by James Renner
Then Nils jumped out of his seat and ran toward the cockpit door.
13 “Listen to me, damn it,” Jean yelled into the pay phone. “There are bombs in the World Trade Center. Both towers. And the Pentagon. Set to explode in a half hour. You have to evacuate everyone. Get them out of there, now!”
“Calm down, ma’am,” said the voice on the other end, which she mistook for a woman’s.
But Jean was not calm. She could see the Twin Towers ten blocks down Church Street and nobody was running out. This was her third call to the police. The buildings were filling with people on their way to work. Her job was supposed to be the easiest part of the plan. And nothing was happening.
“I’ll calm down when you get those people out of there.”
“Ma’am, I assure you the World Trade Center is in no danger today,” the voice said, calm, self-assured.
“Listen to me. If you don’t get everyone out of there in thirty minutes…”
“Jean.”
Jean froze. This wasn’t the police. “Who is this?”
“Jean, I commend your altruism,” said Scopes. “But you can go home now. Go home and get ready to forget this terrible day. We know what Jack is up to. Steps have been taken to prevent the attack. You needn’t worry. Nothing will bring these buildings down today. Now, please, go home and leave the rest to us.”
The phone clicked as the call disconnected. Jean looked around. Was she being watched? It didn’t matter. They could lock her up in prison, an asylum if they wished, but she was going to get those people out of the towers.
She hailed a taxi. “World Trade Center,” she said. “Fast as you can.”
14 “Stop the plane,” the Captain said, his voice a calm tenor. He held the box cutter to the pilot’s neck, a gaunt man with white hair. There was a drop of scarlet at its tip where it had punctured the man’s skin. “Call for air stairs. Get the passengers off. Now.”
Cole held another knife to the back of the first officer’s neck. He willed himself not to faint.
“What are you doing?” the pilot asked.
“I’m hijacking your goddamn plane and I will put this thing in your heart if you don’t do exactly as I say.”
The man coughed. He eyed his first officer. Then he pushed a button on his armrest and spoke clearly to the tower. “Ground control, this is American Airlines Flight 77 requesting assistance on runway thirty. We have a situation in the cockpit. We have been hijacked.” He looked at the Captain, afraid he had said something wrong, but the Captain only nodded for him to continue. “Request air stairs be brought to our position.”
“Flight 77,” said a male voice through a burst of static. “This is Dulles ground control. Please repeat.”
“We’ve been hijacked,” said the pilot. “There are two men in the cockpit with knives. They want stairs, pronto. I think they want to let the passengers out.”
“Ground control to Flight 77, come again?”
“Tell them we have a bomb,” said the Captain. “And if they don’t get that staircase out here in two minutes, I’m going to set it off.”
The pilot relayed the information, less calmly this time.
“Roger that, Flight 77. We have stairs en route.”
“Ten-four, Dulles.”
“Do they have any demands?” asked the controller.
“Tell him to shut up until we get everyone off the plane,” the Captain barked.
“Uh, Dulles. Radio silence, please.”
A minute later an odd-looking truck pulled away from the concourse and drove toward them. Slanted over its roof and down the back was a set of stairs. Cole noticed other planes were frozen on the runways across the tarmac. Soon there would be sirens. They needed to be gone before that happened.
“Tell your attendants to get everyone off. Right now,” said the Captain.
The pilot gave the order. Beyond the cockpit door that Cole had barricaded with a fire extinguisher, they heard the airtight seal open and a clamor of activity as the passengers disembarked. When there was no more noise, the Captain nodded at the boy.
Cole opened the cockpit door. The plane was empty.
“Door’s still open!” he shouted to the Captain.
“Close it!”
“I don’t know how.”
“There’s instructions!”
Cole found a graphic decal on the wall beside the door. It was pretty simple, really. He closed it, turned the red latch until it locked, and the seal gave a short hiss. He ran back to the cockpit and took his place behind the first officer.
“Get us up,” said the Captain.
The pilot and his first officer began checking the instrumentation around them. Then the pilot pushed the throttle forward and the plane started down the runway, engines whining.
“Dulles tower, this is Flight 77. We’ve been ordered to take off. Please clear the air.”
“Negative, Flight 77,” the controller responded. “Stand down.”
“Do it,” said the Captain.
“We are going to take off, Dulles.”
“Negative, Flight 77. Stand down. We have FBI five minutes out. They are ready to listen to demands.”
The pilot pivoted the plane on the runway until it was pointed down the length of it. “These men have no more demands, Dulles. My apologies. Somebody call my wife.”
“Go,” said the Captain. “Take us to twelve thousand feet.”
15 “Don’t you have more than one set of air stairs?” Nils asked, his voice betraying his anxiety.
From the cockpit of Flight 175, they watched the last few passengers unload from Flight 11, D.B. and Zaharie’s plane, which was parked a hundred yards in front of their own.
The air stairs pulled away and they watched Flight 11 roll onto the runway and lift into the air. But instead of driving toward them, the air stairs turned back toward the concourse.
“What the hell?” said Nils.
“Call them back,” Sam shouted to the pilot.
The pilot pushed a button and spoke loudly into his mic. “Newark ground control, this is Flight 175. We need those stairs.”
But nobody answered.
“Goddamn it!” said Nils. “What the fuck is going on?”
As if to answer him, twelve police cars turned onto the runway from behind a low concrete terminal, lights flashing angrily.
“Motherfucker!” yelled Sam.
“It’s over,” said the pilot. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
16 At 8:15, United Airlines Flight 93 leveled out at twelve thousand feet over western Pennsylvania. Tony opened the backpack and removed two boomerang belts with “pilot” written in wax pencil on the leather.
“Punch in the autopilot and then climb out of your chairs,” he instructed.
The pilots climbed out of their seats. The cockpit was now crammed with their four bodies and Tony hurriedly strapped the belts around the men’s waists before they could take advantage of the close quarters.
“Belts?”
“It’s too hard to explain,” said Tony. He pushed the buttons where the buckles should be. When the pilots vanished, Tony and Jack were pulled into the void they left behind, thumping together like characters from a silent comedy.
Jack picked himself up and went to the console between the seats. The transponder was right where his father had said it would be, a little black box with four knobs. He turned a dial until it clicked off, then he climbed into the first officer’s chair and slipped his headphones on. Tony climbed into the pilot’s seat.
Tony pulled a cell phone from his pocket, dialed a number, and hit the button for speaker. Then he used a piece of electrical tape to secure it to the dash. While he did that, Jack found Reagan National Airport on the computer’s autopilot feed and programmed it to turn the jet toward D.C.
“Anybody there?” came a male voice from the phone’s speaker.
“Who’s this?” asked Tony.
“It’s D.B. Tony? Is that you?”
“Yes,
we’re here. Everything okay on your end?”
“On ours, yes, but it looked like Nils and Sam were having some trouble back there.”
“Who’s this?” asked a gruff voice, just keying in. “Who’s there?”
“Dad? It’s Jack. I’m here with Tony. D.B. and Zaharie are fine. How ’bout you and Cole?”
“We’re hanging on,” said the Captain. “Where’s Samantha? She here yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Guys, we’re turning back for New York,” said D.B. “We’re ten minutes out.”
“Sam,” said Jack. “Sam, you there?”
Only silence. Jack looked out the window. The sky was vivid blue, full of puffy white clouds. “Oberlin Center to United Airlines Flight 93,” said a voice in his ear. “Come in, 93. We’ve lost your signal.”
“Dad,” said Jack. “You turn your transponder off?”
“Yep.”
“Shit,” said D.B. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“Oberlin Center. Come in, Flight 93. Oberlin Center to Flight 111. You have visual on Flight 93?” asked the air traffic controller from the open channel coming through their headsets.
“Negative, Oberlin Center,” said another pilot’s voice.
“Where the hell did they go?”
“Sam?” said Jack, again. “You there?”
Tony looked to Jack. Sam and Nils should be at twelve thousand by now. If they were still on the ground, they were fucked.
They sat in silence, watching the world below. When seen from this distance, it was impossible to tell what side anybody was on.
“Hey! Hey, uh, hello?”
“Nils?” yelled Jack, sitting up.
“We’re here,” said Nils, out of breath. “We’re level at twelve thousand.”
“What took you so long?”
“Jack,” said Sam. “Jack, we have a big fucking problem.”
“What?”
“We couldn’t get rid of the passengers. They’re still on board.”
Jack stared at the console, unable to speak. Tony pulled out the smartphone he’d secretly purchased from the gas station in Cambridge when he’d gone looking for Swisher Sweets. He entered a command on an app he’d downloaded last night.
“Jack?” said Sam. “Did you hear me? I still have sixty people on board.”
“It’s all right, Sam,” said Tony. He looked at Jack, his first real friend. What he’d done with Sam had broken Jack’s heart. And he’d wanted it to break. As much as he’d loved Jack, he’d wanted to break his heart, because Jack had always had everything he ever wanted. It had always been easy for him. Having Sam on top of everything else was too much. But that betrayal was nothing compared to what he had to do now. “Nobody has to die today,” he said. “I want you all to listen to me for a minute. Just listen. I have something to say. I decided to go along with this stupid fucking plan, thinking if we could pull it off, fine. But I kept a contingency open because I knew it was too complicated to work. I made a deal with that Hound, Scopes. He’ll let us go back to Mu and keep the island a secret from the world, until the end, but we have to turn around and land the planes first. We can’t take out a single relay. It’s over. I’m sorry.”
“You son of a bitch,” said the Captain. “You little fucking brat.”
“I made up my mind last night,” said Tony. “I decided that if anyone might really be killed, I’d call it off. I’ve just keyed in a command to disable your belts. They won’t work. If you crash your planes into those buildings, you’ll die, too.”
Jack stared at him, eyes wide. He didn’t say anything. Maybe he couldn’t. He just sat and stared. And time ticked onward.
“Why?” the Captain asked.
“This world can’t be saved,” said Tony. “And why should we fight to wake them up when they just want to forget? I’m just giving them what they want.”
There was silence, and then they heard Nils’s voice. “If the belts don’t work, you’ve killed us anyway. We don’t know how to land.”
“These jets can land on autopilot,” said Tony. “Ask the Captain. The control towers will walk you through it.”
Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, Sam sighed loudly. “I hate you, Tony,” she said. “I hate you and no signal is strong enough to make me forget that. I will feel it so deeply forever.”
“What do you want to do, boss?” asked D.B. Everyone knew the question was directed at the Captain.
After a moment the Captain answered, and when he did his voice was full of emotion. “The way I see it, nothing has changed. Tony is still the little shit that he is. And we still have a job to do.”
“What do you mean?” asked Nils.
“Jack,” said the Captain. “You remember that story you hated in Sunday school? The one the priest told you when you were six years old? You were so mad, you yelled at Father Donohue. Told him it was a stupid story.”
Jack nodded. “The kid on the bridge.”
“Yes.”
“It was an allegory,” Jack explained to the others. “But I didn’t know it then. I just thought it was a sad story. Father Donohue said there was this guy who worked on a bridge. One of those bridges on the Cuyahoga that opens up in the middle to let the big ships through. The guy took his three-year-old son to work with him one day. Somehow the kid got away from his dad, ends up on the bridge when this big ship comes up the channel. The ship is full of people and it can’t stop because it’s going too fast. The man, the father, sees his son out there on the bridge and realizes he must make a choice: open the bridge and let his son fall to his death or keep the bridge closed, which would save his kid but kill all the people on the ship. He sacrifices the boy to save all those other lives.”
Nobody said anything for the space of many seconds. He thought he heard Sam sniffling.
“Oh, hell,” said D.B.
“Count me in,” said Cole.
“But what about the people on Sam’s plane?” asked Tony. He could hear the fear in his own voice and was ashamed of it. This was something he hadn’t planned on. They could not do this. Not when they were all so close to a better ending.
“We’re waking up the world today,” said the Captain. “If the world knew that true freedom only cost sixty souls, people would line up to volunteer. That’s the difference between true heroes and you, Tony. Some people are willing to sacrifice themselves.”
“They’ll call you terrorists,” said Tony.
“They’ll call us patriots.”
“Okay,” said Sam. “We’ll do it. I can do it.”
“You’re all being stupid!” Tony screamed into the mic. “You’re going to die. You’re going to die for a world that wants to forget. Don’t you know they voted to forget? They willingly gave up their freedom.”
“The difference is,” said the Captain, “now they don’t have that choice.”
“Well, you need all four planes for it to work. And this plane is not going to crash.”
“Jack?” asked Sam.
“I’ve got this,” he said, a resolute and humorless grin stretching across his face.
“I will put this thing in the ground before I let you crash it into the Washington Monument,” said Tony.
“No you won’t,” said Jack. “Because you’re not ready to die.”
Tony laughed. “My belt still works, asshole. I’ll turn the plane upside down and transport out of here and be back on Mu before it crashes.”
“Tony, Tony, Tony,” said Jack. “You think I could ever forget what you did to me? I know better than to trust you. When you showed me the belts, I wondered to myself, why would he label them if they all do the same thing? I tried to think what you might be up to. I never expected this. But as a precaution, I switched the names on the belts.”
“Good boy,” said the Captain.
“So who the fuck has my belt?”
“Who do you think?”
“Jack, no!” said Sam. “I don’t want it. Don’t. Jesus. I don’t want to be the only
one left to remember all this.”
“You know why you have to live,” said Jack.
“He’s right,” said the Captain. “Somebody should survive. Somebody should know what happened here.”
“Goddamn it, Jack!” she yelled. “Goddamn it!”
“No,” said Tony. He was pushing at the button where his buckle should be. It glowed red for an instant, then faded away. “No!”
“I hate to interrupt, gentlemen,” said Zaharie. “But I can see the two towers.” They all heard the scream of a plane’s engine over the phone as Zaharie nosed down.
“Don’t!” screamed Tony.
“Goddamn,” said D.B. “New York was always so beautif—”
Their transmission cut off, followed by a burst of static, then nothing.
“I’m proud of all of you,” the Captain said. “So damn proud.”
And then Tony was on Jack and they rolled to the floor behind the controls, at each other’s throats.
17 “There are bombs in both towers,” Jean told the security guard at the front desk. “You have to evacuate. Right now, man.”
“Calm down,” said the guard, standing up.
“Don’t tell me to calm down, damn it. Get everyone out.”
“I’m not going to do that. I’ve already been briefed about your hoax. If you’ll just wait here, help is on the way.”
Cursing the guard, Jean ran toward a red fire alarm set into the granite wall by the bank of elevators.
“Don’t!” a woman shouted at her.
Jean turned. The woman had curly brown hair and was dressed like some special agent with the FBI, although Jean suspected she really worked for a forgotten branch of the NSA.
“What are you doing, Ms. Felter?” she asked.
“Two planes are about to crash into the towers. We have to get everyone out.”
“I want you to calm down and come with me. Let’s sort this out together.”
An elevator opened and a dozen businessmen walked out between the agent and Jean. She disappeared behind them, into the empty car. She pushed a button and then thumbed Close Door. The doors shut tight and carried her up.