by James Reston
“You think he was trying to get arrested?”
“Yes. For the second time.”
“Second time?”
“Yes. The first was in the Dubai Airport.”
“You think he wanted more than just a speeding ticket?”
“All he got was a ticket and a lecture.”
“But what about his checklist? The part about scuttling the mission and landing the plane safely?”
“I doubt he had the skill to pull that off, and I think he knew he didn’t have the skill. We’ve talked to his trainers.”
“Including the one in Sarasota?”
“Yes, she was hard to find. She fled to Australia. She confirmed that Sami was not the brightest bulb.”
The night fog was moving in from the North Sea. Karima pulled her jacket tightly around her.
“He wrote me that letter on the last night.”
“Yes … as he took a break from studying the cardboard mockup of the cockpit panel of a Boeing 757 that they found in the dumpster of his motel afterwards. At that point, Karima, you were an afterthought.”
“But he called me from the airport.”
“That call was his last act of treachery toward you. He knew the call would be traced.”
Again the mournful, clang-tinged wail of the foghorn drifted across the dark sea.
“You have thought a lot about his case, haven’t you, Günther?”
“Yes.”
“What else do you know … that you haven’t told me about?”
He paused. “I had the chance to stop him too,” he said finally. “But I didn’t.” She seemed not to have heard him. “I am far more responsible for 9/11 than you are,” he said emphatically. Still, his confession did not seem to register. In the dim light of the nearby street lamp and the glow of the distant searchlight on the piers across the way, he stopped and looked at her. He started to speak and then hesitated.
“What else do you know, Günther?” she repeated.
“The cockpit …”
“The cockpit recording?”
“Yes … from the voice recorder … from the flight data recorder … from Shanksville.”
“You have heard it?”
“Yes.”
“Um Gotteswillen,” she whispered.
“It’s horrible,” he said.
She sat down on the cold grass and covered her eyes with her hands. A tugboat moved away from the distant pier with a roar of its powerful engine. He sat down next to her.
“I want to hear it,” she said.
“I’m not sure—”
“Do you have it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I want to hear it. I insist on hearing it.”
Slowly, half-reluctant, half-eager, Recht rummaged through his pocket and pulled out a microcassette player.
“You understand English, nichtwahr?”
She nodded. “You wanted me to hear it, didn’t you, Günther?” she said.
“Yes.”
Forcefully, he switched it on. Haddad was making his first announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, here is your captain speaking. Please sit down. Remain seated. We have a bomb on board. So, sit!”
Recht switched it off again. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
“Yes. What’s happening?”
“Sami and Ahmad had stormed the cockpit. The other two musclemen were herding the passengers to the back of the plane. Sami and Ahmad had knives at the throats of the pilot and copilot.”
Recht took hold of her hand and held it tight. “I warn you. The next five minutes are very difficult,” he said.
She nodded. “Go ahead.”
They listened to the sounds of mayhem. Sit down. Shut up. No. No. No. Lie down. Please. Please. Please. Down. Down. Down. I don’t want to die. No. No. Please. Gurgles and then Ahmad’s squeaky little voice in Arabic, “That’s it. I finished. Everything is fine.”
Then a different voice. A flight controller in Cleveland.
“United 93.”
Sami’s voice again, in English, with Arabic cadence and German syntax. “Here is the captain. I would like to tell you all to remain seated. We have a bomb aboard, and we go back to the airport. We have our demands. So please remain quiet.”
“United 93,” the controller’s voice crackled again. “I understand you have a bomb on board. Go ahead.” Ten seconds went by. The controller again: “Center exec jet 956. Did you understand that transmission?”
A different voice. “Affirmative. He said that there was a bomb on board.”
“That was all you got out of it also?”
“Affirmative.
“Roger.”
“What’s going on, Günther? Center exec jet? I don’t understand what’s happening!”
Recht switched off the recorder. With the slow deliberation of a veteran policeman, he laid out the facts. Forty-five minutes into the flight, Haddad took control of the plane over Ohio. He forgot to turn off the communication link to the ground, so the controllers and a private jet in the vicinity—executive jet flight number 956—could hear his warning to the passengers. With the pilots dying at their feet, Sami turned the plane to a southeasterly course and set the GPS with the coordinates for the US Capitol: N3853.3W7700.3.
Meanwhile, their two musclemen held the passengers at bay in the rear of the plane with box cutters and mace. Because Flight 93 had departed nearly half an hour late, and only a few minutes before the first plane hit the World Trade Center tower …
“Wait a minute,” Karima broke in. “It left late? I thought they grounded all flights after the first plane hit the World Trade tower?”
“Yes. If Flight 93 had been delayed another five minutes, it would have been grounded.”
Recht plowed on. The Flight 93 passengers knew from their cell phones what had happened in New York and began to call their families. Seeing this, one of the musclemen announced in a loud voice that the passengers might as well call their loved ones because it would be the last opportunity they would have to speak to them.
“Um Gotteswillen,” Karima mumbled again. “How do you know this?”
“We have the calls of the passengers.”
Recht switched the recorder on again. For the next ten minutes, there was a garble of unintelligible sounds, thumps, electrical switching, snatches of Arabic, and in the background, the liquid sounds of life ebbing away. A voice said clearly in Arabic, “In the name of Allah. I bear witness that there is no other God but Allah.”
“Who was that?” Karima asked.
“Ahmad. They were now twenty-nine minutes out of Washington, and the third plane had just hit the Pentagon.”
Several minutes later, the revolt began. Recht surmised that Ahmad saw several passengers rise up through the pinhole window in the cockpit door.
“Is there something?” Haddad shouted.
“A fight,” Ahmad shouted back.
“A fight?”
“Let’s go, men,” Ahmad shouted. “Allah is greatest!” Suddenly, there was a distant sound that became increasingly louder, of something heavy being rolled up the aisle, along with the shouts of two American males. “Oh guys. Oh no,” Ahmad shouted his unintelligible alarm.
Recht hit the pause button. “We know from the flight data recorder that at this point, Sami, sensing the impending attack from the cabin, pushed forward on the control column as hard as he could and put the plane into a steep dive. This probably threw the passengers against the ceiling, creating almost a zero-gravity environment. And then he pulled the column back for a steep climb. He was such a novice. He was exceeding the tolerance limits of the plane, and it could easily have broken apart.”
“Did it work?” Karima said.
“No. Listen.” He turned the recorder on again.
She could hear the banging and the shouting, and she heard Sami scream, “The ax! Ge
t the ax!”
Amid the confusion, Ahmad screamed, “Stay back! Stay back!”
And Sami, “They want to get in here. Hold. Hold from the inside. Hold!”
There was more banging and a cracking sound, as if plastic and metal were giving way.
And then, in an eerie voice, Haddad said, “Is that it? Shall we finish it off?”
“No! Not yet!” Ahmad screamed.
“When they all come in, we finish it off.”
“There is nothing.”
Recht turned off the machine again. He and Karima sat on the cold ground, breathing heavily. Trembling, Karima asked, “What did he mean, ‘There is nothing’?”
“I don’t know,” Recht answered. “I’ve wondered about that myself … many times.”
“You’ve listened to this many times?”
“Yes. Nothing. Nothingness. I don’t know. We need a Hegel or a Heidegger to explain it.” And then he turned back to her. “Can you handle the end?”
She took his hand and held it tight. “Yes, play it.”
It had become just noise to her now. A few words were intelligible: cockpit … roll it!… oxygen…. engine … until she heard Sami say, “Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?”
And Ahmad said, “Yes, put it down.”
Seconds went by. Ahmad shouted more forcefully. “Put it down, kalb! Put it down, I say.” And more seconds, as the banging became louder. And finally, Ahmad screamed. “Give it to me, then! GET OUT OF THE WAY! Give it to me! Get away! Get your hands off there!”
A few more seconds passed. There was the sound of rushing wind. Ahmad started to chant.
“Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.”
In the last moment, Sami, the passenger at last, joined him. “Allah is the greatest.” Then—silence.
They sat there for a long time, listening to the gentle waves lap against the sea wall.
“He couldn’t do it in the end,” Karima said at last. It was more a statement than a question.
“No,” Recht replied. “He couldn’t do it. Ahmad did it.”
They got up and wandered aimlessly, losing track of time. Karima leaned on his arm, wobbly at times, as they walked, an occasional wave of nausea washing over her. He tried to be stout and strong, but he did not feel strong. They were joined now in their mutual culpability.
“What is to become of me, Günther?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You will have to decide. I have some decisions to make too.”
“Am I still a person of interest to the BKA?”
“No. I will have some explaining to do. And then I will no longer be a person of interest either.”
“I feel like a castaway.”
“We’re both castaways now.”
“I’m thinking I might move to Turkey. I would feel safe there.”
“You could take one of those unpronounceable names.”
“Yes. Build a new life in some small, remote village.”
“How about that conflict between the German and the Turk in you?”
“I’m older now.”
He nodded. “Yes, we’ve all aged in the last year.”
“Someday, when I’m stronger and have more distance, I might go to America. Visit Washington, and even, if I could find the strength, go to Shanksville.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Karima. I’d think twice about doing that.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out Sami’s last cassette. The thin, acidic strips came out of the housing with a whine, and Recht broke them strand after strand. The tangle gathered around his large, yellow fingers until it became a nest of gibberish. And then he took the Flight 93 tape and did the same, so that Sami’s confessions and his final act were intertwined. He reached to the ground, scooped up a handful of mud and pebbles, and squeezed the jumble into a ball. And then he threw it into the North Sea.
Together they watched it sink beneath the froth.
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS LATER, a few weeks after the first anniversary of 9/11, Vice Kommissar Günther Recht arrived early for his last day of work and lingered in his car for a leisurely smoke. The daunting modernist building in front of him, where he had spent the last years of his professional life and fought so many battles, seemed like a medieval fortress that morning, with its prongs emanating from its central donut and its base raised in a berm. It reminded him of the walls of Vienna that held back the Turks in the sixteenth century. He looked up at his office window. How he wished he could have had the office at the end of the hallway, with its panoramic view of the woods, but that belonged to the first kommissar.
A day earlier, Recht had turned over all his classified documents to counterintelligence and endured his final debriefing. There had been significant developments in the past months. Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora, and his trail had gone cold. Al-Sahrawi had been indicted in America as the twentieth hijacker and faced the death penalty. The real Omar had been captured in Karachi, and Muktar in Rawalpindi. Their interrogations in various US secret prisons formed the basis of current knowledge about the plot and plotters. But Recht was not impressed with the reports of their interrogations, and he bluntly said so to the first kommissar.
The vice kommissar disapproved of the Americans’ harsh methods. The operatives had been tortured unmercifully, and as a result, the principals were either vegetables or crazy. Omar was now a raving paranoid, afraid of his own shadow, addicted to psychotropic drugs, given to loopy disquisitions on the state of the world. He had lost himself in food and was now immensely fat. In one proceeding at Guantánamo Bay, Recht reminded everyone, Omar had to be chained to the floor like a rabid dog. Was that any way to extract useful information? he asked. Muktar, after repeated waterboarding, was confabulating incredible tales that glorified himself at every step. His information was ridiculously unreliable. No wonder there were such gaping contradictions in the assertions of the two captives, Recht told his debriefers. If only they had had Sami Haddad’s tapes. But of them Recht said nothing.
His colleagues listened politely. Their minds were elsewhere. America had shifted its focus from 9/11 to Iraq, and their priorities had shifted as well.
The ceremony for his early retirement was slated for noontime in the central courtyard of the headquarters at Bruno-Georges-Platz. Folding chairs, about twenty of them, had been set up near the sculpture of the iron eagle seal of the German Republic. Flags of the department, the province, and the nation stood like sentinels behind a simple podium amid some recycled potted plants. Colleagues from his thirty years of service had been invited. The first kommissar had been sent around a directive that everyone in the office was expected to attend.
The small audience gathered promptly at noon. Braun, his head clean-shaven now and a big smile on his face, sat grandly in the front row. He had been temporarily appointed acting vice kommissar until someone more senior and more accomplished could be sent to take over.
When everyone was seated, Recht scanned the audience for Karima. He had written her an awkward little letter in which he had wondered how she was coping. He wanted her to know that he personally had signed the order to remove her police protection. He hoped her mother had won her case. And then, if by any chance she were free, he would be pleased if she could attend his retirement ceremony. The food for it was costing him a pretty penny. Not only that, he had a nice surprise for her.
The speeches were dignified, if a little flat. Law enforcement officials, especially those in the secret services, are not given to soaring rhetoric. The high points of Recht’s career were ticked off seriatum, ending with Kommissar Recht’s “remarkable” management of the complicated 9/11 investigation. This occasioned a few muffled snickers in the audience. First Kommissar Schuh, in his brief remarks, gave his deputy credit for the arrest of dangerous domestic terrorists. If Recht was not exactly beloved, he was respected and even liked by some of
his colleagues.
Through the fog of comfortable words, Recht’s mind wandered. He did not believe that Karima would ever find a way out of her unknown place, no matter where she had gone. Phantoms would torment her for the rest of her life. While her guilt might lie dormant, some random event would trigger a memory like a grotesque, clown-faced jack-in-thebox. Because he was a policeman, he had helped her define where her culpability did not lie—but her problem was no longer with the law. Merely to say that she was not guilty, in the legal sense, was the easy part. In the face of such daunting shame, he recognized that his paltry efforts to protect her had been fleeting. And he had his own secret shame to deal with. He had escaped official reprimand, but he had been unable to compensate for his errors or exculpate himself for his own failures.