ONE

 “No, no, no, no, no. That can’t be right,” said Winston Reynolds to no one in particular.

He had arrived at the El Sauce Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile just hours earlier. His work with ATLAS—the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System—at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy had been stymied by a late season tropical depression that had produced thick cloud cover over their two .5-meter telescopes at Mauna Loa and Haleakalā on the islands. The storm system had stalled just south of the island chain and forecasts still gave a high probability for the storm to advance to typhoon status.

On top of cloudy skies, the storm had also disrupted communications with the rest of the ATLAS group of observatories. He had been unable to connect remotely with scopes at any of their international locations. Tropical Storm Lillian hit with its double whammy at just the wrong time.

What he had seen just before their scopes were blinded by the clouds needed confirmation. Right away. His director had agreed and arranged for him to fly as soon as possible to Observatorio El Sauce Rio Hurtado, where the high desert offered 300 clear nights a year, and its altitude of 5,000-plus feet afforded great viewing of the southern sky. The observatory was designated ATLAS-CHL as part of the automated alert system.

He examined the astronomical survey images captured by CHI-1, a Planewave CK24 telescope. The 61-cm telescope with Corrected Dall Kirkham optical design, a set of Astrodon astrophotography filters, and Sloan photometry filters, was excellent for the astrophotography of deep-sky objects that he desperately needed. He hoped that the southern perspective of the deep sky would enable him to more accurately calculate a trajectory for the object he had observed. Instead, he was shocked by what he saw . . . or didn’t see.

“Where’d it go?” Again, alone in the room, he talked to himself.

He turned at the sound of footsteps entering the room and was shocked to see who had joined him. No introduction was needed. He knew her by sight and reputation.

“Professor Ruiz. How? Why? I-I-I’m honored to meet you, but how . . .”

The elderly astronomer held up her hand and nodded to quiet him. “Buenas tardes, Doctor Reynolds. Dr. Davies called me and told me of your concerns. I helped arrange your transportation here in Chile and thought I might be of some help.”

Elena Ramona Mendoza was currently a Professor at the Universidad de Chile Department of Astronomy (DAS) and the Director of the Center for Excellence in Astrophysics and Associated Technologies (CATA). She had earned her doctorate in astrophysics at Harvard. Her pioneering work included the discovery of the brown dwarf star system Baloo-1 just 62 lights years from earth. She was recognized as a trailblazer for women in science, having been the first woman to receive Chile’s National Prize for Exact Sciences and the first female president of the Chilean Academy of Sciences.

“Thank you, Professor Mendoza.” He truly appreciated the helicopter ride from Santiago, instead of the six-plus hour drive into the high desert north of the capital, the last hour of which encompassed dusty gravel and dirt roads.

“Por favor, call me Elena. What have you found?”

Winston called up a series of star surveys on the computer. “I have been following this . . .” He pointed to a speck of light on the screen. “. . . for the past week.” She nodded, her brow furrowed. “Initially, its trajectory seemed to point to another interstellar origin, like 1I/’Oumuamua and 3I/ATLAS, but coming from the direction of Virgo.” The 1I and 3I designations pointed to the first and third interstellar objects discovered in our solar system.

“Have you looked at it through Hubble or Webb?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I wanted one more night of observation to confirm before reporting it to the Minor Planet Center, but the clouds arrived at home.”

“I was told that you have a concern about its trajectory.”

Again, he nodded. “I do, and I came here hoping to get a better look, after Hawaii got shut out by the storm. But now I don’t know what to think. It . . . it has disappeared from our surveys.” He pointed to the latest survey from El Sauce’s telescope. “I can’t continue running its trajectory now.”

The professor let out a deep breath. “Ay dios mío.”

TWO

“C’mon, Aric. Do you really need to invite the entire football team?”

Aric Afton and his fiancée Jessica Larson sat in his brother Adam’s den, reviewing the final invitation list to their upcoming wedding. After his stellar proposal at the Missouri Botanical Gardens the previous Christmas, she had hoped for a June wedding. Booking the church was no problem. Her father, Thomas, was the senior pastor at the church where they would marry. The problems arose with the caterer, reception venue, and photographer. Well, those whom she and her mom insisted upon, anyway. They were all booked for months in advance, particularly for the weekends of the summer months, which in Kenosha, WI weren’t numerous.

“Gee, Jess. Those were the guys I hung with at Carthage, besides our common friends in the church’s young adults group.”

She frowned and shook her head. “No, you hung out with the three or four guys in your dorm, not the entire team. You weren’t even on the team.”

He waggled his head from side to side. She had a point, but he felt that he couldn’t invite just three guys without upsetting some of the others on the team. They had all stood up for him when the LGBTQI+ alphabet crowd tried their hardest to get him expelled simply because he stood for Biblical values.

“We need to pare this list down. The Upper East only holds 250 guests comfortably, and we’re at almost 300 people. I have to get these invitations out this week. We’re only six weeks away.”

Six weeks? Where had the time gone? Aric furrowed his brow. “I thought they could hold 300. I’m sure I saw that number somewhere.” He grabbed his phone to check their website.

Jess nodded. “True. That’s their max, if we want to feel crammed in like sardines in a can.”

“Oh.” He put his phone back on the table.

“Besides, I don’t want to make my folks spend more than we really feel is necessary. If we go over the 250 number, there are higher setup fees and stuff in addition to the cost of the added meals.”

Aric reached deep into his memory to find another reason not to back down, but there wasn’t one. He had already dropped some of his closer high school friends. After all, he had mostly lost touch with them when they went off to other colleges or started work. His best friend from those years, Dan Lewis, had apparently gone underground after their escapade in Portland with Dan’s cousin, Peter, and Peter’s Antifa cell. The last he’d heard, Dan had joined that anarchist group and had a price on his head for arson. That he hadn’t been rounded up yet simply attested to the lack of interest in doing so by the progressive authorities that used Antifa for their own purposes.

Actually, in thinking about it, he didn’t need to eliminate Dan from the invitation list. The guy hadn’t even made to the list in the first place, a fact that saddened Aric if he dwelt on it too long.

Aric sighed. He wasn’t going to win this one. “Okay, okay. Just keep Mitch, Brian, and Zach. We can drop the other ten.”

She smiled. “Thank you. That means 20 less since they’d all come with their plus-ones. That helps a lot.” She crossed off those ten names and reviewed the list. “Let’s see it we can drop at least ten more names.”

“Hey, you two. Did you hear the news?” Aric’s brother, Adam, walked into the den and went straight for the TV remote. “Hey, where’s the remote? It usually sits right here on the end table next to my chair.”

Aric nodded. “Sorry, moved it over there, under the TV, to make room for all of our stuff.” He pointed to the TV stand that held bis brother’s DVD player and soundbar for the large-screen television that was mounted to the wall above it.

Adam retrieved it and flipped on the device. Newsmax was covering whatever was happening. Sam Sussman, one of the lead newscasters for the network, continued.

“Well, this certainly changes the dynamics of the upcoming election. Eric, what do you think?” He passed the question on to Eric Georgescu, one of his fellow commentators—no relation to Călin Georgescu, the conservative, ultra-populist agronomist from Romania who was running for election as that country’s president.

“That’s an understatement, Sam. Early polls would suggest that the President’s endorsement of Vice President Ellis puts her in a good position. Of course, word on the Hill is that this move has truly angered the senior ranks of the Democrat Party. The President’s campaign is saying that he did so because her name was also on the campaign’s bank accounts, and this allows her to continue on with that war chest of nearly a billion dollars. Otherwise, the campaign would have to refund most of those donations.”

Sussman nodded. “There are also rumors that the President did this to spite those Democrat leaders who forced him out. That holds some ominous implications to it.”

“Yes, we’re hearing that as well. And I believe that could be true. Insiders are telling us that the President’s wife and family are livid over the party’s leaders pushing him aside. One way or the other, the match-up of Graham and Ellis has thrown this election cycle into a tizzy. We’ll see what the Democrats do at their national convention next week. We might be up for another twist to this saga.”

Aric tuned out at that point. Between wedding planning, his so-far unsuccessful job search, and all of the political drama of the upcoming elections, he felt drained. Time to set priorities. Again. He started at the beginning of their list and reviewed the names one more time.

*****

Adam could see that Aric and Jess were focused on their invitation list, so he didn’t push the matter of the President’s withdrawal from the race. But to him, the change seemed to hold more important overtones.

“I’ll let you two get back to your list.” Jess hadn’t even looked up while he was there.

Aric grunted a brief, “Okay. Thanks,” and returned his focus to Jess and their list.

Adam shook his head in accepting their lack of interest, turned off the TV, set down the remote where he’d found it, and left the room. He knew who to call to discuss it. The recipient of the phone call answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Adam. Do I get three guesses as to why you’re calling?” He laughed.

“Hi, Lynch. You’d probably get it in one.” He, too, laughed.

Lynch Cully knew him too well. But he also knew Bradley Graham very well, having been Graham’s director of security in the man’s first presidential campaign. In fact, when Graham had been kidnapped by Deep State operatives during that campaign, Lynch was the guy who found him. Adam wondered if the Graham campaign had again consulted Lynch during this second campaign. If so, Lynch could have some special insights about what might happen next.

“Well, let’s see. You’re curious about what’s going on with Sidon’s withdrawal from the race.”

“Told ya. You got it in one guess.” He paused. “So, do you know anything you can share with me?”

“Do you have a need to know?”

Adam didn’t know how to reply. Of course, he had no need to know. He was just curious. “Uh, not really.”

“Just messing with you. To be honest, I don’t know anything special. The alternative press is reporting that Sidon was pushed out the door with blackmail threats from Democrat leaders, and that appears to be the case. No one seems to know what those leaders have over the guy, but we figure they have lots of options they could use. Sidon’s been the most corrupt president in recent history, maybe in the entire history of the country. What do you know?”

“Huh?”

“C’mon, Adam. We both know you have the ability to uncover all kinds of dirt on, well, on anyone.”

Lynch was one of four people who knew about UltraNet. Years earlier Adam had worked on a PsyOp program for the DOD in Afghanistan. The resulting, privately-owned, surveillance software, AlterNet, was unlike anything ever created. However, after his daughter’s kidnapping, he learned what his boss was really doing with the software. Adam used the program not only to find his daughter but to expose his boss, General (Ret) Wallace Chamberlain. With Chamberlain’s unexpected “accidental” death, he proceeded to shut down the program entirely. When Werner Koch and the World Order Council, or WOC, tried to resurrect the program for their Deep State to use against, well, against everyone outside of their elite circle, he shut them down completely as well. He had also been successful in remaining anonymous. Only one person had succeeded in uncovering his identity, and ironically, Koch had had her killed before learning that she had found the person Koch hunted and attempting to force that info from her.

“Lynch, I’ve been living up to our deal. No using UltraNet for stuff like that without your agreement. I’m being good.”

He had cleaned up his act, as they say. His use of the program remained aboveboard, typically being used only with Lynch’s agreement. Besides, to online snoop on a sitting President held all sorts of national security implications. True, he damaged the government’s cybersecurity apparatus several months earlier, but he had no doubt that they had learned from that encounter, rebuilt, improved, and secured the system.

 “I’m glad to hear that, but, honestly, if you were to, say, calculate the new odds of Graham winning, I’d be glad to pass that on.”

“That’s all? I’m confident I could find things to help sway those odds.”

“No. Let the campaign do that kind of work. Let them be the ones with dirty hands, if caught.”

“Okay. Do you really think we’ll even make it to an election?”

“Actually, yes. I know I’ve talked with you about the 42-month reign of the beast in Revelation and that there’s a chance that Christ could return soon, at the end of that 42-month period I discovered. But that didn’t pan out. Yom Teruah, aka Rosh Hashanah, just ended for this year, and I’ve come to realize two things. One is that events in the Middle East just haven’t lined up to lead to such an event. For example, Damascus hasn’t been destroyed yet, as prophesied in Isaiah, and the countries mentioned in Ezekiel 38 are not aligned as I’d expect them to be. Iran doesn’t lead that group, Turkey does. But more importantly, I’ve realized that nothing in Scripture said He’d return at the end of that period. John’s prophecy simply talks about the end of the beast’s reign. Still, I’m beginning to think that the end of the Deep State’s reign will be the trigger for other repercussions mentioned in Revelation.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Reread Revelation 17 about the woman sitting upon the beast. She’s called the great harlot and the mother of all harlots who sits on many waters. She represents the status quo, the worldly culture that exists all around us. She has to be taken down, destroyed to some degree, before Christ returns.”

Adam shook his head, not wanting to think about what he thought Lynch was referring to.

“Am I reading you correctly, or am I reading too much into your comment? Are you saying the world will be crashing down around us?”

“I’m not saying that. The Bible says that, in my opinion, but there are a couple of options there. It might not be the entire world economy crashes. It might be the Deep State’s economic system that is eliminated, what some people call the British Imperial System.” There was a long pause. “Hey, Amy is calling for me, so I need to go. Let’s give this a couple of months to see what happens and then we can discuss it again. Keep your eyes open. Something’s bound to change now that Rosh Hashanah is over, and it might be subtle.”

Or not, thought Adam. Lynch’s “discovery” made sense. God’s timetables seemed to work along the dates of His ordained feasts, not timetables created by man. That there were precisely 42 months between the last day of Passover Week in 2021 and the first day of Yom Teruah a couple of days ago, couldn’t be a coincidence. Sidon’s administration and his appointees were firmly in place by that April three and a half years ago. He, and the Deep State he represented, had full reign to establish their goals. But now? If that reign was truly over, what lie ahead?

 

Thank you for reading the sample of The Return.

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