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  “Well?” the President snapped. “What’s our response to this going to be?”

  “How bad is it really?” the Vice President asked. “In military terms, that is.”

  The President looked at the Secretary of Defense, who said, “The Israelis blew the crap out of the place. Leveled it. It was a good clean strike, too, with little or no collateral damage, despite what the Iranians are saying. Our satellite imagery confirmed all of that.”

  “What about civilian casualties?” the President asked.

  The SecDef shrugged. “I’m sure any workers who were inside the plant at that hour were probably civilians. But they were civilians who knew damned good and well that they were working on nuclear weapons that were intended to one day blow Israel off the face of the earth. I wouldn’t call that innocent.”

  “What about the civilian workers at our nuclear facilities?” the President shot back. “Wouldn’t you consider them innocent?”

  “Of course I would.”

  The President folded her arms across her chest. “Well, the Iranians feel the same way about their people.” She prided herself on being able to empathize with other points of view—especially those of America’s enemies. “I don’t see any way we can support Israel on this.”

  “What about sixty years of friendship between the United States and Israel?” asked the National Security Advisor. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  The President frowned. She wasn’t sure she liked or trusted the NSA. The woman had a brilliant mind and all the proper academic credentials, as well as mixed ethnicity, debatable sexuality, and camera-friendly looks. She was freakin’ perfect, as the President’s husband had put it…except for the fact that the President had come to realize that she didn’t fully share all of the administration’s views. Neither did SecDef, but being a good soldier, she would go along with whatever her commander in chief said.

  “Israel is still our friend,” the President said as she looked at the NSA. “But that doesn’t mean we have to be one hundred percent in favor of anything Israel happens to do.”

  The Asian American woman shrugged. “Respond however you want, of course, but if you condemn Israel’s action it’ll be a slap in the face. The Israelis won’t forget it. And it’ll make you look like you’re waffling and soft on the threat of Islamofascism.”

  “We don’t use that word in this White House,” the President snapped.

  “Why not? It’s a perfectly good, descriptive word. Or did you mean the word waffling?”

  The President heard something, and glanced around to see that her husband had his hand over his face. He was trying to look solemn, but she could tell that the big bastard was actually stifling a chuckle. He loved seeing someone get the better of her, even for a moment, probably because he had never been able to.

  “All I’ve tried to do is repair some of the damage that the previous administration did to this country’s standing in the community of nations,” she said to the National Security Advisor.

  “Oh, sure, that’s what the rest of the world says they want from the United States,” she responded, much as she would have slashed right through some feeble argument from a student in one of her classes. “They want us to make nice and consult them on any action before we ever make a move and do whatever they tell us. But when we behave like that, they don’t see a strong but cooperative nation. They see a patsy, a pushover. They see an impotent giant without the balls to do what needs to be done.” The NSA shrugged. “I’m sorry if that’s not politically correct enough for you, Madame President, but you hired me to tell you the truth as I see it—and that’s the way I see it.”

  For a long moment, the President thought about firing the arrogant bitch on the spot. Nobody talked to her like that and got away with it. Nobody. Even her husband would be licking his wounds—literally as well as figuratively, in his case—if he ever dared to speak to her in that tone of voice.

  But the slant-eyed slut had a point, the pragmatic part of the President’s brain insisted. Ever since the bloody debacle in Iraq caused by the total troop pullout as soon as she took office, America’s enemies around the world had been licking their chops, just waiting for the right opportunity to humble the giant even more. So far it hadn’t happened, but according to the intelligence briefings from the CIA and Homeland Security, it was only a matter of time. Of when, not if.

  But maybe she could postpone the day when some other rogue nation or organization would spit in Uncle Sam’s face. Maybe a show of strength now really was what was needed. For one thing, it would take the rest of the world by surprise. It was good to keep your enemies off balance, a little unsure of what to expect.

  The atmosphere in the Oval Office following the NSA’s comments was thick with tension. The President broke it by turning to the Secretary of State and asking, “What’s the diplomatic response by the Iranians going to be? Can they do anything except whine to the U.N. and get the French and the Germans and the Russians to feel sorry for them?”

  The heavyset man shrugged his shoulders. “What else can they do?”

  The President looked at the SecDef and the JCS Chairman. “Militarily?”

  “They don’t have the capacity to do much of anything,” the SecDef replied. “The Israelis wiped out any shot they had at delivering a nuclear strike, and while their conventional forces are fairly strong, they’re not up to invading Israel.”

  “About all they can do,” the Chairman added, “is turn off the oil spigot.”

  “Shut down the Strait of Hormuz, you mean?” the President asked.

  The man nodded. “That they can do with their navy and air force…if nobody’s there to stop them.”

  “What are our assets in the area?”

  “A few,” the Chairman said. He was an old Navy man, an admiral, and his eyes glittered with the desire to get into the action. “And we can get our carriers in the Mediterranean over there in forty-eight hours.”

  The President looked at the Vice President, but the gesture was more out of courtesy than anything else. They both knew who was going to make the decision here. But he was strong-willed enough to register an opinion anyway. “I don’t see that you have any real choice, ma’am.”

  The President wanted to look at her husband and see if she could tell what he thought, but she suppressed the impulse. He wasn’t the commander in chief here; she was. Her head jerked in an abrupt nod as she looked at the Chairman and said, “Get those carriers to the Gulf, Admiral.”

  She could tell that he fought to keep from grinning as he snapped to attention and said, “Will do, ma’am.”

  “All right, everybody out,” she went on as she stalked over behind the desk. Her desk. The President’s desk. The ultimate seat of power in what was still the most powerful nation in the world. “I’ve got a statement to write. Somebody tell my Chief of Staff to advise the networks I’ll address the nation at eight tonight.”

  She sat down and pulled a legal pad and a pen over to her as they all filed out of the Oval Office, even her husband. He lingered until last, and then looked at her with his bushy eyebrows lifted questioningly, as if he were unsure whether she really wanted him to go, too, or if she might want his help on the speech she was going to have to deliver to the American people.

  She flipped an impatient hand at him, shooing him out with the others, and paid no attention to the hurt-puppy-dog look on his face. She had important work to do here…at the President’s desk.

  God, despite all the annoyances, the power felt good.

  As if she were born to it.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Accordingly, American aircraft carriers and other elements will be traveling to the Persian Gulf as quickly as possible in order to peacefully secure the region.”

  Nate Sawyer called from the living room, “Mom, where’s the Persian Gulf?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it’s over in the Middle East somewhere,” Allison Sawyer told her son. She was folding laundry on the kitchen ta
ble in their little apartment and not paying much attention to the TV. She knew the President was on, talking about that crisis overseas. There was always a crisis somewhere overseas, it seemed like.

  “Where’s the Middle East?”

  “You know, Iraq and Iran and Israel, all those places. Don’t they teach you this stuff in school?”

  Nate grinned. “I know all those countries you just said start with I. Wanna hear me say the alphabet?”

  “You’ve been saying the alphabet since before you even started to school.”

  “I could read before I started to school.”

  Allison wasn’t so distracted by the laundry that she failed to hear the pride in her son’s voice. She smiled at him and said, “You sure could, champ.”

  And she could take some pride in that, too, since she was the one who’d read to him every day since he was a baby. She was convinced that was why he had learned to read by the time he was four and now read at a higher level than any of the other kids in his third-grade class. She knew she wasn’t supposed to make too much of a fuss about that; the teacher had told her so. Doing that might foster a sense of elitism in Nate and ultimately damage the self-esteem of the other kids in the class, and you couldn’t have that. The whole public education system was geared toward leveling the playing field and making all the kids as much alike as possible.

  But facts were facts, and Allison’s kid was smart. She wanted to make sure he knew it, too.

  Maybe that way he wouldn’t make the same sort of dumb mistakes that his mom had made, like marrying a self-centered asshole—

  “Are we gonna have a war?”

  “What?” Allison set aside the laundry she was folding and walked into the living room. Maybe she ought to pay more attention to what the President was talking about, she thought.

  “The President said there was gonna be a war between Israel and Iran. Are we gonna be in it?”

  Allison sat down on the edge of the sofa beside Nate. “Surely that’s not what she said.”

  “Uh-huh! Just listen.”

  The camera, steady as a rock, showed the President sitting behind her desk in the Oval Office. She had some papers in front of her, but she wasn’t reading from them. Instead she gazed into the camera with an earnest, worried expression on her face.

  “…deeply regret that Israel was forced to take this action by Iran’s continued refusal to allow United Nations inspectors in its nuclear facilities. I spoke to the Prime Minister of Israel a short time ago, and he personally assured me that it was imperative action be taken now, without delay. According to information received by the Israeli intelligence services, Iran was less than a week away from launching a missile carrying a nuclear warhead at Tel Aviv.”

  “See?” Nate said. “A nuclear warhead.”

  “That doesn’t mean there’s going to be a war,” Allison told him.

  But if it was true, it meant that Israel and Iran had come damned close to a war. And it might happen yet if Iran tried any sort of payback for the Israeli air attack. Allison didn’t keep up with politics all that much—Nate and her job kept her too busy for that—but there was such a bombardment of news and information all the time now that you couldn’t help but be aware of what was going on in this crazy world. Today especially, TV and radio had been full of stuff about what was going on in the Middle East. As usual for that region, things seemed to be teetering on the brink of Armageddon.

  “Maybe you should go on to bed,” Allison suggested. “You’re already up past your bedtime.”

  “No! I wanna watch the rest of this.”

  “You don’t really care about somebody making a speech, even the President.”

  “Well…there might be somethin’ good on afterwards.”

  Not likely, Allison thought. All the talking heads would have to yammer for another hour about everything the President had said. Politicians and military experts from both parties would be interviewed. The ones from the President’s party would agree with everything she said; the ones from the opposition party would disagree. And none of them would see that if the situation had been exactly the same—hell, if the words of the speech had been exactly the same—and only the party affiliation had been reversed, then their reactions would have been exactly the opposite. That was what Allison hated about politics and why she didn’t bother to vote anymore.

  “I don’t think there’s going to be anything else good on tonight,” she told Nate. “You go on to your room. I’ll be in to read a story to you in a few minutes.”

  “I can read to myself, you know.”

  “I know you can.” She put an arm around his shoulders and hugged him to her. “But I still like to do it. Let me do it for a while longer, okay?”

  “Okay.” He trudged off toward his room. He didn’t have far to go because the apartment was so small.

  Allison leaned back against the sofa cushions and watched the last few minutes of the President’s speech. It was full of flowery rhetoric about respecting the rights of sovereign nations and abiding by the rule of law and not allowing ourselves to descend once more into barbarism. All that stuff meant that the President didn’t want to go to war. Everybody knew that. The woman’s antiwar credentials went way back. And everybody had seen what had happened in Iraq as soon as she took office, too. She had cut and run, choosing sure defeat over possible progress someday. Allison couldn’t really fault her for that; that war had been poorly run, from what little Allison could see from her civilian standpoint.

  That was just it, she thought as the President signed off with the usual “Good night, and bless the United States of America.” She, Allison Sawyer, was a civilian. All this stuff going on didn’t have anything to do with her. She worried about her son, and her job, and coming up with enough money to pay all the bills at the end of the month…with maybe a little left over for an occasional treat. Christmas was coming up after all. It was only a few days until Thanksgiving, and then it would be less than a month until Christmas, and Allison hadn’t even started her shopping yet.

  But luckily, there was a new MegaMart, one of those giant UltraMegaMarts, only a few miles away, on the Interstate between Fort Worth and Denton, and it was about to have its grand opening on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. There would be a lot of sales and specials—there always was on what was traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year—but the prices would be even better at the UltraMegaMart on that day. Allison tuned out the talking heads on TV and started thinking about what she might be able to get Nate for Christmas. There would be a huge mob there, of course, but she might have to brave it anyway.

  She would do whatever was necessary to make this a good Christmas for her son.

  CHAPTER 6

  Although the Prophet had taught his followers to practice moderation, Hamed al-Bashar’s reaction to what he was hearing and seeing on the television had no moderation to it.

  Indeed, he wished he were there in the Oval Office with a sword in his hand—the holy sword of Islam—so he could kill that Zionist bitch.

  Hamed had little use for Iranians, of course—they were Shiites, and he was Sunni—but right now his hatred for the Shiites was subordinated to his even greater hatred of the filthy Jews. At the training compound in the hills of Pakistan, his superiors in Hizb ut-Tahrir had taught him that tribal differences had to be put aside for now, because all of Islam faced an even greater threat. It was the goal of the West to wipe out the entire Muslim world, the leaders said, to obliterate all the Prophet’s holy teachings, and that was why the cause of jihad was so important. That was why the infidels had to be wiped out first.

  The Jews’ attack on Iran was just one more example of lawless aggression against the Muslim world. And instead of condemning it, the American President was supporting Israel. In fact, she was sending warships to the Persian Gulf to further suppress the Iranians and interfere with their right to enforce their will in their own waters.

  It made Hamed seethe with outrage. He wanted to
pick up one of the new Adidas shoes he had bought earlier in the day and throw it through the television screen. Instead, he sat in his apartment in Kansas City and fumed.

  After a while, his anger faded and was replaced by depression. He had been in America, living and working with these godless devils, keeping to himself and not doing anything that might make anyone suspicious. Those had been his orders, and he had followed them faithfully. He assumed that the other members of his cell, scattered through the Midwest and the South, were conducting themselves in the same manner. They were probably feeling the same frustration he was.

  He was ready for action, ready for the call that would summon him to his mission, whatever it might be. Ready to strike back against the Great Satan.

  Ready to die for his holy cause. Eager to die. Eager for the day when he would inflict the same sort of pain and suffering on the Americans as they had inflicted on his people. On his brothers—using the word loosely—in Iran, and in all the other places where Westerners had attacked Muslims. Eager as well for the beautiful virgins who would be waiting for him in paradise, but really, that was just a minor consideration. What was important was striking back against the Jews and the Americans. The same thing really. They were all Zionists. Filthy Zionists.

  The shrill ringing of the cell phone in his pocket made Hamed jump.

  He had bought it in a drugstore in Crosby, North Dakota, not far from the Canadian border, on his first day in the United States. Along with it, he had bought a time card that was good for a year, and had activated both the phone and the card from a computer in the public library that was connected to the Internet.

  Then he had written the phone’s number on a piece of paper, put it in a get-well card he had also bought at the drugstore, sealed the envelope that came with the card, addressed it to Bob Wilson at a post office box in St. Petersburg, Florida, bought a stamp from a coin-operated machine in the local post office, and dropped the card in the mail.