Countdown to Mecca (34 page)

Jack almost sucked in a breath. Suddenly Brooks had thrust the ball into his hands. “Eliminated,” he echoed, “yes. But the right way. The American way.”

“By trial? In the courts? Give me a break—”

“No,” Jack replied. “On main street, at high noon, one-on-one. The ordinary man, the small town sheriff, the big city cop—he or she has to show these lunatics that we're not afraid to face them. And when we stand up to them, who do you think will cave? Us?”

“I admire your confidence in the American spirit,” Brooks said. “But this is the twenty-first century and we've got to fight fire with fire. I've heard what you've said. I've read what you've written. You, of all people, know the truth of what I'm saying. You've advocated it.” He wagged a scolding finger at Jack, moving to the edge of his chair. “Don't you go weak on me now. Not you! You got weak once, and let them throw you off the air! The greatest voice of reason in the entire country and they throw you off the air.”

Jack got very cold and became very still. “They threw me off the air because I asked one question—”

“Yes!” the general all but exalted. “And you were one hundred percent right in asking that question. Because, make no mistake, the Islamic terrorist will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction and they will not hesitate to use it on us. That is why we have to stop them before they can.” Brooks pointed at the camera. “You know that, I know that, and now we have to tell the world! We have to be strong and smart enough finish it, finish them! Once and for all.” Brooks leaned back, smiling and certain. He positively beamed with righteous fervor.

“Yes,” said Jack quietly. “But what about starting it?”

Brooks blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“On
Truth Tellers,
I asked one simple question. ‘How would you feel if Muslim extremists got hold of a nuclear weapon?'”

“Yes, yes,” said the general nodding, leaning forward. “That's what we have to stop.”

“But how? The heroic way or the way of the desert jackal?” Jack asked, leaning forward himself so their faces were no more than six inches away from each other.

“Stop comparing us to them—”

“Why? General, what would you do if you had a nuclear weapon or some other WMD?”

It was as if Jack had just told him he had won a million dollars. General Thomas Brooks leaned back, lay his crossed fingers onto his stomach, and smiled like he had just had the best meal ever.

“There's no ‘if,'” he said point-blank. “I do have a weapon of mass destruction, one the world has never seen, and I am going to use it to start a war that will end the Muslim extremist threat forever.”

In his four decades of life, Jack had been face-to-face with hundreds of people advocating hundreds of beliefs, expressing veiled and unveiled threats, proposing violence and aggression. He had battled fanatics with words and deeds. He had even defused a pair of weapons of mass destruction.

Most of the people he encountered in his life and career were sane, just extremely, often blindly, passionate. A few CEOs had lost their moral compass due to greed and yes-men. A few politicians had been radicalized by vocal constituents, or by colleagues who vigorously espoused opposing viewpoints, or both. A few big-mouth professors held positions inside ivory towers where the lack of strong contrary voices or the easy submission of students made them feel intellectually invincible.

Yet no one in Jack Hatfield's experience was as coolly, obliviously off-his-rocker as the man who sat before him.

Not that there hadn't been mad or homicidal generals in American history. William T. Sherman threw men, ordnance, and flame at the South in hellish, impersonal numbers to crush Lee. No one would accuse George A. Custer of letting reason cloud ambition … and patience. Truman was afraid to give Douglas MacArthur access to nuclear weapons for fear he would use them prematurely and with enthusiasm. During the Vietnam War, General Curtis LeMay was vilified for advocating carpet bombing the North back to the Stone Age, even if the collateral damage included Soviet and Chinese citizens whose death would draw those nations openly into the conflict.

Right or wrong, none of those men had the devious mind and steel resolve of General Thomas Brooks. He was ready to fall on his sword, to go outside the checks and balances of the Constitution, to work his will. Even at the height of his hubris, the current President of the United States—a tyrant at heart who did end runs around American law—had never risked anything so despotic.

The general was advocating a war many times more destructive than World War II, with a free exchange of weapons of mass destruction. He was proposing—no, promising—to start a war with all of Islam. A war to exterminate all extremists, but also, unavoidably, everyone like Jimmy including countless other good, decent, peaceful human beings in America as well as the Middle East. It was a war destined to touch every corner of the planet. Once the fight was started, no one would be allowed to be neutral.

Jack stared at the man's power-infused expression—which, more than anything else, inspired his next words. “So,” he finally said softly, “it's as I've been saying all along. You're no different than a Muslim extremist now.”

“You, a radical, ostracized by his colleagues—you
dare
throw stones at me?” Brooks's face lost all superiority, replaced with shocked affront.

“What do you think cost me the friendship of my colleagues?” Jack shot back. “I'm a Truth Teller.”

“You're a poseur,” the general said. “What gives you the standing to say such a thing? When did you lose whatever vision you had?”

“Insulting me doesn't make you any closer to being right,” Jack said. “Those lunatic terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, otherwise known as ISIS, have threatened the same thing,” Jack stressed. “The question that threw me off the air was about the danger of allowing Muslim extremists to get the bomb. Because they're the bad guys. We're the good guys. We don't set off bombs that can wipe out entire populations.”

“We're the only ones who had the courage enough to!” Brooks barked back. “We're the only ones who
did
!”

“Only when it became obvious that the World War II Japanese government would sacrifice themselves and every individual citizen, one by one, rather than surrender their evil cause.”

“It's the same!” Brooks maintained. “Don't you see? It's exactly the same, only no one will admit it. This war is not of my making. The Fort Sumter of this conflagration was the 1993 parking garage bombing at the World Trade Center. There's a straight line from that event to the attack on the USS
Cole
in Yemen in 2000, to the attacks of September 11, to the London rail bombings in 2005—with a bus thrown in solely to provide a visual image to horrify people—and on and on.”

“No one denies that there are radical elements who want to tear down the West—but they are relatively few in number,” Jack said, trying to stay in the rational center of this debate, hoping he could draw the general in from the fringe.

“They may be few in number but they are being hidden by the many,” Brooks said.

“That's sheer speculation.”

“No, Mr. Hatfield. That is fact. Law enforcement watches mosques and what happens? The so-called moderates say we're profiling. If they were helping us find the terrorists, our guys could be off fighting drug dealers or human traffickers. Look at what happened to the stop-and-frisk program in New York City. The police in high crime areas, which happened to be heavily populated by black youths, invariably stopped a high percentage of black youths to frisk them for guns. Sure, a couple of innocents were stopped and say they were embarrassed. But illegal weapons were confiscated in record numbers and countless lives were saved. As soon as that program was stopped by the courts, homicides went up. It's the same here.”

“Then fight for strategic, surgical operations in civilian areas,” Jack suggested. “Use your platform for programs that don't involve genocide.”

“We are past ‘programs,'” Brooks said dismissively. “In the Muslim mind, it's been ‘us' or ‘them' since the Crusades. They've been biding their time for centuries, lashing out when they could to keep the flame of hate alive. That is their doing, Mr. Hatfield, not ours! They've just been waiting for a time like this when they could finally acquire weapons of mass destruction. Well, sir, I would be derelict as a patriot, as a man, as someone sworn to protect America if I did not eliminate that threat. I thought you of all people would understand that!”

“General, if we were on my old TV show right now I'd probably go to commercial so you could cool down,” Jack said. “I'd like to recommend that: take a time-out. Let's talk. You said it yourself—who else but me is going to listen to what you said and not judge you, just point out the shortcomings in your scheme. Let's find a better way.”

“There is no better, more certain way,” the general shot back.

“There
is,
” Jack insisted. “Let me put your voice out there. I have the means and I still have an audience.”

“Talk and diplomacy?” Brooks said dismissively. “Isn't there enough of that? An idiot president tried that with Iran and what did it get the world? An Islamic theocracy steps closer to having nuclear weapons.” Brooks leaned forward now. “And for every voice like mine, ten bleeding hearts, ten ACLU boosters, ten peaceful-sounding Muslim clerics, ten
thousand
entitled college kids, will pile on for the other side. You don't have a megaphone big enough so I can be heard over that.” He sat back. “I do. And it goes ‘boom.' It's no different than colonial patriots, fed up with talk, throwing British tea into the Boston Harbor. There comes a time, Mr. Hatfield, to leave the table and push the button. That time is now. And, dammit, you
know
it! By bombing Mecca during the Hajj we wipe out millions of the world's most radical Muslims.”

“All I know is that the other way has kept a relative peace for most of the world,” Jack said. “Your way will involve that world in a conflagration of unprecedented destruction.”

“It's coming whether we want it or not,” Brooks said. “We might as well land the first blows.”

“Like Pearl Harbor?” Jack asked.

Brooks was silent.

“General, you can't blow up Mecca. You'd be as guilty as the Japanese, and we all know how that ended. All those moderates you accuse of secret complicity—your action will radicalize them.”

“Good,” Brooks said. “Then we'll know who to shoot, burn, and bomb. Which, may I remind you, is how we beat Japan.”

“The world is different now,” Jack said, grasping for intellectual straws.

“How? Didn't we round up Japanese in America and put them in camps, just to be sure?”

“Yes, though we didn't round up Italian-Americans,” Jack said. “Many fought heroically against their ancestral land.”

“Show me one Muslim who will take up arms against the Quran, Mr. Hatfield. I'm not talking about hollow words of pacifism. I mean, when the shooting starts what Muslim will take out an imam? These cowards take our money in Egypt, enjoy the bounty and opportunities of America, sell us oil—yet politically they hang to the rear in case things go south for us. Then all of them will suddenly shout ‘
Allahu akbar
.'”

Jack considered what Brooks said. As the general spoke, Jack had been sifting through the rage and rhetoric to find something he could hang on to, a wedge to get through to the man. He regarded the general, who was still chillingly calm for a man who had proposed genocide.

“Abraham argued with God that Sodom should be spared if there was one righteous man in the city,” Jack said. “Genesis 18. You believe in the Bible, don't you?”

“I have said before that I believe in Bible, fist, and gun, in that order,” Brooks replied. “And I put it to you that no man who believes in the Quran
can
be righteous. Believing in the Bible, I can be devout and American. My enemy? He can only be Muslim. I am not in contradiction with Abraham or God. They are a cancer that must be eliminated, and sometimes healthy tissue goes with that.
You
know that, Mr. Hatfield. I know you do. Your whole career has been predicated on speaking the truth, not softening and subverting it.” Brooks looked profoundly disappointed, and waved his arm as if in dismissal. “Who are you? You're not the Jack Hatfield I know and respect.”

Jack gripped the edge of the table and rose halfway to his feet. “I'm the Jack Hatfield who knows the difference between good and evil. I'm the Jack Hatfield who knows if you strike first, without warning, it will not turn out well. It never does. It never will.”

For the first time Brooks looked over at Doc. Jack had been so focused on his
Truth Tellers
tack, ignoring the camera operator, that he had forgotten Doc was there.

“You're military, Mr. Matson,” Brooks said. “What do you think of this man's position?”

Doc was unfazed, and the camera lens steady. “He stared down a dirty bomb and saved our city,” he rumbled. “And some pretty toxic stuff after that.”

“No one is questioning his courage, Mr. Matson. Only his judgment.”

“That's what I'm getting to,” Doc replied. “What would you have done in his position?”

“The same thing, of course.”

“Since I wouldn't impugn your courage by disagreeing, let's assume you would've,” Doc said. He smiled lightly. “Or would you have?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean if a Muslim radical had destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge and half of San Francisco, wouldn't that have solidified ‘our' cause? Mightn't that have won many of those moderate Muslims to ‘our' side. Wouldn't that have isolated and eventually quarantined the extremists the way the attacks of 2001 started to? Until we went to war with Iraq,” he said. “We tried to slip that in under a kind of ‘Remember the Alamo' clause but it didn't fly. All the credibility we had went out the window when we became what we beheld, when we attacked the way we had been attacked.”