by Jim Defede
Being able to call home had had a liberating effect on most of the passengers, and the tension on the plane lifted. Rather than worrying about family members who might be worried about them, they mainly concentrated on piercing the boredom of being trapped on a plane all night. Also, no one on board seemed to have a direct connection to the tragedy—no family members in New York or Washington who might be missing or dead. Their only real link was the bits of news they would receive.
Inside the cockpit, the pilot’s radio was tuned to a news station broadcasting nonstop reports from the United States. From time to time passengers would poke their heads in to listen. Whether the pilot realized it or not, leaving the cockpit door open proved to be incredibly reassuring for those on board. Rather than feeling alone and isolated, they knew they had access to the latest news without having it forced on them. It was up to each passenger to decide how immersed in the details of the day’s events he or she wanted to be.
Once the flight attendants served the last of the food, they rolled out the carts containing those marvelous miniature bottles of booze. The attendants set them up by the back of the plane and then walked away. A few passengers promptly donned aprons and played bartender. So while those interested in listening to news reports huddled near the cockpit, those who wanted to escape flocked to the rear of the aircraft.
The mood was set by a group of wealthy oilmen from first class, One in particular, Bill Cash, was feeling especially social. Cash owns a company that helps build offshore oil platforms. He had been born in England but married a girl from Alabama, and they now lived in Houston. At fifty-one, Cash was the kind of fellow who could start a party just by walking into a room. As far as he was concerned, a stranded jumbo jet was as good a place as any for a good time.
It didn’t take long for him and Deb to become friends. She proved to be just as outgoing as he was. Her gin and tonic was the idea of one of Cash’s fellow businessmen and it sounded good to her. When one of the flight attendants heard it was the first time Deb had ever had this particular libation, she raced off to the galley. Returning a few moments later, she plopped a wedge of lime in Deb’s drink.
“You can’t have your very first gin and tonic without lime,” the flight attendant said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
Farrar was awestruck by the different people she met. Two of the women she befriended on the plane were Lana Etherington and Winnie House. The first thing Deb noticed about Winnie was how strikingly beautiful the twenty-six-year-old was. Winnie was tall and slender, like a model. And her hair, tied in braids, stretched all the way down to the small of her back. Born in Asaba, Nigeria, where her father is a village chieftain, Winnie spent a lot of her time growing up in London. Fluent in both English and her native language of Igbo, she also spoke a little French. She attended college in Oklahoma and had recently settled in Houston. On September 11, she was flying home to Houston after visiting her sister in London.
Lana was also from Africa. She had grow up in what was then known as Rhodesia and received a law degree from the University of Rhodesia. She left the former British colony in 1980 as the white-controlled government was being replaced by Robert Mugabe, a guerrilla-leader-turned-dictator who renamed the nation Zimbabwe. From Africa, Lana moved to the Middle East, where she worked for Pan American Airways as an executive secretary. While living in Dubai for five years, she married an American who worked for an oil company. Together for nineteen years, the couple now lives in Houston with their two children. The Lone Star State hasn’t made much of a linguistic impression on Lana. She continues to speak with a proper British accent.
Deb, Winnie, and Lana made an eclectic trio: an innocent Texas Aggie, a Nigerian princess, and a globe-trotting mom.
By the time Wednesday morning rolled around, the plane had been wrung dry of alcohol and most of the passengers had managed only a couple of hours’ sleep. Continental Flight 5 was the thirty-fifth plane to be emptied. Bleary-eyed, Deb and her new friends climbed onto yellow school buses for the ride to the terminal building, where they would be taken through Canadian customs and then passed along to the Red Cross for processing. Twenty-nine and a half hours had passed from the time they boarded in London to the time they finally stepped off the plane in Gander.
Most of the shelters in town were already filled when Flight 5 was ready to leave the airport, so they were sent thirty miles down the Trans-Canada Highway to Gambo, a town of 2,300 people located at the confluence of the Gander River and Freshwater Bay. This is the southern edge of Newfoundland’s scenic Kittiwake coast, a series of small fishing villages, inlets, and islands that jut into the North Atlantic. The Kittiwake coast stretches from Laurenceton up to Twillingate and Fogo Island, and then down to Port Blanchard. In the late spring and early summer, when the polar ice cap begins to break apart, visitors come to the area to watch the massive icebergs flow into the Atlantic.
For nearly a century, from the 1860s until the 1950s, Gambo was the hub of the area’s logging operations. The daily harvest of spruce, fir, and pine trees would be floated down the river to the sawmills in Gambo, where they were cut and then loaded onto railcars. The Great Fire of ’61 changed all that. Tens of thousands of acres went up in flames, and with it the economy of Gambo. All that’s left is an empty train trestle, a reminder of the town’s storied past.
As they drove along the winding roads leading into Gambo, Lana was reminded of the hills and valleys of northern England. It was all so quaint and rural. They arrived at the Salvation Army church early Wednesday afternoon. It seemed as if the whole town had come to welcome them. There was a big pot of beef stew and sandwiches waiting on one table. At another, there were seven women all in line, serving freshly brewed tea in little teacups.
Inside, a television was on, but Deb, Lana, and Winnie ignored it, opting instead to use the phones in the church to call their families. When Lana finished talking to her husband, she noticed that one of her fellow passengers, Mark Cohen, had gone outside to have a cigarette. A closet smoker who hides her habit from her children, Lana joined him. Whether it was conscious or not, Lana made the decision not to see the devastation on television. The fresh air and warm sun on her face had invigorated her. After she’d spent almost thirty hours cooped up on planes and buses, the last thing she wanted to do was to sit indoors and watch the news. She suggested to Mark that they find Deb and Winnie and explore the town a bit. He agreed, and the four of them were soon on their way.
Their plan was simple: find Gambo’s one pub. Walking down the road, they made quite a sight. After a few minutes a red van, driven by a man who appeared to be in his early sixties, pulled up alongside them.
“Are you the plane people?” asked the driver, George Neal.
The group nodded, not quite sure what to make of him.
“Do you want to come around for coffee?” he suggested. “I live just down the road. I can give you a lift.”
The foursome looked at one another and through a series of discreet nonverbal gestures—a raised eyebrow, a few tiny head shakes, and an assortment of grimaces—quickly came to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t a good idea to get into a complete stranger’s van. Politely begging off, they told George they were fine and wanted to walk. George said he understood, but if they changed their minds, or if they ever needed a ride somewhere, to just stop by his house. He pointed out where he lived and drove off.
Standing by the road, they all laughed. After all, there must be at least a dozen horror movies that start off with just this type of scenario—a group of friends, out in the middle of nowhere, who hitchhike a ride from a kindly old man and end up struggling for their lives. After walking a few more minutes, they spotted the town store. They pooled their cash—no credit cards accepted—and bought ice cream and potato chips and bottled water. They asked the clerk how far it was to the pub. The answer shocked them. It was still a good two miles away. Gambo may not have had many people in it, but it is long and narrow and winds with the river. The churc
h where the passengers had been dropped off was on the western edge of town, and the pub was on the eastern side. The sun that had felt so good a short time before was now feeling a bit oppressive. None of them wanted to hike another two miles in eighty-degree weather, but they refused to give up on their quest for the next round of cocktails. It was clear what they had to do.
Following the van driver’s directions, they approached a large house with off-white vinyl siding and white trim. Mark joked that he would protect them if there was any trouble, and the women laughed nervously. They noticed an older woman standing in the driveway.
“George invited us over for coffee,” Deb said.
“You must be the plane people,” the woman replied, introducing herself as George’s wife, Edna. “Come on in, my dears.”
George was inside and was thrilled to see them. As he and Edna scurried off to the kitchen, Deb, Lana, Winnie, and Mark found themselves staring at the couple’s big-screen television. It was late Wednesday afternoon, and for the first time they all saw the images of destruction in New York. Until now they had done a good job of distancing themselves from the terror, but as soon as they saw news reports and those pictures, the reality of the last twenty-four hours hit them, hit them in such a way that they could no longer ignore it. Shocked. Shaken. Horrified. There were no words to describe what they were feeling. Deb broke down in tears in the living room. Winnie ran into the bathroom to cry. The others just stood there speechless.
For now at least, the party was over.
CHAPTER NINE
Eithne Smith, Rabbi Leivi Sudak, and Lakewood Academy principal Jamey Jennings.
Photo courtesy of Eithne Smith
Eithne Smith was working the fax machine. Since some passengers were having trouble reaching loved ones by phone, many had resorted to sending messages by fax. Inside the office of the Lakewood Academy, the only school in Glenwood, Smith was assembling the dispatches from passengers and feeding them into the machine. She sent so many faxes on Wednesday that her index finger was starting to swell from her pounding on the keys.
A native of Newfoundland and a teacher for twenty years, Smith loved the sense of family evoked in a school the size of Lakewood, with its 220 students and a faculty of seventeen. The school teaches the children of Glenwood and Appleton from kindergarten through grade twelve, and Smith constituted 100 percent of the school’s senior history department, 100 percent of the French department, and one-third of the English department. Like all of the teachers, she was used to doing a little bit of everything.
As she continued sending faxes and waiting patiently for confirmation that each had been received, one of the passengers walked into the office. Four planeloads of strandees—more than 650 people—had been sent to Glenwood and the neighboring town of Appleton. The majority of them were staying at the school.
“I’ve watched you all morning solve other people’s problems,” the woman said, “and now I have one for you.”
The woman explained that there was an Orthodox rabbi in the school, along with at least two women who were Orthodox Jews, and they hadn’t eaten since their plane had arrived in Gander more than twenty-four hours earlier because none of the food being served was kosher. They were hungry, but they didn’t want to complain to anyone. The woman said she only discovered this when she noticed the people weren’t eating and asked them why.
Smith was more than ready for the challenge. Her given name, Eithne, is an ancient Gaelic name that her mother had always loved. The two most recent uses of the name that Smith had found were for an old Irish battleship and a Catholic nun. Her husband often joked that he wasn’t sure which of the two she reminded him of more.
In the days following September 11, she was a little bit of both.
Smith promised the woman she’d fix the problem at once, called the main school district office, and told them she needed help. Within an hour the owner of the company that provides meals to the regular flights in and out of Gander drove to Glenwood with a cartonful of kosher meals for the school to use over the next few days.
“How did you know we were hungry?” asked Rabbi Leivi Sudak, when she came to tell them the food had arrived.
Smith told him another passenger had noticed.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for everything.”
Smith wished they had thought of asking for kosher meals without being prompted. The truth is, there just aren’t a lot of Jewish people in Newfoundland. The island is 98 percent Catholic and Protestant, and the only synagogue in the province is more than two hundred miles away in St. John’s. As far as she knew, the only Jewish person in Gander was David Zelcer, a correspondent for the CBC.
To help them take care of their needs for the duration of the crisis, the school gave Rabbi Sudak free rein in the faculty lounge, which had a stove, a sink, and a refrigerator. Along with several other Orthodox passengers, the rabbi turned the lounge into a kosher kitchen, complete with new pots, pans, cutlery, and cooking utensils.
Smith felt a great deal of warmth toward Rabbi Sudak, and as she often does to people she likes, she attempted to give him a reassuring hug. When the rabbi realized she was about to touch him, he gently stepped back and folded his arms across his body. He told her he appreciated the gesture, but in his faith it was improper for him to touch a woman.
There were so many different cultures represented in the school, it was just staggering to Smith. Soon after the passengers arrived, school officials hung a large map of the world on the wall and asked everyone to place a thumbtack next to the place they were from. By her count, at Lakewood Academy alone there were people from forty different countries, from Sri Lanka to Tasmania. There were women in burkas and men in flowing robes. The hallways were filled with the sounds of different languages.
After resolving the food crisis, Smith went back to faxing. Before long she was interrupted by a phone call from Australia. The woman on the line was trying to reach her son, Peter. The Red Cross said he had been sent to Glenwood, but Smith couldn’t find a record of him on their sheets. The woman was distraught. She had argued with her son before his flight took off and was upset that their last words to each other were filled with anger. Ever since the attacks on the United States, she had been frantically trying to find out where he was to make sure he was safe.
Smith set out to look for the young man. When she was unable to find him, she left notes around the school and on bulletin boards asking him to report to the office as soon as possible. An hour or so later he arrived.
He was a big fellow, tall and blond. He looked like the classic Aussie surfer. Spotting him holding one of the notes she had posted, Smith walked over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “That’s from your mother,” she said. “She wants you to call her. She says she’s not angry.”
Peter started sobbing uncontrollably. “I was afraid to call her,” he said. “I thought she would still be mad.” Smith took him by the hand and led him into the principal’s office and told him to call his mother that very instant.
General Barbara Fast finished her shopping and made it back to the Knights of Columbus building in time for dinner. The volunteers at the fraternal organization had made a point of cooking something special for the passengers on their first night with them and had prepared a roast-beef banquet. Rather than serving the meal buffet style, the volunteers insisted on each of the 154 passengers taking their seats and being waited on as if they were in a restaurant.
By now, some of the passengers knew what Fast did for a living. Some turned to her for answers. How could something like this have happened? Fast didn’t know what to tell them. How do you provide a rational explanation for such an irrational act?
Fast continued receiving updates from her staff in Germany. Initial reports from the Pentagon placed the death toll in the building as being very high, possibly as many as 900. She had walked those halls on many an occasion, and now they were nothing more than smoldering rubble. Ultimately, it was determined that 125 pe
ople were killed inside the Pentagon, with another 64 lost on the American Airlines flight that crashed into it.
And when the final lists were released, she counted several friends among those who died, including Lieutenant General Timothy Maude, the army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel and the highest-ranking officer killed on September 11. Fast had known General Maude and his family since 1996. The last time they had seen each other, she’d played a round of golf with him and his wife in Germany.
Wednesday was the Knights’ regular bingo night, but they canceled the event because of the arrival of their unexpected guests. Fast thought this was a mistake, as the organization could probably have made a fortune selling bingo cards to the passengers, who would have been thrilled by the diversion. Nevertheless, Fast wouldn’t have had time to play. After dinner, she spotted several Canadian military officials who were walking straight toward her.
“General Fast,” the lead officer said, “I’m Lieutenant Colonel McKeage.”
McKeage is the wing commander for the Canadian air force base in Gander. He apologized for not realizing sooner that she was there. He told her they were going to move her to a secure site on the base where she could speak candidly to her staff and that preparations were being made to get her out of Gander as soon as possible. A great deal had already been happening. While she was in Gander, German police had raided an apartment in Hamburg, where they believed much of the planning for September 11 took place.
In the morning, special arrangements were made to secretly fly Fast to Europe. By Friday, she was back at her command in Stuttgart, where her staff continued to help piece together the circumstances that led up to the attack and hunt for those responsible. Before leaving the Knights of Columbus, she said good-bye to some of the passengers and thanked the volunteers for their kindness.