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  “The authors’ style continues to be thoroughly captivating and keeps the reader glued to the book, wondering what will happen next. And it leaves the reader hungry for more.”

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  “Wildly popular—and highly controversial.”

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  “Bible teacher LaHaye and master storyteller Jenkins have created a believable story of what could happen after the Rapture. They present the gospel clearly without being preachy, the characters have depth, and the plot keeps the reader turning pages.”

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  Copyright © 2003 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph courtesy of U.S. Navy website: www.wasp.navy.mil

  Author photo by Michael Patrick Brown

  Written and developed in association with Tekno Books, Green Bay, Wisconsin.

  Designed by Julie Chen

  Edited by James Cain

  Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982, 1991 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc. 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920.

  Published in association with the literary agency of Sterling Lord Literistic, New York, NY.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  Left Behind is a registered trademark of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Odom, Mel.

  Apocalypse dawn / Mel Odom.

  p. cm. (Apocalypse dawn #1)

  ISBN 0-8423-8418-9 (sc)

  1. Rapture (Christian eschatology)—Fiction. 2. End of the world—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.D53A86 2003

  813′.54—dc21 2003007784

  * * *

  Printed in the United States of America

  07 06 05 04 03

  5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

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  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Epilogue

  1

  Turkish-Syrian Border

  40 Klicks South of Sanliurfa, Turkey

  Local Time 0547 Hours

  Covered in three days’ worth of perspiration, filth, and fine yellow dust, First Sergeant Samuel Adams “Goose” Gander knelt beside the river that cut through the harsh land of southern Turkey. The stream was muddy brown, low for the season. Fish nearly as long as his arm swam slowly through the water.

  Goose leaned forward and filled his canteen, wishing for cooler weather. He popped two water purification tabs into the canteen and shook it.

  Then one of the fish he’d been watching jerked violently. Blood sprayed from a huge wound that ran through the creature’s side. Water jumped from the river only a few inches from the dying fish, seeming to hang frozen in the air for a split second. A rainbow flashed through the spray and Goose knew a bullet had caused the splash.

  “Sniper!” Goose yelled to his squad as he dove for cover. A second bullet slammed the metal canteen from his hand, leaving his fingers numb from the impact. Goose landed behind a shelf of broken rock.

  The Rangers working the water supply detail flattened out against the harsh terrain immediately. Some of them ducked in behind the Hummers and cargo trucks and the big water-pumping unit.

  Then the sound of three rifle reports rolled over their position.

  “Anybody see anything?” Goose yelled.

  “Nothing, Sarge.”

  “Thomas?” Goose asked over the headset. Cliff Thomas was the team scout.

  “I don’t see anything, Sarge.”

  “That’s a heavy-caliber rifle,” another Ranger said. “The sniper could be set up as much as a mile away.”

  Goose scanned the broken mountains in the distance to the south. “Anybody hit?”

  A chorus of nos followed.

  Goose breathed a sigh of relief. Syrian snipers had been something of a problem, but so far he hadn’t lost any of his men. More shots ripped into the river. Two dead fish floated up in response.

  Goose didn’t think the shooter was actually aiming for the fish. The creatures were unexpected casualties. But the effect was a sobering one. It was a message of sorts, warning shots fired across the bow of the United States Rangers assigned to the area.

  Switching frequencies on the headset, Goose said, “Base.”

  “
Go, Phoenix Leader. You have Base.”

  “I’ve got a sniper hosing my water detail,” Goose said. “I can’t find him. Can you assist?”

  “Affirmative, Leader. Base is looking.” Base was the central Ranger command post. The intelligence teams there had access to spy satellites that could peer down into the country and read the time off a man’s watch.

  Goose remained pressed into the hard earth, feeling the heat soaking into his body. He listened as Base maneuvered their own sniper team into position.

  “Got a line on your troublemakers out there, Leader.”

  “Affirmative, Base. Patch me through to the sniper team.” Goose breathed out, blowing dust from the baked grit covering the bare areas where vegetation had given up the struggle to survive.

  “Phoenix Leader, this is Sniper Team Romero.”

  “Good to have you there, Romero. Can you confirm Base’s report of one hostile sniper team?”

  “Not only confirm it, Leader, but we’re in position to cancel their pass to the party.”

  “Negative on the cancellation, Romero,” Goose replied. “The Syrians are baiting us. None of my team has been hit. But I wouldn’t mind seeing them sit out the next few dances.” Sliding his M-4A1 to the side, he took out his 10X50 binoculars and had the Ranger sniper team direct him to the hostile shooter’s location.

  After a brief search, Goose found the enemy team—a shooter and a spotter—stretched out on a rocky outcrop in the jagged mountains to the southeast. No one else was around. The digital readout on his binoculars estimated the distance at a little less than a mile.

  “Romero,” Goose said, “I have our sniper team in sight. Send them on their way.”

  “Affirmative, Leader. We’ll send them packing.”

  An instant later, rock jumped from the outcropping around the two Syrian soldiers. They jumped for cover, obviously not expecting to be found so quickly.

  The other Rangers cheered the sniper team on as they reported, “Leader, your water detail is clean and green.”

  “Understood, Romero. Thanks for the assist.” Goose put his binoculars away and stood. He took up the assault rifle and felt fatigue eat into his bones.

  Glancing at the dead fish floating on the river, he was reminded of an old army axiom, the military version of Murphy’s Law: “It isn’t the bullet with his name on it that a professional soldier has to fear; it’s all those that are addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern.’”

  The 75th Ranger Regiment was stuck between a rock and a hard place. And it seemed more than their share of trouble was looking for them.

  Turkish-Syrian Border

  40 Klicks South of Sanliurfa, Turkey

  Local Time 0601 Hours

  Death stalked the invisible line that separated Syria and Turkey.

  Goose peered through his binoculars and adjusted the magnification as he scanned the border. He knew the balance that kept three armies from each other’s throats was so tenuous that any change might tip it the wrong way. Even a shift in the slow, dry wind might trigger renewed hostilities. The hatred between the Turks and the Syriansponsored Kurdish terrorists had existed for too many generations to count. And Goose knew that the Turks’ American allies would be in the thick of the fighting, no matter who started it.

  The early morning light hurt Goose’s eyes, and the rocks and sand around him absorbed the sun’s rays and steadily rose to baking temperature. By midafternoon, he knew from hard experience, the arid land would be almost unbearable.

  For the last seventy-two hours, he and C Company had been on constant alert in full battle dress, camped in the harsh, barren plateaus overlooking the border. He’d been awake for so long that sleep was a distant memory. The exhausted man inside him had no place here. The professional warrior had to stay sharp.

  Despite the circumstances, he’d taken the time to stay cleanshaven, although he hadn’t foisted the same expectation on his men. Leadership was often as much about image as about substance. A shade less than six feet tall, with wheat-colored blond hair that almost matched the desert around him and a body disciplined by nearly two decades of military training, Goose looked like a soldier. He kept his hair cropped high and tight, but sand still found a way to burrow into his scalp, where it itched furiously. Just one more irritant he had to ignore. The dry heat pulled at the half-moon shrapnel scar that ran from his right eyebrow to his cheekbone. The scar was less than six months old and still felt tight.

  During the last few months, his border patrol assignment had turned nasty. The body count was getting serious for all sides. Of late, a few American casualties had been added into the mix, kicking up international scrutiny and drawing the attention of news media from all over the globe. There were other hot spots in the world, of course, and news service people were hunkered down like vultures around the various front lines, waiting to see where the bloodiest violence would erupt first.

  Goose prayed some other place would win that lottery. He was sitting atop a powder keg that could leave dead soldiers piled high on both sides of the border—some of whom he might be responsible for.

  Many months ago, the United Nations had sought the help of the United States to police a flare-up in terrorist activity along Turkey’s borders. President Fitzhugh responded by sending in the troops. He explained to the American people that it was more than local terrorism that threatened the peace in that part of the world. Before long the Syrian army was facing off with the Turks at the border. Because of Turkey’s role as a key Western ally in the turbulent Middle East, Fitzhugh had made sure help had been quick in coming. The 75th Army Ranger Regiment moved into the area on a peacekeeping mission. Rifle companies of the Third Battalion from Fort Benning, Georgia, an outfit with an illustrious combat history, had taken on their portion of the mission.

  Goose hoped the American forces could keep the border nailed down until peace talks between Turkey and Syria and the Kurdistan Workers Party could bear fruit. It was his job to see that the diplomats had the time they needed to keep people from dying.

  But being so far from home for so long was hard. He missed his wife, Megan, and his boys, Joey and Chris. The last couple of years hadn’t been kind to Goose—or to any American Special Forces troops. Terrorist activity around the globe had kept them in the field. Goose’s five-year-old son, Chris, seemed to be growing up much too fast in the pictures Goose had received from home over the last few months. And his seventeen-year-old stepson, Joey, was on the brink of manhood. It nearly killed Goose not to be there for his boys and his wife.

  According to the intel from HQ, the peace talks between Turkey and Syria were going to get serious any day. Any day had been more than a month in coming, and moving C Company from support capacity inside Turkey to the border wasn’t a promising sign.

  Dug in on the plateaus that made up the southeastern section of Turkey, Goose stared due south. The terrain wasn’t as mountainous or craggy as in many places along the border. This had once been the gateway to Mesopotamia, home of some of the world’s oldest civilizations—Babylon, Sumer, Persia, Assyria, Chaldea. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers flowed from the mountains further north and spilled into the lowlands in the southeast, emptying into Iraq and Iran to form what had once been known as the Fertile Crescent.

  Back when he was a young man, in a Bible class his daddy’d taught at church back home in Waycross, Georgia, Goose had studied this region. It was the place many Bible scholars believed had once housed the Garden of Eden. But now the green paradise was gone. Here the world seemed reduced to a sea of shifting yellow sand and gravel that sported islands of treacherous rocks and stubborn scrub bushes. And Goose, too, had changed. His easy acceptance of the church’s teaching was long gone. He had seen too much violence to buy into the simple beliefs of his youth.

  His faith, like the landscape around him, had been blasted.

  “So, what do you think, Sergeant?” The voice of his commanding officer came via Goose’s ear/throat headset. Satellite communicatio
ns kept the teams in constant contact, and with HQ five klicks behind the front lines, that was good. As First Sergeant, Goose’s headset was chipped for the main channel as well as four subset frequencies he could use for special team assignments. He was second-in-command and ranking NCO of a company consisting of for four rifle platoons ranged across the border, shoring up the exhausted Turkish soldiers on the front lines.

  Despite the fact that the Syrian military hadn’t shown signs of having audio-pickup equipment or signal-capturing communications antenna, Goose spoke quietly and evenly over the scrambled channel. “I think they’re waiting on something, sir. Or someone.”

  “Nothing appears out of the ordinary,” Captain Cal Remington replied.

  “No, sir,” Goose said, surveying the way the Syrian soldiers took refuge from the sun under vehicles and tarps. “The grunts are all business as usual. But I do see a little more spit and polish than normal today.”

  “‘Spit and polish’?”

  Goose grinned. “Yes, sir, Captain. An enlisted man, sir, he never forgets the dog and pony show he has to put on for an officer. Always cleaning. Always drilling. Always looking busy. The more important the officers, the more spit and polish.”

  “And you’d know that, would you, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir. And if I recall, sir, there was a time before OCS when you knew that, too.” Their friendship reached through nearly sixteen years of hardships and dangerous assignments, including Remington’s choice to sign up for the army’s Officer Candidate School. That long bridge of friendship more than spanned the gulf between officer and non-com.

  Remington was silent.

  Knowing the captain was back at headquarters, availing himself of the computer systems tied into the geosynchronous spy satellites twenty-three thousand miles into space, Goose waited. He shifted the binoculars slowly. Maybe Remington hadn’t noticed the subtle change in the attitudes of the Syrian soldiers on the other side of the border.

  The Syrian soldiers wore camouflage fatigues that looked a lot like the ones worn by the American and Turkish troops. The pattern was bigger, cleaner, and not as shaded. A civilian eye, Goose knew, probably wouldn’t be able to differentiate between the three sets of battle dress uniforms in this part of the world, but Goose had no problem. His life—as well as the lives of his squadmates—could depend on that skill. It wasn’t just a matter of finding and shooting the enemy. Like the old saying went, “Friendly fire isn’t.”