Fuse of Armageddon by Sigmund Brouwer, Hank Hanegraaff Page A

clear,” Steve said when he was finished. Formality had to be served. Rossett was a freak for procedure and had become even more of a freak in the last month or so. Steve paused. “Just so you know, Rossett had Starbucks as he came through this morning.”
    All the employees knew that Rossett only stopped for coffee down the street when he was in a particularly bad mood. In fact, Rossett hated the stuff, but on the mornings he wanted to be left alone, he carried it into the building like a red flag of danger.
    “Thanks for the warning,” Quinn said. He took a step toward the elevator, mentally confirmed that the video camera was focused on the back of his head, and stopped. Rossett had a feed from the camera into his office.
    “Steve, take a few quick steps and grab my shoulder like you don’t want me to get to the elevator,” Quinn said, still facing away from the camera behind him. It wouldn’t surprise Quinn to learn someday that Rossett could read lips and had kept this from everybody else at CCTI. “Trust me on this.”
    A second later, Quinn felt Steve’s hand.
    “Good,” Quinn said. “When I turn around, point at my left hand.”
    Quinn turned around, face toward the camera. No doubt Rossett was watching. Rossett saw everything.
    Steve obliged Quinn by pointing at his left hand, wrapped in fresh gauze, with a trace of blood leaking through.
    “Give me a break, Steve,” Quinn said, clearly enunciating the words for the sake of the video camera. Rossett was tough enough to deal with when he was in a good mood. Security lapses drove him nuts and would put him on a rant for days.
    “I just left the hospital,” Quinn continued to Steve. “Think I’ve got a poison gas capsule hidden in it or that the physician implanted C-4 in my palm? And do you know how much it’s going to hurt for you to pat this down?”
    Steve blinked but figured it out a split second later. “Good catch,” he said in a low voice to Quinn. “I owe you one.”
    Suez Canal, Port Said, Egypt • 10:43 GMT
    Although the heifer had been sedated, when the crane lifted the container, the sudden movement startled the animal into a small fit of bucking. A flailing hoof caught the upper thigh of one of the soldiers who had been standing to stretch.
    Joe Patterson had been dozing in a sitting position, his back against the metal wall of the container. The sharp cry of pain from that soldier jolted him out of his dreams.
    It took a moment for Joe to orient himself and remember that he was in a shipping container with the rest of the soldiers. A crane was unloading the container from a cargo ship. The platoon shared the interior of the container with a black and red heifer—a small cow that had never calved. Patterson had no idea why the heifer was with them. Only Saxon knew their ultimate mission; he’d told them it would not be revealed until the last minute. This was to protect the mission in the event that any soldiers were captured before then.
    The platoon had endured two weeks of slow travel to reach Port Said at the top of the Suez Canal. The journey had begun with a military flight from Afghanistan to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. From there, a ship carried them northward up the Red Sea. It would have taken less time to fly into Port Sudan, halfway up the Red Sea, but the economy there was in tatters, and the risk of drawing attention to the platoon was too great.
    On the ship, the soldiers had been armed with fake seamen’s books and contracts of employment to look like workers if for any reason the ship was stopped and searched. The beards they had all begun to grow weeks earlier were thick and untrimmed. They had orders to sit in the sun for hours each day to darken their skin. They’d applied deep brown dye to their hair and with each passing day had begun to look slightly more native to the Middle East.
    At the north end of the Red Sea, their cargo ship had met another coming down through the Suez. The rendezvous of the two