Nostradamus - the last Christmas.
Publisher: Book Guild
Published: 1988
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
First sentence: The pale blue Mazda pickup pulled to a halt a few yards in front of a red and white banded security barrier blocking the entrance to Ndola airstrip. The drive from Lusaka had been long and tiresome along an ill-maintained and pothole ridden excuse for a road that only a few years previously had been a main trunk route to Zambia's thriving coppper belt.
Description: The Last Christmas describes events leading to the exposure in 1995 of a new Islamic leader born from the ashes of the devastating conflict between Iraq and Iran. The king is a new 'chosen one', determined to end the humiliation of a Gulf war settlement and bring the Moslem nations to the front of world leadership. While the west looks inward, the new Mahdi, allied with the Russians, makes his moves in a global chess game where there can be no winners - and the world could be reduced to ashes. Maxwell - an enigmatic Englishman - has friends in both camps. But what can one man do against the intrigues of Arab politics allied with even shadier influences. The Last Christmas is a terrifyingly but wholly believable scenario of a world we might have known. Will the prophesies of Nostradamus be fulfilled?
Notes: Nostradamus - The Last Christmas was meant to be the first part of a trilogy of world events starting in 1999 and leading through to the prophesies of Nostradamus Century Two, Quatrain Twenty Nine:
'A man from the East will come out of his seat and will cross the Apennines to see France. He will cross through the sky, the seas and the snows and he will strike everyone with his rod'
However, the events of the first Gulf war against Iraq changed the political scene in the Middle East to such an extent that the planned following books were never published.