The Last Jihad (24 page)

“I’m not entirely sure. But, basically, yes, my instinct is that it would.”

“Do we have any other immediate, viable, effective options?”

The VP pondered that for a moment. That was, of course, the heart of the matter. Bennett found himself silently imploring this man to come up with something better.

“In the next half hour? No.”

Bennett could feel the train leaving the station, and he wanted to jump off.

“Could we invade Western Iraq and move towards Baghdad and occupy the city and find Saddam and shut him down? Given six to nine months? Yes. Given the willingness to lose upwards of ten thousand to twenty thousand American soldiers, at least, maybe many more? Probably. Would U.S. public opinion support that? Doubtful. Would our alliance hold, particularly in the Arab world? Absolutely not. Could it become our next Vietnam? Absolutely. You were there, Jim—Mr. President. You know what it was like. You want to go back?”

“So what are you saying, Bill?” the president pressed. “Give me a bottom line.”

“We’re in one hell of a mess.”

“I noticed.”

“Sir, I’m saying that I am not in favor of a nuclear strike. Not under any circumstances…”

Everyone’s eyes were riveted on the vice president. McCoy bit her lip. Bennett held his breath. The president visibly tightened.

“…not under any circumstances, that is, but these.”

Bennett could feel the oxygen get sucked out of his body. He was winded and scared and cold.

“In the abstract, it’s ugly and grotesque and bordering on the barbaric,” the vice president continued. “But in terms of our immediate military options and the threat to U.S. national security and that of our allies? It’s instant. It’s overwhelming. It’s decisive. And yes, I believe it buys us fifty or a hundred years of world peace, at the very least.”

“Does that make it worth it?” the president asked.

“Well, sir, it might. But again, I go back to my previous question. What next? Where would we go from here?”

“Ecclesiastes.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“There’s a time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war…”

The words hung in the air for a moment.

“…and a time for peace.”

“Yes, sir. That might be a good way to put it. We can’t just think about how to destroy our enemy. We need to think about how to rebuild a new world, a world of peace and prosperity.”

Bennett could tell the president wanted to get up and pace. That’s what he used to do in GSX strategy meetings when he was trying to get his hands around how to approach a new deal.

But now he was trapped in a wheelchair, deprived of sleep, forced to decide about the use of nuclear weapons in the middle of the night at forty-five thousand feet and a thousand miles away from his top national security advisors.

Unable to pace, however, the president suddenly chose to pray. Without saying anything to anyone, he simply bowed his head, closed his eyes, and folded his hands. Bennett just stared at him.

The next few moments felt like an eternity, and Bennett found himself seething inside, furious with his friend and mentor for wasting such valuable time when there was so little of it to begin with. This was no time for fairy tales. This was the time for rational thinking and logical decisions. The fate of the world hung in the balance.

Carrie Downing was smart, stylish, and thirty-two.

She had been a rising star at
Excite@Home
, once the world’s leading broadband Internet provider. That is, until the company filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy protection in October of 2001.

Downing’s dream of riding the wave to dot com millionaire status had been sunk faster than the
Titanic
. She and more than thirteen hundred other employees got dumped overboard just as the
al Qaeda
terrorists struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and the U.S. economy was sinking fast into a serious recession.

So Downing did what any aspiring email software writer might do when her boatload of stock options plummeted in value from $100 a share in April of 1999 to a mere thirteen cents a share two and a half years later. She joined the FBI.

Trained in short order as a specialist in electronic counterintelligence and counterterrorism, she was fast making an impression on her superiors. She’d been assigned to an elite team and a highly classified project known to the outside world only as Magic Lantern.

The state-of-the-art and highly controversial software was part of what the Bureau called the “Enhanced Carnivore Project Plan.”

It was designed to gobble up as many meaty morsels of email as possible. It could be secretly installed onto the hard drive of the computer of a potential enemy of the United States, or sent incognito as a virus to such a person, attached to a seemingly innocuous email note or advertisement.

Once installed, it allowed the FBI to read encrypted files, and even capture individual keystrokes, like passwords, thus unlocking the most sensitive financial and organizational details of the most elusive criminals and crime syndicates. And it could evade even the most sophisticated antivirus software on the market, so far.

But even the best technology is only as good as the people who make use of it. It fell to people like Downing to invade a target’s computer, steal its data, and sift it rapidly and without detection for the kind of information that could help her fellow agents in the field break the toughest of cases. And Downing was good. Very good. She’d helped blow open so many cases in the last several years that she’d landed on FBI Director Scott Harris’s radar screen and been dubbed “The Carnivore Queen.”

That didn’t mean she got to avoid the night shift, of course. It was, after all, the busiest and most productive time of day for the Magic Lantern team. But what did it matter? Despite her striking good looks, dazzling blue eyes, and feisty, infectious laugh, she hadn’t been out on a date since she’d first joined the @Home team. Working twelve to fourteen hours a day might have something to do with that, her roommates kept telling her. But the lack of a social life was getting old, and it just made her work all the more.

But Carrie Downing now froze. Any trace of fatigue or self-pity suddenly and instantly evaporated. She stared at the freshly intercepted email, but had no idea what to do with it. She knew who’d received it. The target—Stuart Iverson, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, and his private AOL account—was one of sixty-three email accounts of top administration officials personally authorized by the FBI Director himself to be monitored. But it wasn’t Iverson per se that caught her attention. Not at the moment. It was the sender’s name that made her blood run cold.

She quickly ran a trace and a systems check, then triple-checked her results. An involuntary shudder rippled through Downing’s body. Everything she’d been doing for the FBI had been fun and cool and clandestine—until now. This was different, and she knew it. She could feel her heart racing and the beads of perspiration forming on her upper lip. She quickly picked up the phone in front of her and speed-dialed the watch commander in the Counter-Terrorism Op Center downstairs.

This one was hot—and way above her pay grade.

The president lifted his head again and began to speak calmly and confidently.

“All right. Hear me out. I’m not saying this is what we’re going to do. But try this on for size for a moment.”

Bennett glanced at the monitor trained on Tucker Paine. He couldn’t help but feel for him. The man looked stricken. The president gathered his thoughts, and then continued.

“Let’s say I call Prime Minister Doron back again when we’re done with this meeting. I refuse to acknowledge his request. I simply say that I’m calling to inform him that I am launching a massive air strike against Iraq immediately. Moreover, I tell him that based on rapidly developing and very disturbing new intelligence, the United States is immediately declaring war on Iraq. We will be unleashing the full fury of our military might on Saddam Hussein’s regime. And I tell him that in the course of the next few days, we may—I repeat,
‘may’
—be forced to use one or more weapons of mass destruction against Iraq. Would his government and country support the United States if such a series of actions were to ensue?”

Now Bob Corsetti broke in for the first time.

“Right. Pledge war, but hedge on 100-percent commitment to going nuclear. Start an air campaign immediately. Bomb the hell out of Baghdad and Tikrit and send the 82nd into the western deserts of Iraq to hunt for any mobile Scud missile launchers. That will buy us time. If you need to go all the way, you can make that decision. Hopefully, that won’t be necessary. But in no way can we acknowledge that we’ve been asked by Israel to do this. If we do this, we’ll need to do it without Israeli fingerprints.”

“Absolutely,” echoed Kirkpatrick. “But you have Jack or Burt or me—probably Jack—call Defense Minister Modine back immediately after the president’s call to the Israeli prime minister and personally insist that the Israelis neither strike first nor ever allow word of their commando action to leak out. And he can tell them we need the warhead in our possession in Washington by seven o’clock Eastern tonight.”

Now the vice president jumped in.

“Exactly. You address the nation at nine tonight. You explain that the United States has just foiled an Iraqi effort to launch a nuclear missile at the State of Israel. You announce that you consider such an act an attack against the United States of America. You explain that our actions to date have wiped out most of the world’s terrorist cells. But you help people understand that this has moved beyond a war on terrorists, that the government of Iraq has declared war on us and put us in existential danger. You tell the world our forces—no,
‘American-made Apaches’
—went in and took out an Iraqi Scud team and captured this warhead. You show photographs to the world, explain the Iraqi biological, chemical, and nuclear threat, and explain that if decisive action is not taken immediately, no one will be safe from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.”

“Then, Mr. President,” added Kirkpatrick, “you declare war. You say that the ‘full and courageous forces of freedom will prevail against the cowardly forces of evil’ and that Americans and ‘all freedom-loving people the world over must now prepare for the darkest moment in our history as a civilization.’ You prepare people for what we’re going to do, and why, and you ask them to pray with you and for our armed forces during this moment of grave national peril.”

“Then you end,” Corsetti added, “by telling the Iraqis, ‘May God have mercy on your souls. For we will have none.’”

“No,” said the president, raising his hand in opposition to Corsetti’s remark. “We’re not going to end on a note of vengeance, however well deserved.”

“Mr. President, I…”

“No, Bob, I know what you mean. But the answer is no. Look, I need to lay out the case against Iraq. It will be clear and concise and convincing. But we also need to start talking about a new case, a case for peace and prosperity, beginning in the Middle East. Not in the speech tonight. But among ourselves, and with the Israelis and Palestinians.”

“Sir, what are you talking about?” asked Secretary Paine.

“I’m talking about a post-Saddam world. I’m talking about ending the threat of war and violence in the Middle East once and for all. I’m talking about bringing the Israelis and Palestinians together here at the White House. I’m talking about a peace treaty and the oil deal Bennett’s been working on. Why? To allow every single Jew and every single Arab to personally profit and prosper if they agree to live together in peace. To offer the world a future and a hope, plans for good and not for evil.”

A wave of intense anxiety mixed with gnawing curiosity washed over everyone, including Secretary Paine. They were fast running out of time, and they didn’t quite know where the president was headed.

“OK, I know time is limited—but follow me here for a few moments,” the president continued. “We need an endgame, right? OK. So think about it. If the world is about to live through a nightmare, let’s be ready to offer it a dream as well. The dream of true Arab-Israeli peace—not because they all will love each other but because the price of war is too high, and the profits of peace are too lucrative.”

“What would that mean, sir?” pressed Paine.

“Well, here’s what I’m thinking…”

The president paused a moment to sip some water and clarify his thoughts.

“The moment the war with Iraq is over, we immediately begin working with the Israelis and Palestinians to turn Medexco into a publicly traded company. Officers of the company will be rich beyond their wildest dreams. But we basically insist that every Israeli and Palestinian be given shares in the company from the beginning, from the IPO.”

“The way Thatcher did in Britain,” Bennett interjected, fortunately without being shot down by Kirkpatrick or anyone else.

“Sort of,” replied the president. “Every Israeli and Palestinian would own shares of the company. The Joshua Fund would supply the billion dollars in venture capital. That deal’s already done. All the Joshua Fund investors retain their shares—but by going public, Israelis and Palestinians could become instantly, miraculously wealthy.”

“You’re really talking about coopting Bennett’s deal?” asked Kirkpatrick.

“Absolutely,” said the president. “You’ve all been briefed on the basic details, right?”

“We have, sir,” responded Kirkpatrick. “But I’m not sure how it applies here, sir.”

Bennett’s heart was racing and his mind was whirling. But he felt clearer than ever in his life. The president glanced at him and smiled, then continued.

“Most people have no idea what the Israelis and Palestinians are sitting on in terms of oil and gas. That may include some of you, even if you’ve read the file. But it’s unreal, almost unimaginable. At first we thought it was just natural gas. But last year they discovered oil. Unbelievable amounts of oil. To put it in context, you need to compare it with Saudi Arabia, which of course is the world’s largest oil producer, with about a quarter of the world’s known petroleum reserves. The Saudis pump about eight and half million barrels a day, right? So when oil is between twenty-five and thirty dollars a barrel, they gross well over two hundred million dollars a day—nearly eighty to ninety
billion
dollars a year, at current prices. Now Bennett and McCoy and their team believe that once all the drilling and refinery equipment is in place and everything is running at full speed, Medexco could rapidly become one of the largest petroleum companies in the world. It could eventually pump between five and six million barrels a day, grossing—conservatively—about fifty to sixty
billion
dollars a year, just from raw oil and gas sales alone, to say nothing of all the other refined products and retail sales they could have.”