largely unaffected. He sprang into action, drawing his sidearm and shooting two of the reeling enemy soldiers through the windscreen, two rounds apiece, centre mass. Both men dropped. Azim cringed at the volume of the weapon in the contained space of the car, just inches from his ears, which were already ringing from the radio waves.

Azim hunkered down in his seat. Hillier exited the vehicle and took cover behind the jeep’s rear wheel. An enemy soldier hit the car with a spray of rounds from his M16. The jeep stopped them. The rear window smashed. The bullets were aimed at Hillier. Then Amir dropped to a crawl and shot his assailant’s feet from underneath the jeep. The man hit the ground. Remaining prone, Amir finished him with a bullet to the head. He rose to his feet and dispatched the man Azim had concussed with the car door, firing a double tap into his skull.

The drone lay harmlessly in the sand. One of its rotors was broken. The wave of nausea and pain was passing. While Amir reloaded, Azim exited the car and shot the drone and the bot. He shot the bot squarely in the head. That was where they had been instructed to shoot them, because that’s where the hard drive was stored, mirroring the brain in human anatomy. Then he shot it again, to be sure. As he walked back to the car, the robot twitched. The leg moved. Perhaps it was just a residual power discharge, but Azim didn’t like it. He grabbed a rock from the roadside, ran over to the bot and smashed the head again and again. It was surprisingly difficult, because the robot’s head was made of aluminium, but once he was through the outer casing, and into the hard drive, he started doing some real damage. He was roaring with rage without even realising it, and his hands were bleeding. Finally, he stopped.

‘Good call,’ said Azim.

‘Don’t thank me. Thank Q branch,’ said Hillier, eyeing his teammate warily.

They tried the technical vehicle. The door opened, but the ignition wouldn’t start.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘The car’s electronics are shot. Because of the energy weapon. It’s kind of like sticking your car keys in a microwave.’

‘That won’t be a problem with the jeep. That thing’s so old it doesn’t even have electronics.’

So they got back in the jeep. Amir checked the SATCOM radio on the backseat. It had taken two rounds and was no longer operational.

Azim cursed in Arabic. At length. They were well and truly on their own now. The jeep started, swerved around the technical vehicle and got back on the road.

‘There anything you wanna tell me?’ asked Amir.

Azim looked at him suspiciously.

‘What? No.’

‘The way you went after that bot back there. Almost like it was personal.’

Azim glared at Amir. Then he sighed.

‘My aunt and uncle were killed by a beastbot. They refused to take the Security ID,’ he said, reluctantly.

‘Sorry to hear that. You have other family in Iraq?’ asked Amir.

‘Yes. A brother and a father. I have not heard from them in years, ever since the blackout.’ The blackout was the communications blackout resulting from Khan’s decision to erect a firewall around the internet in the nations of his alliance.

‘And where did they live? Last you heard, I mean.’

‘Baghdad. I am from Baghdad,’ Azim admitted, clenching his jaw.

‘You sure kept that one close to the chest,’ Amir said. ‘So when we get to Babylon, we could run into one of your old friends at any moment.’

‘MI6 did not believe it was a problem, or they would not have cleared me for the mission. At least I have local knowledge of the area, and the right accent.’

‘Still. Would have been nice to know.’

‘I did not know you,’ Azim said, defensively. ‘I still don’t.’

‘Well, I’m beginning to know you,’ Amir said, coldly.

The two men settled into a stony silence.

A road sign told them they had only ten miles left until they hit the outskirts of Babylon. The road checkpoints were bound to get more intense as they approached the capital of the Olive Branch Alliance. The plan was to exit the vehicle and proceed on foot when they were a few miles outside the city perimeter.

After several minutes, grey smoke started streaming from the bonnet. The jeep had caught one too many rounds. The engine started making worrying grinding, straining noises. And then there was a loud crack and the engine simply cut out altogether.

Hillier cursed.

The vehicle rolled to a halt.

‘Just be grateful this did not happen 40 miles before.’

They continued on foot. Truth be told, Amir was relieved. The vehicle had become a liability. After their ‘altercation’ at the last checkpoint, they would not only have had the non-military nature of the jeep to explain away, but also the bullet holes.

As the operators ventured deeper into the Babylon Governorate, the landscape shifted from desert to agricultural scrubland, given an exotic touch by plenty of date palms. The extra vegetation and arable land were due to the proximity of the River Euphrates, which ran through Babylon.

Proceeding on foot, the operators cut across barley fields, small outlying villages and archaeological sites filled with ancient foundations until at last, they reached the affluent suburbs on the  outskirts of Babylon.

Azim became conscious of a low humming noise somewhere up above.

‘What is that noise?’ asked Azim.

Hillier pointed up at the blue sky, dotted and glinting with drones, circling like giant wasps around a landfill site. The beast had drones and robots scanning for ‘apostates’ all over the countries of his alliance, but these systems were especially concentrated within his capital Babylon.

After half an hour walking through quiet residential streets, the operators had reached the city proper, a bustling modern Middle Eastern metropolis of 100,000 people. Construction only began several years ago, when Babylon was still an archaeological ruin, but this was now the fastest growing city in the world, even outpacing the breakneck expansion of the Chinese and Indian megacities. The population was boosted by immigration from within and beyond the nations of the Olive Branch Alliance; Amir was surprised to see quite a lot of white westerners walking the streets. The operators had to pass through this busy modern area, because it encircled the reconstructed old town of Babylon, where Khan was located.

They passed a shopfront boldly offering ‘free abortions!’ The women were queueing out of the door. Azim shook his head.

In the heat of the afternoon it felt like they had stepped into an oven, and the temperature dial was being turned up. Azim and Amir were thirsty and tired. They had brought emergency snacks in their Iraqi Army rucksacks. These were good enough for an impromptu field breakfast, but their canteens only held a litre of water each and they were now running low.

They stopped at a kebab shop and ordered some lamb kebabs and mineral water to go. This was a risk, because their fake RFID chips were incapable of handling financial transactions. To their relief, the kebabs were free of charge; everywhere they went in the city, people were terrified of them, which tallied with the MI6 mission briefing about bribery, corruption and protection rackets among the Iraqi Army under Khan.

Azim was navigating based on an Iraqi Army map of the city procured by the CIA, with street names marked in Arabic. Thus far he had not led them astray. It was hard to go wrong, with the rebuilt Etemananki dominating the skyline and marking their objective in the old town.

They passed another gang of soldiers on the street. Three of these Iraqi infantrymen saw Azim and Amir and nodded their way. The disguised operators nodded back, but kept walking. Hillier resisted the temptation to speed up as they marched past the Iraqi soldiers. He muttered a silent prayer that the soldiers would say nothing to them.

The operators knew they could not get inside the walled palace compound, as this was tightly guarded by members of Khan’s black-clad, red beret-wearing Sacred Guard. That was where Khan resided in a replica palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king who had conquered Judah and committed the first abomination of desolation, by burning Jerusalem and its temple (2 Kings 25:9). Khan’s palace was rebuilt by Saddam from the same bricks the late dictator had used in his partial reconstruction of the old town of Babylon. Etemananki stood within a similar walled compound, that would be extremely tough to infiltrate. That was why the mission planners had opted for a long-range sniper kill.

One of the first things Amir noticed was that Babylon had a nerve-jangling atmosphere of terror and vice. The fear fuelled the desire and the desire drove the fear. It was Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5) all over again.

Occasionally, Azim and Hillier saw a corpse, usually with blood stains and bullet wounds in their backs. A woman, an old man, a child. They were left to rot in the sun, for the same reason the Romans left the bodies of criminals to rot after crucifixion: to send a message to the population. Amir and Azim wondered how these people were killed. Was it just general violence? Despite all the secret police and soldiers on the streets, the legalisation of much formerly illegal activity, and Khan’s doctored statistics, the crime rate per capita of Babylon was higher than in any American city. Or were these people shot for refusing the mark?

They received their answer when they saw an old man running down the street in a shemag and white thobe, chased by a beastbot and a uniformed policeman. There were no warning shots or orders to stop. They just opened fire on the old man. The policeman’s shots went dangerously high and wide. The beastbot chased the man down and shot him in the back. Wow, that thing can move, thought Amir. It ran at about thirty miles per hour, faster than city traffic. The acceleration was so fast, the legs were a blur. The target was clinically dispatched with a shot to the head at point blank range. Just to make sure.

If the dead old man had been caught murdering someone, he would have been arrested and given a trial. If he’d been a pimp, the cops would probably have asked him ‘how much?’ Prostitution was legalised. Incest was legalised. Even bestiality was legalised. Hardcore drugs were legal. Khan wanted chaos, vice and evil in his capital, and he was getting it. There were only two crimes punishable by on-sight execution. Refusal to worship the beast and refusal of his mark, the so-called Security ID.

Far from the Islamic modesty that had characterised the recent past, the women of Babylon wore next to nothing. Western style mini-skirts, skimpy bikinis and extremely tight short shorts were worn on public roads. There were male and female prostitutes all over the place, but it was hard to tell which men and women were prostitutes and which were simply libertines. Realistic humanoid sexbots were at least as popular as human sex workers. As they passed the apartment blocks, Hillier and Azim could hear the moans, sighs and other strange sounds. Soldiers were regularly coming in and out of the more obvious brothels. Aphrodisiacs and ED medications were sold by vending machines in the shops and on the streets, alongside recreational drugs. There were drug dealers on every other corner. Sometimes the prostitutes sold drugs for extra cash.

A drone swooped down the street, scanning for Security ID’s, and shot dead a bleach blonde prostitute in a pink bikini, not for soliciting, but for not having the mark of the beast on her hand or forehead. Khan personally did not believe in marriage and openly kept a harem. He advocated ‘free love’. His soldiers kept prisoners of war as their personal ‘slaves.’

There were young people high on drugs and passed out all over the place. Lying on the street, wandering around screaming, hallucinating, vomiting, shivering half-naked, foaming at the mouth, laughing hysterically. With unfettered access to potent drugs like heroin, crack cocaine, PCP and LSD, mental illness, unemployment and homelessness had skyrocketed drastically in Iraq.

They crossed a bridge over a canal of blue, diverted Euphrates water and passed through a gate in the reconstructed old city walls of Babylon. The walls were made of baked brick and bitumen. They were over 14 metres high.

‘These walls were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world,’ noted Azim.

‘Now they’re guarding the seven heads of the beast,’ said Amir.

The sun had set over the Euphrates River to the west. The sky and the clouds were blood red. Azim grew impatient. Amir checked his watch; only a few hours remained for them to get into position ahead of Khan’s speech.

As they passed deeper into the underbelly of Babylon, the modern stucco and concrete buildings ceased. The houses and shops were increasingly made of yellow mudbricks and arranged in a grid layout, like the ancient city of the Neo-Babylonian period. There were no modern streetlamps, but electric lights were visible inside the mud-brick houses. The public lighting here was provided by braziers and torches, in addition to the natural light from the nearly full moon and the stars. Amir saw a couple of police officers carrying buckets of water, which they set down next to a brazier.

‘What does Khan have against streetlights?’ asked Amir, in Arabic, in case they were overheard.

‘He wants to create a historical atmosphere.’

‘Kind of hard to do with all the drones buzzing overhead, and the humanoid robots prowling the streets,’ noted Amir. ‘This place is like a giant, messed up theme park.’

Azim shushed him.

A gang of young people doing drugs on the street corner stared at Amir. How much did they hear? Even the slightest hint of dissent was punishable by death.

The ziggurat of Etemenanki loomed larger and larger, lit by braziers. The operators were getting closer. They came out onto the Processional Way, the main thoroughfare of Ancient Babylon. It was a wide, straight boulevard running through the heart of the old city, humming with activity and flanked by walls of blue glazed bricks. In the flickering light of the braziers, Amir saw the lions, bulls and dragons adorning the walls. Azim and Amir could just make out the striking blue Ishtar gate to the north. There was a platoon of Iranian soldiers patrolling the Processional Way. The operators quickly turned off down a side street.

‘We’ll have to take a little diversion,’ said Amir.

Azim and Hillier approached the steps of a cultic temple, a massive rectangular yellow brick structure. Male and female prostitutes dressed in semi-transparent shawls enticed passers-by on the steps of the temple. They were ‘cult prostitutes’, like those found in the ancient world among some pagans; the sex was seen as an almost religious act of devotion to the ‘gods’, and the money paid by clients went straight to the temple treasury. In this case the sexual acts were performed in devotion to Khan, and the money went to his treasury. Amir shook his head.

‘Now I see why The Book of Revelation kept talking about the “whore of Babylon”.’

‘I think we are in red light district,’ said Azim.

‘Are you kidding me? The whole city is one giant red-light district.’

‘More so here,’ noted Azim.

A woman approached them in the dark.

She looked to be in her thirties and attractive, with dark brown hair and a prominent bosom. She was very scantily clad, wearing only a skimpy pseudo-historical tunic that left little to the imagination. Sashaying over to them, she said to Azim, ‘are you two interested?’ whilst gyrating her hips in an odd little belly dance.

Azim was about to dismiss her, when they saw a group of five soldiers with six prostitutes on their arms, stumbling drunk out of a tavern. They were headed towards the operators, yelling something incoherent. Damn. It was obviously normal for the security forces in Babylon to have sex with prostitutes, and Azim and Amir did not want to stand out. Posing as ‘clients’ would also give them an excuse to get away from these drunk Iraqi soldiers. The last thing they needed was to get roped into an orgy.

So Azim said to the belly dancing prostitute, ‘Yeah, sure. Where do you want to do this?’

‘Follow me.’

Amir scowled at Azim and muttered, ‘have you lost your mind?’

She led them into a yellow mud-brick house, made in the ancient Babylonian style, down the hall, and into a room with a single bed that reeked of cheap perfume and something vaguely gross underneath the perfume. She flicked the light switch and Azim was quite shocked to see that her face was covered in syphilitic sores, and her hair was thin. She was also older than she had appeared in the dark.

She was about to undress when Azim told her, ‘Wait! We are not interested in sex, but I have money.’ He rummaged in his pocket and produced a gold coin. With all the inflation in the past years, gold had become extremely valuable. Precious metals were also widely used on the black market in Iraq, because it was impossible to buy or sell digitally without the mark. Such things were strictly illegal, however.

The woman looked affronted at this rejection, but she took the coin all the same. Azim and Hillier awkwardly left the building and walked fast down the street.

Then the prostitute emerged from the house and started yelling at the gang of carousing soldiers on the street, pointing at Azim and Hillier.

‘They are racketeers! Arrest them! Shoot them! Kill them!’

The soldiers abandoned their prostitutes and gave chase. Acting on instinct, Azim and Amir increased their pace and quickly turned left.

‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ Amir said.

‘Shut up!’

The operators saw a bazaar ahead of them and sought to blend in amidst the haggling and hubbub of the market. Ironically, their uniforms betrayed them.

‘They are here!’ yelled the foremost of their pursuers.

Azim saw an alleyway.

‘Quick! This way’ he said, pulling Amir in after him.

This lost three of the pursuant soldiers, who ran on ahead through the market, but two of the soldiers saw the operators duck into the alley and followed them.

‘Stop! Stop or I shoot!’

Azim and Amir froze. They were sitting ducks in this alley, and the only cover was a dumpster, about ten metres away. There was no alternative but to try and talk their way out of this one.

‘Drop your weapons and raise your hands!’ the soldier cried.

The undercover operators did as they were ordered. Azim bitterly regretted running, which had made them look guilty. I panicked.

Two soldiers approached them. The one on the left was a Jundiun (private-equivalent). He was younger, thinner and nervous. The one on the right, a corporal, was in his thirties, dead-eyed and grizzled, with a square jaw covered in five o’clock shadow. He looked to be by far the more formidable of the two.

‘Who is your commanding officer?’ the corporal demanded. There were no salutes.

‘I am in command,’ said Azim. ‘And I outrank you. So lower the weapon, salute me, and I may have mercy on you.’

‘Why did you run?’ asked the private.

‘The woman said you were black marketeers trading in contraband,’ noted the corporal.

‘Nonsense. We did not pay her. She got angry.’

The corporal looked to the private. Doubt began to creep in.

‘And you! What is your mission?’ the private asked, addressing Amir.

‘We were assigned to provide extra security ahead of the address.’

‘Only two soldiers? What difference can two soldiers make?’

‘The rest of our regiment was needed at the border.’

‘Your accent…you are not from Iraq?’ the corporal said, thrusting his AK47 in Amir’s face. ‘Are you a foreign spy?’

‘No, I was born in Kuwait. My mother is Kuwaiti, my father is Iraqi.’

‘What is a Kuwaiti doing in the Iraqi Army? How was that permitted?’ said the corporal, fondling his radio with his left hand.

The man was so close, Amir could smell his stale breath.

‘What can I say? I am a loyal Iraqi subject. I have lived here for the last ten years. They asked for volunteers. They let me join.’

The Iraqi corporal and private shared a doubtful look. ‘I think that whore was right,’ said the corporal, before spitting on the ground at the operator’s feet.

‘What is your name?’

‘Jawad Hussein.’

‘What is your unit?’

‘The 28^th Infantry Brigade of the 8^th Division.’

‘Keep an eye on them. I will check their story with someone in the brigade,’ said the corporal.

‘Look, we have Security ID’s. If we were spies, that would be impossible,’ Amir said.

Azim gave him a look. Where was he going with this?

‘Show us!’ barked the corporal.

Amir presented his RFID chip first, on the back of his right hand. His left hand was hovering near the knife sheath hanging from his belt.

The corporal stepped closer and removed his scanner from his belt. The private did not have an ID scanner. Amir had registered this fact before he mentioned the issue of ID’s. The corporal proceeded to scan his ID. Unlike the beastbots’ scanners, which were based on radio frequencies, these scanners used sensors, required direct line of sight and worked better at close range, like barcode readers. The green light appeared on the scanner. The corporal began to relax.

‘Wait! If you are really a loyal Iraqi, you will worship Khan with me! Acknowledge him!’ demanded the private.

Having a false mark was one thing. But as a Christian, Amir couldn’t bring himself to worship the beast. It might mean eternal damnation. Sweat trickled down his back.Screw it.

Amir thrust his knee into the corporal’s groin and stabbed him in the throat with his knife. Azim tackled the private to the ground before he could aim and fire his weapon. Then he punched the man in the face, again and again, stunning him, before pulling out his knife, covering the private’s mouth and stabbing him in the throat. He plunged the blade so deep into the man’s neck he felt it come out the other side. The warm blood spilled over his hands.

Azim stood up and looked at Amir.

‘I couldn’t do it.’

‘I know,’ said Azim.

‘He was too suspicious. We couldn’t take the chance that he would check with the 28^th Infantry,’ Amir said.

‘What should we do with the bodies?’

Both men looked around the alley.

‘Dumpster,’ they both said, simultaneously. They hauled the bodies in fireman’s lifts over to the dumpster, being careful to avoid further suspicious blood stains by slinging the corpses over their backs, facing towards the sky. The dumpster was already overflowing with dirty needles, diapers and food. Babylon was a mess.

Unbeknownst to Azim and Amir, the killings and the disposal of the bodies were witnessed by a 12-year-old girl called Fatima who lived in the house on the left of the alley and watched the whole thing from her rooftop. She promptly called the police and reported everything she witnessed, sparking a citywide manhunt for Azim and Amir, who were now getting close to their objective: an abandoned office building on the edge of the old town.

Azim and Amir high-tailed it out of there and rushed to the sniping position. They had less than an hour left before the speech. They kept a low profile and stuck to the shadows.

The office was formerly used as a call centre, but AI replaced those workers within a couple of years of the city’s reconstruction. They were scheduled to meet with their contact there, Abdul Haram.

The office block was not made of mudbrick, in the same ancient neo-Babylonian style as the other buildings. Instead, it was built from modern materials, including concrete, glass and steel, with modern construction methods. It stuck out like a sore thumb, yet nobody was interested in it.

It was also far enough from Etemenanki – where Khan was scheduled to make his speech in just five minutes – to be beyond the reach of the security cordon, and it was only two storeys high, which minimized the attention from the Sacred Guard as a potential sniper position. At 1.4 klicks out, the shot was a tough one; only ten snipers in the US military could make it reliably with an SVD. And of those ten, only one was of Middle Eastern extraction and spoke Arabic.

‘Here he is,’ said Azim.

A man strode out from the shadows. He was six foot two inches tall, and lean. Very lean. Almost emaciated. His eyes were huge in the thin face, and he wore simple, ragged western style clothes, including jeans and sneakers. His green shirt was torn and covered in dirt.

‘Salaam alaikum,’ he croaked.

‘There is no peace here,’ said Azim in Arabic: the pre-arranged countersign.

Reassured, the man moved towards them and shook hands.

‘I am Abdul. Quick. We do not have much time.’

Abdul led them inside the office building and up the stairs to the second floor. All the computers and anything of value had long since been looted; it was totally derelict. Windows were smashed. There was dust everywhere. Rats scurried across the floor. Azim lagged behind, letting Amir and Abdul go on ahead. He darted into a separate office room, pulled his spray can out and left the Iraqi resistance tag on the wall. Then he put the spray can away and sprinted after the others, hoping Abdul did not notice.

Amir’s heart was pounding, not because of the physical strain, but from nerves. According to his watch, they had just six minutes left until Khan’s speech was scheduled to begin. Nobody knew how long it was going to be, once that maniac got started. Khan was a wildcard. Sometimes he improvised and just said whatever Satan put in his mouth.

When they got to the second floor, Azim pulled out his binoculars from his backpack and sat on an abandoned swivel chair. He was to be the spotter.

Amir set up his rifle on its tripod, and perched it on a desk, positioned about a metre from the window, to conceal the muzzle flash. He had a clear, but distant shot of the top of Etemananki, well-lit by braziers and floodlights in anticipation of Khan’s speech.

In addition to those two weeks of mission specific practice, Amir had trained for a scenario like this for years. He had 40 confirmed kills as a sniper. But the extreme distance, the darkness, and the suboptimal rifle conspired to make this a very difficult shot. When he replicated the shot in training, he only made it fourteen times out of twenty. But this was different. This was real. The fate of the world rested on this shot.

His hands were shaking. The pressure was getting to him. Azim looked at him askance.

Then Khan emerged from a doorway in the blue bricks of Etemenanki’s rooftop shrine. Thanks to the floodlights, Amir got a good look at him through the scope. Khan was short, and visibly overweight. In addition to a stairwell, the modern reconstruction of Etemananki had an in-built elevator, which he had just used. Malik was obviously not a fan of exercise, and he didn’t want to deliver the speech panting for breath. That would not be good optics.

The rooftop terrace, like the six lower terraces, contained a garden of tropical plants including dates, figs, palms and pomegranates. The fig tree was budding.

Khan wore his ceremonial black robe with red lapels. The robe’s hood was up. A golden six-pointed crown was worn over the hood. The 666/Olive Branch party symbol adorned a sash covering his left bicep. His face was barely visible inside the shadowy folds of the hood. All Amir could see was a plump lower lip, sneering with contempt. For his audience. For God. For himself. For everyone and everything. For existence itself.

Amir found his target almost instantly. There was a slight southerly breeze, that would have to be factored in. The flames from the braziers, and the party flags were fluttering slightly to the left. To account for that, Amir pulled the SVD’s crosshairs slightly to the right of Khan’s navel. At this distance (1400 metres), a deliberate headshot was out of the question; he was merely aiming to hit the target, which meant aiming for the torso.

He would also have to consider the Coriolis effect, the deflection of a bullet over long-distances due to the rotation of the earth. After the bullet leaves the barrel, the earth continues to spin before it hits the target. Amir had already performed the calculations in training. They were in the northern hemisphere, so the deflection would be to the right, but at Iraq’s latitude, that would be negligible. Because he was shooting east to west (against the direction of the earth’s spin), he would however need a slight upward adjustment. He pulled the crosshairs up to the bottom of Khan’s ribcage, just off-centre because of the wind. He took a breath.

‘My beloved subjects,’ said Khan.

Wild, howling applause from the people of the city.

Amir was surprised that the speech was delivered in English. Khan was known for doing this occasionally; he was the leader of a multinational alliance, and Arabic was not the primary language in all those countries.

Khan’s AI implant included natural language processing, which meant that he spoke all languages as fluently as the best translation app. At one rally in, of all places, Berlin, he had spoken in perfect German. Passionate, vehement South German. The Hitler parallels were obvious, but that didn’t stop his juggernaut.

‘Take the shot,’ said Azim.

Amir breathed out. The relaxation and decrease in heart rate steadied his aim. Now was the time to fire. The inverted triangle was in the right place. He began to squeeze the trigger.

At that very moment, Khan began to pace around the platform at the top of the tower. Amir cursed. At this range, he needed a stationary target. He resolved to wait until Khan stood still again.

‘Babylon is a den of jackals and thieves,’ said Khan, abruptly, in his supercilious accent. ‘It is a cesspit, an abscess on the face of the earth, a wanton who must be punished. It disgusts me. It is revolting, gruesome, hideous, a syphilitic bog filled with whores and junkies writhing around in their own filth, desperate for the next quick fix, the next shallow, depraved pleasure. The truth is, you have let me down. You have all let down your Messiah. You have failed to serve me as your lord. Now it is time for you to pay the price. Now it is time for justice to come to Babylon, as it did in former times – in the time of Belshazzar, and the time of Alexander before that. The wrath of God is upon you, Babylon, of that there can be no doubt. It is written. Not only that, you all loathe yourselves, don’t you? I know it. I know your hearts. You all want to be destroyed. You know that is what you deserve. The tyrants of history get such a bad reputation. They simply gave their people what they wanted. Not what they thought they wanted. What they really wanted, deep down. Their darkest masochistic fantasies. An orgy of death, torment and destruction. I would not be here if it were not so. You, Babylonians, are collectively a self-loathing prostitute that wishes for her own debasement and destruction. Well, as always, I am here to give you what you want. What you have always wanted, from the moment of your ill-begotten birth.’

‘Did he really just say that?’ asked Azim, staring open-mouthed through the binoculars.

Amir couldn’t believe it. He was so stunned that he struggled to focus on his objective. Khan had been pacing restlessly throughout his diatribe.

Then the tyrant stopped, faced his crowd and made a throat slitting gesture with his finger. The floodlights cut out. All the lights in the city went out.

Amir’s shot was more difficult now, but he could still see Khan’s outline from the light of the braziers on the rooftop shrine. He was moving toward the four Sacred Guardsmen at the centre of the altar on top of the ziggurat. Soon he would disappear amidst the mass of bodyguards. Moving target. It was now or never. Amir aligned the crosshairs over Khan’s back.

Then he heard a faint whirring noise, growing louder. Something blocked his view. Something white.

‘Drone!’ cried Azim.

Amir pulled his eye away from the scope and saw the quadcopter drone was armed. Azim had dropped his binoculars and was pulling out his M4. Amir raised the SVD to take a shot; at this range the scope was a hindrance, and the shot would be taken on reflex, without aiming properly.Too late.

The drone had a red light to the left of its camera. It fired a missile directly at Abdul. 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-8