The Last Crusade (29 page)

“I thought I’d stop by and see what progress you’re making. By the way, you people need to take a shower break, it smells in here. Some of you look like you haven’t slept in two days.”

“Mr. President, we haven’t left this room, except for restroom breaks since we started.”

“Good, what do you have for me?”

“Sir, a request for more time.”

“Time isn’t a resource we have a lot of. I need something from you and I need it now.”

An Army general looks at the President,

“Sir, there are a few things we all agree on, these are;

• If we’re going to strike the Caliphate with nuclear weapons and want to keep it a secret, we need to show them we’re going to conventionally attack them so they don’t figure out what we’re really doing. We suggest we take a page out of the World War Two war planners book. We suggest we assemble a phony army along their border so the Caliphate sees what they expect to see. They’re waiting for another Crusade; they believe we’ll again use an armored strike to cross the border. We should provide them the army they’re waiting for and looking for. That should keep their focus off of our real plans.
  
• Another idea we have is to test fire Trident missiles from land, we have launch tubes, but no submarines. We believe it should be easy for us to erect launch tubes on land to fire the Tridents from.
  
• We’ve dispatched teams to inspect the closed silos, we have three contractors working on the stored Minutemen and Peacekeepers missiles.
  
• We’ve asked the Navy to inspect the stored W80 armed Tomahawks, some of which were designed for ground launch. We believe we can quickly swap the warheads and control boards on the existing cruise missiles.
  

Sir, that’s all we have agreed on so far.”

“That’s an excellent start, why don’t you take a four-hour rest break and get back together?”

“Yes, sir. We appreciate that.”

President Bentley returned to the Oval Office feeling better about the situation. He liked the idea of building dummy units along the border,
I’ll call the Minister today to discuss this idea with him. The General is correct; we need to provide the Caliphate with what they’re expecting to see.”

Chapter 15

Three weeks later, the Mahdi’s direct line to Saladin rings,

“Your Holiness, Mahdi, the infidel’s forces are starting to arrive at our borders.”

“Are they in the same locations as before?”

“No, it appears they are going to launch a single massive strike. All of the armies are staging in the Sinai. We’re able to send drones up every couple of hours, most are shot down before they’re able to get close enough for detailed images, the ones we have seen show thousands of tanks. We have no idea where they came from, we thought we’d destroyed most of their tanks in the last Crusade. I’m sending you images we took of their assembly area over two eight hour periods.”

“You’re correct, where did these new tanks come from? There’s no way they could have built so many new ones this quickly. Did they have tanks stored away we didn’t know about.”

“Your Holiness, we don’t know. In the previous three days, their numbers have increased by three thousand tanks. We didn’t know they had so many in their reserves. If they continue increasing at the same rate, they will soon outnumber us ten to one.”

“Should we attack them now, before they’ve had a chance to get ready?”

“You’re Holiness, we have a limited number of weapons, if we use them now and they continue to build their forces, we may run out of weapons, better to let them gather all of their forces and then attack them.”

“Saladin, why do you think they’re massing in a single location this time?”

“We surprised them the last time they tried to invade us. They split their forces into three prongs, we crushed two of them, forcing the third to retreat when our people overwhelmed them. It looks like this time they decided to strike us with overwhelming force, they are going to strike us with a single massive arrow made up of thousands of tanks. It wouldn’t surprise me if they hit us with ten thousand tanks.”

“Can we handle that many?”

“Once they begin to form into their attack formations, we’ll strike them with our nuclear weapons. We’ll show the world Allah protects the faithful. Once we destroy them, they’ll have nothing standing between us and their soft cities which will be open for our taking. I will personally lead Allah’s holy warriors into Spain to reclaim our land. I expect we’ll conquer Europe within a year.”

“What about the Minor Satan”

“Too many people have tried to conquer the Minor Satan, all failed due to the weather. I suggest we take our time. Time we use to build additional nuclear weapons. When we’ve rebuilt our inventory of such weapons, we’ll use them to destroy the Minor Satan. We won’t make the same mistakes as Napoleon and Hitler.”

“May Allah continue to bless you. Go my son and fulfill Allah’s wishes.”

Unknown to Saladin, every hour hundreds of workers assemble tanks made from metal coated fiberglass with small thermal heaters inside so they show up on IR scanners as being real. The phony tanks are moved to the Crusade assembly location by trucks painted to look like tank haulers, they are left in rows pointed towards the border. Other workers assemble tents and field kitchens while real MPs patrol the phony base to make sure no one gets too close to it. Kitchens cook bacon, ham and roast pigs 24/7 to keep most Muslims from getting close enough to look at what’s really going on at the base.

President Bentley and the Russian Defense Minister both issue press releases saying they’re going to tour their nation’s military bases and check for themselves the rebuilding efforts. Body doubles are sent on the tours while the President and now Russian Acting President hold secret meetings in the White House bunker. The Russian Acting President smiles looking at the pictures of the giant tank base in the Sinai.

“The base is coming along very nicely; I see the Caliphate is moving almost every tank they have to block our attack. They are going to be in for a hell of a surprise.”

“When do you think they’ll attack the base?”

“After the transport ships stop bringing men and tanks to the base, they’ll want to make sure they get all of us. I figure we’ll have to continue the game for another couple of months.”

“Excellent, we might have enough time to prepare enough weapons to ensure this is really the last Crusade.”

“Mr. President, how are your preparations going?” Asks the Russian while drinking his glass of tea.

“Very well, many never thought it was going to be possible, but we’re doing it. We’ve refurbished the fifty Peacekeeper missiles, each is armed with ten warheads, we’ll have five hundred silos reloaded in six more weeks. I’m very proud of the people working on the project, they threw the rule book away and just dug in, they work two twelve hour shifts a day. The Trident 1s are being loaded into one-time use launch tubes, many are being mounted on the Expeditionary Transfer Dock ships. Each ship is 765 feet long. Each ship is going to be loaded with forty-eight missiles, we have three ships, that’s one-hundred-forty-four missiles, each armed with ten warheads. We’re also arming forty-eight missiles on two barges that ocean tugs will tow into position. The launch tubes are covered with a tarp which from a distance looks like a pile of trash. Next are our fourteen Ohio-class boats, each is loaded with twenty-four Trident 2 missiles, one is in dry dock, she’ll fire from the dock. I think it will be the first time a boat will launch without being in the water. That leaves our bombers, the remaining B52s will be armed with twelve cruise missiles and eight free fall bombs, the B1s will be armed with twenty-four bombs and the B2s sixteen. We’re reactivating the Tomahawk land attack missiles which we’ll fire from Israel. Lastly, we have the carriers and our four cruise missile submarines which are being rearmed with one-hundred-fifty-four nuclear-armed missiles. How about your plans?”

“We’re loading silos with our SS18s, each loaded with either ten large warheads or a single monster weapon to dig them out of their bunkers. We’ll have six hundred mobile missiles and all of our missile boats will be ready for action, five will have to be towed into position, but, they will be able to fire. Our bombers will be loaded with gravity bombs. We’re moving two thousand short range land attack missiles into range, each is armed with three warheads. We believe if needed, we can launch-drop seven thousand five hundred of our eight thousand five hundred weapons. We will be ready to launch five suborbital weapons over the Southern pole which will come up from the south surprising the hell out of them. These will carry large EMP weapons to bring down their grid and all of their electronic systems, these should disable their radar.”

“Can you be sure the EMP doesn’t affect us?”

“Yes, we’ll launch them twelve hours before zero hour so none of our forces are caught under the pulse.”

“My staff believes we’ll be able to deliver sixty-five hundred weapons.”

“Based on our combined arsenals, plus Europe’s couple of hundred and Israel’s there should be nothing left of the Caliphate.”

“We need to double check our targeting list so we don’t double strike targets while others survive.”

“I agree; my people are ready whenever yours are.”

“Why don’t we get our staffs together today? After they review the targeting lists, we can get back together to see if any targets are missed. I don’t think there will be anything left.”

“Neither do I, I think two hours after zero hour we’ll be able to kiss the Caliphate goodbye. I hope we won’t have to worry about Islamic terror attacks again.”

“Minister, speaking of which, what do you plan to do with the Muslims already in your country?”

“Mr. President, I think you already know what we’re going to do with them. I think you need to draw up similar plans if you want to make sure you won’t have retaliatory terrorist attacks.”

“I’m not sure my people will support such an action, it’s one thing to kill your enemy, it’s another to round up and kill innocents, we’ll be the same as Hitler with our own Holocaust.”

“The difference is, the Jews didn’t pose a threat to the Third Reich, the Muslims do pose a threat to the rest of the world. They’ve proven they don’t assimilate into society, they start small, they move into towns, soon others move in, they force infidel business owners out of the towns, they take over the local governments and begin passing Sharia Law, soon they have a little Caliphate in our back yards. The Russian people won’t accept it any longer. They’re tired of the rapes, crimes and discrimination against infidels. They want us to cleanse the Motherland of all Muslims.”

“I don’t think I can agree to that.”

“If you don’t cleanse yours, we will hold you responsible for any acts of international violence your Muslims create. Am I clear?”

“You’re very clear. I need some time to think about it and discuss it with my aides and other agencies.”

“Don’t take too long. If you lack the guts, we’ll be happy to do it for you. We plan to accelerate the roundup of our local problems when we start launching our attack.”

“Minister, let’s come back to this point later.”

“As you wish. Mr. President, remember, this isn’t a problem you can make go away by ignoring it. This is a cancer that you have to deal with. Either you surgically cut it out or it kills you. The longer you wait, the more the cancer eats you.”

“Minister, I lose sleep every night over the nuclear attack we’re about to launch, we’re going to kill hundreds of millions, we’re going to make Hitler look like a student…”

“You don’t have the right to speak to me this way, you didn’t lose millions in the Great Patriotic War. He killed twenty million of my people. You sat safely behind two oceans. Did you so quickly forget they tried to get us to kill each other off? Did you already forget the millions of your citizens who were poisoned or killed by our short war? We too lost millions and now you have remorse?”

“Isn’t it possible many of their citizens aren’t supporters of the Mahdi and Saladin?”