The Daily O’Collegian

By James D. Watts Jr.

Tulsa World

(MCT) — At first, they were simply an annoyance — dozens of odd calls made daily to the pager TV newscaster Jack Bunds always carried with him.

The messages were always strings of numbers that Bunds did not recognize, that didn’t even have enough digits to be any kind of phone number.

One sequence of numbers, however, kept reappearing — 911.

It was only after the hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center that Bunds realized that the strange messages he had been receiving could be communiques from terrorists.

“It had never occurred to me, until that day, that 911 could have been a date,” Bunds said. “I had received a new pager just a short time before Sept. 11, 2001, and I wondered if perhaps the number I had been given had originally been used by someone else.

“I also could not help but think that if I had been smarter, or more clever — or more paranoid — I would have realized that something very odd was going on and done something about it, and maybe the tragedy of 9/11 wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “That sounds kind of bizarre to say, I know. But it’s something that’s always been at the back of my mind.”

Bunds finally took those events and emotions and turned them into a work of fiction he calls “Killer Blind” (Tate Publishing, $14.99).

“The first portion of the book — the events leading up to 9/11, and what happened that day — that’s all true,” Bunds said. “But Iwanted the book to be more than that. I wanted to write a story that would encourage people to be a little more vigilant about our nation’s security. I wanted to show the things that so-called ‘ordinary people’ could do and were doing to help keep us safe.”

The book’s title is a play on Bunds’ own color blindness.

He learned several years ago that the military and intelligence services would use people with color blindness to analyze surveillance photographs — the condition allows these people, Bunds writes, to see details in images that others might miss.

In the days following 9/11, Bunds met with some people in the military to offer his services, to be able to take a more active role in homeland security.

“They said the kind of color blindness I had would make me perfect for the job, but I was too old,” Bunds said.

So Bunds began to imagine what might have happened if the answer hadn’t been “no.”

Out of those speculations came the bulk of “Killer- Blind,” in which a character named Jack Bunds — like the author, a sports broadcaster with a Tulsa television station (Bunds was fired by KTUL in 2007) — becomes involved in the shadowy world of espionage.

Bunds said he took pains to stay as close to historical facts — both in the world at large and in his own life.

“If I write about a place I went to, then I was there at that time,” he said. “My wife would read some of those sections and sort of freak out.

I had to reassure her that I hadn’t done some of those things, but she could see how they could have happened.”

It might strike some as hubris, but Bunds said it was all part of the message he wanted to convey — that much of the dangerous work done to preserve the security of the United States happens just below the surface of the life most citizens lead.

“That’s why I dedicate the book, in part, to those who try their very best to keep us safe from future terrorist attacks,” Bunds said. “The government has obviously done a good job, because there hasn’t been an attack like 9/11 in the years since 2001. And it’s easy for us to get complacent about things like homeland security. But I think it’s important that we be aware of what is going on, and what we maybe can do to help protect us.”