At that time, He had said, “Men’s hearts will fail them for looking at what is taking place on the earth, because the power of the heavens will be shaken.” Now, here was the fulfillment and the final revelation of those very words.

DURING THE COURSE of the weekend, John Edwards filled page after page with his hasty scrawl and shorthand notes, and little by little he developed a striking portrait of what had taken place in Asia. He recorded the devastation in Japan. Sixty minutes later, the giant wave struck the island nation of Taiwan with its full fury. The capital of Taipei in the north and the great seaport of Kaohsiung in the south were completely inundated. Although some of the Taiwanese people succeeded in escaping to protected mountainous regions in the center of the island, loss of life was beyond measure.

John Edwards wept as he watched satellite feeds from the East showing the destruction. It was the same story again and again. The series of islands making up the Philippines were blasted, and tens of thousands died in only a matter of minutes. In some villages, no warning was possible. In the major cities, warning was unnecessary. Where, he wondered, could people on flat land go to escape a five-hundred-foot wall of water bearing down upon them at three hundred miles per hour?

China, with a population at the last census of 1.2 billion people, is the most heavily populated nation on earth. The largest percentage of Chinese live in the two-hundred-mile region abutting the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. Roads in China are primitive. The preferred mode of transportation for the average Chinese is the bicycle, Edwards knew, so the possibility of flight from the coming devastation was out of the question.

The government in Beijing had had almost twenty-four hours to alert its population that a meteor would strike the Pacific. But, like their Japanese counterparts, they seemed unable to believe that something occurring near California could have an impact on the people of China.

Even if the Chinese government had given people a warning, what would have happened to two hundred million refugees traveling inland on bicycles with no shelter, no food, and no health facilities? The movement of one million refugees out of the war-torn nation of Rwanda in 1994 had created one of the worst human catastrophes of the twentieth century. John Edwards shook his head. It was impossible to fathom a refugee situation multiplied one hundred, two hundred, or even three hundred times. The logistics would have been an impossible nightmare.

So, John Edwards saw that, not really knowing what action to take, the Chinese government chose to take no action at all. Only those few people with satellite dishes had any warning. Those who depended solely on the government-controlled media had no warning whatsoever.