On a beautiful Friday morning, a warm day in October, at precisely 11:00 am, the entire eighth floor of NATO headquarters in Brussels blew up, or blew out as the case may be. The entire building collapsed in on itself: the top floors settling into position where the lower floors had been. The immediate dead included seven Prime ministers, eleven Ministers of Finance, sixteen Ministers of Defense plus four hundred seventy-three other men and women of various rank of member nations. That was the immediate count. The final count would be 3416 dead, not including the additional hundreds of seriously injured and dying.

NATO’s Security Council had called an emergency meeting to discuss the continuing escalation of a renewed military buildup throughout the Kashmir region of Pakistan and India. The latest incident, a Pashtun attack, had been the slaughter of 1473 men, women and children in and around Yasin, a small village situated in the Hindu Kush. Marauding forces had completely leveled the surrounding area for miles in every direction destroying everything in their path, livestock included. No mercy had been shown by the Pashtun and threats to continue with these actions throughout the rest of the country were being voiced unless the US withdrew from the region that had been claimed as necessary for the American exit strategy of Afghanistan.

Within minutes of the NATO blast, the whole world knew about it and everyone began venturing opinions about responsibility. Names of known bin Laden and al Qaeda terrorist organizations surfaced though no one knew more than anyone else did. Sirens in Brussels screamed while world news agencies reported a terrorist attack speculating as to culpability but they had no verifiable information. The chaos was compounded by the multitude of different languages unlike that of the World trade center attack on September 11, 2001 two years before.

In less than an hour combined NATO anti-terrorist forces began searching for anyone related to anything and everything related to the meeting. The CIA, Interpol, the Surete, the Mossad, remnants of the NKVD and the newly reformed KGB; everyone with a badge included themselves in. No one could take control of the situation because no one was in charge. The BNP, Belgian National Police locked the city down in its entirety; no one could get in or out of the city. T-52 NATO Street tanks quickly encircled the perimeter of the building and adjacent areas. Belgian troops were deployed to cover all roads in and out of the city while other multinational combat troops began filling the plaza as Brussels riot police positioned themselves around the building.

An American general decided to take charge and ordered his troops to quell the panic and disorder. The French commander thought he was in charge and tried to take command. So did the Germans and Italians. It looked like the whole EU was trying to take charge. The newly appointed Russian commander thought it would be appropriate to cordon off the entire area and wouldn’t permit any non-Russian troops to take positions. The situation turned into a high brass stand off that created more of a problem by not allowing fire fighting equipment and ambulances into the area.

While everyone running around trying to get some semblance of order into effect, a glider with no identifiable markings on its wings came in at about 200 feet. People stood watching as leaflets fell creating further confusion as they tried to make sense out of the message demanding 100 billion dollars in U.S. currency and that any and all non-indigenous troops be withdrawn from every area in the world that they were not indigenous too. If these instructions were not taken seriously within 72 hours, the leaders of every country in the world would be executed one by one in alphabetical order starting with the letter“A.” The leaflets did not say if alphabetical order meant by country or by surname. The printing was in English, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, Greek and Cyrillic. The same demands were simultaneously flashed through the Internet with an untraceable email address. The message infiltrated all major commercial communications networks passing through all satellite cable television networks in local languages and dialects. Everything was interrupted; the transmission of all programming, news broadcasts, soap operas, talk shows, sitcoms, including Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Baywatch.

Everyone’s weekend was ruined.