Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins

Not that I didn’t want it to. One night I decided to ask her out when we got to London. Then I thought, hey, I’ll ask her in advance. I’m way out over the Atlantic in the middle of the night with a fully loaded seven-four-seven, so I put it on auto pilot and go looking for her.”
    Rayford paused, disgusted with himself even now for how low he had sunk. Mac looked at him. “Yeah?” “Everybody remembers where they were when the disappearances happened.”
    “You’re not saying. ...” Mac said. “I was looking for a date when all those people disappeared.” “Man!”
    Rayford snorted. “She wanted to know what was going on. Were we gonna die? I told her I was pretty sure we weren’t going to die, but that I had no more idea than she did what had happened. The truth was, I knew. Irene had been right.
    Christ had come to rapture his church, and we had all been left behind.”
    There was a lot more to Rayford’s story, of course, but he just wanted that to sink in. Mac sat staring straight ahead. He would turn, take a breath, and then turn back and watch the scenery as they continued toward Al Basrah. Mac checked his clipboard and stared at the dials.
    “We’re close enough,” he said. “I’m gonna see what I can find out.” He set the frequency and depressed the mike button. “Golf Charlie Niner Niner to Al Basrah tower. Do you read?”
    Static.
    “Al Basrah tower, this is Golf Charlie Niner Niner. I’m switching to channel eleven, over.” Mac made the switch and repeated the call.
    “Al Basrah tower,” came the reply. “Go ahead, Niner Niner.”
    “Albie around?”
    “Stand by, niner.”
    Mac turned to Rayford. “Here’s hoping,” he said.
    “Golf Charlie, this is Albie, over.”
    “Albie, you old son of a gun! Mac here! You’re OK then?”
    “Not totally, my friend. We just raised our temporary tower. Lost two hangars.
    I’m on crutches. Please, not to be bringing a fixed-wing plane. Not for two, three days.”
    “We’re in a bird,” Mac said.
    “Welcome then,” Albie said. “We need help. We need company.”
    “We can’t stay long, Albie. Our ETA is thirty minutes.”
    “Roger that, Mac. We watch for you.”
    Rayford saw Mac bite his lip. “That’s a relief,” he whispered, his voice shaky.
    He monitored the controls, stashed his clipboard, and turned to Rayford. “Back to your story.”
    Rayford was intrigued that Mac cared so much for his friend. Had Rayford had a friend like that before he was a believer? Had he ever cared about another man enough to become emotional over his well-being?
    Rayford looked at the devastation below. Tents had been erected where homes had disappeared in the quake. Bodies dotted the landscape, and expeditions of cheap trailers came to cart them off. Here and there bands of people with shovels and pickaxes worked on a paved road. If they saw what Rayford could see, they would know that even if they spent days on their tiny stretch of twisted pavement, the road for miles ahead would take months to fix, even with heavy equipment.
    Rayford told Mac how he had landed at O’Hare after the disappearances, walked to the terminal, saw the devastating reports from around the world, lost his copilot to suicide, paid heavily for a ride home, and had his worst fears confirmed. “Irene and Raymie were gone. Chloe, a skeptic like me, was trying to get home from Stanford. It was my fault. She followed my example. And we had both been left behind.”
    Rayford remembered as if it were yesterday. He didn’t mind telling the story because it came to a good end, but he hated this part. Not just the horror, not just the loneliness, but the blame. If Chloe had never come to Christ, he wasn’t sure he could have forgiven himself.
    He wondered about Mac. He would tell Mac what was going on, exactly who Nicolae Carpathia was, the whole package. He would tell him of the prophecies in Revelation, walk him through the judgments that had already come, show him how they