36 Chapter 34: Aftermath

After all that the cause of the failed coup turned out to be extremely petty. Lt. General Faoud Kareem had been indulging in graft for the past three years and Ahmed the Ombudsman General had picked up a few threads that would have ultimately uncovered Faouds malfeasance. Fearing what would happen, Faoud had concocted a plan to take over the administration of the country believing that his own hold over the army was strong enough to force a coup.

Our information had been woefully inadequate. Faoud had not been able to wrangle a force of 5000 but just a regiment of 100 soldiers and a solitary tank squadron. Faoud had taken the coopted and confused soldiers on an ostensible training exercise only alerting them to his plans once they were in sight of Baghdad. Even then only about 50 soldiers decided to go along with Faoud, the rest resisted. We found a site of a massacre outside the city the day after the coup. The 50 traitors had turned on their comrades and executed them.

For all his tactical brilliance Faoud's plan had been utterly shambolic. It was doomed to failure. As soon as Saad Hashmi heard what was happening he mobilized the rest of the army and air force and raced to Baghdad personally. Faouds whole plan had been to blitzkrieg through Baghdad and eliminate me before anyone could blink.

To say that Iraq was jubilant and ecstatic with me was an understatement. We could hear chants of 'Saddam Saddam' from outside the Palace gates for days. The only person who really berated me was Ayaan who insisted on overseeing my recovery from my injuries personally. She was also the one who forced Kamal to take leave and take up therapy to deal with what she immediately identified as PTSD.

I got calls and visitors from across the globe. Jimmy Carter joked that I was the only action hero President in the world. The image of me bloodied and holding a rifle atop an army jeep was splashed across newspapers and TV for weeks. I felt disassociated from those memories.

Two palace guards and five policemen lost their lives during the coup attempt. On the other side my ragtag group of guerillas and the airforce killed almost all of the traitors. Faoud surrendered himself, bullet wounds all over his body and his left leg hanging by a thread. The Doctors managed to save his life. He would stand court martial as would the traitor Rashid. I was certain that they would face a shooting squad but I made it known that I wanted a fair trial to take place.

Despite all the congratulations I received from all corners I was aggrieved. The absolute mess that was the communication with the armed forces and the lack of control I felt over the military during the coup alarmed me. It was also really bad for business. No one wants to invest in a country which might be subject to a midnight coup at any time. In fact in the week after the coup, two Japanese firms and a Dutch one pulled out of their plans to invest in factories in the SEZ near Tikrit.

In those weeks following the coup, unbeknownst to the rest of the country, Ahmed and I worked on a master plan to ensure that something like that night would never happen again. We charted out a contingency plan in the event of any such eventuality, arranged for hidden turrets and supply caches around the city. The defences and layout of the Palace would be modified to make the area a dangerous proposition for an attacker. The biggest part of the plan was to deal with possible treachery in the armed forces. Ahmed was tasked with assembling a team that would vet each and every commissioned and non commissioned officer of the army. Their financial transactions, histories, psych evals and family backgrounds would be pored over the identify the high risk individuals who we could phase out. Lastly, we designed a framework to ensure that the War Centre in Baghdad always knew what each and every component of the military was upto at any given time. A task that would of course become simpler once computers were a thing.