The man's side of it!

Executive Orders
by Tom Clancy

I started reading this book the other day, I'm a big Tom Clancy Fan. The opening scenes are taking place right after a Japanese 747 Airliner is deliberately crashed into the Capitol building in Washington DC, killing the President, first Lady and three quarters of our government. My favorite character Jack Ryan (Vice-President for about five minutes) then becomes President. As I'm reading this story I am amazed by the similarity to the terrorist attack on September eleventh. The planes crashing into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the aborted attempt on the Capital, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

I checked the front to see when the book was published 1998 four years before the 9/11 event. It seems to me that maybe the terrorists read Tom Clancy's novels and plotted their deadly strategies from that. I have read almost all of Clancy's books and they all present all sorts of possibilities for terrorists to draw upon. One of Clancy's latest "Rainbow Six" scares me the most. I can just see some of the radical ecologists thinking it a possibility. Life really does imitate art, it is very apparent in Science Fiction, and some of the other genres I read.

Years ago I read a book about a serial killer in the Big Apple cooking up a batch of botulism and walking around the city injecting it into food. a couple of years later we had the Tylenol scare, some nut putting cyanide in some bottles of Tylenol and killing people. That was how we got tamper evident packaging. I wish I could remember the title or author of that book, I'd like to read it again. I think I remember it as One by One, and I did an extensive search but didn't get any results. If anyone knows of this book please let me know. I believe it was published in the late '70's or early to mid '80's