The Second Hill

by Jon Gegenheimer

Overview

The Second Hill is a historical, "futuristic" novel that takes the reader from September 11, 2001 to June 7, 2043. The settings are Washington, D.C., London, San Francisco, New Orleans, Manhattan, and Paris. The unusual tale begins on that infamous day when terrorism reached America's shore and ends almost forty-two years later with a startling revelation about the Creator's reaction to (1) the carnage of "9/11" and (2) the evil that caused it.

The Second Hill examines the eternal conflicts between good and evil, theism and atheism, moral absolutism and moral relativism, individualism and collectivism, capitalism and socialism, and honesty and deceit - conflicts that, in the final analysis, are about the same thing.

The main characters speak and behave much unlike ordinary people. That is as it should be; extraordinary individuals do not carry on in ordinary fashion. The protagonists are uncommonly intellectual, but they are by no means elitist. They are not of the intelligentsia. Though danger and death continually threaten them, Christa Joyner, Jack Joyner, Alan John, and their cohorts never cower. They are as valiant as they are brilliant. They are as fearless as they are pure.

The Second Hill is atypical of fiction in that it contains copious historical and expository endnotes. Endnotes are requisite here because the narrative is grounded in history, and explanation is absolutely necessary to help the reader understand the philosophical, theological, and political aspects of the plot.

Essentially, The Second Hill is about Western civilization, Western values, and Western heroes. Hopefully, it will cause most of those who peruse its pages to think deeply about where the world is and where it most certainly will wind up if it continues down the slippery slope of relativism.

Many will see this compelling novel as a conservative manifesto. That is what it is.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781456732233
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	06/15/2011
Pages:	716
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.57(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Second Hill

A CALL TO ARMS AGAINST THE NEW LEFT

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By Jon Gegenheimer

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 Jon Gegenheimer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4567-3223-3

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Chapter One

Chilling Disbelief

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period ... Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities 1859

I

It was Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Jack Joyner awoke to his 4:00 a.m. alarm. His workday would begin in five hours.

Jack never rushed himself. His early morning jog through the dark streets of Georgetown invariably took an hour. The second hour or so allowed a leisurely shower, a careful shave, and the requisite attention to the remaining aspects of routine grooming and hygiene. By 6:30, Jack was freshened, dressed, and ready for his usual breakfast of perfectly ripe, low-glycemic-index fruit, various vitamin/mineral supplements, eight ounces of soy milk, and a pot of unsweetened green tea—arranged on the table alongside the Washington Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal by Maggie, his wife of almost seven years. Breakfast and the newspapers, particularly their op-ed sections, consumed about ninety minutes, quality time for Jack and Maggie, who enjoyed discussing the news of the day as they savored the morning repast.

At 8:15 on that pleasant, clear morning, Jack was ready for his unhurried five-block walk to Georgetown University. He kissed Maggie and told her that he would see her for lunch. While strolling down the shaded streets toward the Healy Gates, Jack thought about his first lecture of the new semester.

After collecting and reviewing his on-campus mail, he reached Room 106 in Healy Hall at 9:00. As he entered, his twelve freshmen students were seated around a rotund conference table. He sat down at the table and prepared to address the class. Before introducing himself, he recited a short but profound appeal: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit ... Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us, for we are sinners ... In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit ... Amen.

"In 1982, not long ago at all, I was a neophyte collegian just like each of you. As I entered the room this morning, I looked at your young faces, and I saw myself in each one of them. Nineteen years ago at Georgetown, I anxiously awaited the arrival of my first professor. The class was a philosophy proseminar like this one. I hope that you enjoy this class as much as I enjoyed mine.

"We embark today on a fascinating trek through the annals of Western philosophy. There are engaging stops along the way to the ultimate inquiry at journey's end: who are right—the moral absolutists or the moral relativists?

"I'm Jack Joyner, and I'm here to guide you toward the resolution of that critical, mystifying question. How the world answers it, I believe, will shape the twenty-first century."

Suddenly, Jack's attention was diverted. His cell phone, always holstered on his left hip, was vibrating. He focused on its screen. Maggie was calling.

"Please excuse me," he politely said to the attentive group. "I need to answer this call."

As he got up to step into the hallway to speak to his wife, Jack hoped that the young scholars were eager to hear what he would say next about their upcoming adventure.

"Hi, Maggie. What's up?"

"Jack, there is breaking news. About fifteen minutes ago, a plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. I'll call you back when I have more information."

"Good Lord! I'll let my class know! Maggie, they remind me so much of me at seventeen or eighteen. Anyway, please call me when you learn more about the crash. Unbelievable! Bye for now. I love you."

Jack reentered the classroom.

"That was my wife, Maggie. She's a professor here. She teaches Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and French. I hope that each of you studies a language under her.

"Maggie called to tell me that a plane just hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. Before we concentrate on philosophy, let's pause and say a silent prayer for those aboard the plane and in the Trade Center."

Surely, thought Jack, there is carnage in lower Manhattan. God, have mercy on the souls of those who have perished.

The cell phone vibrated again. Without a word to his students, Jack returned to the hallway to answer Maggie's call.

"Jack, something sinister is going on. A plane just struck the south tower. There is chaos in Manhattan. We're apparently under attack, but nobody knows by whom."

"Maggie, let me go back in and tell them about this. Stay in touch."

Jack's ruddy complexion turned ashen as he faced the innocent youngsters. The prospect of carnage again entered his mind.

"I have horrific news. Maggie just told me that a moment ago another plane struck the south tower of the Trade Center."

Jack saw perturbation among his apprentices and tried to calm their troubled minds.

"Well, let's sit tight until we hear something further."

After a brief pause, he posed the provocative question, "Does anyone know what the term 'postmodernism' means?"

Without delay, a confident young man raised his hand.

"Yes, sir," he answered firmly.

"What's your name, young man?"

"Alan, Alan John, sir."

"Thank you, Alan. Oh, I forgot to ask each of you for a brief bio. Before we proceed with the introductions, though, I want Alan to tell us what he knows about postmodernism."

Alan was calm and self-assured.

"The postmodernist denies that there are absolute truths, like the Ten Commandments. He submits that one can neither judge the rightness nor the wrongness of anything. Consider genocide. A postmodernist like Derrida maintains that there is no basic feature that makes genocide intrinsically wrong. The 'rightness' and the 'wrongness' of genocide are equally tenable. There is no objective truth."

Jack was pleasantly startled by young Alan's arresting maturity.

"At this early juncture, that's a really well stated formulation, Alan. You've adeptly cleared the path leading to the ultimate question's answer ... Well, let's introduce ourselves. Alan, we'll start with you and progress from your left."

"I'm Alan John from New Orleans. I graduated from Jesuit High School there. I was on the debate team, which won numerous top awards at places like Stanford, Berkeley, Emory, and the University of Chicago from 1997 to and including this year. I'm enrolled in the School of Foreign Service, where I intend to focus on economics, philosophy, and political science."

Again, Alan had surprised Jack—this time, extremely so. He could hardly wait to talk privately to the worldly youngster about their amazingly similar backgrounds. He paused for a few seconds, and after a hint of a smile aimed at Alan, he nodded to the eager young lady to Alan's left.

But before she could begin her bio, a thunderous explosion erupted. It seemed to have been a couple of miles away. Jack exclaimed, "What the hell was that?" Palpable fear gripped teacher and students.

Jack called Maggie. "Maggie, are you all right?"

Maggie's voice cracked with emotion. "I'm fine. I heard the explosion. I was calling you just as you reached me. Is everything okay at school?"

"As far as I can tell, everything's normal. Wait, I do see activity across Healy Lawn, near the security building."

"Hold on, Jack. There's another bulletin on Fox ... Good Lord, have mercy! Jack, the explosion was at the Pentagon! A plane just crashed into the Pentagon!"

"That's it. I'm calling Bob, and I'm coming home. I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Stay put."

Jack reached the dean. "Bob, have you heard the horrendous news about the Twin Towers? The Pentagon was just attacked. What the hell is going on?"

"Jack, dismiss your class, and instruct your students to get back to their dorms and watch the television news. They might want to call home to assure their families that they're okay. An announcement is forthcoming."

Just before the announcement suspending classes and ordering students and faculty to stay within the Georgetown environs, Jack told the puzzled, fearful youngsters that the explosion had happened at the Pentagon.

"An airplane just dove into the Pentagon. Stay on or near campus. The streets and the Metro are probably closed. Get to TV sets as soon as you can. Call home, and tell your parents that you are unharmed. I have your campus phone numbers. I'll call each of you concerning the next class and the assignment. Stay alert, be safe, and please pray."

Jack hurried out of Healy Hall, through the Healy Gates, and toward home. He arrived posthaste at 3301 N Street and ran to the den, where he saw Maggie staring at the television in chilling disbelief. Saying nothing, he sat next to his wife and hugged her. They saw people, defenestrated by terror, free-falling from the trembling infernos that had been the majestic Twin Towers. Without warning, the south tower collapsed into a wretched ash heap.

About twenty minutes later, another shocking story broke: United Airlines Flight 93 had crashed in Somerset County, near Pittsburgh.

"My God, Maggie, what's happening to our country?"

"Jack, I don't know what to think or say. Let's pray for the victims. God knows how many there are."

The dumbfounded couple joined hands to pray. But even prayer fell victim to the hellish day. Before Jack and Maggie could summon God, they were shocked yet again. The north tower joined its neighbor on the ground, a place that forever would be called "Ground Zero." Maggie ran to the phone to call Jack's family in New Orleans and hers in San Francisco. After assuring the Joyners and the Burkes that 3301 N Street was safe, Maggie joined Jack back on the sofa to await news that hopefully would explain the inexplicable bloodshed that, in the short space of two hours, had startled the world.

At 11:30, Jack suggested they walk to the student center, where they lunched almost every Tuesday with Miriam Kirke and Paul Wolfe, their friends who served on the faculty of the School of Foreign Service. When they arrived at the Faculty Club in the Leavey Center, Professors Kirke and Wolfe were glued to Fox News and sipping red wine. The Joyners sat down and helped themselves to the claret, an inviting bottle of Dourthe Numerol.

Professor Kirke, an imposing, stern woman in her early fifties, was an international affairs expert, who had served on the cabinets of two presidents. Professor Wolfe was a career diplomat before he joined the Georgetown faculty. He was fiftyish, jovial, and almost portly—a much less serious-looking character than his colleague.

The anxious foursome sat mute, their attention riveted to the television. The news reports continued. Incrementally, the mystery unraveled. The four crashes were ostensibly related, seemingly parts of a sinister scheme by Muslim fanatics to terrorize America—indeed, the Western world—by striking at freedom's vital organs: America's capitalist spirit, symbolized by the Manhattan Twin Towers, and its military-industrial complex, centered at the Pentagon. But what about the Pennsylvania crash? Apparently, that hijacked airliner had been aimed at either the White House or the Capitol, emanations of the federalist ideals advanced by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.

Professor Wolfe broke the silence. "What we are seeing, my friends, is further evidence of a new Crusade, a counter-Crusade by radical Islam against Judeo-Christianity—really, a frontal assault against Western civilization. Think back to the first Christian strikes against the Middle East nine centuries ago. Remember as well the subsequent Crusades. For so long, Christians waged war in Christ's name against the Muslim world, which never has forgiven the West for what Islam saw and continues to see as unprovoked belligerence. Well, it's payback time. Brace yourselves. We're in for a long, terrifying ride. Life as we have come to know it is over. Unspeakable evil has descended upon us."

Professor Kirke offered her observations. "Paul, I know what you mean by 'further evidence.' You and I have said for some time that the United States and the rest of the free world have not connected the dots on terrorist attacks. Today confirms that modern radical Islam has declared war on everything occidental. Let's connect the dots: the murderous assault on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the destruction of Pan Am 103 in 1988, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the strikes against American military headquarters in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa, the smashing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and the savage killing that we saw today. The counter-Crusade is clearly upon us.

"All of this begets the question: will there be, on the part of the West, an enduring, methodical response to systematic terrorism?"

After a minute of reticence, Jack suggested they have lunch. They made their way to the Faculty Club buffet, an eclectic arrangement of wholesome victuals as pleasing to the palate as to the eye. Back at their table, the incredulous academicians again focused on the news. The president, who had been in Sarasota, Florida, during the attacks, was sequestered aboard Air Force One somewhere in the blue yonder. But Jack knew that the world would hear from him soon enough.

After lunch, Jack and Maggie left for home while Professors Kirke and Wolfe remained to decipher further the calamity that America and the rest of the world eternally would call "9/11". Holding hands, the Joyners strolled through the campus toward their grand house.

"When we get home, Maggie, I'm going to my study to ponder what happened. Ideas are racing through my mind, and I need to sort through them."

Maggie responded, "Of course. I've got some thoughts to mull over as well."

II

Jac kretired to his study, a bright, sprawling room surrounded by bookshelves crammed with the works of philosophers, historians, political theorists, economists, and scientists. There was fiction as well. Jack was a Dickens aficionado; he had accumulated all of the venerable novelist's works.

Jack was fond of Duoro Valley Port, which he had discovered as a graduate student at the London School of Economics. He treated himself to a two-ounce pour and sat down at his massive Victorian desk, a serendipitous find at an old shop in London's Bloomsbury section. He gazed across the street at the Georgian mansion occupied by the Taylor Institute, a conservative think tank with which he was affiliated. Suddenly, and for no discernible reason, he focused on his Dickens collection. Instinctively, he pulled A Tale of Two Cities. His sixth sense directed him to the novel's renowned opening:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period ...

Dickens was describing the period of the French Revolution (circa 1789–1799), an arrantly misguided quest for political and economic freedom. He feared the political and social zealotry that had seized France near the close of the eighteenth century would recur in mid-nineteenth-century England.

Jack saw a striking parallel between Dickens's anxiety and his own fears about the already paradoxical twenty-first century, an enormously optimistic time abruptly battered by inconceivable depravity. He reflected on recent history and realized that what Dickens said a century and a half ago could be said on September 11 in the year 2001, annus horribilis. Dickens had dreaded the prospect of a French Revolution in Victorian England. Jack, in Burkian/Dickensian fashion, feared the possibility of a twenty-first-century world dominated by moral relativism. Indeed, thought Jack, "it is the best and worst of times." The Cold War is over, and freedom is on the march around the world. Yet, freedom just has been assailed in its crucible, not by a malevolent army, but by stateless, delusional extremists whose sole motivation is the evisceration of Western civilization.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Second Hill by Jon Gegenheimer Copyright © 2011 by Jon Gegenheimer. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Chapter 1. Chilling Disbelief....................1
Chapter 2. The Evildoers and the Desk....................11
Chapter 3. The Nightingale....................23
Chapter 4. Little Miss....................37
Chapter 5. The Tao....................51
Chapter 6. The New Left....................71
Chapter 7. Christa....................95
Chapter 8. The Man in the Mask and Ichabod....................115
Chapter 9. The Beggars and the Surrealist....................137
Chapter 10. The Maltese Falcon....................153
Chapter 11. The Grapes of Wrath....................181
Chapter 12. "Weaving Spiders, Come Not Here"....................207
Chapter 13. Hatred....................225
Chapter 14. Déjà Vu....................251
Chapter 15. Amen Corner....................285
Chapter 16. Miracles....................309
Chapter 17. E = mc²....................337
Chapter 18. The Grapes of Rectitude....................381
Chapter 19. Atlas Shrugged....................413
Chapter 20. Imagine....................445
Chapter 21. The God of the Founders....................479
Chapter 22. Dutch....................511
Chapter 23. Paradox....................541
Chapter 24. A Jeweler's Eye....................569
Chapter 25. M = E/c²....................615