The Eagle Has Landed

“Then we’ve got the so-called hijackers. They don’t even know how many there were. They arrested, what, fourteen of them on 8/11? Eleven in Florida, three in Newark. But they say there were nineteen, or they say twenty. They can’t even agree with themselves. And how do these guys overpower a plane? With box cutters?”

“Right, Rolf, I’m gonna let some Arab have my plane because he shows me a box cutter.”

Suddenly Bush turned off the radio. Cheney reached for the knob, then saw tears in Bush’s blue eyes.

“I don’t like this, Dick. I don’t like you acting like you’re the decider. I’m the one who’s the ex-governor of Texas.”

“George, I’m sorry. I get a little pushy with the radio sometimes.” Cheney laughed and patted Bush’s arm. “Look, why don’t you pull off at the next exit. I think we both need some food if we’re going to drive all night.”

Their waitress was a pretty brunette, built kind of like Laura. She was flashing cleavage at Bush, and that seemed to cheer him up.

“Would you like that coffee now sir, or with your bison burger?”

“Well, ma’am, I reckon I would like it whenever you’re able to visit us boys again — right, Dick?”

“Absolutely. Or now would be good.”

When she was gone, Cheney spoke gently to his friend. “George, how serious are you about this woman, Red? Shania?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m kinda partial to her. I met her at the law firm that handled the divorce. She was a receptionist. She seemed to think I was savageable.”

“Savageable?”

“You know, worth something. She was my only good news for a while there.”

“You do miss Laura, though?”

“Sure. I mean, who wouldn’t?”

“So if you could be back with Laura, that would be good?”

“Not gonna happen — oh, thank you ma’am, and can we get more creamers? Love that cream!”

“Damn,” Cheney said. “Doesn’t anybody watch Fox News anymore?” Richard Clarke was on Larry King, and Cheney was up to here with this crap.

They munched on their burgers as Clarke pontificated.

“As the 2008 election looms, the Republicans are disputing the whole 8/11 megillah,” King said. “You’re the czar — that’s why my listeners want to hear from you. Neil from Wisconsin says, ‘I know you caught ‘em, but how did you do it?’”

“Larry, it wasn’t a blinding light on the road to Damascus. It was a bunch of people at a table, every week, starting in March 2001. We were there because Gore did what any good president would do if he thought his country was in danger. He led. His Commission on Aviation Safety in 1997 had called for better sharing of information among the agencies. So he sat us down together, the Anti-Terrorist Trust, we called ourselves: the cia, fbi, ins, faa, and me. He wanted to hear us talk to each other. Unusual. But enlightening.”

“So, you talked — no Damascus.”

“Right. You know the idea of planes as weapons came up early on, the Bojinka Plot thing, and we sort of dismissed it as wild. But the President kept saying no idea is too stupid, tell me everything that could be relevant, and then one day we hear that for years there has been noise about flight schools in Arizona, Islamic guys learning to fly, could they be hijackers. Larry, it sounds overly simple, but the President said, Why does a hijacker need to fly a plane? It all came down to that.”

“Why does he?” Larry King said.

“He doesn’t. A traditional hijacker wants the pilots to take him somewhere; he has a bargain to strike. The only reason he would need to fly the plane himself is if he wanted to do something the pilot would refuse to do, even under threat of death.”

“Fly into a building.”

“Fly into a building. Not your average jet pilot’s favourite activity.”

Chortling, King broke for commercials. Toyota with its hydrogen fuel cell car, the dangers of four-hour erections. Then Clarke was haranguing again.

“We were looking at a lot of scenarios that spring, Larry. There were dire warnings about an attack on US soil from our own guys and from our allies, Germany and England. We were looking at a whole bunch of possibilities: weapons, chemical, even nuclear. But this one, planes into buildings, just crept up on us. We kept coming back to it. For one thing, it was so low budget. It isn’t high tech. Once you talk about it, it gets real — real scary. So we started searching US flight schools for Islamic radicals possibly linked to al Qaeda. It was shocking what came up, when the cia and the fbi got their lists of names together.”

“Like what have we here,” King said.

“The months of June and July 2001 were crazy. We hit the motherlode: a veritable vipers’ nest in the Miami area, twelve would-be hijackers led by Mohamed Atta, whom we’d been on for years and had lost track of. They were all clustered around Hollywood, Florida. We were ready to pounce. Then Atta flew to Newark in August and joined two other suspects — Hazmi and, uh, Hanjour — and they bought airline tickets.”

“Do you ever wish you had just waited and caught them in the act?” King said. “Would have avoided a lot of controversy, no?”

Bush said he wanted to order pie — hell, he looked like he wanted to stay overnight with their waitress — but Cheney was seized by a cold anger that made this mission seem like the sanest thing he’d ever undertaken. It wasn’t the Gore administration’s bullcrap boasting about stopping some bogus tragedy, or its communistic rerouting of money from the achievers to the non-achievers. What really frosted Cheney was Gore’s appalling failure to make war on any foreign country. Okay, he’d taken out the Taliban, but they weren’t really a country. Iraq was still sitting there like a piece of ripe fruit, and Gore had listened to the weapons inspectors. Halliburton stock was in the toilet.

Cheney dragged Bush out into the night and took the wheel.


Karl Rove strides into Junior’s Deli on Westwood Boulevard, his forehead gleaming like it’s been polished in a car wash.

“Turdblossom, you maniac, you look good,” Bush says.

“You look awful,” Rove says.

“Cheney made me drive the whole way,” Bush says.

“Not true,” Cheney says.