“Forgive my daughter, Patrick, she didn’t mean to upset you. Reading a person’s face is tiring work on a good day. Dawn is exhausted, but there is nothing to fear. Dawn, tell Patrick you are sorry for upsetting him.”
“I’m sorry for upsetting you, Patrick. Please forgive me.”
“Yeah… sure, no worries.” Unnerved, he turned away, staring coldly out the driver’s side backseat window. Somewhere in the distance was FDR Drive, beyond that the East River. There was only darkness out there, save for two towering infernos — the Manhattan Bridge to the north, the Brooklyn Bridge to the south. The two expanses had been destroyed seventeen hours earlier, yet the incendiary thermite used in the blasts still burned, the chemical compound melting right through the steel girders—
— just as it had on September 11, 2001.
Three buildings had collapsed at near-free-fall speed. Two had been hit by hijacked planes, the third building — Building-7, a forty-seven-story structure — had folded like a deck of cards hours later, floor after floor, the skyscraper having been hit by nothing more than debris. While most Americans never questioned what their eyes had seen, scientists and engineers were baffled by events that defied every known law of physics, engineering, and metallurgy known to man.
In the end it came down to a simple numbers problem: How could jet fuel, which burned off rapidly at 800 to 1200 degrees Fahrenheit liquefy steel girders, which melt at 2500 degrees, more than twice the jet fuel’s highest recorded heat? There was no doubt steel had melted; molten steel was videotaped pouring from windows moments before the collapse, and a lake of molten steel had burned beneath the World Trade Center foundation for months after 9/11, despite firefighters’ best efforts to quell the fire with millions of gallons of water and Pyroccol, a chemical-fire suppressant.
Homeland Security had shut down all access to Ground Zero, effectively preventing any close inspection of the debris; still, resourceful engineers had managed to collect plenty of particle samples — their analysis revealing the presence of a foreign substance that should not have been in the wreckage: Thermite. A pyrotechnic material used by the military and construction engineers to collapse steel structures, thermite generated temperatures at a superhot 4500 degrees. Thermite also burned for extended periods of time. And it could be applied as a paint.
In response to independent experts’ unsettling discoveries, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a thousand-page report containing explanations that contradicted every known case study of high-rise-building fires. The report never accounted for thermite residue; nor did it acknowledge the mysterious lake of molten steel. NIST officials also refused to address the series of explosions reported by hundreds of eyewitnesses moments before the towers collapsed. Or the videotape evidence of Building-7's collapse, which clearly showed squibbs — puffs of smoke created by demolition explosions — coming from each floor as the tower pancaked at near-free-fall speed.
More than four hundred independent architects and engineers disputed the NIST findings — to no avail. America had been attacked, and Americans wanted retribution, not ridiculous conspiracy theories.
It was during Patrick Shepherd’s second deployment that he first learned of the controversial 9/11 Truth Web sites from a fellow soldier. The accusations infuriated him. So what if the towers were known health hazards, filled with asbestos? So what if Building-7’s collapse was reported by the BBC forty minutes before it actually happened? Or that the tower housed the second largest covert CIA station in the country, as well as the SEC offices investigating Enron’s and WorldCom’s frauds. True, Larry Silverstein, the new owner of the World Trade Center, had shut down a few of the Twin Towers’ elevator shafts for “upgrades” a month before 9/11, but so what? How could any loyal Americans believe that elements within their own government could have aided and abetted such a nefarious terrorist attack, using the event as an excuse to invade Iraq? It was utter nonsense.
The mainstream media refused to buy into it, and most Americans, Patrick among them, refused as well. But as the years went by, and the deployments mounted, Patrick’s mind began to warm to the evidence, and the toxic thoughts turned his heart stone-cold.
He learned that modern history was littered with false-flag events — acts of violence, organized by ruling elites designed to direct blame at an enemy in order to amass the public’s support. In 1931, the Japanese blew up sections of their own railway as a pretext for annexing Manchuria. In 1939, the Nazis fabricated evidence of a Polish attack against Germany to justify their invasion of Poland. In 1953, the United States and Britain orchestrated “Operation Ajax,” a false-flag event that targeted Mohammed Mosaddegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran. Nine years later, President Kennedy stopped Operation Northwoods, a Department of Defense plot that would have blamed Cuba for a rash of incidents, including the hijacking and crash of a US commercial airliner. Years later, another false-flag operation — the Gulf of Tonkin incident — escalated the Vietnam War.
Three thousand innocent people had been murdered on September 11. As horrific as it was, the numbers were almost negligible when compared to the history of modern warfare. Hitler had exterminated six million Jews. Pol Pot had systematically eliminated over a million Cambodians. The Chinese were massacring Tibetans on a daily basis. Genocide had wiped out a million in Rwanda. The US invasion had killed a million Iraqis… even though Saddam had had no weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq considered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda a sworn enemy.
To the military-industrial power brokers and Wall Street’s elite, three thousand casualties were nothing compared to Iraq’s oil reserves and a trillion dollars in no-bid contracts and military expenditures.
Seated in the backseat, Patrick recalled the moment the truth about September 11 had finally clicked. It was the last day of his fourth and final deployment, the day he had realized that the country he loved had been taken over by the corporate elite, that he had killed innocent people to support their empires of greed, and that he was destined to burn in Hell for his actions, never to see his soul mate again.
Staring at the burning bridges, Patrick registered the familiar copper taste of hatred in his mouth. It was a hatred that had blinded him for the better part of eleven years, an anger so deep that it smothered every ounce of love he had ever felt, destroying every decent memory, blocking every speck of Light. And in this sudden moment of clarity, another truth surfaced its ugly head…
“They’re going to incinerate Manhattan.”
His fellow passengers turned to face him.
Paolo gripped his wife’s hand. “Who’s going to incinerate Manhattan?”
“The feds. The Department of Defense. It’ll happen soon, probably when the sun comes up. It might have happened hours ago had they gotten hold of this vaccine.”
“How do you know this?” Pankaj asked.
“Back at the VA hospital, I overheard Bertrand DeBorn threatening to spill the beans about anthrax and the attacks back in 2001.”
“Kogelo’s secretary of defense?”
“What does anthrax have to do with—”
“The anthrax originated from CIA-run labs. I’m guessing Scythe was designed in a similar lab.”
“For what purpose?” Paolo asked.
“To invade Iran. Since we lack the manpower to take over another country, the intel guys came up with a new plan. We unleash a biological like Scythe, gut the country’s militia, then ride in with the vaccine and negotiate peace.”
“I don’t believe that,” Francesca stated emphatically. “I refuse to believe it. This is Manhattan, the Big Apple. No one’s going to incinerate the most populated city in America.”