Free Shock Warning by Michael Walsh Page B

President.”
    Very well, then, the sky. Tyler looked. Nothing. “What am I looking for?” he asked.
    “Can’t you see it?”
    What was this? Twenty Questions?
    “See what?”
    “The image, sir. The image.”
    Tyler was still struggling.
    “The face.”
    Seelye’s right index finger landed on the photograph, pressing hard. “This face.”
    Gently, Tyler moved Seelye’s finger, then his whole hand, aside. Looked hard . . . harder . . .
    And then he saw it.
    His first thought was that it was one of those Danish cartoons, the ones that had caused such consternation and mayhem among the Believers when they were published in some newspaper or other. The ones that had set off riots across the Muslim world, had caused the deaths of thousands and rained down a host of threats upon the West for the simple act of putting pen to paper.
    Naturally, there was a host of fellow travelers who decried the cartoonists’ effrontery—their blasphemy—and more or less gave tacit, if not actual vocal, approval to the various assassination attempts that ensued. Always eager to be on the right side—that is to say, the anti-Western, anti-Judeo-Christian side—of any issue, the international loonies had howled like werewolves at the moon, a suicide cult eager for the dropping of the blade, preferably accompanied by shouts of “ Allahu akbar .” God is the greatest.
    Well, as far as Jeb Tyler was concerned, Dire Straits was the greatest, followed closely by Elvis, BeauSoleil, and his mother. And he’d be good and goddamned if a bunch of ragheads were going to tell him different. He was the fucking President of the United States, which meant that he was the last man on earth who had to adhere to the intellectual fascism known as political correctness.
    And if it cost him the presidency, so be it.
    “This?” he said. “Mohammed?”
    “Mohammed, yes, sir,” replied Seelye. “Or somebody who looks very much like him.”
    “A projection—like a searchlight. Hollywood does this sort of thing all the time. Look—up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Batman. Or whatever.”
    “It’s not Batman, sir. It’s Mohammed.”
    “Call Spielberg and ask him how they did it.”
    Seelye took a respectful step back. “They didn’t do it, sir,” he said.
    “How do you know?”
    “Because it’s not a projection, Mr. President. At least not from earth.”
    Tyler reached for his scotch and saw that the glass was empty, with no Manuel in sight. “What do you mean, it’s not a projection from earth? What the hell is it?”
    “We don’t know. It appears to be some sort of holographic image, generated from space, creating the impression you can see here.”
    Tyler took a closer look. Once you got past the denial your Western brain imposed upon the image, it was pretty clear: The image, floating in the clouds, was that of a bearded Arab man, his eyes blazing....
    “We’ve compared the images to all known images of the Prophet—”
    “I thought Islam brooked no representations of their so-called ‘prophet,’ ” said Tyler.
    “Not a hard-and-fast rule, sir,” said Seelye. “In the first few hundred years of Islam, pictures of Mohammed abounded, especially in Iran. Remember, sir, Iran has a rich cultural history that antedates the Arab conquest. . . .”
    “Worst thing that ever happened to them,” mused Tyler.
    “Why couldn’t they be more like the Indians? Why didn’t they fight back?”
    Seelye was in no mood for a history lesson, but the timely application of one never hurt. “Because the Indians had Hindusim,” he explained. “Some of them converted, mostly by the sword, which is where Pakistan comes from. But Persian Zoroastrianism could not withstand the onslaught. And here we are.”
    “With Islam.”
    “Yes, sir. No, sir. With Shiite Islam. With a kind of imitation of Jewish and Christian eschatology.”
    “What?” Tyler didn’t like big words. Big numbers, that was different.
    “Eschatology, sir.