And nothing he could do would stop the blazing heat that was obliterating the grass and the trees, and causing the life-giving water within Babylon to evaporate. He and his people were being scorched to death. He hated God for what was happening. He cursed God. He raged against God. But the heat wave continued, and the sores grew worse.

The final battle was coming. He would march on Jerusalem at the head of his armies. “Then,” he said to Joyce Cumberland Wong, “I will win! At last I will have my revenge!”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE INITIAL CONTINGENT of troops from India boarded the UP warships at Calcutta, bound for the seaport city of Karachi in Pakistan. Several hours later, similar units boarded from Madras. Within a day and a half, a naval convoy loaded with trucks, tanks, artillery, ammunition, and thousands more troops set sail from Bombay.

They disembarked in sequence at the port of Karachi in Pakistan, then marched overland through the mountains to the north and west. They took the route that led through the Kajack Pass, which was used centuries before by Alexander the Great when, following his great victory over King Porus at the Indus River, his rebellious troops forced him to give up on further conquests and return home.

The enormous motorized column reached the Afghan plains near Kandahar, then rolled like a deadly serpent across Iran. All along the route, they were joined by Iranian contingents. Soon, their numbers exceeded two million men and five thousand battle tanks. To observers of the scene, the number of troops was so vast that it might just as well have been two hundred million.

They crossed into Iraq, up through the arid marshes of the Shatt-al-Arab, then into the plains west of the dry riverbed of the Euphrates. By first light they were joined by another massive contingent that had come through Iran from the Central Asian nations that had once been part of the former Soviet Union. There they rested, refurbished their equipment, and awaited further orders from the leader of the world.

As their first order of business, joint air, naval, and marine forces from Europe were ordered to eliminate all resistance from the Port of Haifa on the Mediterranean. When the Israeli defenders refused to give ground, the Antichrist ordered the forces of the Union for Peace to break off the fighting and withdraw. Then he ordered one neutron bomb to be dropped over Haifa.

Seconds after the blast, all human life was gone. The port facilities of Haifa were taken over, intact, by the Union for Peace without a struggle.

That one neutron bomb was the first and last of the campaign.