by Matt Ruff
Yes, and if he were super-spy Jafar Bashir he might have pulled it off, might even have made it out of the mansion before being cut down by the rest of the Republican Guard. Samir Nadim would be lucky to get out of the room alive . . . assuming he had the heart to try, which he did not.
Mustafa, the only one of them not contemplating murder, focused his attention on the brass bottle. He’d examined it as carefully as he could in the moving taxi. It contained nothing but a few grains of sand and a faint odor of incense: Sniffing at the bottle’s opening, Mustafa detected an undertone of sulfur. The smell sparked no special memories, but the weight of the bottle in his hands was weirdly familiar.
Mustafa had offered Iyad a chance to examine the bottle as well, but Iyad was no longer interested. As soon as they were clear of Sadr City, he pulled the taxi over and told Mustafa and the others to get out. “And next time you need a favor, cousin, try calling the Mukhabarat.” Mustafa didn’t argue with him, only nodded solemnly and said, “Peace be unto you, Iyad.”
As Iyad drove off, Samir suggested with forced casualness that they return the bottle to headquarters and “have it checked out.”
“Checked out for what?” Amal asked. “It’s empty.”
“Well, yeah, there’s nothing in it, but what if the thing itself is . . . I don’t know, radioactive or something.”
Amal laughed. “If it’s radioactive, I say we get it into Saddam’s hands as soon as possible.”
Mustafa had sided with Amal, so they’d hailed another cab and gone directly to the Republic. And now they stood waiting while Saddam’s antiquities expert verified the authenticity of the “battery.” The expert, a diminutive Kurd whom Saddam had introduced as Mr. Rammal, acted more like a fortune-teller than an archaeologist: He laid both hands on the bottle, closed his eyes, and muttered under his breath. When this incantation, or whatever it was, was completed, he looked over at Saddam and nodded.
“Excellent!” Saddam said.
“Are you sure?” said Mustafa, who’d found himself hoping incongruously that the bottle would fail the test.
“Of course we are sure,” said Saddam. He glanced at the Kurd, who repeated his nod. “If Mr. Rammal is satisfied, so am I. And so should you be.”
“It’s just that this object isn’t what I was expecting. There’s no iron bar inside, no copper cylinder . . .”
“Copper cylinder?”
“To generate the electric current. If it’s really a battery, it’s a broken battery.”
“Mustafa al Baghdadi, you think too hard,” Saddam Hussein said. For a moment his good humor lifted like a veil, exposing a more dangerous emotion underneath.
Then he was smiling again. “Come! Let me give you your reward!” Saddam turned to the wall map of Samarra and pulled it down to reveal a hidden safe. He opened the safe and took out an index card which he handed to Mustafa.
“ ‘V. Howell Industries,’ ” Mustafa read from the card. “This is the source of the mirage artifacts?”
“It’s as close to the source as I’ve been able to get,” Saddam told him. “My agents have traced several of the items in my collection to V. Howell. Whether they’re the origin or just a link in the chain I can’t say.”
“And this address: 1145 Jefferson Davis Pike, Herndon, Virginia . . .”
“It’s a small office park.”
“In Fairfax County?”
“Yes. A section that the Marines didn’t burn down. From the outside it looks like a low-security facility, but every spy I’ve sent in for a closer look has failed to report back.”
“So this is the big lead?” Samir said. “An office park in America?”
“It’s more than you had,” Saddam said. “It’s more than Bin Laden has. Al Qaeda would give a lot for that address, I’d bet. Though whether they’d be able to do anything with it . . .”
“But you think we can?” said Mustafa.
“If you’re working for the president as you claim. You can have the Marines escort you while you make your inquiries. I imagine they’d be only too happy to help convince V. Howell Industries to cooperate.”
“And if we end up disappearing like your spies?” Amal said. “I’m sure you’ll shed a tear for us from the safety of Baghdad.”
Saddam shrugged. “I promised information, not immunity from danger. I think it’s more than a fair trade. But here, I’ll sweeten the deal . . .” He reached into the safe again and pulled out a sheet of paper. “This information is less exclusive, but still quite valuable.”
The sheet contained a list of names. “Who are these people?” Mustafa asked.
“Candidates for my own deck of cards,” Saddam Hussein said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I believe you would call them ‘persons of interest.’ If you can find them and get them to talk, they should have many fascinating things to tell you.” He added: “I’d like to interrogate one or two of them myself, if I could. In fact I would pay for the privilege. Handsomely.”
“But you don’t know where they are?”
“At least some of them should be living in or around the American capital,” Saddam said. “A few others may be in Texas. They will probably be people of influence, well respected, but however much power they have, it won’t be what they feel they deserve.” His expression clouded. “They’ll be . . . frustrated. Eternally frustrated.”
“You are talking in riddles,” Mustafa said, “and I’m afraid after being up all night I have no head for it . . . Who are these people? How did you get this list?”
“I can’t tell you where the list comes from.”
“Somehow I thought that would be your answer.” Mustafa sighed and stared at the paper. “What kind of name is ‘Condoleezza’?”
“A woman. A black lady. She’s less interesting to me than some of the others. The names higher up the list, those are the ones I really want.”
The top two names on the list were almost identical. “A father and son?” Mustafa asked.
“Yes,” Saddam said. “Those two I would very much like to have as my guests.”
“You would like . . . So is this list for our benefit or yours?”
“There’s no reason why we can’t all benefit. If you should find any of these people, and if, after questioning them, you decide to pass them along to me, I will of course show my gratitude. Get me the father and the son, and you can have anything that is within my power to give . . . But please, don’t say yes or no now. Just keep my offer in mind.”
Mustafa ran a hand through his hair. He looked from the paper to the card and back again, then took another long look at the brass bottle. “Very well,” he said finally, “I’ll thank you for this information and see where it leads us. Enjoy your ‘battery.’ ”
“Oh, I will,” Saddam Hussein said. “And you, Mustafa al Baghdadi . . . Good hunting.”
Book Three
The Glory and the Kingdom
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE
Lyndon B. Johnson
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Lyndon Baines Johnson (August 27, 1908–December 30, 2006), a Protestant of the Disciples of Christ sect, was president of the Christian States of America (CSA) from November 22, 1963 until April 9, 2003. He seized power in the wake of the Kennedy family assassinations and was deposed during the Arabian invasion of America.
EARLY LIFE
Johnson was born in Stonewall in the Evangelical Republic of Texas. His father was a government official whose fortunes declined after he incurred the wrath of a powerful Baptist senator. In 1929 the entire family was forced to flee into exile in America.
RISE TO POWER
Little is known of Johnson’s activities over the next quarter century, but by the mid-1950s he had become a member of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the American national police bureau charged with maintai
ning internal security. In 1958 Johnson uncovered a plot by a former naval officer named Richard Milhous Nixon to assassinate then-president Joseph P. Kennedy. Two years later, when Kennedy abdicated in favor of his son John, Johnson was put in charge of the DOJ’s Secret Service branch.
On November 22, 1963, during a state visit to Texas, John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by a sniper. Back in Washington, D.C., Johnson ordered the Secret Service to round up the rest of the Kennedy clan and take them to a safe location. That evening, Johnson went on television and announced that the plane carrying the Kennedys to Hyannis Port had blown up in midair. “For the good of the country,” he said, he would assume the powers of the executive himself. He then declared martial law . . .
While he solidified his grip on power, Johnson also began laying the groundwork for the conquest of his birth country.
“FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM . . .”
Under interrogation following his capture by Coalition forces, Johnson’s senior advisor Henry Kissinger revealed that since at least the 1960s, Johnson had had a recurring dream in which an angel recited to him the closing line of the Lord’s Prayer: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.” In the dream, Johnson understood “the kingdom” to be a reference to the Republic of Texas, while “the glory” was America; “the power” was Johnson himself, destined by God to unite the two nations—and ultimately, the entire North American continent—under one rule.
In September 1964, Johnson publicly accused the Texas CIA of masterminding the Kennedy killings. Among other evidence, he cited the suspicious death, in custody, of Dallas sniper Lee Harvey Oswald—murdered, Johnson said, to prevent him from revealing on whose orders he had acted. The Texas government formally denied Johnson’s charges. Johnson put his armies on alert and prepared America for war.
Both Kissinger and military strategist Robert McNamara recommended a naval blockade of the Texas coast followed by an amphibious assault. But Johnson, inspired by another dream, decided to attack over land. As Texas and America do not share a border, this meant going through another country—either the Pentecostal Gilead Heartland, or the independent kingdoms of Mississippi and Louisiana.
Johnson chose to go through Gilead. He manufactured a casus belli, claiming that American patrol boats on Lake Erie had been fired at by ships of Gilead. On November 1, 1964, he launched a three-pronged ground assault west out of Appalachia. The attack went smoothly at first, but on November 3, an early blizzard blanketed the Midwest and halted the advance. Pentecostal militias, undaunted by the snow, counterattacked the Americans’ supply lines; by the time the weather cleared two weeks later, Johnson’s troops were starving and running out of fuel and ammunition. They staged an emergency retreat to the mountains, but were forced to abandon much of their equipment, which the Gileadites then seized . . .
The Heartland War raged on and off for eight years. Gilead’s eastern plains were devastated and the cities of Detroit, Columbus, and Nashville were all but destroyed, but Johnson’s troops were never able to gain a decisive advantage. America’s technological and industrial superiority was matched by the fanaticism of the Gileadites, who pioneered the use of suicide bombers as a military tactic. The Mormon and Rocky Mountain tribespeople, fearing they would be at risk if Gilead fell, also joined in the fighting. Texas sent military aid and advisors.
The 1973 Algiers Peace Accords officially ended the war. Johnson’s forces withdrew to the Appalachians for the last time. Although America had suffered little physical damage during the conflict, its economy was in shambles and its people were on the verge of revolt. Johnson would spend the next two decades coping with civil unrest and other domestic crises, but he never gave up his dream of conquering Texas. By the 1990s, he was ready to try again.
1991: THE MEXICAN GULF WAR
In June 1990, following a palace coup, the Kingdom of Mississippi allowed itself to be annexed and became America’s eighteenth state. Henry Kissinger flew to New Orleans and invited Louisiana’s leaders to join the CSA as well; they declined.
On August 2, American troops invaded Louisiana. By August 6 much of the Louisiana Armed Forces had surrendered or fled into Texas. LBJ christened Louisiana the nineteenth American state and began massing his forces along the east Texas border.
Texas successfully appealed to its fellow OPEC members for help. On August 8 the UAS and Persia began airlifting troops into Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth, while the Venezuelan Navy established a defensive cordon along the Texas coastline . . . On January 17, 1991, the Coalition launched a massive air campaign. A ground assault followed on February 23, and in just 100 hours of fighting, Louisiana was liberated . . .
Although the Americans had suffered a humiliating military defeat, Johnson declared the Gulf War a great victory. Johnson’s preening only added to the sense among many of the war’s critics that, by allowing LBJ to remain in power, the Coalition had failed to finish the job. This in turn set the stage for the final act in the dictator’s career . . .
They had landed in Tripoli to refuel. Looking out the window beside his seat, Mustafa could see, through the heat-shimmer rising off the tarmac, a broad tract of eucalyptus trees abutting the airfield. A sign identified this as CARBON SEQUESTRATION TEST PLOT #11.
By North African standards Tripoli was a lush city, its parks and gardens well irrigated by one of the governor’s most successful public works projects, the Great Manmade River, which had tapped into the vast fossil water aquifer beneath the Sahara Desert. These eucalypti were part of an even grander Al Gaddafi scheme to fight global warming by turning the desert into a forest. Test plots like this one had been established throughout Libya, some two hundred hectares in all; the final plan called for the planting of a billion hectares, with over a trillion trees. It was going to take a while. But then the Internet hadn’t happened in a day either.
Mustafa, Samir, and Amal had left Baghdad in the early morning, catching a commuter flight to Riyadh, where a military jeep had been waiting to transfer them to Al Kharj Air Force Base. At Al Kharj they had boarded this massive cargolifter. Although the occupation of America was supposed to be winding down, you’d never guess it by the amount of matériel crammed into the plane’s cargo bay. An airman led them forward between the pallets of ammunition, medical supplies, and food rations, and up a stairwell to the passenger deck. There was relatively little human cargo; the handful of occupied seats were taken mostly by flight attendants and other crewmembers not directly involved in flying the plane.
The cargolifter’s scheduled travel time was fifteen hours. Mustafa had brought plenty to read: lots of background material on America, and some classified documents obtained for him, with minimal redactions, by the president’s staff. Samir and Amal had similar reading packets.
“Ready for takeoff,” the pilot announced.
A peculiarity of the cargolifter was that the passenger seats, unlike those in a civilian airliner, were fixed facing backwards, so as the plane lifted off Mustafa was easily able to look out and watch first the eucalyptus tract and then the dusty green patchwork that was Tripoli recede into the distance. Soon they were gone from view and the plane proceeded westward over a tan landscape, the rocks and sand of the great forest yet to be.
Mustafa returned to his reading.
The report, authored by the Political Science Faculty of the University of Sudan at Khartoum, was titled “Colorblind: The Role of Race in the American Insurgency.” It began with a brief recap of the history of black-white relations in 20th-century America. For the first two-thirds of the century, the CSA had practiced a form of racial apartheid—openly in the southern states, and more covertly in the north, where, according to the report, “white citizens wanted the benefits of racial preference without the culpability.”
A Civil Rights Act banning race discrimination had been drafted by the Kennedys and signed into law by LBJ during the first year of his rule. “Statements made by Johnson and his closest aides suggest tha
t in this, as in the attempted conquest of Texas, he believed he was carrying out God’s will. His enemies accused him of more cynical motives. In the south, particularly, the Civil Rights Act was seen as a pretext for expanding federal power and curtailing ‘states’ rights.’ ” Several attempts at insurrection had to be crushed by federal troops. The Department of Justice rounded up political troublemakers—black as well as white—and shipped them off to the front lines of the Heartland War. “While Johnson succeeded at dismantling the American apartheid system—the one truly admirable achievement of his reign—he did not eliminate American racism. Rather, he drove his subjects’ ethnic hatred underground, where it festered for decades, waiting for a chance to spring forth again. That chance finally came in 2003. The Coalition invasion of America crippled federal control over the states. It also created a situation in which open expression of prejudice against darker-skinned people was considered not just politically acceptable, but patriotic . . .”
Enter Boulos al Darir, a favored son of the National Party of God and the man chosen to oversee the reconstruction of America during the crucial first year following the invasion. He was a disaster, issuing a series of unpopular decrees that killed whatever small chance there might have been of a peaceful transition to democracy.
The most infamous of these decrees was Order Number 2, which disbanded the Minutemen—the American National Guard—thereby throwing half a million heavily armed Christians out of work. Order Number 3, a purge of all Christian Democrat Party members from the Federal Civil Service, created another hundred thousand unemployed. “Because many of these civil servants, as well as many of the Minutemen stationed in the Washington, D.C., area, were African-American,” the report stated, “these Orders were widely interpreted as an attempt by the occupying forces to ally with the white majority against the black minority. Had this in fact been the case, Administrator Al Darir’s policy decisions might have been defensible on practical if not moral grounds. However, it appears in hindsight that he acted in ignorance, creating enormous racial animus to no purpose.”