Empire of Lies

20

At first, the idea seemed unimaginably daunting.

An undertaking of this scale, on his own—a Herculean task, to be sure. This would be one of history’s boldest projects, perhaps the most ambitious, and Ayman Rasheed was going to try to accomplish it without anyone else’s help.

There was arrogance there, certainly, some likely delusion, too, perhaps even lunacy. Imagining it was irresistibly addictive and energizing, like having an adrenaline drip tapped directly into his brain. Rasheed was fully aware of the gargantuan goal he’d given himself, which was why he set himself no target date. He would only launch his plan once he was fully prepared.

Ever methodical and analytical, he chose to divide his work into three parts.

The first was the conquest of Vienna. This involved learning everything he could about the siege of 1683 and why it had failed, then devising a strategy that would work.

This task was the easiest part of the puzzle since it dealt with existing history. He was going to influence a specific event, a past battle. So much had been written about the siege, entire books devoted to analyzing every detail of that campaign and dissecting its failure, written by Ottomanists who had access to numerous firsthand accounts. Very quickly, he felt highly confident that he could easily turn that failure into victory, assuming he could get the sultan to accept his help and follow his advice, which was something else he needed to figure out.

He already had some ideas about that.

The tactical mistakes Kara Mustafa had made were clear. Victory would have been his had he not squandered it. Hindsight was truly a wonderful thing, especially when Rasheed had three centuries of other battles filled with brilliant and disastrous campaigns to learn from. A few carefully chosen moves would be enough to change everything. A few moves—and some unexpected game changers he had in mind—would make taking Vienna an easy fix.

The second part of his research dealt with a far bigger challenge: taking over the rest of western Europe.

It was one thing to conquer Vienna; it was quite another to hold it, which was necessary well before thinking of conquering territories beyond it. The city was almost a thousand miles from the empire’s capital, at a time when travel was slow and arduous. Rivers and chains of mountains stood between it and Istanbul. The Ottoman army that laid siege to Vienna was a mammoth force made up of over a hundred thousand men. When on the move, it formed a convoy six miles long and kicked up a cloud of dust that could be seen for miles. Keeping it there to hold the city and bringing forward its supply lines risked overstretching the empire’s resources while making its eastern border vulnerable to its old rival Persia.

Rasheed needed to shrink the landscape and make moving armies and equipment faster and more manageable.

Trains were the answer. The steam engine was in its early stages of development at the time. He needed to dramatically accelerate that. He’d need to lure the brilliant, pioneering inventors from England, France, and Holland and have them work for the sultan. Money, or kidnapping, would bring them to him. Bringing forward technological advances that wouldn’t have happened for decades, if not centuries, would give the Ottomans a titanic advantage.

With Vienna firmly under Ottoman dominance and well supplied, he could turn to conquering the rest of Europe, which was Rasheed’s greatest challenge. Unlike the siege itself, this would be a venture into the unknown, an endless diagram of theoretical actions, reactions, and outcomes, since once Vienna fell, history would be changed and everything he was reading about would be altered.

The scope of the exercise facing him was mind-boggling. He immersed himself in studies of those who had attempted something of that scale before him and ended up focusing on Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler. He aimed to be squarely in their league and he found inspiration in their ambition, but he also took heed of their mistakes. This was research that the consummate strategist in Rasheed relished. It was the simulation to end all simulations, and soon it wouldn’t be a simulation at all. It would become reality.

He’d need to bring in new weapons and military tactics, of course.

Early in his research, he’d remembered something that had come up in a lecture at the military academy in Iraq, an anecdote that had stamped an indelible impression on his mind. It concerned the Spanish conquest of South America, a notorious day in November 1532, in the highlands of Peru. His instructor had explained how on that day Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spaniards had faced off against the Inca ruler Atahuallpa and his entire imperial army. The Spaniards rode horses and had rapier swords and harquebuses, a type of early musket. The Incas, a primitive people who still fought with spears, had never encountered mounted men or firearms. Before the day was out, Pizarro and his men had killed over seven thousand Incas and taken their emperor prisoner—and they’d done it without suffering a single fatality in their own ranks.

Superior weaponry was key, and the Ottomans weren’t alien to this line of thought. Not since their first major conquest, when they took Constantinople in 1453. At the time, the Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, had a Hungarian engineer by the name of Urban working to build him a great cannon. Foolishly, the Byzantines skimped on Urban’s payments, leading him to offer his services to the sultan, who was more than delighted to have the brilliant Christian engineer on his side. The result of his work was the Imperial, at the time the largest cannon ever built. It had a bore twenty-nine feet long, fired massive stones that weighed over a thousand pounds, and was so heavy it needed a team of sixty oxen to haul it. It was this cannon that brought down the ancient fortified walls and allowed the Ottomans to take the city.

More than two hundred years later, Rasheed would give the Ottomans an even bigger advantage. His knowledge of what weapons the Ottomans were using in the seventeenth century was pretty basic, but he did know that muzzle-loading flintlock muskets were a far cry from the AK-47s he was used to. He needed a weapon that would completely overwhelm the Ottomans’ enemies and bring them to their knees, but one that could realistically be produced at the time. He found his answer in Richard Gatling’s American design from 1861, an ingenious weapon that used relatively simple technology.

The Gatling gun looked like a small canon and was typically fitted on top of a wheeled mount. It had multiple rotating barrels that were fired by turning a hand crank. With two men working the gun, it could achieve two hundred rounds per minute, and it could be easily pulled across a battlefield by two horses.

In a world of muskets and swords, it would be a devastating piece of weaponry. As would military tactics that wouldn’t have been dreamed up for centuries and other surprises he would throw into the mix, along with his knowledge of natural events that happened after the summer of 1683, such as weather, famines, and plagues.

Under his guidance, the Ottomans would be unstoppable.

With King Sobieski dead and his hussars decimated, Poland would fall easily. The German states would be next in line. To the south, the Papal States wouldn’t present much of a problem militarily. Venice would be followed by Urbino and Genoa before Rome was sacked. Then, after Savoy, Marseilles and Lyon would fall before the sultan’s army would reach Louis XIV’s residence at Versailles. France was a force to be reckoned with, even though it would be preoccupied with second-guessing the reactions of its other enemies, the British and the Dutch. Rasheed would probably wait until 1694, when a couple of years of catastrophic harvests due to bad weather would lead to a great famine that would kill two million French men and women—more than a thousand dying every day in Paris—and bring the country to its knees.

On the empire’s northern border, the power of the tsars in Russia was growing and would need to be checked; the Ottomans’ ally, the khan of Crimea and his fearless Tartar horsemen, would doubtless be needed to keep the Russians busy, as would the Swedes, historic allies of the sultan.

Of course, things didn’t turn out exactly as he’d planned. But he’d been well prepared, and he was ready.

Europe had fallen. And it remained so, to this day.

One of the fortunate things about Moshe Fonseca was his gregarious personality. The man had a castaway’s appetite for small talk and an almost maniacal attention to detail, which meant that Ramazan was lucky to hear him before he walked into Rasheed’s room.

He barely managed to tweak the IV lines and send Rasheed back to sleep when the surgeon stepped in.

“They told me you were still here,” he told Ramazan in his jovial tone. “So how’s our human notebook doing?”

Ramazan shrugged, trying to appear as nonchalant as he could. “He seems comfortable.”

Fonseca reached for the patient’s chart, which was hanging from the end of the bed, and flicked through its pages. “His numbers are good. But you’re still keeping him under?”

A slight hesitation. “I brought him out this morning,” Ramazan finally managed. “But he was in a lot of pain, so I thought I’d keep him sedated a bit longer. Give him a chance to heal some more.”

The surgeon nodded. The answer was plausible. He put the chart back in its place. “Did you manage to get him to say anything? Do we know anything more about him—well, more than nothing, that is?”

Ramazan stiffened. He still hadn’t told Fonseca about the man’s pre-op outburst, and evidently the nurse, Anbara, hadn’t mentioned it either. He considered bringing it up now, then decided against it. He didn’t want to open that door and didn’t want to be asked why he hadn’t said anything earlier. Most of all, he didn’t want to risk Fonseca’s finding out about his unofficial sessions with the patient.

“No,” he replied, a knot of dread tightening up inside him. “He was too weak to talk, especially after I removed the tube.”

“So when do you think? Tomorrow morning?”

“Inshallah. He should be in better shape.”

Fonseca looked thoughtful. “It should be interesting. I’m curious to hear what he has to say. Assuming he decides to talk. Assuming he can talk.”

Ramazan stifled the unease that was sweeping through him and let out a small snort of derision. “We’ll see.”

“Has anyone asked about him? The registrar?”

“No.”

“You know we’re going to have to file a report soon.”

Even though he brought it up, Fonseca seemed uncomfortable with the notion. Ramazan knew it was because the surgeon wasn’t inclined to point a suspicious finger at anyone unless he had a good reason to. They’d spoken about how, as a Jew, Fonseca had experienced a couple of uncomfortable moments since the recent rise of aggressive ultra-imperialist sentiment. He knew what it felt like to be viewed through a distorted lens of suspicion and prejudice.

“Well, let’s wait and see what he has to say,” Ramazan offered. “There might well be nothing to worry about.”

Fonseca nodded his agreement. “Indeed.” He looked at Ramazan, then nudged his head toward the door. “How’s Khawaja Abdullah doing?” He was referring to a patient who’d gone under his knife earlier that day, with Ramazan assisting. “Have you checked on him yet?”

Ramazan hesitated, then said, “No, not yet.”

Fonseca tilted his head toward the door. “Shall we?”

The anesthesiologist stood there awkwardly, fumbling for what to say. He wanted to stay, of course. Desperately. His window was closing, and he needed more time with the tattooed man. But caught off guard like that, he was at a loss for words. He had no credible reason to stay behind, and he took too long to come up with an alternative excuse. He had no choice.

“Right behind you,” he replied, masking his dismay.

He slid one last parting glance at the mystery man, then followed the surgeon out of the room.

Ramazan would have to come back, but he knew it would be difficult to do so as long as Fonseca was lurking in the corridors. Besides, he was eager to do some research, to see what the history books could tell him about the tattooed man’s story. Maybe it would debunk the whole thing and he wouldn’t need another session with him. Or maybe it would support his tale, in which case he’d want plenty more.

He decided he’d go home and do some reading about the famous governor. Then, if need be, he’d be back at the man’s bedside first thing in the morning, as he’d done earlier that day. After that, he’d probably need to bring his patient out of his induced sleep for good.

He needed to make every minute count.