So now we know that inklings and incidents pointing to a September 11-type terrorist attack have been sprinkled throughout the last decade, like black cats crossing a darkened street. Indeed, the emerging story in the who-knew-what-when blame-game erupting in Washington last week is this: just about everyone involved in counter-terrorism had some piece of the puzzle. Reacting to questions about the ill-fitting clues littering the pre-9-11 gameboard, Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nevada), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, spluttered to the Fox News Channel, "This kind of information could be gleaned from a Tom Clancy novel!"

Yes, that's true. On page 985 of Debt of Honor, published in 1994, a crazed Japanese pilot crashes a civilian 747 jetliner into the Capitol, as the president is addressing a joint session of Congress. Here's Clancy describing the scene: "Nearly three hundred tons of aircraft and fuel struck the east face of the building at a speed of three hundred knots." The building's walls were "smashed to gravel," but even before the roof could cave in, one hundred tons of jet fuel sparked off, "and an immense fireball engulfed everything inside and outside the building."

Is that threat-scenario vivid enough? Indeed, insofar as Clancy is one of the best-selling authors in the country with a particularly large following among military types, it's a depressing commentary on military intelligence that Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could say, a month later, to the American Forces Radio and Television Service, "You hate to admit it, but we hadn't thought about this."

If the military had thought more, the tragedy of 9-11 would have been lessened, if not prevented. Full prevention, of course, could have been possible if FBI hierarchs had absorbed an agent's July 10 warning about terrorists' training at flight schools. But would any career-conscious bureaucrat have followed such a recommendation and ordered the nationwide "racial profiling" of young Middle Eastern men in advance of 9-11? We'll never know.

But as for the next step, as Black Tuesday was actually unfolding, it's clear that someone on the chain of command wasn't doing his or her job right.

Consider, for example, the fate of American Airlines Flight 77, which took off from Northern Virginia, bound for Los Angeles, at 8:10 a.m. For most of the next hour, the 757 flew as far as Kentucky before it was hijacked and turned around. In the meantime, at 8:45 and 9:03 a.m. respectively, two other passenger liners were crashed into the World Trade Center. At 9:30 a.m., President Bush announced that the United States had suffered "an apparent terrorist attack." And yet Flight 77 lumbered along on its tragic mission, crashing into the Pentagon at 9:43 a.m., killing an additional 125 people on the ground.

We might pause over that chronology: 58 minutes after the first observed terrorist strike, the Department of Defense could not stir itself to defend its own military headquarters, shooting down, as a matter of tragic necessity, a rogued plane. In the Clancy novel, at least, a brave security agent atop the Capitol manages to fire a Stinger missile at the oncoming 747, even scoring a hit, although it's too late to stop the onrushing aircraft. But seven years later, it seems, nobody in the Pentagon had thought of even such minimal last-ditch defense, let alone proper patrolling of civilian airspace.

And what if the "let's roll" heroes aboard United Airlines Flight 93 had not brought their fourth doomed plane to a unplanned crash-and-burn in the Pennsylvania woods at 10:37 a.m., well short of Washington? Maybe then the full Clancy scenario -- a civilian jetliner blowing up the Capitol -- would have come true.

So what's next? Lots of recriminations, of course. But maybe someone also ought to be reading Clancy -- and this time, taking notes. Another of his novels, The Sum of All Fears, published in 1991, imagines a terrorist plot to sneak in a "loose nuke" and detonate it at the Superbowl. The good stuff starts on page 702. For those who don't want to turn that many pages, the movie version opens on May 31.

Yes, it might be nice if our homeland securitizers were ahead of the curve, thinking about the next attack, thinking further out than novelists, not to mention terrorists. And maybe they are. But you'd never know it.