The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE

by Carlos Carrasco

  “The only way to save my nation from being carved up into small pieces is to make it part of something bigger,” O’Neill told him. “The North American Union is that something bigger.”

  Simon congratulated the American President on his broadmindedness during their last meeting nine months ago. “I don’t think any past President would have ever considered such a move.”

  “Well, it’s a different world now.”

  “Indeed it is,” Simon agreed. “With a truly progressive leader such as yourself leading a nation as great as yours, we can work together to make it a better world, Mr. President.”

  The long years spent serving under an egomaniac like Hugo Chavez pressed upon the young Aguilera the utility of flattery when dealing with world leaders. It is a skill he has honed to great effect over the years. It helped disarm the President’s initial reluctance to the Secretary General’s other wish, the releasing of the last batch of foreign combatants held, some for over a decade, in American prisons.

  “The Hague, Amnesty International and every human rights group consider those held to be political prisoners,” Simon told the President. “The war is over, sir. They cannot rightly be called enemy combatants any more. Send them home to their families, Mr. President. I believe freeing them will generate much goodwill for you in the Muslim world.”

  O’Neill eventually relented but insisted that Simon make no mention of their ‘gentlemen’s accord’ until after his re-election.

  “There are those among my opposition that would spin these acts of clemency and cooperation as weakness,” O’Neill said.

  “I understand, Mr. President,” Aguilera assured him. “You will choose the best time to announce your plans.”

  That was another lesson learned in Venezuela. Simon is careful never to take credit for his ideas. When President O’Neill left his private audience with the Secretary General, he did so aglow with the self-congratulatory light of a man who thought himself not just clever, but enlightened as well.

  The American President did not know that ‘his’ plan to release the Islamist fighters would allow Simon to close a deal with the Iranian ambassador he has been working on ever since his appointment as Secretary General. The Venezuelan Supreme Revolutionary Council wants nuclear weapons. They need them if they are to effectively counter America’s strength in the hemisphere. More specifically, Venezuela is determined to keep the US out of Cuba and draw the island nation into closer orbit around Caracas. The Council is confident that merely possessing a few ‘big bombs’ will be sufficient to get America to back down and make of the Caribbean and Gulf, a Venezuelan sea.

  Simon is inclined to agree. America’s defeat in Iraq demoralized the nation. The twenty kiloton nuke that destroyed the Panama Canal has it spooked. Twelve years of budget cuts have dulled the eagle’s talons. Whatever fight is left in the superpower is turned in on itself. Everyone senses their day is done. The press runs frequent stories detailing the torturously protracted self-destruction of the American Empire.

  The Iranians agree as well. However, their own Supreme Council of Mullahs was reluctant to share the fruits of their rebuilt nuclear program until the Secretary General used his influence on behalf of Islam and Jihad. After much negotiating, it was agreed that the release of thousands of Islamist fighters would be a suitable gesture of goodwill to both Allah and the Mullahs. All parties were satisfied with the deal Simon brokered. Aguilera himself was well pleased.

  Simon Aguilera has dealt with Islamic leaders often in his thirty years in international politics. He does not like them. He certainly does not trust them. Simon recognizes that they want the same thing he does, a world government; but their medieval notion of a world-wide caliphate is not something he is willing to get behind. As a bloc, Muslim countries rejected UN Resolution 2112 and, it being his signature policy as Secretary General, he resents them for it, but not so much that he will let the slight keep him from working with them on other fronts. Aguilera is too much of a pragmatist for that. Socialists and Islamists worked together often because they shared an enemy in the capitalist power of America, but Simon knows the day must come when the two will fight it out for world domination. If he can bring America and maybe China or Russia into the UN’s fold, he would rid the world of the Islamists once and for all. In the meantime he deals as well as he can with the odious ally.

  The recent events in Washington do not please the Secretary General. Quite to the contrary, Simon Aguilera is displeased and disturbed. The events have ‘military coup’ written all over them. Particularly frustrating is the loss of the satellites. In one swift stroke the entire world has been returned to pre-Sputnik communications. All coups were unsettling affairs, but because nothing of this sort has ever occurred in America, the Secretary General feels a peculiar chill in his bones. The world, he knows, is entering uncharted waters.

  He is at his window, racking his brain, trying to figure out who might be behind it all, and what, if anything, he can do about it, when four American soldiers walk into his office unannounced. The oldest of them, a Colonel with short-cropped brown hair and a badly scarred neck, speaks in a low and raspy voice.

  “Merry Christmas, Secretary General.”

  “Who are you?” Aguilera demands.

  The old soldier tosses a small, leather bag at him. Simon plucks it out of the air. Inside the bag is a lump of coal.

  “What are you doing in my office?”

  “We’re here to evict you.”

  Dearborn, Michigan

  19:28:03

  Sheik Qassim Abdul Zahra does not allow televisions in his Dearborn Michigan home. He doesn’t want his family exposed to the poison of Western culture any more than they are forced to by living among the infidels. Zahra does not hear of the assassination attempt until one of his aides whispers the news into his ear after evening prayers. Sheik Qassim is immediately intrigued. It is not so much by the shooting itself, but the fact that it happened within a locked down Air Force base gives him pause. He cannot think of any of his brothers who have the sort of reach which could’ve infiltrated the Secret Service. He is all but certain that another player is responsible. The American military itself is, no doubt, involved. As Zahra hears further details he becomes ever more convinced of the US military’s authorship. How can it be otherwise, he thinks, especially in light of the satellite failings?

  Sheik Qassim Abdul Zahra orders his guards to bring out his car. Within minutes, he is in the automobile heading to the Ikhwan Mosque and Salafi Cultural Center. He has the driver turn on the car’s television. The small screens on the back of the headrests show channel after channel of snowy static.

  “Can we get news on the radio?”

  “No, Sheik,” answers the driver. “It’s all just static.”

  “Then how do we know what has happened?”

  “I saw the assassination attempt and the shooting of the planes over the Potomac River.”

  “How Mahmoud?”

  There is a pause before the driver answers. “I saw it on my cell phone, Imam.”

  Mahmoud keeps his eyes on the road. He has just admitted that he was watching television while on duty. Sheik Zahra decides to ignore the infraction for the moment.

  “It was on the news for a few minutes,” the driver says, relieved that he was not being called out on the breach of discipline. “It was on for only a few minutes before the phones stopped working.”

  “And how do we know about the kidnapping?”

  “Hamdi in Washington, he called my brother Fazir,” the driver explains. “Fazir has an old style telephone in his shop, you know, the kind that plugs into the wall. Those phones are working, we think, because they communicate through underground wires. So, Hamdi tells my brother what he knows. He tells Fazir about the jet from Barcelona and the President’s kidnapping in the look-a-like helicopter and Hamdi gives him a phone number to call for more information.”

  “Whose phone number is it?”

  “It’s a number for
The Washington Post,” the driver continues. “It’s a hotline. You call it and listen to a recording of the news. It’s updated every hour. It’s their only way to communicate with the world outside Washington. Fazir called the number, listened to the recording and sent our cousin over with the information. He thought you would want to know.”

  The driver dares a glance at the Sheik through the rear view mirror.

  “Your brother has done well, Mahmoud,” the Sheik says.

  The Sheik turns inward, the fingers of his right hand run absently through his beard as he mulls over the few known and striking facts. Six planes were shot down, one of them a passenger jet, all within minutes of the assassination attempt. The President is then kidnapped, whisked away in a Marine One look-a-like. No one knows where the President has been taken because the satellites all around the world go down when O’Neill is snatched. What the connections between the incidents are, he cannot begin to fathom; however, Zahra knows an opportunity when he sees one.

  The heightened security that will grip the country until the crisis is considered passed will come with a heightened sense of anxiety. It is at these times that Sheik Qassim Abdul Zahra likes to strike. The attacks need not be great ones. A series of small ones, a few well-placed suicide snipers, two or three car bombs synchronized to explode together in different parts of the country will be enough to deepen the anxiety and drive the terror further than the President’s kidnapping could by itself. He has a series of such attacks scheduled for the coming spring at sights where college kids like to gather for their yearly drunken celebrations. The strikes, he decides, will have to be moved up to the New Year’s festivities. He will gather his lieutenants and make the necessary arrangements.

  Sheik Qassim is fighting a war of attrition. Success in his war, he knows, lies in the depletion of the enemy’s will. Sheik Zahra is an old man, sixty-nine years of age, but he is optimistic about seeing the final victory of Islam over the West. He believes he will live to see Islam prevail before Allah calls him to paradise. The West will fall. He is sure of it. Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, the world of believers will conquer the world of the infidel, destroying once and for all, Dar al-Harb, the House of War.

  Zahra has no doubt. After all, his Muslim Brotherhood has come quite far from its humble beginnings in Egypt less than a century ago. There is not a nation on the face of the Earth that does not have Brotherhood cells working in it. In just the last twenty years they have accomplished more than he ever hoped or dreamed possible when he was recruited as a teen in a Cairo jail. And the further the Ikhwan, the Brotherhood, advanced, the farther America declined. Despite all howls of protest, their decades-old plan to conquer the West, their glorious ‘Civilization Jihad’ is triumphing daily. It is not difficult. Democracies like America, while normally able to confront external enemies, are generally uncomfortable facing internal threats. So many of them, Sheik Qassim observed, eagerly sold their souls for the dubious honor of being called, ‘open minded.’

  It is a weakness easily exploited. Pushing along lines specifically designed for just such a liberal, multi-culture-minded populace, Zahra and the Brotherhood won concession after concession from the Federal and local governments. The Muslim Brotherhood invented the word Islamophobia precisely for the waging of cultural warfare and it has paid off handsomely. In a society as litigious as America, it was only necessary to claim discrimination to get most opponents to back down. This simple strategy severely limited the attacks they had to counter. For the others, there was the always implicit threat of the violence Muslims could, when offended, be incited to commit that muted their critiques and curbed their resistance.

  The mix of grievances, peddled through an enabling press and violent demonstrations could work wonders through a government as weak and divided as America’s. Through such a combination of pressures the US could even be made to turn on its own. In one that first convinced the Sheik that America was doomed, its’ government offered up three of its own soldiers to Afghanistan’s Taliban at the close of the war. The men were beheaded and their bodies dragged through the spitting crowds of Kabul for the burning of a Koran. Qassim had it on good authority that the men were set up and that their government even suspected as much, but gave them up anyway in the hope of ‘healing relations’ with the Muslim world.

  Nowhere is Islam’s progress more visible than in his adopted home of, Dearborn Michigan. And the crowning achievement of his sharia-compliant city is the newly built mega-mosque looming into view ahead of him. It is the largest mosque in the western hemisphere. Its construction paid for by the United States government as part of the reparations settlement won from the Department of Peace for the mental and emotional anguish Bush’s wars inflicted on the Muslim-American community. The settlement, to the Sheik’s great amusement also endowed Muslims in America with a protected minority status that made them immune to many of the laws and policies that were closing down churches across the country.

  “If anyone needed proof that Allah and time are on our side,” he told his audience after last Friday’s service. “One need only consider how our ancient adversary, Christendom is beaten back as Islam thrives on her former ground.”

  Sheik Zahra initiated and led the landmark suit ten years ago. And while he had the support and resources of every Muslim interest group behind him, his best allies were Westerners themselves. Self-loathing Americans, wanting desperately to make their government pay for ‘war crimes,’ bent over backwards to help them through the suit process. It was the same with the latest suit that promised to erase all traces of Christianity from the nation’s monuments. Their chief lawyer was an avowed atheist and socialist with the ACLU. Sheik Zahra asked her why she decided to work with the Brotherhood.

  “I hate Christians,” she explained. “I understand you all are not too fond of them either. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, no?”

  Qassim smiled in response to her question. Fool, he thought. She could not see that Islam would quickly fill the void left by vanquished Christendom. It was the same story in his native Egypt and the other North African nations that now made up the Ihkwan Caliphate. Socialists and other secularists worked with the Brotherhood to bring down Mubarak, Gaddafi and others. In exchange for their service they expected to share power with the Brotherhood and some even thought to win Western-style liberties for themselves when the fighting was done. They got none of it. In the end, most of them lost their heads for their troubles.

  Lenin had rightly called their sort, useful idiots. America was full of them.

  They arrive at the mega-mosque. The car drives through the empty parking lot and around the large domed structure. The Salafi Cultural Center building is behind it. His office is on the top floor of the twelve story building. The black Lincoln comes to a stop at the front door. His body guard gets out and walks around the back of the car.

  “Go gather the others,” Zahra tells his driver. “Bring them here.”

  Mahmoud nods, knowing what to do.

  His body guard opens Sheik Qassim’s door. At the entrance, Zahra punches in his security code. The door slides open and lights come on in the crescent shaped atrium. He enters the building and hears his car drive off. The two men ride the elevator in silence to the top floor. Qassim’s office is just down a short hall. It consists of two rooms, an outer office where he handles public business and an inner, secure chamber where the plans for Jihad are advanced, safe from the prying, electronic eyes and ears of the government. He punches the code to his door and enters his outer office with his bodyguard.

  “What’s shaking, Sheik?”

  The two men spin around at the sound of the voice. They each find themselves looking down the barrel of gun.

  Washington, DC

  19:18:17

  Felix Culpa is popping the old bird from the coop.

  The facebook post excites millions of users around the world, leading them to believe that satellites were back online & they would be allowed reentry into thei
r digital worlds. Their hope is false & short-lived. All they can do with their gadgets is read Felix Culpa’s status update. At sixty-one seconds from the posting, all their PalmPals, cell phones, pads & readers go dead again. Everyone who noticed the update is left scratching their heads at the posting & wondering, who is Felix Culpa? Try as they might, they cannot place him in their immediate circle of friends or acquaintances. They cannot remember ever inviting or accepting his e-friendship. Not a one of them is able to fix a face to the name. The profile picture that accompanied the post, a sword, held hilt high in a gauntleted hand, is no help whatsoever.

  At facebook headquarters, the post fires off another burst of excitement. It is the second posting by Felix Culpa, & like the first, it inexplicably goes out to everyone, to all the billion and a half people in the network. It is another unprecedented breach of all their firewalls & security systems. Programmers & technicians spring to attention & try once again to wrest back control of their network. However, the sixty seconds of online connection is not long enough to do anything.

  “Nothing is working,” the chief of operations reports to the CEO. “We’re completely locked out.”

  The CEO squeezes a rubber stress ball in each hand. “The timestamps on the postings are definitely pointing to a countdown.”

  “Yes, to six o’clock tomorrow night.”

  “Then what?” The CEO asks.

  The chief of operations can only shrug in response.

  “They may know already,” the CEO says after a short spell of silence. “But in case they don’t, we should advise the government.”

  Twenty-five hundred miles away, Ralph Golden slips the Ghost Mobile into a reserved slot in the parking lot of DC’s Metro Central Detention Facility. The Ghost Mobile is a 1963 Chevy El Dorado. The old century car’s exterior is white but for the mirror-polished chrome grill, highlights, & the large, red, eight-pointed, Knights’ Templar cross on its hood. The seats are red with white piping. A red & white Rosary hangs from the rearview mirror. The license plates read REPENT, red letters on white.