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 . . .

They 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.”