The Plan Read online

  THE PLAN

  A Novel

  By

  J. Richard Wright

  The Plan is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  However, having said that, in this work and each work by this author, there is generally one or more precipitating events which happened personally to the author but did not involve other individuals.

  Copyright © 2012 by J. Richard Wright

  All rights reserved

  Visit www.jrichardwright.com or www.jrichardwright.ca

  Book cover creation and design by Sherron Moorhead www.motivationgraphics.ca

  Offering custom and creative quality web site and eBook cover design to maximize your marketing efforts and enhance organizational exposure.

  QED stands for Quality, Excellence and Design. The QED seal of approval shown here verifies that this eBook has passed a rigorous quality assurance process and will render well in most eBook reading platforms.

  For more information please click here.

  For Sandi, my love,

  Who watched the good times from afar,

  And when they ended,

  Picked me up and made me whole again

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Part One – THE AWAKENING

  Part Two – THE COMING

  Part Three – IN HARM’S WAY

  Part Four – THE MISSION

  Part Five – THE HUNT

  Part Six – WHEN NIGHT IS DARKEST

  Part Seven – ADAM’S CURSE

  Part Eight – HOUR OF THE WOLF

  TORNGAT – Description of new J. Richard Wright novel

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  I wish to thank a number of people who were kind enough to encourage and support me during my lengthy journey to transform from a long-time television and radio writer into a novelist. First among many is Lorna Stone who read early bits and pieces of this novel over many, many years and who encouraged me initially and along the way with her positive feedback, bright outlook and unwavering confidence. Then there were my other readers including: Sandi Johnston, Sue Rautenberg, Nancy Denise, Bob Moorhead, Heinz Rautenberg and Diane Underwood who read the manuscript and offered insightful and helpful comments. I also apologize to Sandi for the many prolonged and spirited debates we had (Okay, okay... arguments!) over portions of the manuscript that she felt needed to be changed or did change as a result. Again, thank you for your medical and story input. The only defense I can come up with for my intransigence on some points is: “The voices were in control.”

  Many thanks to Nicole Rautenberg for her invaluable help and knowledge in marketing and promoting The Plan.

  I also wish to thank Captain Bob Ferguson (Retired) Air Canada pilot who spent time vetting the aircraft landing and takeoff sequences to make them true to life. Bob, who has served as a consulting pilot for some high-profile feature movies was amazingly patient throughout the process. However, any and all errors or omissions that may have occurred are totally mine.

  Thank you to my children Matthew and Sarah who always had faith.

  Finally, I wish to thank Sherron Moorhead who graciously created and designed a bang-on cover for The Plan as well as a beautiful website – www.jrichardwright.com – and who had to wait and wait some more for me to contract a hosting service. While patience may be a virtue Sherron, a whip often works wonders.

  Thanks everybody.

  P R O L O G U E

  “THE BEGINNING”

  In the beginning, God created

  the heaven and the earth. And

  the earth was without form, and

  void; and darkness was upon the

  face of the deep. And the spirit

  of God moved upon the face of the

  waters. And God said, “;Let there

  be light; and there was light....”

  GENESIS 1; 3

  Rather than the popular theory of a single moment of creation 14 billion years ago, some biblical scholars believe that the earth was created not once, but twice. Its first appearance was during the Ante-Chaotic Age when God created Heaven for his angelic beings. Here the Dispensation of Angels was complete and they ruled the planets under His light of eternity and peace. But during this time of great joy, one archangel, the Light-Bearer, a favorite and more beautiful than the others, was not content to be one among many. Lucifer thirsted for knowledge and power.

  And so, eons before earth saw light and before the salvific birth to save mankind from the torment of the everlasting damnation of sin, Lucifer the Accuser screamed blasphemy at a loving God and questioned His right to rule. For a time, God’s perfect love quieted Lucifer; his ambitions fell victim to God’s will. But finally he again thirsted for what he could not have, all-knowledge and all-power. He again challenged the Divinity and union of God – The Trinity.

  But as the Heavens split asunder with his jealousy, rage and covetousness, Lucifer learned that his loving God was also a just God. The Holy Trinity summoned the Nine Orders of Angelic Beings; the Seraphims, Cherubims, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels stood in council before the Most High.

  Archangel Lucifer stood boldly aside. In a cunning oratory ripe with promises, lies and deceit, he swayed legions of angels to join him in revolt.

  And as Lucifer viciously attacked the justness of The Order, it soon became apparent that the irrevocable lines of conflict were being drawn. The word was set and there was no retreat from the blasphemy.

  Sadly God mourned the loss of perfection as it lay at the feet of The Trinity – the first victim of His servant’s malicious goals. He knew that other, more terrible ordeals would follow though they were neither of His choice nor making. A challenge was issued by the traitor in a fiery proclamation of individuality and hate. He and his would turn out The Trinity and seize the power.

  And it came to pass that God’s sadness soon turned to anger. He called to a new lieutenant to champion the cause of goodness. Preparations for war followed.

  Soon Archangel Michael led God’s angels against the usurpers in a celestial and eschatological conflict where solar systems served as marshalling points for the multitudes of warriors and universes as the bloody battlegrounds.

  Epic, unimaginable destruction followed as the battle raged. Bloody, smoldering weapons and powers of such intensity as to melt the Heavens were employed. When the last trumpet sounded, Lucifer’s forces were found to be no match for the Sons of Light; the Trinity triumphed.

  Banished in disgrace from the Light forever, the new Keeper of Hell screamed foul and echoed forth that so-called righteousness would again be truly tested. He and a full third of God’s angels became embodiments of evil and slunk into the blackness of space vowing to seek revenge.

  God walked the planets, now dark and void of those angels who had been banished. Though He had triumphed, the calm emptiness was not a sign to rejoice. He knew that while perfection was the first casualty of the battle, innocence was the second victim of Lucifer’s ambitions. Now a spectrum of good and evil existed where only goodness had reigned before. The evil blackened even the night and God was troubled.

  God looked at the dark, wasted earth – the former planet of Lucifer – and said: “Let there be light.”

  And there was light. And God saw the light and that it was good. And He separated the light from the darkness.

  For five days God created a second incarnation of earth adding the waters, the beasts, fishes and fowl. On the sixth He created man and He called him Adam; and from Adam, He created Eve. Together He gave them dominion over ever
y living thing on the earth.

  On the seventh day He rested and watched their pleasure in His garden. He was well pleased with His creations.

  But from the shadows Lucifer also watched and yearned to test the power of this goodness. After all, God had bestowed upon Adam and Eve a free will, the will to choose their personal destiny.

  The dark one approached God and from the safety of the shadows taunted Him. If He believed goodness without evil could exist, then make earth the arena and mankind the gladiators. Let free will be tested.

  And God had faith in His creatures.

  But as Adam found happiness with Eve in the Garden of Eden, Lucifer created his own advocate, a black champion to second evil’s presence and tempt God’s creatures – an arch demon in the infernal satanic hierarchy: Adramelech.

  And so a serpent was indeed loosed upon the earth; not just a mere reptile – but a serpent of evil taking many forms over the ages. The first incarnation was a snake.

  And as the Scriptures recorded, malevolence in the form of the Beast led God’s children to fall from initial grace and to be banished from the Garden. Hell’s leaders Lucifer, Satan, Belial and Leviathan rejoiced and commanded their champion to continue his evil torment on earth, to sway mankind from God’s path whenever possible and point them on the path to hell.

  God saw this and vowed to help His creatures. He would send His son to renew hope even as the Beast brought more followers to evil. Though earth spurned Christ, His teachings lived on.

  And so, through the ages, Adramelech lived: when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt under Jehovah’s charter, he cursed and thirsted in the hills; when Jesus of Nazareth went into the desert to fast, he tried to turn Him from the Father; when Roman General Gaius Marius waged wars against Jugurtha, he fed quietly on the battlefield wounded; and when Charlemagne restored Leo III to the Holy See and was crowned Emperor by him in Rome on Christmas Eve in 800 A.D., the Beast slunk in the shadows of a stone passageway and cursed the seed of the Holy Roman Emperor.

  As the Beast moved on the mists of time and performed his black deeds, he became legend and was known by many names and personifications: in Romania people whispered of the blood-sucking Vampira; in Denmark, the savagery of a wolf-like man called the Vaerulf; and in other cultures, as he seized women and spirited them away, he was known as an Incubus, a male demon who copulated with human women to produce devil children known as Cambions.

  In his many forms he watched the Ch’in dynasty begin building the Great Wall of China, the blood flow during the Crusades and the rise of modern monsters such as Hitler and Ceausescu.

  And now, slightly less than half a century after he had haunted the Nazi death camps and from there journeyed to Central America where he was found out and put into the Deathsleep, the Beast was awakening again to begin anew the work for which he had been created.

  With a cumulative and inherent cunning born of billions of years in spirit and millenniums in flesh, he would rip into the very bowels of humanity and force the pitiful wretches to confront their own mortality and see the inevitability of eternal damnation.

  * * * *

  PART ONE

  THE AWAKENING

  ...But thou art cast out of thy

  grave like an abominable branch

  and as the raiment of those that

  are slain, thrust through with a

  sword, that go down to the stones

  of the pit; as a carcase trodden

  under feet. Thou shalt not be

  joined with them in burial...

  ISAIAH 14:19; 20

  ~ 1 ~

  PANAMA JUNGLE – SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF THE RIO CHAGRES RIVER

  DECEMBER 1989

  It was time.

  Six feet down in the damp earth, shadows stirred where stillness had reigned for almost half a century. A manlike shape, a creature of the night entombed in the remnants of an old wooden vessel emblazoned with a fractured, silver cross, shuddered in a damp hollow pocket in the earth as the inky blackness of the grave witnessed catatonic slumber surrender to a greater, primitive urge.

  Starvation yanked the Beast through a fog-shrouded haze of oblivion towards the sanctity of conscious life as a pulsing hunger raced urgently through his body. Cobwebs of sleep were swept aside, and ravaged muscles rippled and contracted. Fingers curled in agony and the creature’s back arched upwards to where a mortal’s spine would have snapped with the tinder of a dry twig.

  But this creature was not mortal.

  Nor had he ever floated peacefully in a loving womb, a product of a sacred union. The Beast, an arch demon of hell – having taken the name Adramelech – had been conceived from hate and born of fire when only time and space existed. He was a supernatural challenge to all that was blessed and privileged, the Beast Master’s answer to goodness and an antithesis of righteousness. This was evil incarnate sent to irrevocably seal the fate of the near-damned while further seducing pure innocence to enter its fiery mouth and experience the raptures of hell; he had always done his work well.

  He groaned....

  Suddenly Adramelech was fully conscious; nerve endings danced and screamed for relief from the dreaded hunger gnawing painfully at his congealed insides.

  Frigid blood, previously dried and crusted, began to ooze sluggishly through long-collapsed veins. Vessels and arteries ballooned into new life as an unholy power created, healed and rejuvenated long decayed tissue that for a mortal would have turned to dust.

  Aware of his awakening, he tried to roll over but found no strength. His impotency and an arrogance born of his inherent supremacy over the earth’s beings brought angry indignation.

  He bawled weakly....

  The surprising and frightfully pitiful sound of his own mewling filled him with despair at first, and then with rage. In desperation, one twisted, talon-like hand lashed violently out and burst through the side of the rotted coffin to plunge into the damp earth. Cracked and dried lips screamed for sustenance but only a rasping croak emerged.

  Two encrusted eyelids peeled open and dried orbs, shrunken and yellowed by time and rot, blinked unseeingly at the roughened wood of the vessel that trapped him.

  He tried to roll over again. This time a powerful shoulder crashed into the lid of the casket tearing the beaten metal and splintering the remaining wood. He began to move.

  Above, the grass rippled and parted; fresh, moist dirt forced its way upward and squeezed through the earth’s wound like a stream of black blood. The tear rapidly widened as small rocks, roots and rotted vegetation appeared and spilled over. The hole grew larger.

  Yellowed eyes blazing with anger, the Beast pulled himself swiftly through the shadows of the earth. He burst upward from the bowels of his grave in an explosion of mud and squatted trembling on the turf like a shadowy, giant grasshopper, spent and exhausted.

  Sapped by the exertion, his head lolled from side to side as he sniffed the air. With his body temperature near freezing, the humid tropical air misted and steamed about the creature. An answering wisp of frost escaped from the depths of the hole and lost itself against the twinkling stars in the night sky. The Beast’s eyes followed the wisp as a misshapen, pointed tongue lolled from his mouth.

  The Central American jungle was strangely silent now, the quiet broken only by the low, snarling rumble of a nocturnal predator. He swung drunkenly towards the sound. After a moment, a black panther, warned by some primeval instinct, beat a hasty retreat from the area and vanished into the safety of the underbrush.

  As he moved clear of the hole, the last few pieces of a rotted, wooden stake dropped from his chest to the ground. Though still weak, he seized the moment of triumph and with mouth open in a soundless scream, leaped defiantly upward to his full height of almost seven feet.

  Though he had the head, torso, appendages and general shape of a human being, the resemblance to any of nature’s creations ended there. He lifted his head in the hazy light of the full moon and took in his surroundings.

&n
bsp; Dried morsels of rotted meat were dropping from his cheeks and forehead. But as he drew his first shuddering breath in decades, these rotted pieces were replaced by spider-veined, milk-white skin and flesh growing magically to cover the gleaming bone of his skull.

  Slanted eyes shone with the pale, yellow, reflective light of an animal as perfectly preserved white fangs gaped from the black hole that served as a mouth. Above the mouth, cartilage and mottled flesh were reforming a semblance of a nose which had surrendered to the ravages of the grave. A wrinkled, hairless dome topped by two bony protuberances over a squat triangular head looked up and hungrily drank in the pale light of the moon. Except for the tattered remains of a coarsely-woven, black cloak hanging from his shoulders, the Beast stood naked. The shawl, fastened by an intricately-carved iron clasp, was draped over unnaturally-wide shoulders which grew into arms, long and powerful, and ended in hands which more resembled talons. The fingernails had grown long, black and curled. From his shoulder blades, two bone-ribbed skin wings protruded; a reptilian spider webbing of moist, pink veins throbbed with newfound life within them.

  His bulk, supported by long, muscular legs, swelled ever so slightly as he felt his strength returning. His male sex, long, hard and gnarled, swayed as the creature, no longer unsure, now betrayed the savage energy of a coiled snake.

  As the Power returned, the Beast vowed never to sleep the Deathsleep again. He would eviscerate all of humanity rather than allow the pitiful innocents of this planet to again drive a missile through his pulsing heart and reduce it to a busted, bloody, deflated mass unable to mend itself around the stake cursed with the blessing of the Hated One.

  A new contest for possession of the Hated One’s chosen masses had now begun. It was time to feed, grow stronger and reap what had been sown so long ago. As foretold, Lucifer would seek to dominate the earth, and for his good work, the Beast would sit at the right hand of the true Chosen One – the antithesis of that incarnation whom man called The Savior, The Father or The Holy Spirit.