The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (24 page)

‘One World, One Law’
is both the title of Aguilera’s bestselling book and his highest aspiration.

His goal is still a long way off, he knows. Countries still hang, with superstitious devotion to their borders and their anachronistic national identities, few as doggedly as the United States; but as the years pass, his hopes rise. While the old borders ostensibly carved up the globe, the real power was is now being administered through the macro borders of the various UN regional unions. His predecessors created the template when they stitched together the European Union. At the beginning of the century things began to unravel and by the end of its first decade the EU was in real danger of disintegrating in the great
crash of world markets. With the help of the International Monetary Fund and a capital infusion from the United States, the United Nations bolstered the Euro and saved the Union.

Since taking the helm of the United Nations, Aguilera worked tirelessly to further centralize control of the world’s resources and economies. The UN’s Group 21 Advisory Councils were revamped by the Shanghai Accord, their powers greatly expanded. In exchange for the UN-brokered bailout of their economies, member nations allowed the new and improved Group 2112 Advisory Councils to reorganize the global economy from the ground up, resetting many of their domestic policies along the way.

The European template was duplicated around the world. Russia, China, America and the ever fractious Middle East still remained outside the UN corral of unionized nations, but Aguilera has teams on the ground working to round up the holdouts. There are Group 2112 Advisory Councils all over the globe and through them, the United Nations is steadily whittling away at the sovereignties of the more obdurate countries. Simon hopes that America will soon join the fold, with Mexico and Canada in tow. America is the key. Even without benefit of membership in a union, Simon got the United States to sign on to the Shanghai Accord. The United Nations even has a token force on their southern border. Creating the North American Union will put considerable pressure on the others to follow suit. Bundling the resources and economies of North America to the existing Unions will buy Simon the much needed time and treasure to forestall the new economic collapse threatening the Eurozone and through it, the world. Assimilating the populace and might of the North American continent will help make the United Nations the kind of super power that can, at long last, create the world government Aguilera has long desired.

The American President, a man with an amiable instinct for internationalism, is in favor of the Union. O’Neill is convinced that the pooling of resources and the creation of a new currency is the only way out of depression’s grip for his nation. He rightly sees that the international community will never allow the dollar to become the world’s reserve currency again. Through the UN, O’Neill and his counterparts in Mexico and Canada have agreed to scrap their individual currencies and create a new, shared one, the Amero.

O’Neill is hoping that the new currency will do more than breathe new life into the economy; he is hoping to save his dying country from the burgeoning
secessionist movements working to tear it apart. Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Arkansas and Utah each have sizable secessionist movements. California is in talks with Oregon and Washington about creating, an eco-topia between them. The states of Alaska, Florida and Louisiana joined the chorus this past year, each claiming they were prepared to go it alone. Worse yet for the President, all their neighboring states are, if not happy to let them go, certainly not overwrought at the prospect.

“The only way to save my nation from being carved up into small pieces is to make it part of something bigger,” O’Neill told him. “The North American Union is that something bigger.”

Simon congratulated the American President on his broadmindedness during their last meeting nine months ago. “I don’t think any past President would have ever considered such a move.”

“Well, it’s a different world now.”

“Indeed it is,” Simon agreed. “With a truly progressive leader such as yourself leading a nation as great as yours, we can work together to make it a better world, Mr. President.”

The long years spent serving under an egomaniac like Hugo Chavez pressed upon the young Aguilera the utility of flattery when dealing with world leaders. It is a skill he has honed to great effect over the years. It helped disarm the President’s initial reluctance to the Secretary General’s other wish, the releasing of the last batch of foreign combatants held, some for over a decade, in American prisons.

“The Hague, Amnesty International and every human rights group consider those held to be political prisoners,” Simon told the President. “The war is over, sir. They cannot rightly be called enemy combatants any more. Send them home to their families, Mr. President. I believe freeing them will generate much goodwill for you in the Muslim world.”

O’Neill eventually relented but insisted that Simon make no mention of their ‘gentlemen’s accord’ until after his re-election.

“There are those among my opposition that would spin these acts of clemency and cooperation as weakness,” O’Neill said.

“I understand, Mr. President,” Aguilera assured him. “You will choose the best time to announce your plans.”

That was another lesson learned in Venezuela. Simon is careful never to take credit for his ideas. When President O’Neill left his private audience with
the Secretary General, he did so aglow with the self-congratulatory light of a man who thought himself not just clever, but enlightened as well.

The American President did not know that ‘his’ plan to release the Islamist fighters would allow Simon to close a deal with the Iranian ambassador he has been working on ever since his appointment as Secretary General. The Venezuelan Supreme Revolutionary Council wants nuclear weapons. They need them if they are to effectively counter America’s strength in the hemisphere. More specifically, Venezuela is determined to keep the US out of Cuba and draw the island nation into closer orbit around Caracas. The Council is confident that merely possessing a few ‘big bombs’ will be sufficient to get America to back down and make of the Caribbean and Gulf, a Venezuelan sea.

Simon is inclined to agree. America’s defeat in Iraq demoralized the nation. The twenty kiloton nuke that destroyed the Panama Canal has it spooked. Twelve years of budget cuts have dulled the eagle’s talons. Whatever fight is left in the superpower is turned in on itself. Everyone senses their day is done. The press runs frequent stories detailing the torturously protracted self-destruction of the American Empire.

The Iranians agree as well. However, their own Supreme Council of Mullahs was reluctant to share the fruits of their rebuilt nuclear program until the Secretary General used his influence on behalf of Islam and Jihad. After much negotiating, it was agreed that the release of thousands of Islamist fighters would be a suitable gesture of goodwill to both Allah and the Mullahs. All parties were satisfied with the deal Simon brokered. Aguilera himself was well pleased.

Simon Aguilera has dealt with Islamic leaders often in his thirty years in international politics. He does not like them. He certainly does not trust them. Simon recognizes that they want the same thing he does, a world government; but their medieval notion of a world-wide caliphate is not something he is willing to get behind. As a bloc, Muslim countries rejected UN Resolution 2112 and, it being his signature policy as Secretary General, he resents them for it, but not so much that he will let the slight keep him from working with them on other fronts. Aguilera is too much of a pragmatist for that. Socialists and Islamists worked together often because they shared an enemy in the capitalist power of America, but Simon knows the day must come when the two will fight it out for world domination. If he can bring America and maybe China or
Russia into the UN’s fold, he would rid the world of the Islamists once and for all. In the meantime he deals as well as he can with the odious ally.

The recent events in Washington do not please the Secretary General. Quite to the contrary, Simon Aguilera is displeased and disturbed. The events have ‘military coup’ written all over them. Particularly frustrating is the loss of the satellites. In one swift stroke the entire world has been returned to pre-Sputnik communications. All coups were unsettling affairs, but because nothing of this sort has ever occurred in America, the Secretary General feels a peculiar chill in his bones. The world, he knows, is entering uncharted waters.

He is at his window, racking his brain, trying to figure out who might be behind it all, and what, if anything, he can do about it, when four American soldiers walk into his office unannounced. The oldest of them, a Colonel with short-cropped brown hair and a badly scarred neck, speaks in a low and raspy voice.

“Merry Christmas, Secretary General.”

“Who are you?” Aguilera demands.

The old soldier tosses a small, leather bag at him. Simon plucks it out of the air. Inside the bag is a lump of coal.

“What are you doing in my office?”

“We’re here to evict you.”

Dearborn, Michigan

19:28:03

Sheik Qassim Abdul Zahra does not allow televisions in his Dearborn Michigan home. He doesn’t want his family exposed to the poison of Western culture any more than they are forced to by living among the infidels. Zahra does not hear of the assassination attempt until one of his aides whispers the news into his ear after evening prayers. Sheik Qassim is immediately intrigued. It is not so much by the shooting itself, but the fact that it happened within a locked down Air Force base gives him pause. He cannot think of any of his brothers who have the sort of reach which could’ve infiltrated the Secret Service. He is all but certain that another player is responsible. The American military itself is, no doubt, involved. As Zahra hears further details he becomes ever more convinced of the US military’s authorship. How can it be otherwise, he thinks, especially in light of the satellite failings?

Sheik Qassim Abdul Zahra orders his guards to bring out his car. Within minutes, he is in the automobile heading to the Ikhwan Mosque and Salafi Cultural Center. He has the driver turn on the car’s television. The small screens on the back of the headrests show channel after channel of snowy static.

“Can we get news on the radio?”

“No, Sheik,” answers the driver. “It’s all just static.”

“Then how do we know what has happened?”

“I saw the assassination attempt and the shooting of the planes over the Potomac River.”

“How Mahmoud?”

There is a pause before the driver answers. “I saw it on my cell phone, Imam.”

Mahmoud keeps his eyes on the road. He has just admitted that he was watching television while on duty. Sheik Zahra decides to ignore the infraction for the moment.

“It was on the news for a few minutes,” the driver says, relieved that he was not being called out on the breach of discipline. “It was on for only a few minutes before the phones stopped working.”

“And how do we know about the kidnapping?”

“Hamdi in Washington, he called my brother Fazir,” the driver explains. “Fazir has an old style telephone in his shop, you know, the kind that plugs into the wall. Those phones are working, we think, because they communicate through underground wires. So, Hamdi tells my brother what he knows. He tells Fazir about the jet from Barcelona and the President’s kidnapping in the look-a-like helicopter and Hamdi gives him a phone number to call for more information.”

“Whose phone number is it?”

“It’s a number for The Washington Post,” the driver continues. “It’s a hotline. You call it and listen to a recording of the news. It’s updated every hour. It’s their only way to communicate with the world outside Washington. Fazir called the number, listened to the recording and sent our cousin over with the information. He thought you would want to know.”

The driver dares a glance at the Sheik through the rear view mirror.

“Your brother has done well, Mahmoud,” the Sheik says.

The Sheik turns inward, the fingers of his right hand run absently through his beard as he mulls over the few known and striking facts. Six planes were
shot down, one of them a passenger jet, all within minutes of the assassination attempt. The President is then kidnapped, whisked away in a Marine One look-a-like. No one knows where the President has been taken because the satellites all around the world go down when O’Neill is snatched. What the connections between the incidents are, he cannot begin to fathom; however, Zahra knows an opportunity when he sees one.

The heightened security that will grip the country until the crisis is considered passed will come with a heightened sense of anxiety. It is at these times that Sheik Qassim Abdul Zahra likes to strike. The attacks need not be great ones. A series of small ones, a few well-placed suicide snipers, two or three car bombs synchronized to explode together in different parts of the country will be enough to deepen the anxiety and drive the terror further than the President’s kidnapping could by itself. He has a series of such attacks scheduled for the coming spring at sights where college kids like to gather for their yearly drunken celebrations. The strikes, he decides, will have to be moved up to the New Year’s festivities. He will gather his lieutenants and make the necessary arrangements.

Sheik Qassim is fighting a war of attrition. Success in his war, he knows, lies in the depletion of the enemy’s will. Sheik Zahra is an old man, sixty-nine years of age, but he is optimistic about seeing the final victory of Islam over the West. He believes he will live to see Islam prevail before Allah calls him to paradise. The West will fall. He is sure of it.
Dar al-Islam
, the House of Islam, the world of believers will conquer the world of the infidel, destroying once and for all,
Dar al-Harb
, the House of War.

Zahra has no doubt. After all, his Muslim Brotherhood has come quite far from its humble beginnings in Egypt less than a century ago. There is not a nation on the face of the Earth that does not have Brotherhood cells working in it. In just the last twenty years they have accomplished more than he ever hoped or dreamed possible when he was recruited as a teen in a Cairo jail. And the further the
Ikhwan
, the Brotherhood, advanced, the farther America declined. Despite all howls of protest, their decades-old plan to conquer the West, their glorious
‘Civilization Jihad’
is triumphing daily. It is not difficult. Democracies like America, while normally able to confront external enemies, are generally uncomfortable facing internal threats. So many of them, Sheik Qassim observed, eagerly sold their souls for the dubious honor of being called, ‘open minded.’