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 maintaining 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.