“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

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

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 . . .