Chapter 137: Treason

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

It was surprisingly easy to commit high treason.

By the end of July, it was becoming obvious that if I had been hoping to have any effect on the future of the country it had been a delusion. They were beating a drum loudly about going to war with Iraq. Anybody moderate or who tried to point towards terrorism was fired, demoted, or ignored. I was asking all sorts of questions about sleeper cells and whether information was passing between the FBI and CIA and was told to sit down and shut up. I heard from one of the mid-level people over at the CIA that Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby were ordering intelligence estimates to be slanted heavily in the direction that Cheney and Bush wanted. He wasn’t sure, but he thought some of it was being falsified.

This was something that happened in a lot of cases. Intelligence is a tricky business, and you can never really say for sure what the bad guys are up to. The analysts normally give you a spectrum of choices, such as a happy choice, the realistic choice, and the if-things-go-to-shit choice. They were busy over at Langley blowing smoke up everybody’s asses, and if you weren’t with the program, shut up and pack your bags. Saddam Hussein was gearing up to bring nuclear war to America, and we needed to stop him!

I tried to stop it. I stayed in contact with Richard Clarke and tried to figure out ways to highlight the possible damage coming. We even went over all the various scenarios that I knew were coming, even if they were only the ones in Tom Clancy’s novels. Nothing we did was even allowed to be discussed at National Security Council meetings. I could have marched through with a brass band and a bullhorn and not been noticed.

On the domestic side, it wasn’t much better. We already knew taxes were going to be lowered. While I had managed to get the original ten percent decrease for the year cut to five percent, they would make up for it next year. In addition, dozens of domestic programs were going to go under the axe in the name of efficiency and deregulation. Be careful eating that burger, because while the FDA and the Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control were still around, their budgets were cut in half, and they no longer had any inspectors or technicians to test anything or doctors to treat you if you got sick.

Elsewhere, my disloyalty was goading Bush into an action practically unheard of in modern politics. He was planning to dump me. The Vice President is an elected official, not an appointee, so he can’t be fired, only impeached. Rove was leaking to Washington that the President was unhappy with my performance and that I wasn’t a team player, and he wouldn’t be bringing me back for the second term. There was even a quiet intimation that my family’s mental health issues were surfacing in me as well. So far this was just a whisper campaign, with nobody saying anything for the record, and nobody saying where they had heard these silly rumors, but it was starting to get out. I spoke to Fletcher Donaldson the last weekend of July at the house in Hereford, and he told me he had heard some things, but without any confirmation he couldn’t print it yet. I simply replied that it was three years away from the election, and he shouldn’t believe everything he heard.

So, I fought back. What better way to fight a whisper campaign than with one of my own? I made a few phone calls to some financial types in New York and let them know I wanted to explore some options for the future, and would they be interested in putting together a breakfast meeting and then maybe some one-on-one time with a few people in New York. We could discuss options for the future and some financial issues, maybe do a little preliminary fundraising for the RNC for the future. No, of course I wasn’t going to run! No, we were just going to talk and raise a little cash for the future. I’d give a nice little speech or two somewhere and come home the next day.

The breakfast meeting was set for 8:30 AM Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. We would have breakfast at Windows on the World, the restaurant near the top of the World Trade Center North Tower. After breakfast I would join some of the executives of Cantor Fitzgerald in their conference room, along with a few other financial types.

Of all the things I had ever done since I recycled, this would be the worst by orders of magnitude. After I hung up the phone I went into my private bathroom and threw up my lunch. I knew I was condemning thousands of people to death, but they were going to die anyway. There was nothing I could do to stop the attacks of 9-11. Nobody in the White House, the CIA, or the State Department was listening. I could stand up on the table in the Cabinet Room during a meeting and scream it from a megaphone and it wouldn’t be heard.

Was I simply an opportunist? Or was I a psychopath? Had I always been one?

I remember reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, where in an early chapter one of the heroes, Hari Seldon, is arrested. He explains to a protégé that he wasn’t worried about being put to death. The judge in the case was too smart. The judge knew that while he couldn’t reverse the decline of civilization, he also knew that he could speed it up by acting stupidly. In this I considered George Bush, who thought that acting stupidly was a high calling. The global dominance of the United States was not a guaranteed thing, and there were a number of indicators that it was ending. I could guide it into a soft landing as the first among equals, or I could allow George to crash it into the ground at high speed. The changes he made over the next eight years took us from global power to international laughingstock in twenty years.

And yet I knew my plan would work. It was too simple. We had roughly six weeks until then, and I knew somebody would talk. Sure enough, the following Monday I got a call from George Bush asking me to step into the Oval Office, where he and Karl Rove were sitting and chatting amicably. Did I have something planned as a fundraiser in New York in a few weeks? No, George, of course not! I’d never go around you like that! This is just something for the future. So, you wouldn’t mind if I joined you? No, of course not! Love to have you along!

While we all sat there smiling at each other, I pulled my phone out and called the VP at Cantor Fitzgerald I had been talking to and gave him the good news. Not only would I be there, but the President of the United States would be making a visit!

From there it became even simpler. By mid-August I was off the trip, assigned to a grade school library visit that morning in Sarasota, Florida, followed by a visit to a high school in Tampa in the afternoon. This was all part of Bush’s big initiative to revitalize education. All I had to do was to wait for the inevitable.

I lost ten pounds that late summer, horrified and sickened, half by what I was doing and what I knew would happen anyway, and half because I wasn’t sure it would work! What if things had changed because I had recycled? What if they attacked on Monday or Wednesday or Tuesday afternoon? What if they attacked but hit something else?

What kind of a monster was I? How could I just allow this to happen, and send people I knew to their deaths? George Bush wasn’t a criminal; he was just criminally stupid! Did he deserve to die for that? The only thing I could see was that no matter what I did, the assholes in the caves and training camps in Afghanistan weren’t going to stop because of what was happening here. All the people that died that day would end up dying anyway. There was nothing more I could do to stop it.

So, on September 10^th I flew to Tampa and stayed the night, and then on Tuesday morning we drove down to Sarasota. At 8:45 I was sitting on a very short chair in a circle with a group of first graders, debating the merits of The Cat In The Hat versus Green Eggs and Ham (Please, Green Eggs and Ham wins going away!) At 8:46, the Secret Service agents standing in the corner and by the door suddenly looked serious and pulled Uzis from under their jackets, while several more burst through the door to the classroom. Without even saying ‘Excuse us!’, I was grabbed by each arm and lifted off my feet and run down the hallway and out a door. When I say lifted off my feet, I mean every word. My feet didn’t touch the ground until I was at the open door of a black GMC Yukon. Behind me I could hear the screaming of little children as we ran through them, knocking them to the floor. I was tossed into the back seat of the Yukon, hitting my head on the door frame of the vehicle, and before I could even get a seat, I was slammed backwards into a seat as we tore out of the parking lot. A siren was blaring before we even hit the street. Behind us a small convoy was racing behind us, also with sirens blaring and lights flashing.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” I demanded. Up in the front the agent in the passenger seat was speaking into a microphone in his sleeve but otherwise ignoring me. I repeated the question to the one sitting next to me.

His head swiveled to me for a second, and then he yelled back over the sound of the siren, “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK! THE PRESIDENT IN NEW YORK HAS BEEN ATTACKED!” Then his head turned back to the window.

I tried to ask what he meant, but I was ignored. About thirty seconds later we bounced over a curb and drove across the grass into a small park. Just settling down in front of us was a helicopter with the markings of the Florida State Police. We drove close to it, and I was dragged out of the Yukon and over to the helo, where I was thrown into the back and three agents climbed on after me. The bird had never stopped its engines and seconds later we were airborne.

I grabbed the arm of one of the agents and asked the question again. “What’s going on?”

He took a deep breath and said, “We’re under attack! We’re flying to Tampa and getting on Air Force Two! That’s all I know for sure.”

“Who’s attacking us?” I asked. I grabbed his arm again, and repeated it louder, “WHO’S ATTACKING US?”

He shrugged me off and said, “We don’t know yet. We’ll know more on the plane!” That was all I could get from him.

By the time we landed at the Tampa airport the entire airport had been shut down to all traffic. We landed on the tarmac directly in the taxi area next to the 757 and everybody hopped out. Guns drawn, the agents surrounded me and ran me to the plane and up the stairs. The engines were already running, and as soon as the stairs were pulled away and the hatch was shut, the plane began moving. We were airborne within seconds.

For the first time since this began, the Secret Service agents around me began to relax. They put away their weapons and sighed and sagged into their seats. “WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON?” I demanded.

An agent came out from a compartment in the front and stepped in front of me. “Sir, a short while ago, at 8:44, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, the North Tower, where President Bush is. A short while later another one hit the South Tower.”

Memories from my first life came rushing back to me. I think every American who was alive that day remembers where they were and what they were doing when they learned the horror of what was happening. When the news began hitting the airwaves at about 8:50 I was just pulling into the parking lot at Lefleur Homes, and thinking that it was a small plane, a Cessna or Piper. I sat there listening to it for a minute, and I remembered learning that back during World War II a B-25 had flown into the Empire State Building. That couldn’t happen anymore, though. Modern planes had radar and all sorts of navigational aids. Then, a few minutes later the news of the second hit, and that they were airliners, not little planes, which meant it was terrorism, not accidental.

I remember afterwards sitting in my office listening to the radio all day in shock and disbelief. I got nothing at all accomplished. I was so shocked by it all that a day later I apologized to my brother-in-law Gabriel, my boss in sales at the time, for not getting anything done the day before, even though he had already told me he hadn’t gotten anything done either. None of us did that day. Around lunchtime, one of my fellow adjunct teachers over at MVCC drove over and told me classes were shut down for the day, and I didn’t have to teach that night. We were both stunned, and we both mentioned that it must have been like when our parents heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. It was the closest thing anybody could come up with.

I stared at the guy for a second, both in shock and trying to hide my lack of shock. “What?”

“Sir, two airliners, jets as big as this one, have slammed into the Twin Towers in New York. The President is trapped in them.” Then he held his hand to the earbud in his ear. “What ... say again ... Oh, sweet Jesus!” He looked up in horror at us. “Another one just took out the Pentagon!”

The other guys just stared at each other, white faced. “Where are we going?” I asked.

The guy who was listening to his earbud seemed to be in charge. “Sir, that is classified information.”

“Excuse me?” I asked incredulously.

“Sir, where you are at a time like this is classified.”

“Who the hell am I going to tell?” I demanded. “I’m on the plane with you! Now, where are we going?” I looked out the window but simply saw white clouds below us, and occasional glimpses of blue.

“Sir, that is classified. We will stay here and then land at an undisclosed location.”

Unbelievable! The mind set of these people! “Well, mister, you can damn well disclose it to me! I’m the Vice President. I need to know!”

“No, sir, that is not in the ops plan.”

“Jesus Christ!” I muttered to myself. This was ridiculous! I stood up and brushed past him and headed towards the cockpit.

“Sir, sir! You can’t ... STOP!” he demanded.

I was grabbed from behind by the Secret Service agent, who dragged me back. “I DEMAND TO SEE THE PILOT!” I roared.

An Air Force type noticed me being dragged back towards my seat and grabbed a phone and began speaking into it. Moments after I was pushed down into my seat, an Air Force colonel showed up in shirt sleeves. He stared at us for a second and said, “Mister Vice President, I’m Colonel North. I’m the pilot. You asked to see me?”

The lead agent said, “Colonel, this does not concern you. You need to return to the cockpit and proceed with the mission as authorized.”

“Colonel! I demand to know those orders!” I told him.

“Colonel North, you are to continue the mission,” said the agent.

The colonel took one look at them and then at me, and said, “Like hell. Let that man up now, or so help me God I’ll ... I’ll ... just let him up! Unless you’ve suddenly learned how to fly an airplane, I’m in charge here!”

Hands left me, and I shrugged loose. “Colonel, are you aware of what is occurring in New York and Washington?”

“Yes sir, I am.”

“Do you recognize me as the Vice President of the United States of America?”

“Of course, Mister Buckman. What can I do for you?” he replied.

“Where are we currently and what is our course? We need to get back to Washington immediately!”

“Colonel, this is a classified mission, and you cannot reveal our destination!” ordered the lead Secret Service agent.

“Good Lord!” muttered the pilot. “I can’t tell other people, you twit! I can certainly tell the people on the plane!” To me he said, “Sir, we are currently over the Atlantic Ocean, about seventy-five miles east of Jacksonville, and circling to hold position. We will maintain position here for another two hours and then we will be heading towards Omaha. We will be landing at Offut Air Force Base.”

“Colonel, you may consider yourself under arrest at this time,” said the lead agent.

Colonel North simply rolled his eyes and muttered in disbelief. I shook my head in disgust and said, “Thank you. Now, Colonel, I am countermanding those orders. We need to get back to Washington immediately. Put us into Andrews as soon as possible, please.”