Free December Ultimatum by Michael Nicholson

forehead and saw that his left eye had become noticeably more bloodshot.
    The President’s voice got suddenly louder. ‘But when a pusher stops supplying, the clients get angry and rough it up, and that is exactly what I intend to do. I am President of the most powerful, most technically advanced, nation history has known, or will ever know, a nation that once fought a colonial war for its liberty and two world wars to keep it. And a nation that has sent its own men to the moon will not be brought to its knees by a few million Arabs who’d still be living in the Dark Ages, squatting in tents and eating camel shit, if we hadn’t brought the oil up out of the sand for them. They have it. We need it!
    ‘I’ve read all your reports and heard all I need to hear in this room, and I am persuaded that if we do not move fast to those oilfields, others will. You tell me that this man Rahbar is a devout Moslem. I say he has led a revolution and has used Marxists and Soviet-supplied weapons to do it. I don’t care a monkey’s ball whether the Jews or the Arabs, the Protestants or the Catholics, the Moslems, Hindus, Hare Krishnans or the Mafia own that chunk of desert. But I do care what they do with the oil in it, because we have a stake in it—a large and very vital stake, and if we lose it we will not survive. Our factories will wind down, our farms will go derelict, we will sit and go impotent. The lights would go out all over America. That oil is the stuff of our survival!
    ‘It’s something we have known about for a long time now. Five American Presidents before me knew about it, so did umpteen Generals, so did the Department of Energy, and the oil companies. But none of us care to think too long about it. Impossible, we used to say, that the wells would run dry. Even now, go out into the streets, ask a dozen people how much oil they think we have left and they’ll guess at twenty, thirty, fifty years. And anyway, they’d say, there’s always Arab oil—there’s plenty around. And they would be right, two days ago. Two days ago we were just paying rotten high prices for it. Today it’s not there to buy any more.
    ‘Now the Soviet Union remains the biggest single oil producer in the world. With or without Arab oil it is self-sufficient and its war machine will continue to run. But the only guaranteed fuel we’ll have if the Saudi fields remain closed to us is rocket fuel for our intercontinental ballistic missiles. D’you see? Without oil there is no such thing as limited conventional war. Without oil we have only the once-and-for-all nuclear warhead left. The Arabs are pushing us to our final option. As of this day, oil has a greater power potential than the entire American Military because without it there is no American Military. We know it. So do the Arabs. So does Moscow. And that is why I intend to go and get it. By persuasion if the Saudis can be persuaded. By force if they cannot.
    ‘So, do what’s necessary, Tom, to get our Peace Zone Resolution into the UN and, Generals, Admiral, get our men moving. I’m going ahead with an Address to the Nation and I’m going up to Camp David to write it. By the time I go on television I want confirmation that we have troops standing- by within two hours of their drop over those fields. And, Johns, you get going on Fahd. God knows how you’ll do it in the time we have, but you’re gonna do it, by Christ you are. I’ll have him back on that throne if it needs a task force to put him there!’
    He moved away from the table towards the one-man elevator that would take him into the public world of the Oval Office and to the bright winter sunlight overlooking the White House gardens.
    As he got up the Generals, the Admiral, the Director of the CIA and the President’s Foreign Affairs Adviser quickly stood to attention, men who would not stand that way for any other living American.
    He turned. There was sweat on his forehead, his arms were stretched straight down the