Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

He fell to his hands and knees and vomited, his stomach heaving until nothing was left in his guts but the fear that had overcome him. When his pounding head began to clear he staggered to his feet and began to run. There was no going back the way he’d come, and if he tried to flee into the forest he knew he wouldn’t last the day; long before the enemy or the elements could kill him he’d no doubt be found by his own side and shot for desertion.

By the time he reached the edge of the trees, the rest of his company was ahead of him by a quarter mile.

Down there, just in front of the men on foot, the tanks were slowing to navigate a narrowing path through the natural and man-made obstructions. They reached a choke point with the river on the left and then maneuvered into single file to begin to creep through the restricted pass.

But something wasn’t right.

Through his zoomed-in viewfinder he searched the hilly terrain, finding nothing for long seconds but knowing it must be there, and then suddenly he saw a glint of reflected sunlight from above, on the steep face of the minor mountain to his right.

Noah took the camera from his eye and stood. The word formed in his mind but before he could shout it the fire had already begun to fly.

Ambush.

Dozens of gray-white streaks arced down from hidden emplacements in the high ground on either side of the valley. These rocket-propelled grenades were targeting the helicopters but the ones that missed fell with devastating effect among the boxed-in vehicles and the scattering foot soldiers. As the lumbering Abrams tanks swiveled and swung their turrets toward the threats, a flashing line of detonations shook the ground around them. The tanks and Humvees all stopped dead, pouring smoke, gutted by the explosively formed penetrators that had been buried along the bottleneck of the pass.

The last surviving Apache helicopter was maneuvering and returning fire, but the enemy commanders had saved an ace in the hole. Two guided missiles streaked into the air in the distance, shoulder-fired Stingers most likely. One missed wide as the chopper jinked and evaded, but the second tore through the blades into the heat of the turbines and the aircraft disappeared in a bright yellow ball of descending fire.

As the rebel forces coldly found their range and the mortars began to rain down again, in front, between, and behind, Noah Gardner had only a moment to turn and run before a final blinding, deafening boom carried him away.

The approach of his death seemed a lot like he’d always heard it might be. Calm, a warm, settling peace, almost no pain at all, darkness coming on, the scene before him softening around the edges, a blurring of the lines between the real and the remembered. As consciousness passed away, Noah’s last thought shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did.

Though her cause was lost, with all the world now joining forces against what remained of her fragile, fading American dream, he thought of Molly Ross, closed his eyes, and wished her luck.

Chapter 2

The last thing she’d ever seen clearly had been a nearby nuclear explosion, an instant of unimaginable brightness before the coming of the permanent dark. But Molly didn’t need her eyes to know one thing for certain: as bad as the last few months had been, the gravest danger yet was right outside the door.

Though she was obviously a prisoner in this place, no one had been left to guard her, and no one was watching—even without vision she was assured of this somehow by the atmosphere of the space, the solitary feel of the strange, stuffy room around her.

After months on the run, she and her dwindling inner circle of Founders’ Keepers had nearly been cornered by—what was an accurate term for them?—by the state-sponsored mercenaries who’d seemingly been granted federal police powers, a borderless jurisdiction, and the skeleton key to the national armory. The events of the weeks that followed had blurred into one long flight through the wilderness, broken only by stretches of tense, restless waiting in various safe houses and hiding places.

This day had started with an anonymous message that their pursuers were finally closing in for the kill with a massive force. After that urgent warning all she could remember was running, desperate and directionless. That, and the gradually building sounds of a moving battle, the fury of it echoing like rolling thunder and never far behind. Hollis, her friend and longtime bodyguard, had split from the group at some point in hopes of drawing the enemy’s attention and buying the rest of them some time.

And then, just as it seemed that she and her people had finally reached the hill they would die on, out of the blue they’d all been swept up and spirited away by a shockingly well-armed and -organized resistance. In the moment the help had seemed to be a gift from above. It was becoming clear now that these new allies had sprung up from another direction entirely.

Voices drifted through the rugged wall on the far side of the room. Their words were mostly sifted out by the dense old varnished logs and rosined mortar in between. Still, through only these muffled remnants the gist of the debate next door was unmistakable. These men who’d snatched her from the jaws of certain death had done so with an evil intent of their own. Now they were deciding what was to become of her, and their hasty mock tribunal seemed to be nearing its final verdict.

Her guide dog, Cody, was seated on the floor next to her chair, his chin resting on her knee, so attuned to her by then that he could hardly be counted as a separate being. Molly held the dog’s harness, her free hand resting on his side. She could feel the tension in him, but, like his sworn companion, he was as calm as these circumstances would allow. Neither of them was at ease in the company of strangers, particularly men of the sort in the adjoining room.

A knot of fear had been twisting its way into her stomach, waiting there to cut free and flood her mind at the first invitation. Molly took a long moment to get a grip on what courage still remained, and resolved to think her way out of this place.

Blind is a tidy word coined by the able majority, a black-and-white term for what’s been lost that overlooks all that might have been gained in the bargain. There were other, older forms of perception, much deeper than sight, that had been steadily reawakening in her over the past several months as she recovered. Only in the faintest hints at first, from out of the dark these neglected human senses had slowly knit together to restore a different kind of seeing. Lesser in some ways, greater in others, this subtle new vision was a sense she’d learned to believe in—to entrust with her life at times—and she would have to trust it now again.

Okay, then, she thought. Now what do we need to know?

A heavy door from the noisy meeting hall was behind and to her left, closed and key-locked from the outside. A pale yellow blur of flickering illumination shone high up and in front of her—an old cyclone lamp by the sooty coal-oil scent on the air. A different, cleaner light—the late afternoon sun through a tall, wide window—was there on the other side.

“Cody,” she whispered, and Molly felt the dog stand ready beside her. She got to her feet as well, her right hand extended forward as though in preparation to explore unknown surroundings. “Let’s have a look around, boy.”

Cody took the cue and began to walk her carefully through the space, giving a polite head-nudge to her thigh or an outward tug on the harness to shift their path when an obstacle would have blocked her way. Step by step, she began to sketch the detail of the floor plan in her mind, measuring and memorizing along the tour.