Category: Ripped From The Headlines

Marginal Notes on Benghazi

On page 130 of my novel, The Hammer of God, the Ambassador to Egypt is kidnapped. This becomes the center issue of a dramatic debate, which is, I am sure, as old as terror and as fresh as yesterday:  Do you negotiate with terrorists?

As I was writing the scenes that take place in the Oval Office, the words got heated between the Secretary of State and the President. Both entrenched in their diametrically opposed positions, with the President not wanting to accede to the kidnapping and thereby instantly create an open season on US Ambassadors worldwide, while the Sec State wanted some back channel trade to release a mastermind terrorist that America was holding – in a super-max in the middle of the country.  To help me keep the beats of this ethical dilemma straight, I made a note: “The President is saving all future Ambassadors, the Sec State is trying to save the current one.”  This sub-textual motivation helped me keep the arguments between my characters aligned.

Yesterday, I was cleaning my desk, and found my notes from the blog I wrote, “Benghazi and Impotence”. Posted on September 15, 2012, when I ran across something that, even though I had seen, had no meaning on Sept. 15th but I believe does today.  I will attempt to retype it as I wrote it in marginal chicken-scratch of my early 2010 draft of my novel (pictured below).

The writing process: Plot twists and chicken-scratch.

“DS inside plot SS .  Take Amb, trade Sheik, back ch.  B&R disobey ‘unmolest’. Start real FF w/Friendlies.” Bring back CS to unc? Does JeA have GF?”

Okay, so that’s how I really write (misspellings and all) and it even took me a minute to decipher what I jotted down two years ago, here’s the handy-dandy index:

DS inside Plot SS – The kidnapping of the Ambassador was a plot hatched within the Diplomatic Security Service at the Direction of the Sec State. The plan was to force to force a back channel, out-of-the-news prisoner exchange of the Ambassador for a terrorist mastermind Sheik who was caught and held in America.

Continue reading “Marginal Notes on Benghazi” →

A Split Second to Kill or Be Killed.

On August 24th, through a quirk of fate, I was NOT on my usual 8:40 bus across 34th street that would have dropped me off at 34th and 5th at 9 a.m. Which means, by that same quirk, I was not in front of the Empire State Building on my way to get breakfast on 5th and 30th, at 9:03 when all hell broke loose and a gun battle erupted.

Once again, it’s only fiction ‘til it happens. In my second book, The Hammer of God, when the bad guys take a broadway theater in broad daylight, it starts with a shootout on 47th street. My immediate interest as I was writing was – here are the bad guys and the cops shooting it out, but what about everyone else? What about all the people on the street – the tourists, the street venders, the homeless people. So while I was writing, I made sure that the action was laced with the impact on the innocent bystanders.

On that Friday in August, nine innocent bystanders found themselves in the line of fire. This was totally the act of the gunman, who decided to draw down on two New York City cops in front of the busiest landmark on the earth. The officers had no choice but to defend themselves, and by extension, everybody else on the street. Unlike my drawn out beats and reactions in the dramatic telling of the shot by shot gun battle unfolding in fiction, this actual shootout took less than a few seconds.  Too fast to know what happened even if you were in the middle of it.

In the aftermath however, there was a lot of second guessing. Did the police shoot anybody? Did they do the right thing? Was there another way to handle the situation? Luckily, there was a video tape, and I think it’s all but conclusive that the cops had no choice, this guy drew down on them. He had already killed somebody, and he was a credible threat that had to be removed. I believe six or seven of the nine people injured were not shot, but victims of fragments and pieces of large flower pots which are used to protect the front of the building. (See Photo)

Flower Pots in Front of Empire State Building
Flower Pots in Front of Empire State Building

Two of the injured received wounds – one in the leg, one elsewhere – from a direct bullet.

Now, being fiction, the carnage in the scene in my book, was heavier. It had more gravitas, if you will, because unlike the New York City cops, who had to react in a fraction of a second, I had a couple of months to write the scene. I had the time to make it all work out.

NYPD cops train for all situations, but the majority of the dilemmas these cops, who are posted at the Empire State building day in and day out face are questions from families and kids asking about King Kong. They smile through the answer as they watch the man with the backpack who looks nervous, or imperceptibly twitch when someone makes a fast move to pull out a cell phone while a tourist takes their picture.   Yet on this morning, a normally dressed man, actually someone no more out of place than anyone else who worked in the neighborhood, came to within 1 second of being a mass murderer. I guess, ‘It’s only fiction ‘til it happens’, also covers heroes.

Benghazi and Impotence

I received many E-mails the night of September 11th and Wednesday morning, most from fans and readers, but a few from friends as well. They all pretty much echoed the same theme… Did you see where they kidnapped an ambassador, just like in your book?

Even though this blog is called “It’s only fiction ‘til it happens,” I hate when something as God awful as this happens. I have been lucky enough to know a few ambassadors and my thoughts immediately went to them and their families.

When I wrote The Hammer of God, I thought that the taking of ambassador would be the high level type of offense that would serve as a prelude for my President Mitchell to send in Special Forces… Those forces then stumble across a dastardly plot to kill millions of Americans and so my plot had its inciting incident.

The last ambassador to be attacked was back in the late 70’s. In the early hours of the morning of September 12th, the grim reality was very soon revealed when the kidnapping became murder. We found out that our Ambassador was brutalized and killed along with 3 other Americans. I only wish it were fiction.

The threat matrix against which my stories are set is often deemed exaggerated or indeed a work of fiction. Then something as horrible as this happens to real people, real Americans and it makes me feel angry and impotent. The angry part of me wants to fly to Libya find the bastards that did this and deliver swift justice. Then the reality of my civilian impotence sets in and I realize that the closest I’ll get to avenge this act and assuage my anger is this keyboard and the creation of another cautionary tale wrapped up as fiction for people to read and sense the threats – between the lines.

To my friends and readers; although in Hammer, it is the American Ambassador to Egypt that is kidnapped, the reality of this real act of war, which played out in Libya this week, does not follow my storyline.

I extend my deepest sympathies to the families of those slaughtered. They were dedicated professionals, who in the end, were representatives of diplomacy. Diplomacy being the last step before hostilities, these radical fools may have just killed, along with the Ambassador and his staff, their best chance, to avoid being ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’, and talk their way out of this. At least I hope that’s the way this story ends.

In The Hammer of God, Bill said to Janice upon learning the news that an ambassador was kidnapped, “…This is just a guess, but I’d say there’s a Delta Force or SEAL strike team warming up the coffee right about now…” I hope that bit of ‘Fiction’, happens.

Did Bin Laden read my book?


Let me start out by saying there is absolutely no proof supporting the rumor that a dog-eared copy of my book, “The Eighth Day”, was found in the Bin Laden compound. (hat tip, Lawyer Robert Rosenblatt) Yet, rumors can be persistently pesky little gnats always buzzing around.  Like the one that I got an $8 million dollar advance for the film rights to “The Eighth Day.” Let me categorically state for all you who are reading this, and any IRS agents, that I have not received that check yet.

But as someone once said, “Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?” of course his name is a fact that never came with the story so he will remain “someone.” As an author, some rumors are cool, “I have Alec Baldwin on speed dial”,  “I used to hang with Raquel Welch”, “Tom Clancy liked my book.”  “Bill Clinton gave me the final green light to write, “The Hammer of God.”

Now, here’s the thing, that last one, about Clinton, was True! Yet, with all these other tall tales out there, who’s going to believe it? For years I hesitated to publish “Hammer” the sequel to “The Eighth Day” because I didn’t know if the “secrets” revealed within would hurt America’s National Security.  After a generous, and in-depth discussion with the former president, he assured me that as far as global thermo nuclear war was concerned, those “secrets” were, at best, theories, but ones that never the less, ever crossed his desk or was part of the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan, which was the secret playbook for American Nuclear response).  So, here I sit cut by the double-edged sword of the rumor mill. While any unfounded item, at minimum, gets your name out there, they also create a fog that makes it hard to see the truth underlying the main plot point to my second novel in Bill Hiccock’s Quarterback Operations Group, Thrillogy.

I have to tell you, it’s enough to push me to spend the entire 8 million on an ad campaign to set the record straight.

 

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Scientists find God on Mars… Sort of

Like at least 204,329 Earthlings “Early in the morning of Monday Aug 6th, I watched the feed from NASA and rode the 2.5 billion dollar roller coaster ride down to the dusty red planet with it’s “7 minutes of terror” drop.  What a ride!  500,000 lines of computer code had to be flawless, least a single semicolon, out of place, relegate Curiosity to a smoking hulk of debris marring Mars.  At 350,000,000 miles (14 light minutes away) it was the greatest robotic/engineering feat in all of human history.

In my upcoming book, The God Particle, I delve into the science/religion divide.  A topic that underlined the Stokes Monkey Trial in the early 20th century, which “evolved” into the movie, Inherit the Wind. There was also vehement religious objection to the first inroads of nuclear energy.  As the third installment of my Bill Hiccock “Thrillogy,” my action-adventure book focuses, in part, on this same divide. It’s alive today as the rift between the “Black-Holers” and the scientists.

That night, the word most spontaneously uttered by the crew at the JPL was “God”. Think about that, in the epicenter of the greatest Science, Technology, Engineering and Math minds the human race has ever assembled, and at the moment of their and our greatest triumph, they collectively and individually acknowledged – God! Be it in unconscious comments or pure out praise, it just slipped out.

The lesson: If the great parishioners of science can see the resonance of the divine in the perfection of their accomplishment, why do we allow petty differences over religion and tradition impede our progress over war, hate, intolerance and evil.

If the smartest folks in creation can recognize the role of the “supreme inertial guidance package” in the red dust, 350,000,000 miles off, shouldn’t it be some what more obvious closer in… like on this planet?

Pearl Harbor – Coming to a Backyard Near You

The fiction in my novels are becoming reality. The government talks about a modern day Pearl Harbor but it's a much larger threat than that.The name of this blog is “It’s Only Fiction ‘Til it Happens.” Elsewhere, in other posts, I’ve explained how that (U.S. Patent Office Registered) line, my tagline, came to be. Today’s another example. The headline reads, “Leon Panetta Warns of Cyber Pearl Harbor – ‘The Capability to Paralyze This Country is There Now’” Well, Mr. Panetta, it was actually there awhile ago, when I wrote The Eighth Day. That’s why a top government official said, “Frighteningly realistic. Homeland security had better read this one!”

I’m patting myself, and other authors who delve into the threat matrix as a plot point, on our collective backs. This headline proclaiming that the Secretary of Defense is finally catching on is actually “news speak” for, “We’re about to get hit, and hit really hard, in a way that will affect all of us.” The headline is misleading, in that Pearl Harbor is not the proper analogy, because Pearl Harbor was essentially a military attack on our navy. What the next cyber attack will do is take out everybody’s internet. Take out everybody’s bankbook. Take out everybody’s electric power. Take out everybody’s ability to function in our newly defined digital world. And that is a million times bigger than Pearl Harbor.

Continue reading “Pearl Harbor – Coming to a Backyard Near You” →