“Why do you say that?” Cameron asked.
“Well, don’t forget that back in the 1990s, a Chinese general — I think he was the second or third guy in command of the PLA — actually threatened to vaporize Los Angeles.”
“Wasn’t that just a bit of saber rattling?” Cameron asked.
“I thought so,” the general said. “But now? Who knows what Beijing is thinking, or what some rogue faction within the PLA is thinking?”
Bennett watched Cameron swallow hard. He could see the fear in the man’s eyes, and the anchor didn’t seem to know where to take the interview from there.
“What about the Chinese navy?” Cameron asked, clearly scrambling for something — anything — concrete, not theoretical. “How formidable are they?”
“They’re no match against the American navy,” the general explained. “But believe me, aside from us — and with Russia out of the picture — they’re the most dangerous fleet on or under the seas.”
“Can you give us a sense of their specific capabilities?”
“I can try,” the general said. “As I recall, the Chinese have at least twenty-five destroyers. They’ve got about fifty frigates, about two dozen tank landing ships. More importantly, they’ve got fifty diesel submarines and at least five nuclear submarines. That’s a whole lot of firepower, and nearly all of it could be thrown against Taiwan with devastating effect.”
“What do the Taiwanese have to defend themselves?” Cameron asked.
“The Taiwanese have a small but impressive navy, much of it built by us,” the American general said. “And they have one simple objective: to deter an invasion by the PRC. But a critical element of Taiwan’s strategic doctrine is that the U.S. Navy and Air Force would be there to help them in the case of an attack. Will we be, under the circumstances? Honestly, given what’s unfolding at the moment, I’m not so sure.”
“The Chinese say the U.S. is moving two aircraft carriers into the East China Sea,” the CNN anchor noted.
“Maybe, and that would help,” the general replied. “But the brutal truth is that if the Chinese are really behind these attacks on the U.S., then they’re willing to annihilate anyone or anything that gets in the way of their objective.”
Missiles, Bennett thought.
“Might Beijing resort to nuclear missiles against Taiwan?” Cameron asked, as if on cue.
“That’s the X factor,” the two-star said. “That’s the real worry. The Chinese have at least twenty silo-based ICBMs. Each is armed with a nuclear warhead. Each is capable of reaching the United States — the West Coast, at least. Plus, they’ve got a bunch of sub-launched nuclear missiles; I’m not sure how many. I’m not sure if anybody knows how many. They’ve got nearly fifty missile boats. What’s more, they’ve got literally hundreds — maybe thousands — of medium-range missiles, many of which were also equipped with nuclear warheads. And all of them can reach Taiwan — or our aircraft carrier battle groups — before you and I go to a commercial break.”
Bennett couldn’t take any more. He couldn’t just sit around and watch TV. But what difference could he make? And even if there was something he could do, he couldn’t leave Erin, could he?
He suddenly remembered his satellite phone. He pulled it out and prepared to call back whoever had called him. But that was odd, he thought. There was no call-back number. There was, to his surprise, no evidence that such a call had ever come in.
24
Mustafa Al-Hassani lit his pipe and turned to Khalid Tariq.
“Events are moving rapidly now, Khalid,” he said with an air of calm assurance.
“You have your empire,” Tariq replied. “But can you keep it? Can you expand it? Today might determine that once and for all.”
“Yes, Khalid, it might.”
In the wake of the Day of Devastation, Arab and Persian leaders — what was left of them, anyway — had literally begged Al-Hassani to help them, protect them, rebuild them, restore them, lest they be swallowed up by American and European imperialists or by the incompetents at the U.N. Iraq was the only Arab country left standing after the so-called War of Gog and Magog. With oil prices soaring through the roof, trillions of petrodollars were flowing into his coffers, and with them unprecedented leverage to shape events in a way that his predecessors could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.
Al-Hassani had agreed. He would help his brothers and sisters in their desperate hour of need. But only on one condition. They had to agree to unification under his command.
The only way the peoples of the Middle East could truly compete and succeed against the U.S. and the European Union — and against the increasingly powerful trade alliance between China and the ASEAN economic community (the Association of South East Asian Nations, which included Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, and Cambodia, among others) — was to come together as one, and fast, he had argued. They needed one leader, one legislature, one court system, one tax system, one currency, and one capital — Babylon. The faster they agreed, the faster they could tap into Iraq’s enormous oil wealth. The faster they could rebuild their own oil industries. The faster they could become players again on the world stage.
Everyone in the region could see Al-Hassani’s offer for what it was: a power grab, pure and simple. But what choice did they really have? They could unify under Babylon or risk being carved up by Washington and Brussels.
And thus was born the United States of Eurasia.
From the provinces of Mauretania in the west to the provinces of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan in the east, nearly a half billion people now lived and moved and had their being at Al-Hassani’s pleasure. The unification process was going faster than even he or his most trusted advisors had expected. Reconstruction efforts, especially in the Gulf states, were well ahead of schedule. New oil wells were coming on line at the rate of between six and ten a day. Four brand-new, state-of-the-art petroleum refineries were already up and running. Five more would be operational by the end of the month, with another five slated to be completed by year’s end.
It was all good, but not good enough, which was why he had summoned Salvador Lucente to Babylon.
Al-Hassani savored the sweet, mellow aroma of his golden Virginia tobacco, laced with buttered Jamaican rum, the one sinful pleasure he allowed himself from the Americas. He stared out over the city of his dreams, blazing in the late-summer sun and teeming with cranes and construction equipment as far as his eye could see.
So, what exactly was Salvador Lucente going to say now? he wondered, though he said nothing to Tariq. What excuse was the U.N. secretary-general going to bring this time?
Al-Hassani vividly remembered their meeting eight months earlier, right here in his private suite, on his private balcony, actually. Lucente had explained very carefully what he needed, and Al-Hassani had explained very carefully what it would cost him.
“Our economies are choking,” Lucente had begun. “Oil is topping 175 euros a barrel. Unemployment in Europe is soaring. We can’t operate with prices this high. We’ve got to get oil flowing out of the Middle East again, and we need you to take the lead. We need you to get oil prices under a hundred euros by summer”—and this Al-Hassani would never forgeT — “or I am afraid we will have to consider some unpleasant scenarios.”