The Mirage: A Novel (29 page)

Book Three
The Glory and the Kingdom

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Lyndon B. Johnson

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Lyndon Baines Johnson
(August 27, 1908–December 30, 2006), a
Protestant
of the
Disciples of Christ sect
, was president of the
Christian States of America
(CSA) from November 22, 1963 until April 9, 2003. He seized power in the wake of the
Kennedy family assassinations
and was deposed during the
Arabian invasion of America
.

EARLY LIFE

Johnson was born in
Stonewall
in the
Evangelical Republic of Texas
. His father was a government official whose fortunes declined after he incurred the wrath of a powerful
Baptist
senator. In 1929 the entire family was forced to flee into exile in America.

RISE TO POWER

Little is known of Johnson’s activities over the next quarter century, but by the mid-1950s he had become a member of the
Department of Justice
(DOJ), the American national police bureau charged with maintaining internal security. In 1958 Johnson uncovered a plot by a former naval officer named
Richard Milhous Nixon
to assassinate then-president
Joseph P. Kennedy
. Two years later, when Kennedy abdicated in favor of his son John, Johnson was put in charge of the DOJ’s
Secret Service branch
.

On November 22, 1963, during a state visit to
Texas
,
John F. Kennedy
was shot and killed by a sniper. Back in
Washington, D.C.,
Johnson ordered the Secret Service to round up the rest of the Kennedy clan and take them to a safe location. That evening, Johnson went on television and announced that the plane carrying the Kennedys to
Hyannis Port
had blown up in midair. “For the good of the country,” he said, he would assume the powers of the executive himself. He then declared
martial law
 . . .

While he solidified his grip on power, Johnson also began laying the groundwork for the conquest of his birth country.

“FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM . . .”

Under
interrogation
following his capture by Coalition forces, Johnson’s senior advisor
Henry Kissinger
revealed that since at least the 1960s, Johnson had had a recurring dream in which an angel recited to him the closing line of the
Lord’s Prayer
: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.” In the dream, Johnson understood “the kingdom” to be a reference to the Republic of Texas, while “the glory” was America; “the power” was Johnson himself, destined by God to unite the two nations—and ultimately, the entire North
American continent
—under one rule.

In September 1964, Johnson publicly accused the
Texas CIA
of masterminding the Kennedy killings. Among other evidence, he cited the suspicious death, in custody, of Dallas sniper
Lee Harvey Oswald
—murdered, Johnson said, to prevent him from revealing on whose orders he had acted. The Texas government formally denied Johnson’s charges. Johnson put his armies on alert and prepared America for war.

Both Kissinger and military strategist
Robert McNamara
recommended a naval blockade of the Texas coast followed by an amphibious assault. But Johnson, inspired by another dream, decided to attack over land. As Texas and America do not share a border, this meant going through another country—either the
Pentecostal Gilead Heartland
, or the independent kingdoms of
Mississippi
and
Louisiana
.

Johnson chose to go through Gilead. He manufactured a
casus belli
, claiming that American patrol boats on
Lake Erie
had been fired at by ships of Gilead. On November 1, 1964, he launched a three-pronged ground assault west out of
Appalachia
. The attack went smoothly at first, but on November 3, an early blizzard blanketed the
Midwest
and halted the advance. Pentecostal
militias
, undaunted by the snow, counterattacked the Americans’ supply lines; by the time the weather cleared two weeks later, Johnson’s troops were starving and running out of fuel and ammunition. They staged an emergency retreat to the mountains, but were forced to abandon much of their equipment, which the Gileadites then seized . . .

The
Heartland
War raged on and off for eight years. Gilead’s eastern plains were devastated and the cities of
Detroit
,
Columbus
, and
Nashville
were all but destroyed, but Johnson’s troops were never able to gain a decisive advantage. America’s technological and industrial superiority was matched by the fanaticism of the Gileadites, who pioneered the use of
suicide bombers
as a military tactic. The
Mormon
and
Rocky Mountain tribespeople
, fearing they would be at risk if Gilead fell, also joined in the fighting. Texas sent military aid and advisors.

The
1973 Algiers Peace Accords
officially ended the war. Johnson’s forces withdrew to the Appalachians for the last time. Although America had suffered little physical damage during the conflict, its economy was in shambles and its people were on the verge of revolt. Johnson would spend the next two decades coping with civil unrest and other domestic crises, but he never gave up his dream of conquering Texas. By the 1990s, he was ready to try again.

1991: THE MEXICAN GULF WAR

In June 1990, following a palace coup, the
Kingdom of Mississippi
allowed itself to be annexed and became America’s eighteenth state. Henry Kissinger flew to
New Orleans
and invited Louisiana’s leaders to join the CSA as well; they declined.

On August 2, American troops invaded
Louisiana
. By August 6 much of the
Louisiana Armed Forces
had surrendered or fled into Texas. LBJ christened Louisiana the nineteenth American state and began massing his forces along the east Texas border.

Texas successfully appealed to its fellow OPEC members for help. On August 8 the
UAS
and
Persia
began airlifting troops into
Houston
and
Dallas–Fort Worth
, while the
Venezuelan
Navy
established a defensive cordon along the Texas
coastline
. . . On January 17, 1991, the Coalition launched a massive air campaign. A ground assault followed on February 23, and in just 100 hours of fighting, Louisiana was liberated . . .

Although the Americans had suffered a humiliating military defeat, Johnson declared the
Gulf War
a great victory. Johnson’s preening only added to the sense among many of the war’s critics that, by allowing LBJ to remain in power, the Coalition had failed to finish the job. This in turn set the stage for the final act in the dictator’s career . . .

T
hey had landed in Tripoli to refuel. Looking out the window beside his seat, Mustafa could see, through the heat-shimmer rising off the tarmac, a broad tract of eucalyptus trees abutting the airfield. A sign identified this as
CARBON SEQUESTRATION TEST PLOT #11
.

By North African standards Tripoli was a lush city, its parks and gardens well irrigated by one of the governor’s most successful public works projects, the Great Manmade River, which had tapped into the vast fossil water aquifer beneath the Sahara Desert. These eucalypti were part of an even grander Al Gaddafi scheme to fight global warming by turning the desert into a forest. Test plots like this one had been established throughout Libya, some two hundred hectares in all; the final plan called for the planting of a billion hectares, with over a trillion trees. It was going to take a while. But then the Internet hadn’t happened in a day either.

Mustafa, Samir, and Amal had left Baghdad in the early morning, catching a commuter flight to Riyadh, where a military jeep had been waiting to transfer them to Al Kharj Air Force Base. At Al Kharj they had boarded this massive cargolifter. Although the occupation of America was supposed to be winding down, you’d never guess it by the amount of matériel crammed into the plane’s cargo bay. An airman led them forward between the pallets of ammunition, medical supplies, and food rations, and up a stairwell to the passenger deck. There was relatively little human cargo; the handful of occupied seats were taken mostly by flight attendants and other crewmembers not directly involved in flying the plane.

The cargolifter’s scheduled travel time was fifteen hours. Mustafa had brought plenty to read: lots of background material on America, and some classified documents obtained for him, with minimal redactions, by the president’s staff. Samir and Amal had similar reading packets.

“Ready for takeoff,” the pilot announced.

A peculiarity of the cargolifter was that the passenger seats, unlike those in a civilian airliner, were fixed facing backwards, so as the plane lifted off Mustafa was easily able to look out and watch first the eucalyptus tract and then the dusty green patchwork that was Tripoli recede into the distance. Soon they were gone from view and the plane proceeded westward over a tan landscape, the rocks and sand of the great forest yet to be.

Mustafa returned to his reading.

The report, authored by the Political Science Faculty of the University of Sudan at Khartoum, was titled “Colorblind: The Role of Race in the American Insurgency.” It began with a brief recap of the history of black-white relations in 20th-century America. For the first two-thirds of the century, the CSA had practiced a form of racial apartheid—openly in the southern states, and more covertly in the north, where, according to the report, “white citizens wanted the benefits of racial preference without the culpability.”

A Civil Rights Act banning race discrimination had been drafted by the Kennedys and signed into law by LBJ during the first year of his rule. “Statements made by Johnson and his closest aides suggest that in this, as in the attempted conquest of Texas, he believed he was carrying out God’s will. His enemies accused him of more cynical motives. In the south, particularly, the Civil Rights Act was seen as a pretext for expanding federal power and curtailing ‘states’ rights.’ ” Several attempts at insurrection had to be crushed by federal troops. The Department of Justice rounded up political troublemakers—black as well as white—and shipped them off to the front lines of the Heartland War. “While Johnson succeeded at dismantling the American apartheid system—the one truly admirable achievement of his reign—he did not eliminate American racism. Rather, he drove his subjects’ ethnic hatred underground, where it festered for decades, waiting for a chance to spring forth again. That chance finally came in 2003. The Coalition invasion of America crippled federal control over the states. It also created a situation in which open expression of prejudice against darker-skinned people was considered not just politically acceptable, but patriotic . . .”

Enter Boulos al Darir, a favored son of the National Party of God and the man chosen to oversee the reconstruction of America during the crucial first year following the invasion. He was a disaster, issuing a series of unpopular decrees that killed whatever small chance there might have been of a peaceful transition to democracy.

The most infamous of these decrees was Order Number 2, which disbanded the Minutemen—the American National Guard—thereby throwing half a million heavily armed Christians out of work. Order Number 3, a purge of all Christian Democrat Party members from the Federal Civil Service, created another hundred thousand unemployed. “Because many of these civil servants, as well as many of the Minutemen stationed in the Washington, D.C., area, were African-American,” the report stated, “these Orders were widely interpreted as an attempt by the occupying forces to ally with the white majority against the black minority. Had this in fact been the case, Administrator Al Darir’s policy decisions might have been defensible on practical if not moral grounds. However, it appears in hindsight that he acted in ignorance, creating enormous racial animus to no purpose.”

Any favor that Al Darir had incidentally earned with white Americans went out the window with Order Number 5, the decree banning the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The idea that prohibition could be made to work in what was still a war zone was farcical at best; outside the occupied capital, the ban had little effect on Americans’ drinking habits. But there were other consequences. In suddenly dry Washington, a thriving black market sprang up, giving out-of-work Minutemen a new way to make a living—and a new reason to fight for territory. The Coalition forces, meanwhile, became an army of untrained Halal agents. Troops that should have been helping to reestablish stability were instead sent on search-and-destroy missions for breweries and distilleries. Sometimes they found them. Sometimes they made mistakes and destroyed other targets instead: medical supply factories; food warehouses; schools. News of the worst outrages spread throughout the country, causing more unrest.

At an emergency meeting, some of Al Darir’s aides tried to convince him to repeal the Order. He refused. Then, making the single most regrettable statement of his career, he suggested that if Americans wanted to relax at the end of the day, they should try smoking hashish; the climate of the southern states in particular, Al Darir noted, ought to be excellent for the cultivation of cannabis.