Fuse of Armageddon Read Online Free PDF Page A

and all of them had been officially reported dead. Patterson knew that high up strings had been pulled so that commanding officers made sure a rogue unit could operate without interference from the army or the political-correctness police known as the media.
    Satellite phone in one hand, Patterson cradled in his other arm the M16 that had been in his possession when he and five other soldiers had supposedly been inside a lead convoy truck exploded by a buried bomb on a main highway twenty miles outside of Kabul.
    Today Patterson had been able to make this phone call for one simple reason: the other soldiers were still busy with the remaining pigs. Patterson had helped earlier with the slaughter of the other pigs. But even with a knife in his hand and blood running down his wrists, Patterson’s thoughts had not been on the pigs or the prisoners he had agreed to capture and kill. He’d only been thinking of Sarah.
    Sweet Sarah. Blonde, tiny, feisty, passionate. No man had ever been as blessed in finding a woman, and Joe thanked God for her every night in his prayers.
    It was driving him crazy to imagine how badly she would be grieving his death. Not even the insurance money would make up for it. With the final pigs almost prepared, Patterson had approached the commanding officer, Del Saxon, a man he’d reported to the first night after the convoy explosion.
    “Sir, I’d like to make a call,” Joe had said, pointing at the phone that Lieutenant Saxon had strapped to his belt. “I need to speak to my wife.”
    “A call.” Del Saxon was square jawed, square shouldered, and with his brush cut hairstyle, square headed. He was a large man who talked in a growl from the side of his mouth as if he were chewing on a cigar. “You want to make a call. Like you’re waiting in traffic and you forgot what you were supposed to pick up on the way home.”
    Private Joe Patterson was big himself. He’d been tough before boot camp and had grown tougher during. Part of the bargain had been that he’d be joining a squad that didn’t treat him like army—the Freedom Crusaders. So he wasn’t going to back down.
    “My wife thinks I’m dead,” Joe said. “I can’t stand it any longer. One call and it’ll fix that problem.”
    “So I’m supposed to hand you my phone.” Saxon gestured toward the other soldiers, out of earshot. “Then let them take turns to tell people stateside they’re not dead either?”
    “That’s between you and them. I want to call my wife.”
    “Not part of the deal. She gets money. Nothing else. You knew that at FCU. You put your hand on a Bible and swore to follow this duty.”
    Patterson was very aware of this. Over a period of months, as a professor and mentor subtly checked his reliability and ideology for the cause, he had been recruited on the Freedom Christian University campus, inspired with fervent, crusading passion to become a Christian soldier marching forward for the cause of Jesus.
    What he hadn’t expected was that he’d fall in love with Sarah. He hadn’t expected that during his last month at FCU, passion would overcome them and lead them into sin. He hadn’t expected Sarah to become pregnant, and he hadn’t expected to marry her before sending her back to Georgia so that his child could at least have his last name.
    He’d pledged to join the Crusaders while a single man only to discover that the pull of his own new family was a stronger force. No wonder, he often told himself now, Jesus had never married. Jesus, the ultimate man of love, must not have wanted to cause pain to a woman and child the way that Patterson was by serving here. Of course, Jesus would have never sinned, let alone sinned in passion as Joe had, and Joe knew he was paying the price for it with his agony.
    “If I can’t call my wife, I walk,” Joe said.
    “You can’t walk. There’s a hundred miles of desert in every direction.”
    “I’ve got two legs until you shoot them out from under me,” Joe