Bush was gone from the school moments later. A Secret Service agent emerged at a run to tell local police officers, “We’re under terrorist attack. We have to go now.” The presidential motorcade sped off, heading for the Sarasota airport. Before it got there, however, events would torpedo the plan to return to Washington.
FROM THE TOWER at Reagan Airport in Washington, a supervisor had been talking urgently with the Secret Service’s Operations Center at the White House. “We’ve got an aircraft coming at you,” he said, “and not talking with us.” It is less than four miles from the airport to the White House. Within three minutes, by 9:36, according to the Secret Service record, the agents who had been waiting in Cheney’s outer office—submachine guns in hand—acted. “They came in,” the Vice President remembered, “grabbed me and … you know, your feet touch the floor periodically. But they’re bigger than I am, and they hoisted me up and moved me very rapidly down the hallway, down some stairs, through some doors, and down some more stairs into an underground facility under the White House.” He was on his way to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a fortified bunker originally built for President Roosevelt in World War II, where he was to remain for many hours.
DULLES CONTROLLERS had reported that the suspect airplane was headed toward the restricted airspace around the White House, known as P-56. It was ten miles out, still pointed that way, when radar at Reagan National picked it up. Then it turned south. A National Guard cargo aircraft pilot, asked if he had it in sight, could see it clearly. It looked “like a 757 with a silver fuselage” descending, Colonel Steve O’Brien would recall.
Then, squinting through the haze, O’Brien saw the plane begin to turn back again toward the city. Suddenly, horrified controllers in the Reagan control tower no longer needed the reports of the National Guard pilot. There the airliner was, in plain sight and less than a mile away.
A fire engine captain and his crew on Interstate 395, en route to a training session, saw the plane in steep descent, banking right. A policeman on a motorcycle on Columbia Pike saw it, flying so low that its fuselage reflected the shapes of the buildings beneath. A Catholic priest, on his way to a graveside service at Arlington Cemetery, saw it—flying no more than twenty feet above the road, he said. Steve Anderson, an executive for USA Today, who saw it from his 19th floor office, couldn’t believe his eyes.
“I heard an airplane, a very loud airplane, come from behind me,” said Richard Benedetto, a reporter for the paper, “an American Airlines airplane. I could see it very clearly.”
“I was close enough—about a hundred feet or so—that I could see the American Airlines logo on the tail,” said Steve Riskus. “It was not completely level but … kind of like it was landing with no gear down … It knocked over a few light poles on its way.”
“I looked out my driver’s side window,” said insurance company employee Penny Elgas, “and realized I was looking at the nose of an airplane … I saw the end of the wing closest to me and the underside closest to me … I remember recognizing it as an American Airlines plane … The plane seemed to be floating as if it were a paper glider.”
AT THE PENTAGON, on the south bank of the Potomac, the news from New York had set some people thinking. “What do we have in place to protect from an airplane?” someone had asked Pentagon police chief John Jester. “Nothing,” he replied. There were measures in place to counter a terrorist attack on the ground, but there was no antiaircraft system. Jester raised the “Protection Condition” to “Alpha,” all he could do in the circumstances.
Controller Sean Boger, in the little tower beside the Pentagon heliport, wondered aloud why it was that no airplane had ever hit the Pentagon—even by accident. The vast complex was, after all, only a mile from Reagan National. Then, out of nowhere, Boger saw “the nose and the wing of an aircraft just like, coming right at us.”
The plane hit just as Jester’s deputy was passing on the “Alpha” alert order. Six hundred feet from the point of impact, Jester heard the noise, felt a shaking, but—so huge and so solidly built is the Pentagon—thought it was caused by “furniture on a pallet rolling over an expansion joint.” Others heard the sound as a muffled “thwoom.”
Flight 77, still with some 5,300 gallons of fuel in its tanks, had hurtled into the military nerve center of the United States at a speed later calculated to have been about 530 miles per hour. The plane struck the west side of the Pentagon just above ground level, going on in diagonally at an angle of about forty-two degrees.
To Penny Elgas, watching petrified in her car, the airliner seemed to “simply melt into the building. I saw a smoke ring surround the fuselage as it made contact with the wall.”
“I saw the plane,” another driver, Rebecca Gordon, said. “It was there … Then it was gone … it just vanished.”
“I expected to see the tail sticking out,” recalled Sheryl Alleger, a naval officer who saw the crash site afterward. “But—nothing. It was like the building swallowed the plane.”
As the airplane pierced the structure, a great mass of flame blossomed above the Pentagon’s roof. There were explosions. The carnage and destruction covered a ragged area of more than an acre of the vast complex.
A total of 189 people, 64 on the airliner and 125 military and civilian staff of the Defense Department, were killed—many instantaneously, more within minutes. Some of the Pentagon’s dead would be found still seated at their desks and conference tables. Forty-nine people suffered injuries sufficient to warrant admission to hospitals.
Christine Morrison, a survivor, described vividly what happened to her. “From the back of the room there was a heatwave-like haze … moving. Before I could register or complete that thought, this force hit the room, instantly turning the office into an inferno hell. Everything was falling, flying, and on fire, and there was no escaping it … I felt the heat and I heard the sizzling of me … Oxygen disappeared; my lungs felt like they were burning or collapsing. My mind was like sludge and thoughts took forever to form and longer to reach the brain, and even longer to make use of them … Everyone lost his or her sense of direction.”
Morrison would emerge into the daylight relatively unharmed. Juan Cruz Santiago was terribly injured. In the words of the official Defense Department history, he was “engulfed by fire. Most of his body was scorched with second, third, and fourth-degree burns.… Hospitalized for three months, Cruz underwent some thirty surgeries, including skin grafts to his face, right arm, hands, and legs. He was left with cruel damage to his face, eyes, and hands.”
Louise Kurtz, who had been standing at a fax machine, was—in her words—“baked, totally … I was like meat when you take it off the grill.” She lost her ears and fingers, underwent multiple skin grafts, and spent three months in the hospital.
Astonishing escapes included Sheila Moody, in the accounts department, who had been seated near the outer wall of the building. Instead of calling out when she heard a rescuer close by—she was stifled by smoke and flames and unable to make a sound—she had been able only to clap her hands. A staff sergeant heard her and got her to safety. Thirty-four others in the department died.
April Gallop, in information management, had brought her two-month-old son to work with her because the babysitter was sick. After the plane hit, and waist-deep in debris, she was horrified to see that the infant’s stroller was on fire—and empty. She found the baby, however, curled up in the wreckage and virtually unscathed, and both were rescued.
The crash site being the Pentagon, trained military men were on hand at once. Marines—doing “what we’re supposed to do,” as one of them put it—went into the wreckage time and again. They and the hundreds of firefighters who arrived would more than once have to retreat—once when it became clear that part of the building was going to collapse, again when it was feared that another hijacked plane was approaching. The firefighting operation lasted thirty-six hours.
WHEN THE PLANE HIT, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was still in his offi
ce with his CIA briefer. The room shook, even though his quarters were at the furthest point from the impact—in a building each side of which is longer than three football fields. Told that an airplane had crashed, Rumsfeld set off fast to investigate, bodyguards in his wake. They came eventually, a member of the escort recalled, to a place where “it was dark and there was a lot of smoke. Then we saw daylight through a door that was hanging open.”
The defense secretary would remember emerging to see the building ablaze, “hundreds of pieces of metal all over the lawn,” “people lying on the grass with clothes blown off and burns all over them.” He examined a piece of wreckage, saw writing on it, and muttered: “American Airlines …” He helped push a gurney, was photographed doing so, then headed back inside.
Assistant secretary Torie Clarke, waiting in the Executive Support Center as instructed, remembered seeing Rumsfeld arrive at about 10:15, “suit jacket over his shoulders and his face and clothes smeared with ashes, dirt, and sweat.” He was “quiet, deadly serious, completely cool.”
WHILE DONALD RUMSFELD was on the move around the Pentagon, President Bush had been on the short limousine ride from Booker Elementary to the Sarasota airport. News of the Pentagon attack reached the party as they were en route, leading the President’s Secret Service escort to advise against the planned return to Washington. Chief of staff Card agreed.
From the airport, on board Air Force One, Bush spoke with Cheney at the White House. “Sounds like we have a minor war going on here,” he told the Vice President, according to an aide’s notes. “I heard about the Pentagon. We’re at war … somebody’s going to pay.”
The Secret Service wanted Air Force One off the ground fast. “They were taxiing before the door was closed,” an officer recalled, “and the pilot shot off using only half the runway. There was so much torque that they actually tore the concrete.”
Air Force colonel Mark Tillman, at the controls, took the plane up “like a rocket,” a passenger remembered, “almost straight up.” After flying northeast for a while, it turned west. Those recommending caution had won out. Instead of returning to Washington the President would simply fly on—destination, for the time being, undecided.
In the skies to the north, and even before the Pentagon was hit, the crisis had become yet more serious. Unknown to the President, unknown to anyone at the White House, and once again as predicted in the children’s story at the Sarasota school, there was more to come.
SIX
AT HOME IN NEW JERSEY, A WOMAN NAMED MELODIE HOMER HAD been worried by the television pictures from the World Trade Center. Her concern was for her husband, Leroy, copilot that morning on United 93, a Boeing 757 flying from Newark to San Francisco. Through a contact at the airline, Mrs. Homer sent him a text message asking if all was well.
That message was quickly followed by another. As Flight 93 cruised 35,000 feet over eastern Ohio, it received the warning dispatcher Ballinger was by now sending to all United aircraft: “Beware any cockpit intrusion—two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center.”
Captain Jason Dahl was evidently nonplussed. “Ed,” he messaged back, “confirm latest mssg plz.” It was 9:26, and clarification came swift and savage.
At 9:28, the sound of mayhem crackled over the radio from Flight 93. Cleveland control heard a shout of “Mayday!”; then, “Hey! Get out of here!”; and finally, sounds of physical struggle. Thirty-two seconds later, more fighting. Again, three times: “Get out of here! … Get out of here! … Get out of here!” And screaming.
Melodie Homer never would receive the reassuring reply for which she had hoped. Ballinger’s warning had been in vain, and there would be no more legitimate transmissions from Flight 93.
Instead, at 9:32, came a stranger’s voice, panting as though out of breath. It intoned: “Ladies and gentlemen. Here the captain. Please sit down. Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board. So sit.” Some investigators would surmise that lack of familiarity with the communications system led this hijack pilot—and, earlier, his accomplice on Flight 11—to transmit not to the passengers as intended, but to ground control.
Though the United pilots could no longer transmit, we know a good deal of what went on in the cockpit. Unlike voice recorders on board the three other hijacked flights, all either never found or irreparably damaged, Flight 93’s Cockpit Voice Recorder survived. So did the Flight Data Recorder. Though often difficult to interpret, the voice recorder made for a unique partial record of the final thirty-one minutes aboard the plane.
The cockpit recording began four minutes into the hijack, as the hijacker “captain” tried to tell passengers to remain seated. The microphones picked up a clattering sound, followed by the voice of someone giving orders: “Don’t move … Come on. Come … Shut up! … Don’t move! … Stop!”
Then the sound of an airline seat moving, and more commands: “Sit, sit, sit down! … Sit down!” More of the same, and a voice repeating in Arabic, “That’s it, that’s it …” Then in English, loudly, “SHUT UP!” Someone other than the terrorists was alive in the cockpit, and evidently captive.
Though one cannot know for sure, the person being told to sit down and shut up was almost certainly one of the female flight attendants. Perhaps she was senior attendant Deborah Welsh, who spent much of her time in First Class. Or perhaps she was Wanda Green, who was also assigned to the front of the airplane. Some United attendants carried a key to the cockpit, and one key was usually kept in the forward galley. By arrangement with Captain Dahl, reportedly, his attendants could also gain access to the cockpit by means of a coded knock. Welsh, aged forty-nine, was a veteran with a reputation for being tough. She had once managed to shove a drunken male passenger back into his seat. Green, the same age as Welsh, doubled as a real estate agent and had two grown children. One of these two attendants was likely used to gain access to the cockpit.
The woman in the hijackers’ hands did not keep quiet or sit down. A minute into the series of orders to the captive, a terrorist’s voice is heard to intone in Arabic the Basmala: “In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.” This is an invocation used frequently by observant Muslims, often before embarking on some action.
Next on the recording, the man exclaims: “Finish, no more. NO MORE!” and “Stop, stop, stop, STOP!” Repeatedly: “No! No, no, no, NO!” Time and time again, frantically: “Lie down! … DOWN! … Down, down, down … Come on, sit down, sit!”
For two minutes of this, the captive has not spoken. Now, however, a female American voice is heard for the first time. She begs, “Please, please, please …” Then, again ordered to get down, she pleads, “Please, please, don’t hurt me … Oh, God!”
According to Deborah Welsh’s husband, the attendant had spoken of Muslim terrorists with scorn, thought them cowards. If the captive in the cockpit was Welsh, perhaps she now tried an acid response. After another minute of being told to stay down, the female voice on the recording asks, “Are you talking to me?” Her reward, within moments, is violence.
Barely has the hijacker started in again on his mantra of “Down, down!” than the woman is heard pleading, “I don’t want to die.” She says it three times, her cries accompanied by words—or sounds—that are blanked out in the transcript as released. Then, the transcript notes, there is the “sound of a snap … a struggle that lasted for few seconds.” Moments later, a voice in Arabic says, “Everything is fine. I finished.” The woman’s voice is not heard again.
Two minutes after the silencing of the attendant, the terrorist pilot tried again to make an announcement to the passengers. He asked that passengers remain seated, adding this time: “We are going back to the airport … we have our demands. So, please remain quiet.”
About a minute later, at 9:40, a surviving flight attendant on board got through to Starfix, United’s maintenance facility in California. This was Sandra Bradshaw, probably seated toward the rear of the plane in Coach. Those who handled the call thought she sounded “shock
ingly calm” as she told of hijackers, armed with knives, on the flight deck and in the cabin. Bradshaw said that a fellow flight attendant had been “attacked” and—as relayed to United Airlines Operations by a Starfix operator—that “knives were being held to the crew’s throats.”
It may be that Captain Dahl and copilot Homer were not killed at once. Well into the hijack, the voice recorder transcript shows that a “native English-speaking male” in the cockpit says—or perhaps groans—“Oh, man! …” A few minutes later a hijacker is heard saying in Arabic, “… talk to the pilot. Bring the pilot back.”
A flight attendant—perhaps CeeCee Lyles, who also worked in Coach—at one point passed word that the hijackers had “taken the pilot and the copilot out” of the cockpit. They were “lying on the floor bleeding” in First Class. It was not clear whether the pilots were dead or alive.
Did the hijackers try to get the pilots, already wounded, to help with the controls? Did they then move them to the forward passenger area and leave them lying there? There is no way to know.
FAR BELOW, ALL WAS CHAOS. At the very moment that the attendant in 93’s cockpit had fallen ominously silent—all unknown to those wrestling with the crisis on the ground—Flight 77 had slammed into the Pentagon. On his first day of duty in the post, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney and his senior colleagues had no way of knowing what new calamity might be imminent.
A Delta flight on its way from Boston to Las Vegas missed a radio call, triggering suspicion. Was this another hijack? Boston had been the point of departure for two of the planes already attacked. Then word reached the FAA Command Center that Flight 93 might have a bomb on board.
The Eleventh Day Page 5