The Mirage: A Novel (2 page)

“Ah, that’s not the riffraff I’m talking about. He’s a wicked man, it’s true, but the criminals you should be investigating are the ones in city hall.”

Amal feigns astonishment. “You’re saying the Baghdad mayor’s office is corrupt?”

“Are you kidding? That incompetent woman comes from the same swamp that the Persians are always sneaking through, so what does that tell you?” The manager pauses, momentarily entranced as the breeze stirs a loose strand of Amal’s hair. “You know,” he continues, “you look a bit like her.”

“Well, that’s flattering!”

The manager smiles. “I said she was corrupt and incompetent, not ugly! And of course you’re much younger than she is.”

“Yes,” Amal says. “Young enough to be her daughter, in fact.” Behind her she hears a sound that she at first takes to be Rafi snickering, but it’s actually the camera shutter. “Something happening?”

“One of the sons is on the move,” Rafi says. “Uday, I think.”

Amal takes a look. A yellow sports car has just exited the front gate of the estate and is racing down the causeway. “That’s Uday all right. Qusay drives the red one.” She turns back to the manager, who’s still smiling in a way that makes her wish she’d worn a bigger headscarf. “Anyway . . .”

“Please.” The manager stops her. “I can see you’re busy. Perhaps . . . we could talk more later?”

Amal has to make an effort not to roll her eyes. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you give me your card, and I’ll see if—”

He’s already reaching for his wallet. But before he can fumble out a business card, his cell phone rings. “Yes . . . ?” As he listens to the caller, his smile fades.

“What is it?” Amal asks, after he hangs up. His face gone grave, he ignores the question, reaching past Amal to tug at Rafi’s sleeve.

“Excuse me . . .”

“What?” says Rafi, annoyed.

“I’m afraid there’s a problem.”

“Yes, we know. Give Amal your card, like she said, and we’ll—”

“No,” the manager says. “This is something else. Something serious. An Arabian Airlines flight out of Kuwait City has been—”

His phone rings again. More bad news.

“What’s going on?” says Amal. “Has the plane been hijacked?”

No response. It’s like she’s suddenly invisible. The manager stares at Rafi, but Rafi stares right back, waiting for the guy to answer Amal’s question.

“Two,” he finally says. “Two planes . . . At
least
two.”

8:41. Another Halal agent, a thin, wiry man with a mustache, arrives at the riverbank. The agents already on scene have opened up additional bottles of “evidence,” and the gathering now seems less like an arrest and more like a party, with everyone except the handcuffed guest of honor in a festive mood.

“Hey, Mustafa!” Samir calls to the new arrival. “About time you got here!”

“What do we have?”

“Another Jewish wine-smuggling conspiracy.” Samir laughs and offers him an open bottle, but Mustafa waves it away.

“What is it really? More Scotch whiskey?”

“A mixed assortment. Whiskey mostly, looks like, but also some vodka, and some horrible cherry concoction.”

“This one tastes like coffee!” Isaac calls from the boat.

“I’m hoping for a nice arak, myself,” Samir says.

“Just the thing, with Ramadan coming up,” says Mustafa, his tone more than his words causing Samir to raise an eyebrow. Mustafa nods at the weeping boat pilot. “This is our smuggler?”

“Yes,” Samir says, still reacting to the Ramadan comment. “A real hard case, as you can see.”

“I suppose you didn’t wait to see if anyone would show up to meet him.”

“Why bother? If we know about this shipment, you can bet Saddam knows we know. The real shipment’s probably being unloaded upriver somewhere while we’re busy with this decoy.”

“Busy.” Mustafa shakes his head. “You’d better hope no one with a camera catches you being ‘busy’ with that bottle.”

“What’s gotten into you this morning, Mustafa? Why are you late?”

“My car wouldn’t start.”

“And for that you’re being an asshole? You’ve been fighting with the wives again, haven’t you? Which one, Noor?”

Mustafa points to the dusty hatchback he drove to the pier. “Does that look like something I’d borrow from Noor?”

“Ah,” Samir says. “Fadwa then. That’s a shame. Still, no need to take it out on me.”

“Let’s just knock this off before the
Post
does an exposé on corruption at Halal.”

“Fine, fine,” Samir says. “All right everybody, let’s start wrapping things up—”

The other agents, clustered by the boat, are all staring at something in the sky to the south. Even the boat pilot has stopped crying and raised his head to look.

“What . . . ,” Samir says, turning. “Huh. He’s awfully low . . .”

Mustafa is the last to look around. He catches only the briefest glimpse of the jet before it passes overhead, engines screaming. The impact is hidden from view by the structure of the bridge; they’ll watch it later, of course, replayed endlessly on television, but in the moment it’s only a loud
boom
, followed by the screams of people who can see it.

Then for just a second there is silence, a pocket of stillness during which some instinct makes Mustafa look not towards the hidden tower but at the car that brought him here. “Fadwa,” he says, and a shockwave passes beneath his feet, leaving a different world in its wake.

Book One
The Mirage

T
HE
L
IBRARY OF
A
LEXANDRIA

A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

United Arab States

This page is currently
protected
from editing to deal with
repeated acts of vandalism.
To suggest changes, please
contact an administrator.

The
United Arab States
is a
federal constitutional republic
made up of 22
states
, one
federal district
, two
religious districts
, and several
territories
. Situated largely in the
Eastern Hemisphere
, it occupies the entirety of the
Arabian Peninsula
and the
Levant
, most of
Mesopotamia
,
North Africa
, and
Northeast Africa
, and numerous islands in the surrounding waters. It shares land borders with
Turkey
,
Kurdistan
,
Persia
, and various African nations.

At over 14 million square kilometers and with more than 360 million people, the United Arab States is the world’s
second largest country by total area
and
third largest by population 
. . .

HISTORY

Birth of a nation

The UAS was born from the ashes of the
Arab League
, a loose federation of Middle Eastern states that broke away from the
Ottoman Empire
near the end of the 19th century. Having successfully—if tentatively—declared independence from the Empire, the members of the League fell almost immediately to fighting amongst themselves along clan and sectarian lines. The bloody civil war continued until an attempt at reconquest by the Ottomans caused the League to once again unite against a common foe. Supported by a newly independent
Egypt
and the armies of the
House of Saud
, the League routed the Ottoman invasion force.

Following the armistice, the victors gathered in Egypt to discuss their future. In what became known as the
miracle of Alexandria
, the various parties managed to set aside their differences and agree on a plan to form a new and more lasting union,
“One nation under God.”

At its founding the UAS consisted of thirteen states—
Arabia
,
Bahrain
,
Egypt
,
the Emirates
,
Iraq
,
Jordan
,
Kuwait
,
Lebanon
,
Oman
,
Palestine
,
Qatar
,
Syria
, and
Yemen
—and the religious district of
Mecca-Medina
. The nation’s capital was initially at
Cairo
, but within a few years, during the presidency of
Abd al Aziz ibn Saud
, it was moved to
Riyadh.

Early growth

The new nation’s geographic location made it a nexus of international trade, and despite an ongoing feud between Egypt and the federal government over control of the
Suez Canal
, the economy grew rapidly. The discovery of major
petroleum reserves
in the 1910s added further to the economic boom. While
Christian Europe
tore itself apart in war, the UAS embarked on an ambitious project of industrialization . . .

The world at war

Towards the end of the 1930s, war broke out again in
Europe
and
Asia
. The UAS attempted to remain neutral, but
German
and
Italian
threats against the Muslims of
North Africa
, and
Japanese
aggression in
Malaya
and
Indonesia
, made this impossible . . . In 1941 the UAS unleashed its military might against the
Axis
. . . By 1943,
Libya
,
Tunisia
,
Algeria
,
Morocco
, and
Mauritania
had all been liberated, and joined the union . . . In July 1944 a newly armed and trained
Maghrebi
invasion force stormed the beaches of southern
France
while allied Arab, Persian,
Turkish
, and
Kurdish
forces captured
Rome
and the
Russian Orthodox Army
launched its own series of offensives against the German eastern front . . . In the
Southeast Asian Theater
, Arab and
Indian
marines liberated the last of the
Indonesian archipelago
and struck north into the
Philippines
. . . In August 1945, after a third
atomic bomb
was dropped on
Tokyo
, Japan surrendered, ending the war . . . In December 1946,
Adolf Hitler
was beheaded at
Nuremberg
 . . .

1948: Israel, the Orthodox Union, and the beginning of the Cold Crusade . . . President Nasser and the Arab Unity Party . . . “One small step for a Muslim . . .” The Islamic Awakening and the war in Afghanistan . . . “Black Arabs”: Somalia and Sudan join the Union . . . The Mexican Gulf War . . .

11/9 and the War on Terror

On November 9, 2001,
Christian fundamentalists
hijacked four commercial passenger jetliners. They crashed two of them into the
Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers
in downtown
Baghdad
,
Iraq
, and a third into the
Arab Defense Ministry headquarters
in the
federal district of Riyadh
. The fourth plane, which is believed to have been bound for either the
Presidential Palace
in Riyadh or, possibly,
Mecca
(see
Controversies and Myths of 11/9
), crashed in Arabia’s
Empty Quarter
after its passengers attempted to retake control from the hijackers.

Responsibility for the attacks was claimed by the
World Christian Alliance
, a
North American
white supremacist group
based in the
Rocky Mountain Independent Territories
. In retaliation, UAS airborne troops captured the city of
Denver
, and UAS Special Forces backed by strike aircraft launched raids against Alliance strongholds in the surrounding countryside. Thousands of Alliance troops were captured or killed, but the Alliance leadership remained at large.

Even as the fighting in the Rockies continued,
President Bandar
used his
2002 State of the Union address
to announce a broader
War on Terror
that would include preemptive attacks against “regimes that aid, harbor, or sponsor terrorists.” The president made special mention of
America
, the
United Kingdom
, and
North Korea
, branding them “an
Axis of Evil
” whose attempts to develop
weapons of mass destruction
would no longer be tolerated . . .

In March of 2003,
Coalition forces
launched a successful invasion of America . . . A provisional government was established in the so-called
“Green Zone”
in
Washington, D.C.
. . . Hopes for a quick transition to a stable democracy were dashed by outbreaks of violence between rival American factions and by the rise of an anti-Arab insurgency . . . In 2006, with Coalition casualties mounting and no end to the war in sight, the
National Party of God
suffered heavy losses during the midterm Congressional elections. Candidates closely affiliated with the House of Saud fared especially poorly . . .

Now, with the
Arab Unity Party
once again in control of both Congress and the executive branch, there is hope that the
War in America
will soon be over. But even as the first troops return home, there are rumors of new terror threats against the Arab homeland, and fears that Arabia’s most challenging days still lie ahead . . .

T
he crusader was staying on the eleventh floor of the Rasheed Hotel. He’d arrived in Baghdad in the early afternoon and registered under the name John Huss. Among his possessions was a five-kilogram box of plastic explosives stolen from the army base at Kufah.