“What is it you want? Weapons? Fuel? Food? We are in short supply of all these things.”
“Then the fewer men we have here on this base, the better,” Zarazi said calmly — and he put a bullet into the old officer’s forehead. Zarazi then stationed a Turkmen-speaking man inside the office to cover the phones and went outside with gun in hand to see how Turabi was progressing.
“It went smoother than I ever expected,” Turabi reported. “The border guards here are all conscripts, none more than twenty-five years old. We found one career officer and one career NCO and executed them. The conscripts practically kissed our boots in return. We shouldn’t have any trouble with them. They are refueling our vehicles now.”
“Very good.” Zarazi motioned to the detainment facilities. “What do we have there?”
“Women and children in there, men over here, existing just a little bit better than a herd of cattle,” Turabi said disgustedly. “Damned Turkmen — they think their country is so special. What do you want to do with them?”
“Release the women and children with enough rations to last them a couple days. By then they’ll either be discovered by relief troops or they’ll decide to walk to Andkhvoy.” Turabi nodded. “As for the men — if there’s anyone willing to join us, they may.”
“They’ll all want to join us, Wakil. Either that or starve.”
“Then weed out any who are from hostile tribes, foreigners, unbelievers, or anyone who doesn’t wish to join us, and execute them,” Zarazi said. “Keep one or two of the older men here to supervise the rescue of the women and children. Make sure they all understand that if they tell anyone what happened here, I will return and execute them and their entire families. Put the others to work burying our dead and collecting weapons, ammunition, food, and water. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
“Where are we headed”—Turabi paused, then added with a smile—“Colonel?”
“ ‘Colonel’ will be fine — Major,” Zarazi said with a smile. “North, to Kerki.”
“We’re going to stay in Turkmenistan? Why not head east back toward home?”
“Because the Northern Alliance, the United Nations, and the Americans will pursue us and hound us until we are destroyed,” Zarazi said. “The Turkmen garrison at Kerki will have more ammunition, weapons, and supplies, and we’ll be safe from our pursuers.”
“What about the Turkmen army? They’ll pursue us even more relentlessly than the Americans.”
“If the state of this border guard detachment is any indication of the state of the Turkmen army, I’m not concerned,” Zarazi said. “The Turkmen government is weak and corrupt. Taking what we want shouldn’t be too difficult for us. Even if we had to assault this border post, we would have had no trouble.”
Zarazi stared out into the darkness to the north and fell silent for several long moments. Turabi thought his superior officer was entering some kind of trance. Just before he was about to ask if anything was wrong, Zarazi went on, “And I have been chosen by God to be His instrument of revenge against the nonbelievers,” he said. “God saved me from the American robot planes. He wants something of me, Jala, I know it. Something great. Something important. I will not stop fighting until I have accomplished it.”
One
I apologize for holding this press conference in this kind of weather, with no shelter,” former president of the United States Kevin Martindale began. As he did, the early-morning downpour seemed to intensify. “Out of respect for this place, I chose not to set up any tents or shelters and add any more to the circuslike atmosphere I’m already creating here. It’s also why we’re out here in the visitors’ parking lot instead of on the grounds themselves, and why I requested that no cameras be aimed toward the cemetery itself. But I did come to Arlington for a reason.”
Despite the weather, Kevin Martindale, standing on the running board of his armored Suburban, looked as groomed and polished as if he were in a television studio. In his early fifties, tall and handsome, a former two-time vice president and one-term chief executive, Martindale still looked every inch the political pro and commander in chief. He kept himself in good shape; he still dressed impeccably; he had shaved his beard and cut his hair for this appearance. The famous “photographer’s dream” was still there, even in the rain — the two locks of silver hair that automatically mirrored his mood. If he was angry, they curled menacingly across his forehead, as they did right now; when he was contented, they swept gracefully back across his salt-and-pepper mane.
“I asked you to meet me out here today so I might make an observation and an announcement,” Martindale said. “The weather happens to match my mood pretty well.
“Today is a very solemn anniversary: the twelfth anniversary of the last postwar combat deaths of Operation Desert Storm. Two weeks after the Iraqi army was decimated and a cease-fire was declared, a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter went down in bad weather over Kuwait, and six brave soldiers were lost. Some of those heroes are interred here in Section H at Arlington National Cemetery. That these losses happened at all is a huge tragedy, but to suffer such a loss after such a great victory against the Iraqi army makes the loss even more grievous.
“Yet it was a great victory for freedom. The mission to release Kuwait from the clutches of Saddam Hussein took only six weeks to accomplish; Iraq surrendered just one hundred hours after the ground war began, after being pummeled into submission by forty days of continuous aerial bombardment. Coalition forces lost just five hundred brave soldiers, against nearly one hundred thousand Iraqi casualties. It was clearly one of the most lopsided wars in history. Those soldiers’ deaths were tragic, but it was a mission I feel the United States needed to accomplish. They did not die in vain.
“I bring all this to your attention today to point out an alarming fact: that the United States does not now have the capability to perform that same fight for freedom,” Martindale went on. “The United States mobilized two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen in six months to fight that last battle. Today it would take us years to mobilize and move the same number of troops and send them halfway across the world to fight. We have no ground forces stationed overseas—none. We have a total of fifty thousand Marines deployed aboard ships around the world with aircraft-carrier battle groups. Those are the only ground forces that can respond to an emergency. We also happen to have two fewer aircraft-carrier battle groups operational, which in essence leaves one-fifth of the world unpatrolled at any given time.
“In addition, the forty-first president managed to commit, organize, mobilize, and direct another two hundred and fifty thousand troops from fifty-seven nations in the war against Saddam Hussein, including those from six Arabic-speaking nations and another seventeen Islamic nations,” Martindale continued. “The current administration has managed to ignore, cancel, violate, and abrogate dozens of treaties; it has alienated most of our allies, created distrust among the nonaligned world, and angered our enemies.
“Thomas Thorn continues to cut the size of the United States military at a ridiculous rate, especially our Army,” Martindale said, his voice rising in anger. “The Army is now one-half the size it was just two years ago, and it continues to shrink. The size of the Reserves and National Guard has increased, but the overall force is still one-third smaller. We have abrogated numerous mutual-defense and cooperation treaties with dozens of nations, most important among them the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which in my opinion has ensured the safety and security of the entire world for almost half a century. Thanks to Thomas Thorn’s shortsightedness, the United States is a friendless, futureless desert island hopelessly lost and forgotten in the sea of global geopolitical affairs. We are not adrift — we are being purposely and maliciously steered around every tragedy, every responsibility, and every crisis, all in the name of splendid isolationism. It is time for that policy to end.