"We're completely surrounded! They're trying to blockade the clinic."

"What?" The eighteen-year-old college beauty sitting on the exam table glanced with worry at the only window in the room. "Has this ever happened before?" The sound of the chatter outside grew louder and she pulled her thin hospital gown tighter against her skin, shivering more from anxiety than from the chilly air falling from the vent above her.

"Not as long as I've been here." The nurse regretted her frantic announcement and tried to comfort the patient with a pat on the thigh. "Don't worry, Jessica. The police will start arresting them and then they'll disperse."

The patient's eyes grew dim and the nurse could tell that the sedative was taking effect. A dark-skinned man in green scrubs entered the room pushing a waist-high machine on wheels. "Ah, there's the physician now."

"Hello, ma'am." The physician greeted the sedated patient in his thick foreign accent. He rolled the machine beside the exam table. "This'll be over in a few minutes." The nurse plugged the machine into an electric outlet, flipped a switch, and it jolted to life with a hum.

"Will it hurt?" the freshman brunette slurred, her speech affected by the medication.

"You'll only feel a little bit of pressure."

"No. Will it hurt the baby?"

The nurse and the physician stared at each other uneasily for a moment and the doctor ordered her, "Two more Versed and fifty Demerol." He donned the sterile rubber gloves and grabbed the speculum.

"Will it hurt the baby?"

"It's just a blob of tissue, Jessica." Dr. E inserted a plastic speculum to visually examine her cervix. "It can't think, it can't feel anything."

The physician was startled by what sounded like gunfire in the distance. "What the--"

He jumped off his stool and headed to the window. He saw federal agents and camouflage-clothed soldiers arresting protesters and loading them into several buses. But he could not see where the gunfire had originated. Several of the soldiers began to raise their weapons and turn their attention to the west.

The nurse joined the abortionist by the window. He shut the blinds with a curse, and then returned to the patient. "Come on! The FBI and the military will do their job, now let's do ours."

"Yes sir."

As Dr. E reached for a pair of pincher forceps on the table of instruments, the singing outside the clinic grew loud and bothersome. He tried to remain focused on his duties. "You'll feel a little pinch, ma'am." He grasped the lower lip of her cervix with the forceps and the patient complained in a slow drawl.

"Oww!"

"One more milligram of Versed." The physician began to insert steel rods into her cervix, beginning with the small rod, and then moving to larger and larger rods, to gradually dilate the opening to the womb. He slid out a shelf from the top of the exam table between the patient's legs to catch any blood that dripped out. He grabbed the suction device attached to the wheeled machine. When he inserted it into Jessica's dilated cervix, she roused from her somnolent state to let out a gravelly moan.

Suddenly, the cheering and shouting from the protesters outside grew very loud. Dr. E was suspicious, so he went to the window to glance outside. He felt confident that most of the protesters would freely depart when faced with arrest, but he was shocked to discover that those who had been handcuffed and detained on the yellow school buses were getting off the buses and coming back on his property. The soldiers on the sidewalk did not appear to be trying to prevent them.

Dr. E was furious! He removed his gloves and threw them on the floor. Then he unlocked the window and opened it about six inches. He parted the blinds and shouted at the soldiers on the sidewalk, "What in the world are you doing?"

His shouting startled Jessica and the nurse. Jessica turned to the doctor and saw him gazing out the window through the parted blinds.

The hundreds of protesters blockading the clinic turned to the abortionist and began to shout reproofs at him, and he hastily shut the window and the blinds. He stomped back to the patient and donned fresh gloves. "Let's get this over with!"

Momentarily, Dr. E heard yelling coming from the hallway outside. At first, the words were not discernable. Then he heard, "Dr. E! Dr. E!"

The abortionist handed the suction device to the nurse and bemoaned the fact that he had not given enough sedative to the previous patient. He removed the speculum from Jessica and stood up to exit the room, predicting that he would have to restrain an unruly, emotional patient in the hallway.

Just as he reached for the doorknob, the door opened, and in stepped the unshaven Austin sheriff, six foot four and sixty pounds heavier than when he was a heavyweight-boxing champion.

"Dr. Eladomidachi?" Sheriff Matt Wellington slowly stepped through the partially ajar door.

"Yes?" The doctor had a confused look on his face.

"Have you completed this abortion?"

"Uh, no. Why?"

"Well, then for this," Sheriff Wellington said as he flipped off the abortion suction machine, "you'll be charged with attempted murder." He pointed down the hall and ordered his deputies in the hallway, "Those patients are to be cuffed and taken to the hospital, along with the records." The sheriff turned to face the doctor. "For those abortions, you may face charges of first degree murder."

"You have got to be kidding me?" Dr. E's foreign accent became more prominent with the rise in his adrenaline.

Sheriff Wellington took one look at the patient on the table and raised his voice, "Get the squad in here!" The officer just outside the room made a call on his radio for the emergency medical team to make their way to room eight.

"This is my patient and I'm in the middle of a procedure! This is a violation of my rights and the rights of this patient."

"I'm the chief law enforcement officer in the city of Austin, and I'm placing you under arrest."

"Under arrest?"

The sheriff glanced at the stunned nurse, who anxiously gripped the clipboard. "Arrest all the staff as murder accomplices. The murder weapon is in here."

"This procedure is perfectly legal!" the physician shouted. "A panel of three federal judges ruled the Texas Life Bill unconstitutional this morning."

"The state of Texas is going to prosecute you anyway. Where's that squad?" The sheriff turned to look over his shoulder at a subordinate on the phone in the hallway. "I want an EMT squad, now!"

"No!" Dr. E's shrill scream made the austere Austin sheriff flinch. The physician reached under his scrub top and unholstered a 38-caliber pistol. He raised it and leveled it at the sheriff's chest. Sheriff Wellington's eyes widened and he put up his hands as the doctor prepared to shoot. The doctor pulled the trigger and the bullet struck the sheriff's left shoulder. The force of the bullet striking bone slammed him against the wall, splattering blood onto the mirror. The sheriff grunted in pain then darted from the room just as a second bullet whizzed above his head.

The two deputies in the hallway unholstered their weapons and prepared to fire through the open door. Dr. E ducked behind the exam table just as Jessica tried to sit up. He grabbed her by the hair with one hand, put the tip of his handgun to her temple, and dragged her off the table till she was standing in front of him. She screamed in terror as Dr. E shouted out orders.

"Get the FBI in here or I'll kill her!"

The two deputies lowered their weapons. "Don't shoot her--"

"The FBI! They're just outside. I want an FBI escort out of Texas, now!"

"Okay, just take it easy."

When Dr. E pulled out his handgun, the nurse had crawled behind the suction machine to hide. Dr. E saw her and ordered her, "Shut the door!" When she was slow to move, he screamed louder and pointed the gun at her. "Shut it now!" The nurse quickly obeyed.

The adrenaline rush Jessica was experiencing soon overcame any affect the medication was having on her. When she realized that the gun was no longer pointed at her head, she stomped on the doctor's right foot, thrust her head forward, then whipped it backwards and struck his nose. His body cringed in pain and he dropped the gun. It landed by the foot of the exam table. Jessica lunged for it and the physician pushed her forward. Her body slammed against the table and she fell hard to the ground.

The deputies heard the struggle and peeked in the door. When they saw the physician had been disarmed, they leveled their 45-caliber handguns at him. "Freeze! Put your hands in the air!" He instantly complied.

Jessica reached for the physician's pistol and that's when she saw it - a three-inch fetus leg lay beside the gun. Her body was expelling her mutilated baby. The leg was perfectly formed; she could count five little toes. She opened her mouth in horror and screamed at the top of her lungs. At first, the deputies thought she was gravely injured, but when she grabbed the pistol, rose to her feet, and aimed the gun at the abortionist, they froze.

"Whoa! Young lady, put that gun down. We'll arrest him and put him on trial."

She turned and aimed the gun at them briefly. "He was going to kill me. He killed my baby!"

"Just put it down, sweetheart." One of the deputies noticed the river of blood pouring down her leg, apparently from the incomplete abortion. "We're gonna give your baby justice. Put it down and we'll get you to a real doctor."

"No! Get me a preacher!"

"You don't want to do this," one of the deputies pleaded with her.

"I need a preacher now!" She slammed the door shut with her foot, careful to keep the gun aimed at the abortionist.

Sheriff Wellington had been leaning against the wall in the hallway, diaphoretic with pain, applying pressure to his shoulder wound to try and stop the bleeding.

The two deputies turned to him for guidance. "What do we do?"

"Get her a preacher."

"Why does she want a--"

"Just do it!" Matt Wellington sat down in the hallway just outside the room, and leaned against it.

One of the deputies rushed from the room and found a man who claimed to be a preacher just outside. He had been helping to orchestrate the crowd of protesters who surrounded the clinic. He was a thin man with a light brown goatee. He had a well-worn muddy orange cap pulled low on his brow. He did not look like a preacher at all. The deputy had briefed him on the situation on his way into the clinic. He knelt down beside the sheriff and prayed a brief prayer for him.

"Are you a concealed carrier? Do you have a weapon?"

The preacher shook his head side to side. "That's not the kind of weapon that'll pull down these kinds of strongholds, Sheriff."

"She could shoot you. She's not in her right mind."

"For me to live is Christ and to die is gain." The smile on the thin preacher's face was quite out of place. The sheriff gazed into the cool blue eyes of this thin preacher with the U.T. cap, and he felt at peace.

"Philippians 1:21," Sheriff Matt Wellington responded, giving the reference of the Bible verse. "I'll be praying."

The preacher rose, slowly opened the door, and poked his head into the room as the officers kept guard beside their injured boss. He quickly assessed the situation. The dark-skinned physician's face was covered with blood from a broken nose. He leaned against the wall in the corner of the room with his hands raised, a look of terror on his face as he begged for his life. A young woman in a thin hospital gown tied loosely in the back pointed a 38-caliber revolver at the abortionist. She trembled as she stood in a pool of her own blood. Her face was as white as the tile floor. A nurse cowered on her hands and knees in the corner of the room.

The woman glanced at him quickly, careful to keep her aim on the abortionist. "Are you a preacher?"

"Yes. My name is David Jameson."

When the deputy outside the clinic approached him, his heart had been pounding from a surge of rapturous joy at the closing of the last child-killing center in the state of Texas. At first he was worried that the deputy had identified him; he was, after all, the most wanted man in America according to the FBI. As he watched this pale, anxious young woman aim the pistol at the abortionist in the killing room, his heart found a new reason to pound wildly inside his chest.

"Will God forgive me if I kill him?" She did not turn her gaze from her target as she asked her question.

When the preacher hesitated to answer, she turned to him and warned him coldly: "I've got enough bullets in this gun for every person in this room, so don't try anything funny. He told me it wasn't a baby, but there's a little leg right there on the floor!" She stepped six inches closer to the abortionist, the gun shaking in her grasp. "He deserves it!"

"No, Jessica. Please, no." The physician summoned pity, begging for his life.

David's thin frame, prematurely thinning hair, and nasal voice had never been the stuff of confidence. He had been thrust into a storm of political conflict and raging violence apart from any choice of his own. Revival in God's church and across the nation was his unbending prayer. He never wanted revolution. All he wanted was the unhindered presence of God in his life and in his country. All he wanted was freedom for his children. But God wanted him to be the bridge of heaven over the pit of hell.

She raised her voice to a high-pitched shrill, the gun shaking in her trembling grasp. "Will God forgive me if I kill him?!"

Four months earlier...