Time seemed to freeze — and then there was a roar, followed by more roars, and flashes inside the gleaming white villa. Guards ran in to find bodies strewn on the floor. Many, including General Hammad, were wounded, sitting up or leaning against the fountain.
Nine others were dead: the four rebellious Shura members, blown to bits from the blast of their four hand grenades. Four guards. And Abdullah bin Rashid.
Blood poured down General Hammad’s face; his eyes bulged out. He struggled to respond to an officer who had just run in to take charge of the scene. “Call the Center. Get me Dr. Ahmed bin Rashid….”
“Call the President,” Russell MacIntyre urged the Senator. “Tell him what his Secretary of Defense is about to do.”
Sol Rubenstein answered his deputy on the Senator’s behalf. “He can’t just call up and get the President and have a one-on-one chat. Besides, the President is at the Asia Pacific meeting in Chile.”
“They moved Chile to Asia?” Robinson joked. “Look, Rusty, all of this has taught me something, and I intend to build a coalition and act on it. We can’t go into this century with our energy policy being to fight wars over who gets the remaining oil. The Chinese growth has just exacerbated it, but we already had a problem. We have a market failure here. The private sector cannot pay for the massive costs and risks of developing alternative energy. So we have to. With new tough conservation regulations, with tax credits, and with an unprecedented R & D program. As to what’s happening today and tomorrow…”
“Look, Rusty, it’s not that we don’t believe you. We do,” Rubenstein added. “It’s just that we don’t know how to stop it. The intel brief this morning shows the Chinese fleet is more than halfway there. Conrad is right to try to stop them from landing troops and sending in nukes.”
Rusty bristled. “We haven’t done enough diplomatically with the Chinese to stop them. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. How did we stop the Soviet ships from bringing in nukes? Not with just the Navy. Besides, he’s not just stopping the Chinese from landing, he is having Americans land and take over the fucking country,” MacIntyre said in exasperation. “Except for the part he bargained away with Iran.”
The two older men looked at each other. Rubenstein spoke. “Rusty, you can’t prove Conrad did that. At best those documents you have prove that some Iranian wrote that he had met with Kashigian and he agreed. Of course, Kashigian will say it’s a setup… he was there to threaten them. At best we get Conrad for not coordinating with the State Department.”
MacIntyre stared at his boss. “Look, Sol, I know I’m too close to this thing, but the way I look at it, we are only a day or two away from a war with China and an occupation by a division of U.S. Marines of the most holy land in the Muslim world.” MacIntyre looked from Rubenstein to Robinson. “Am I missing something here, Senator?”
Neither man answered.
“All right, well, what about the fact that Kate Delmarco is about to blow the lid off the whole Saudi funding deal with Conrad? Isn’t that enough to get him recalled from Egypt?” Rusty asked.
The Senator walked over to a stack of newspapers. “Did you say the Kate Delmarco story?”
“Yeah, did she run it already? I just got off the airplane two hours ago. Been in the air and airports for twenty-two hours,” MacIntyre said, rubbing his forehead.
Senator Robinson picked up the paper and put on his reading glasses. “Here it is. Made the late edition. Pulitzer Prize — winning reporter for the New York Journal Katherine Delmarco was found dead tonight, an apparent victim of a heart attack….”
“What!” Rusty screamed. He felt a sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach.
The Senator continued, “Ms. Delmarco, forty-five, was found by Park Police in an area off George Washington Parkway, where she had apparently stopped while experiencing chest pains driving to an appointment in McLean….”
Rusty sat down and looked at the rug. “They killed her!”
“Who killed her?” Senator Robinson asked.
“Who? The Saudis, Kashigian, I dunno. The same guys who blew up Admiral Adams’s plane, the guys who compromised Brian Douglas’s source and damn near got him killed in Tehran. The ones who sicced the FBI on me for meeting with terrorists… them.” Rusty sat back in the chair and closed his eyes. What was the point? Maybe like the characters in Furst’s book, he was just a little person who had to stand by and watch the war come, get swept up in its vortex, have everything he loved destroyed.
“Here, what’s this?” Sol Rubenstein asked, pointing at the television. “Paul, take that thing off mute. Turn up the volume, will ya?”
Senator Robinson found the remote and turned up the audio on CNN. “… fighting. A statement issued in the name of the Shura Council Vice Chairman Abdullah bin Rashid said that there had been an attempted coup by Iranian-sponsored elements and that Shura Chairman Zubair bin Tayer had died in the fighting. The statement said that full stability had been restored. It gave no further proof of the alleged Iranian involvement, but said that Rashid would address the nation tomorrow. In other news from…”
Rusty looked up and smiled. “That’s it. They’ve started. Abdullah and Ahmed!”
“Sounds to me like what you feared would happen is happening,” Sol Rubenstein answered. “Both Iran and Conrad can claim there is chaos there. And Iran can say that this bin Rashid guy is blaming Tehran so he can beat up on the Shi’a.”
“No, no,” Rusty countered. “Don’t you see? Ahmed and Abdullah are taking over. They are going to try to stop this engine that’s coming down the track. How ironic. We three sit here and can’t think of how to affect our own government, and it’s the guys in Islamyah who are doing something.”
“I dunno who Amos and Ahmed are, Rusty, but from where I sit, it’s going to take a helluva lot to stop the U.S., China, and Iran from invading Islamyah,” the Senator observed.
16
“How far are you from the lead element of their battle group, Captain?” Admiral Brad Adams asked the skipper of the cruiser USS Ticonderoga on a secure voice hookup.
“Admiral, I am on the bridge and I can see one of their ships on the horizon through the glasses. Looks just like a U.S. Burke-class, and he’s closing on me,” the voice said over the speaker.
“Too close,” Adams said to Captain John Hardy, who was standing next to him in CIC. Then the admiral pressed the mike to talk to the cruiser Ticonderoga. “Captain, pull back. Maintain twenty-fivemile separation, but let him know you’re there. Turn everything up so he knows.” Hanging up the phone, he turned to his intelligence officer. “If we have to fight them, we’re going to get bloody. I don’t want to start that fight by mistake or miscalculation.” He exhaled.
“Johnny, do the Chinese still think that the Ticonderoga is us? The Reagan? Do they think we’re down there in the Indian Ocean?”
“From what I can tell from the intercepts, that’s exactly what they think”—Hardy laughed—“and from the daily plots the Pentagon issues, I’d say Washington thinks we’re down there, too!”