"Gleason's work with Junius Podrug on such novels as Apocalypse 2012 and The 2012 Code has made him an expert on all things apocalyptic, a subject he returns to with gusto in this wildly expansive tale of the coming End Times…It all adds up to a thrilling take on a frighteningly possible future, one that makes the journey in Cormac McCarthy's The Road look like a stroll through the park."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) on End of Days
"Gleason tackles Armageddon and emerges with one of the best end-of-the-world thrillers in quite some time…The combination of resonant myth and on-the-ground reality delivers a narrative knockout punch. Comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song are well founded, but Gleason’s novel is in a class by itself."--Booklist (starred review) on End of Days“Multilayered …the book includes many military and scientific details to add verisimilitude . . . Fans of such nuclear apocalyptic fiction as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach will enjoy this exciting addition to the genre.”
--Library Journal on End of Days
“Just when we thought it was safe to dream again, Robert Gleason has pulled us back, kicking and screaming, to our collective nightmare: nuclear annihilation.”
--Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author of The Gate House
“What an amazing story, sweeping in scope, terrifying, uplifting, outrageous, funny, and shocking, forming an unforgettable picture of humanity’s ‘end of days.’…A story for the ages.”
--Douglas Preston, New York Times bestselling author of Impact
“Robert Gleason has been to the jagged edge of the pit and peeped in; he’s been seared by the heat of the eternal furnace, smelled the brimstone, listened to the mournful wailing of the damned. The Dante of our age, he’s back to tell us about it.”
--Stephen Coonts, New York Times bestselling author of The Assassin
“Gleason does for the end of the world what Milton did for Hell itself.”
--W. Michael and Kathleen O’Neal Gear, New York Times bestselling authors of Fire the Sky and The Dawn Country, on End of Days
“Gleason has been pondering the inevitability of a Nuclear Apocalypse for more than twenty years. His thoughts are now words. . . . Once you enter his nightmare world, you’ll race wildly through it to find the nearest exit---only to realize that End of Days is not a dream. It’s just tomorrow arriving a day early. Let us hope it inspires all of us to take action.”
--William S. Cohen, former secretary of defense, U.S. senator, and New York Times bestselling author of Dragon Fire
“One twist and turn after another. Scary and compelling. A devious plot, it’s spun by a stellar hand, check it out.”
--Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor's Tomb
"This masterful tale of the risks of nuclear Armageddon---and much, much more---can only be compared in its imaginative impact with the seminal novels of the “What-if?” genre---John Buchan’s Greenmantle leaps to mind, as well as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach---in the sense that this novel is groundbreaking and peerless in its time.”
--Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters (U.S. Army, ret.), New York Times bestselling author of The War After Armageddon and The Officers’ Club
“A devious, believable tale packed with action and atmosphere. Gleason is at the top of his form, and you’ll hate to see it end. Given current world events, his story unfortunately isn’t that farfetched. The end may be closer than you think.”
--General Sid Shachnow (U.S. Army/Special Forces, ret.)
“Reads like a dark prophecy. A brilliantly conceived, ferocious journey into the final fire, it swept me up with its blazing intensity. A heart-stopping reading experience.”
--Whitley Strieber, New York Times bestselling author of Hybrids,on End of Days
“The ride of a lifetime—or more accurately…of a deathtime! Written in 3-D, it will take a Spielberg to make a movie of it!”
--David Black, winner of two Edgars, a dozen Emmy and Writers Guild nominations and awards, as well as the author of The Extinction Event,on End of Days
“The Road on steroids!”
--Jon Land, award-winning author of Strong at the Break, on End of Days
“One of the reading experiences of my lifetime. Seldom if ever have I read a book that combined such literary power with a factual background that induced those basic components of tragedy, fear, and pity. Talk about being riveted to the page! I was transmuted!”
--Thomas Fleming, winner of the Lincoln Prize for Lifetime Achievement in History, former president of the American Society of Historians and of PEN, and New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee, on End of Days
“Readers diving into Gleason’s world will never be the same again End of Days is a nuclear warhead of a novel, which could do for the anti-proliferation movement what Silent Spring did for environmentalism. People will inevitably compare End of Days to such apocalyptic masterworks as The Stand, Left Behind, Swan Song, Fail Safe, Dr. Strangelove, and The Sum of All Fears, but in truth there are no comparisons. End of Days dwarfs all previous efforts. A vision old as the Bible, violent as Armageddon itself, End of Days is more than a novel. It is the fulfillment of Revelation, Nostradamus, and all the ancient apocalyptic scrolls rolled into one. This is the End Time writ large. Bravo! Hats off! I wish I could have written End of Days, but I’m man enough to admit that I could not have done it for all the tea in China!”
--David Hagberg, New York Times bestselling author of The Expediter
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 They Won’t Know It Was Missing …
“Yo, Katy, how’s it hanging? Thought I’d send you a memento mori, just to let you know I’m thinking of you.”
Stone was on her phone screen, smiling and waving at the camera.
Kate Magruder hit “pause”—freezing his grin on the screen. It was hard to believe that three years ago they’d been lovers, partners—a team.
She sighed. It seemed a million years ago.
In another hour Stacy would make Kate up, and she would be on TV—her special news report from Mecca. In the portable makeup mirror on her folding camp table, she studied her face with professional detachment. At age thirty-six, she had her mother’s mouth and high Apache cheekbones, framing her father’s emerald eyes. Her reddish blond hair she wore straight down her back, and her figure—still athletic from decades of running, weight workouts, and Tae Kwon Do—drew more than its share of wolf whistles.
But she took no pride in her appearance. She’d always viewed good looks—hers, anyone’s—as physical fraudulence, a diversion from the person within.
“Whoever the hell that is,” she grumbled to the mirror.
Maybe that was what she’d seen in John Stone. He put no one on pedestals. His nickname for her had been Beauty—which he’d always intoned with a sneer—and he’d goaded her continually about her now-famous face.
“Your looks may stop some men’s clocks, but not mine. Around here we work for a living. Get the picture, Spoiled Rich Girl? Pick up those mikes and cameras. Get the lead out. We have a shoot and a story to cover.”
And stories they had covered—every war, famine, earthquake, and plague planet Earth had to offer—for four long years. She’d been his camera operator and sound woman, then rewrote his copy, then coauthored the news stories.
He’d been a bastard—but without bullshit. And he’d seen her for what she was—a consummate pro, not just a pretty face.
For that she had loved him.
She still loved him.
Oh, John, where are you now?
Where did it all go wrong?
Not that he was hard to look at. She wished he’d gotten his nose fixed after she’d dragged him bleeding out of a biker bar in East L.A. As usual, he needed a haircut. She also wished he’d get a new wardrobe. Bush jackets and fatigues were hardly her idea of haute couture. Lean, rangy, she guessed he was still fit. Maybe as fit as when he’d won fourteen straight for the Yankees his rookie year and taken them to the Series. Ordinarily, she would have muttered an obscenity about his conceited smirk, except the grin now bothered her in a way she couldn’t explain to herself.
Something about the eyes.
Kate sat down on her cot. She couldn’t sleep. Even when she wasn’t playing the video of John Stone, it was playing in her mind. Memento mori. Remember that you shall die. It was just like Stone to send her a message wrapped in a riddle. Stone was afraid of nothing, but there was something in his voice.
Wind attacked her tent, and she peeked out the flap as the bloody dawn rose over the city. Mecca sprawled like a wrinkled old woman in a wadi, a dry river-bed carved between steep hills. The muezzins’ morning call to prayer from the minarets towering over the city’s mosques sang to her on the stinging wind. Their song, for Kate, summoned the ghosts of Islamic holy warriors past, a wail for the Mahdi-Messiah to redeem the True Believers and restore Dar-al-Islam—“the Domain of Islam”—to its rightful place on Mohammed’s earth and in Allah’s paradise, to punish the wicked and reward the righteous.
Answering the call of the criers, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came out of the tents that surrounded the city and prostrated themselves in the direction of the black draped Ka’ba, the House of Abraham in the heart of the city. Kate knew that many of the Muslims on earth, more than a billion people, were at this moment facing in her direction as they answered the call of the muezzins to embrace Mecca and praise Allah. She ducked back inside the tent, reminding herself that she was one of the infidels.
They were here to cover the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mohammed’s birthplace that attracted millions of Muslims each year. Vladimir Malokov, Russia’s minister of defense, had been her ostensible reason for coming to Mecca. He had converted to Islam, was in Mecca for his hajj, and despite her mother’s wishes, the Saudi government—sensing in his pilgrimage a PR bonanza—had granted Kate and MTN exclusive coverage of the event. But her real reason was the concern raised by Stone’s video. Stone claimed he was unearthing “the scoop of the century.”
She flopped back down on the army cot and picked up the phone. Stone was one of the few people who mattered to her. He was the best reporter the gods ever created. Stone and Kate had been through some hairy stuff together. Genocide in Africa and the Balkans. Invading a Cuban gulag to search for a gun-toting nun.
“You’re a man to ride the river with,” Stone told her in an exaggerated Texas drawl after she’d covered his back in that biker bar after he pissed off guys who thought MAC-10s and rattlesnake tattoos were fashion statements.
Kate backed up the video and hit “play” again. Stone’s curly black hair and raptor’s grin reappeared on the phone’s small screen.
* * *
“You thought your mom and I were a few bricks shy on the subject of nuclear proliferation. Well, after my last foray into the Land of Loose Nukes I couldn’t resist proving you wrong. Catch a glimpse of the Russian nuclear storage facility behind me.”
* * *
Behind Stone was a paint-blistered storage building. Untended, unguarded.
* * *
“As you can see from the rickety fence, the absence of guards—or any personnel at all, in spite of the fact that this shed is a high-security installation warehousing several tons of bomb-grade nuclear fuel—we can walk right in now and help ourselves to any of the containers, then waltz out the way we came. How can we be so sure? you ask. Because we did just that.”
* * *
The camera moved in tight on two small slate-gray steel drums.
* * *
“One of the drums is filled with bomb-grade plutonium, the other enriched bomb-grade uranium. Each weighs around fifty pounds—containing enough for an Hiroshima and a Nagasaki bomb blast. Easy for me to carry out.”
* * *
The camera panned to the fence and the side of the building.
* * *
“How can this be happening? The Russian economy is in chaos. The guards and workers are gone because they haven’t been paid in months. They’re out hustling for food, heating oil, medicine, and gasoline—anything to make ends meet.
“Not that anybody would want to hang around these installations even if they were well-paid. There is no money for upkeep or even safety inspections. Consequently, these installations are death traps.”
* * *
The camera panned the interior of Stone’s nearby hotel room. In the middle of the room sat his drum of nuclear materials.
* * *
“Well, Katy, I know what you’re wondering now. How is that maniac going to get that stuff out of the drum? No prob-lem-o. As long as I don’t ingest the shit, it’s perfectly safe. So first I open this drum with my trusty hacksaw.”
* * *
The camera closed in on Stone’s trusty hacksaw.
* * *
“Then I can scoop it up with my bare hands and shove it into the cargo pockets of my shirt and fatigue pants. Because … alpha rays don’t pass through skin!
“By the way, I can squeeze enough into my pockets for a couple of bombs. You don’t need boxcars full of this stuff to build a good fissile bomb. A piece of high-grade nuclear fuel the size of your fist is all you’d need.
“Getting it through airports, seaports, and border checkpoints, you ask? Ha! Russia has no money for detection devices.
“Now you’re thinking: ‘Okay, asshole. You were foolish enough to swipe some stuff from an unguarded installation. What are you going to do with it? You need nuclear weapons scientists to turn that stuff into a bomb.’
“Wrong again, Katy dear.”
* * *
The video cut to a photo of an old Civil War cannon.
* * *
“All I have to do is sneak up some dark night on one of the innumerable Civil War cannons, and with an acetylene torch cut off a hunk of cannon six feet long.
“Or I can just buy a hunk from an ordnance plant—the easier course.
“In any event, I weld one end shut, load it with a piece of the enriched uranium we just stole, then pack the other end with more dynamite or gunpowder—and wham! We blast our uranium bullet into the uranium at the cannon barrel’s far end. Guess what we have? The Hiroshima ‘gun-barrel bomb.’ The genius of this baby is that it’s foolproof. Any moron can make it work. The guys at the American Manhattan Project—not to be confused with that gaggle of State Department morons who ran our ‘Pakistani Manhattan Project’—were so confident of the old gun-barrel desi...
