Despite his doubts, Dan smiled. “Okay. How do I get him to invite me to Austin?”
“Leave that to me, boss. That’s what I get paid for.”
Khartoum, Sudan
The Sun was setting over the dusty, picked-bare hills. Standing alone at the window of the now-empty conference room, Asim al-Bashir watched the molten red ball sinking slowly, slowly into the parched and dying earth, turning the cloudless hot sky into a bowl of burnished copper, sending long purple shadows across the decaying old stone fortress, the ancient mosque of the city’s central square, the modern office and apartment blocks that were already crumbling gradually into disrepair.
After three days of sometimes bitter discussion, the others of The Nine had left the hotel to go their separate ways. They had listened to al-Bashir’s plan, incredulous at first, but with slowly increasing understanding. None of them were enthusiastic about it, but at last they had reluctantly given their approval. The power satellite would be used for their purposes, and the Americans would not even realize they had been attacked. But this attack would kill thousands, tens of thousands, and it would humble the arrogant Americans mercilessly. They will turn on themselves after this, al-Bashir thought, rending each other in an eruption of accusations and recriminations. They will do our work for us.
And the very idea of a power satellite will be damned forever. Al-Bashir smiled to himself as he saw a future in which the West became even more dependent on oil from the lands of Islam. Oil is power, he told himself. Nothing must be allowed to challenge that power.
The cry of a muezzin came wailing faintly from the loudspeakers in the distant mosque’s minaret:
“Come to prayer. Come to salvation. Allah is most great. There is no god but Allah.”
Al-Bashir turned, ready to go back to his hotel room upstairs. He had no intention of taking a chance on being seen outside the hotel, especially at the hour of prayer, when a man in an expensive Western business suit was something to stare at.
He was startled to see the Sudanese who had hosted the meeting of The Nine standing in the doorway of the conference room, silently watching him.
“Will you pray with me, my brother?” The Sudanese’s voice was surprisingly soft and gentle for such a stoutly built man. In his white djellaba and turban he looked like a mountain of snow, except for his deeply black face. They think of themselves as Arabs, al-Bashir thought, and lord it over their neighbors in the south of the country who have not surrendered to Allah.
“I will be honored to pray with you, my brother,” said al-Bashir. Prayer was not foremost in his thinking, but he agreed to the Sudanese’s simple request out of respect for the greatness of Islam, where men of all races were equals. Neither wealth nor poverty, neither family nor the color of a man’s skin nor the land of one’s birth should stand between those who have accepted the faith.
The Sudanese led him down a corridor of the hotel to a small private office, which he unlocked with an old-fashioned metal key. He went to a filing cabinet and withdrew two prayer rugs from its bottom drawer. The rug he handed al-Bashir looked threadbare, almost fragile.
“My grandfather’s,” the Sudanese murmured. “It was all he had left after the rebels took his village. They raped all the women and slaughtered all the younger men.”
Civil war, al-Bashir knew. Sudan had been torn apart by civil war for two generations and more. North against south. Moslems against the nomadic pagan tribes who camped in their tents atop billions of dollars worth of oil deposits. It was the oil that counted, al-Bashir knew. In the end, all wars are fought over wealth, even civil wars.
After their prayers, the Sudanese carefully rolled up the rugs and placed them back in the filing cabinet drawer from which he had taken them.
“Tell me, my brother,” he said softly, looking away from al-Bashir, toward the blank and silent computer screen on the desk, “this thing with the power satellite—it will kill many?”
Al-Bashir nodded. “Many thousands. Tens of thousands, perhaps even more.”
“But the Americans will not know that we of the faith have done this to them? They will believe it was an accident?”
“Yes. An accident that will cripple their efforts to steal energy from space.”
“Which will make them more dependent on oil from the lands of Islam?”
“Indeed so. If all goes as I believe it will, we will be in a position to demand a return of the oil fields the Americans now control. We will drive them out of the Persian Gulf region altogether.”
“But it will kill many thousands? Truly?”
“Truly,” said al-Bashir.
The Sudanese appeared to think about that for a few silent moments. At last he said, “It is good, then. Hurt them. Hurt them as we have been hurt. Let them suffer as we have suffered. Let them know the pain and blood that have made my life into an endless hell. May God’s will be done.”
“Indeed, brother,” said al-Bashir. And he thought, Keep the Americans dependent on our oil. That is our power over them. As long as they need our oil they must bend to our will. But we must be subtle. We must be as silent as the snake. And as deadly.
Thornton Ranch, Love County, Oklahoma
From her bedroom window in the sprawling old ranch house, Jane Thornton could see the Red River winding through the wheat fields and, off in the distance, the greener pastures where cattle still grazed. Texas lay on the other side of the river, but here along its northern bank stretched the family ranch, as it had for generations.
Easterners thought of Oklahoma as oil country, even now, a quarter century after most of the oil had been pumped out of the ground. All through the oil boom of the twentieth century the Thornton family had tended its acres, growing wheat and beef, the staples that people needed no matter who was getting filthy rich from oil. Now, with the oil just about gone, the wheat and cattle remained to feed the hungry—at a price that kept the Thorntons in luxury and provided the money to send a Thornton to the U.S. Senate.
Jane’s father had been a senator and had groomed his eldest son to take his seat when the time came. But Junior had killed himself, his wife, and both children in the crash of his private plane. Dad saw to it that his blood alcohol level was never revealed to the public, but neither money nor influence could heal the pain and shock of the tragedy. Then Dad died in office from a massive stroke, and the governor that he had maneuvered into office in Oklahoma City appointed Jane to fill out his unexpired term.
She had met a headstrong young engineer named Dan Randolph and fallen into a whirlwind of romance with him, but then he’d run off to Japan to follow his own wild dreams and Jane had gone to Washington.
Jane found that she enjoyed being a United States senator. She enjoyed the power of belonging to that exclusive little club of one hundred men and women. Quickly she latched onto Senator Bob Quill, the “silver fox” who chaired the Senate Finance Committee. He became her mentor, and there were even occasional rumors that they were having an affair, rumors that never got far because the standard wisdom on Capitol Hill was that Quill was the straightest arrow in the quiver, and Jane Thornton was the Ice Queen, beautiful but cold and aloof.
Both those characterizations were very far off the mark, although Jane and Quill kept their relationship strictly nonsexual. Jane had a lover, but no one knew it. She went to great lengths to make certain that no one—not even her closest staff aides—knew about her love life.
Dan Randolph had popped into her life again briefly, disastrously. They had parted for good, she thought, on the Day of the Bridges.