“Sir, we have to leave now,” a Secret Service agent told Vice Presi- dent Dick Cheney. He grabbed Cheney by the back of his belt and forcibly propelled him to the underground bunker known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. Minutes later the hijacked jet smashed into the Pentagon–and Cheney, after conferring with George W. Bush who was aboard Air Force One, began to direct the U.S. response to the terrorist threat.
In an atmosphere thick with tension, Cheney and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice remained unflappable–even when Washington was overrun with false alarms and ominous radar blips. One of those blips was United Flight 93, only 80 miles from the Capitol when it crashed in rural Pennsylvania. “I think an act of heroism just took place,” Cheney said. He was absolutely right.
