Ark of Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

Holy Grail.
    Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
    Stan MacFarlane knew from his Bible studies that the twelve inlaid stones had originally been entrusted to Lucifer when he was still God’s favorite. After Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven, God retrieved the stones and later gave them to Moses, who created the breastplate according to God’s specific instruction. Worn only by the Hebrew high priest, the breastplate came to be known as the Stones of Fire. Hidden within the sacred confines of the Jerusalem Temple, the breastplate was plundered by the Babylonians when Nebuchadnezzar’s army sacked the holy city in the sixth century B.C. For the next twenty-six centuries, the holy relic had remained hidden in the deserts of Babylon, in what is now modern-day Iraq.
    When the U.S. military forces liberated Iraq, Stan had ordered a special-ops team to find the relic. Much to the team’s chagrin, someone beat them to the prize. Shortly thereafter, he learned from paid informants that Eliot Hopkins, the director of the Hopkins Museum of Near Eastern Art, had uncovered the Stones of Fire in Iraq. Not about to let the relic elude him a second time, Stan sent his most trusted aide to retrieve the breastplate.
    Except his trusted aide had made a very careless mistake.
    “ ‘And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood,’ ” he hissed to the man who stood at attention in front of him. His temper bridled with a loose slipknot, he stared down the red-faced subordinate. “So tell me, Gunny, how did this Miller woman get away from you? Do you think she hitched a ride on Satan’s dinghy?”
    The penitent, former gunnery sergeant Boyd Braxton, shook his head. “I told you, sir, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t even know that she was a woman until I found her purse in the museum.”
    “The weaker sex, yet still she eluded you.” MacFarlane stepped toward the gunnery sergeant, jabbing him in the chest with his finger. “Boy, you’re not going soft on me, are you? I hate to think that you’ve been pussy whipped.”
    “No, sir. You don’t need to worry about that, sir.”
    “You make certain of it, Gunny. Each and every day, you make certain.”
    His subordinate properly chastened, Stan MacFarlane stepped back. Such discipline was necessary to keep order in the ranks—a lesson he’d learned during his thirty-one years in the Corps.
    A full-bird colonel when he left the service, he’d still be in uniform had his career not been abruptly derailed two years ago by the Pentagon watchdog group Freedom Now! The godless cabal made up of left-wing lawyers and activists had targeted him soon after he’d been promoted to the intelligence office of the Undersecretary of Defense. Hypocrites one and all, they claimed their purpose was to protect religious freedom in the U.S. military. Because of his strict adherence to the word of God, Freedom Now! branded him a religious fanatic bent on converting the whole of the U.S. military to the evangelical faith.
    Well, guess what, you godless hippie freaks? It was already happening.
    When Freedom Now! caught wind of the weekly prayer meeting he held in the Pentagon’s executive dining room, they wasted no time blowing the whistle, somehow getting their lily-white hands on a photo of him standing in a prayer circle with other uniformed officers. The photo made the front page of the Washington Post . In the accompanying article, several junior officers claimed that he’d personally harassed them, told them they would eternally burn in hell if they didn’t attend the prayer meetings.
    The left-wing pundits had had a field day, and the Washington politicos and military-bashers were unwilling to let the story drop. Soon thereafter, he’d been relieved of command.
    God, however, worked in mysterious ways.
    No sooner did the furor die down than Stan founded Rosemont Security Consultants. In