Astrophysicist, Dr Jada Shaw, theorises that dark matter associated with the comet is bending time as well as space in the atmosphere, and the image shows what our world will look like in four days' time. Simultaneously, at the Vatican, a mysterious package arrives for the head of Pontifical ancient studies, sent by a colleague who had vanished a decade earlier. It contains two strange artifacts: a skull scrawled with ancient Aramaic and a tome bound in human skin. DNA testing reveals both are from Genghis Khan - the long-dead Mongol king whose undiscovered tomb is rumoured to hold the vast treasures and knowledge of a lost ancient empire.
The ancient tome is a copy of The Gospel of Thomas, while the skull is inscribed with the prophecy of the end of the world in four days.
Soon Dr Shaw, the priest and his niece, and Commander Gray Pierce, with members of the Sigma Force, a covert group of ex-special forces soldiers, race to Mongolia to uncover the truth tied to the fall of the Roman Empire, to a mystery bound in the roots of Christianity’s origins, and to a weapon hidden for centuries that holds the fate of humanity.
An asteroid storm in Antarctica is a prelude to what is coming if the satellite can’t be recovered and if it offers no clue to reversing the space-time distortion that is opening earth’s atmosphere to deadly “near-earth objects”. Closely related to the effort is a legendary black cross, made from an earlier NEO that struck earth. The cross belonged to St.Thomas the Apostle, who evangelised in Asia, according to the apocryphal “Acts of Thomas” and ancient Christian communities in southern India.
That, in a nutshell, is the plot and basis of the story.
One drawback of this book is that rather than keeping the readers focused on the real threat, restating it until it is vivid, Rollins throws in distracting subplots which included six major gunfights with Chinese triads, North Korean soldiers, and Mongolian nationalists. Including these obstacles while the clock is ticking away is a proven way to ramp up tension, but the repetitive nature of these firefights – where bad guys who can’t shoot versus outnumbered, crack-shot good guys – is a distraction. But eventually, the story comes to a climactic ending. Will the Sigma guys succeed to save the world from holocaust?
Readers will still enjoy the elements of The Eye of God, including an appendix in which Rollins discussed what was fact and what was fiction in the book. This also included a real comet that passed near the earth in the winter of 2014. Comet ISON, via Nasa Hubble telescope, made its closest pass to the earth on Dec 28, 2014.
The Eye of God is the ninth Sigma Force novel, and those who have read the earlier ones are probably bonded with the characters and will enjoy reading this book.
