The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  She looked up instantly in its direction.

  That’s when she saw the enormous ball of fire rising from below.

  • • •

  John Ryan was to meet an informant that morning. The spot they set was downtown, in a vast, bustling place, strategically anonymous and far away from the subjects they would discuss. They’d convene somewhere in the World Trade Center complex.

  It was a place Ryan knew well, long before he’d joined the Port Authority Police Department. Growing up in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, he had pursued a passion with a deep history in the borough, a hobby he kept despite all the other, more modern distractions calling to a teenager in the city. Ryan liked to keep and fly pigeons.

  The rooftops of south Brooklyn were a working center of the pigeon-flying subculture, filled with makeshift coops, wood-and-wire shacks, and lean-tos. For some of the men who kept pigeons, the pursuit had all the demands of a part-time job, from the hours they spent feeding and watering the birds to keeping them and their quarters at least partially clean to training the pigeons to fly their routes and find their way back.

  It led to moments of great serenity, times when the birds lit out from their coops, winging over the confining streets and into the freedom of air and sky. They soared, and the birdmen of Brooklyn followed the patterns of their flights.

  When Ryan looked out across the rooftops, eyes trained west, the towers were always there to fix the horizon, familiar yet magnetic, drawing his gaze. Maybe that’s why, at seventeen, he crossed the river to work there. Not merely inside the buildings, but as close to the top as he could. Ryan got a job as a guide, working the observation deck at 2 World Trade Center.

  The North Tower, 1 World Trade, had its restaurant, Windows on the World, a breathtaking venue on the 106th and 107th floors, serving three meals a day at high prices with incomparable views. The South Tower’s answer was its Top of the World observatories, two observation decks, on its 107th and 110th floors. The space on 107 was indoors, with wider windows and smaller columns, to allow for the best viewing experience. For those who wanted to climb higher still, depending on the weather, escalators carried visitors up another three stories to the 110th floor and a greater thrill—stepping outside onto a platform to behold the vistas in open air. The deck was 1,377 feet above street level. There weren’t many pigeons interrupting the panorama.

  A friend from the neighborhood suggested Ryan apply for the part-time gig. The job proved perfect, and also placed him in the spot where he’d build his career. WTC served as the headquarters for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a joint venture between the states overseeing all the transportation infrastructure of the region—from its seaports and airports to many of its tunnels and bridges. A vast governmental agency, it included its own police force with more than fifteen hundred officers. As he entered college, Ryan’s interest moved toward law enforcement. The authority’s headquarters were located in the North Tower.

  After attending college, and then graduating from the police academy, Ryan started with the Port Authority Police Department in 1979. His first assignment was at JFK International Airport in Queens. Eventually, he was transferred to Manhattan and the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue near Forty-second street. Times Square. He spent more than twenty years on the assignment.

  For most of those years, the terminal was in the center of a strip of X-rated movie theaters and peep shows, a neon-lit underbelly attracting every flavor of hoodlum and every brand of crime. The western edge of the neighborhood was its worst, with Eighth Avenue the darkest vein, pulsing with the rough trades of prostitution and drug dealing, and the attendant shootings and stabbings. The sprawling bus station was the stage set for all sorts of greater or lesser crimes.

  There was also an entrenched and expanding gang problem moving through the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and infecting the terminal. Ryan was working on that issue with the help of his informant. To protect the informant’s confidentiality, they had arranged to meet downtown, away from Times Square.

  In making the appointment, however, Ryan had forgotten about the family calendar. The eleventh was the first day of his daughter’s preschool out on Long Island. He needed to be home in time to take his daughter to the school’s afternoon session. The meeting at the World Trade Center was rescheduled.

  Ryan asked for the day off. But that morning, the phone rang, and he went straight to work.

  He would not have another day off for the next eight months.

  • • •

  Eighty-three people were in the offices at Sandler O’Neill that morning—men and women, mothers and fathers, war veterans and MBAs, founding principals and executive assistants, underperformers and rainmakers, Little League coaches and marathon runners, surrounded by the blue sky, beginning to sort through the demands of the day. For most, it was a time to settle in—readying for the meetings and reports, the trades and positions, the e-mails and calls that would shape the nine or ten hours ahead across a cloudless Tuesday.

  • • •

  8:46:40 A.M.

  Impact.

  American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, a Boeing 767 jet with eighty-one passengers and eleven crew aboard, was carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel and traveling at 465 miles per hour when it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  The jet slammed into the north side of the building, killing all ninety-two on board as it exploded through seven floors of the tower. It measured 156 feet across its wingspan, the jet’s left tip blasting through the 93rd floor, while its right ripped through the 99th. The path of destruction ran directly through the offices of a single corporation, the Marsh & McLennan Companies, an insurance and professional services firm. Hundreds were killed instantly by the impact, without ever having known what ended their lives.

  The force of the crash was so great, parts of the plane’s landing gear burst out the south side of the tower, opposite where the plane entered, flying the length of five city blocks through the air before landing in the street. The plane’s fuel ignited on impact with the building, triggering an explosive fire, scorching all it touched in its spread as it roared from the open wounds of the building, sending out a blast of heat strong enough to singe the blue itself.

  • • •

  Chuck Platz reached for his phone and dialed. The call went straight to voice mail. He tried again. Same.

  His next impulse was simple: Go. Go there. Get to him. Get on the subway and head south to Chambers Street, up and out to the plaza, to find a way to reach Welles. Or walk or run there, through the chaos. The moment held as much uncertainty as urgency, maybe more. He didn’t stop to calculate whether the smoke he saw in the moment was pouring from the tower closer to him or farther away, whether it was World Trade Center 1 or 2, the North Tower or the South.

  He headed toward the subway, but then heard the announcement. Downtown service was already being suspended. He turned around and headed back to 115 Washington.

  If he heard the second plane hit, or understood that its target was the South Tower, Platz can only recall walking into the building and making his way upward, past the apartment on the fifth floor, until he reached the roof. The smoke from the towers was flooding outward now and blurring the city’s skyline before his eyes. He continued to call Welles, without success. At one point, he left a message, forcing himself to sound casual and matter-of-fact. “Hey, make sure you’re okay. I’ll meet you at Boxers tonight.”

  Standing on the rooftop of the building, he wondered what he could do. He remembered he had a disposable camera in his bag, and, lacking any other way to help, he raised the plastic shell, looked through its hollow view, and snapped a picture looking south. It would be years before he found the courage to develop the film.

  A short time later, standing in the same spot, he saw the first tower fall. He didn’t know whether it was the North or
the South Tower, the one where Welles worked or the one he looked at from his 104th floor office. He didn’t know if Welles was inside or outside, trapped or free, headed home by then, or never again.

  Platz was paralyzed by what he saw and couldn’t understand, what he feared and didn’t know. “People asked me if, in my heart of hearts, I knew,” Platz said. “My mind wouldn’t allow itself to form a thought.”

  Something primal kept his rising panic at bay: hope.

  • • •

  Only 131 feet separated the towers—less than half a football field of open space between a furnace of flame erupting from the gashes of one structure and the gleaming façade of the other.

  Inside the South Tower, people on the highest floors facing west could feel the extreme heat through their office windows, its swelter touching their cheeks and the sleeves of their shirts. In the first several minutes after Flight 11 hit the North Tower, confusion ruled everywhere, including in the South Tower, where even those facing away from the plane’s entry point felt the reverberations of the crash. Many who could see the damage assumed that a small plane or helicopter had flown into the building. The smoke made it hard to absorb the scope of the devastation.

  In her office at Sandler O’Neill, on the 104th floor of the South Tower, Karen Fishman was talking with Gordon Aamoth, who had just made key progress on an enormous and complicated merger he’d been working on for years. It was the biggest deal of his career at the firm, set to be announced that week. That’s when she heard Herman Sandler, and perhaps Chris Quackenbush as well, two of the firm’s three leaders, make the announcement that a plane had hit the North Tower.

  She ran out of her office into Quackenbush’s to see what happened. A truly panoramic view wasn’t possible in the towers, particularly up close. Its windows were less than two feet wide, just eighteen inches across. The towers’ architect, Minoru Yamasaki, suffered from a fear of heights. The narrow office windows, with pillars on either side, restricted the views. Fishman’s view from the windows in Quackenbush’s office was complicated by a storm of paper blowing through the air and a growing cloud of smoke.

  Mark Fitzgibbon had been Welles’s boss on the research side of Sandler until Welles moved to the trading desk. He was in his office that morning, meeting with his colleague John Kline, both of them oblivious to anything happening outside, when the two heard a commotion outside the door. The office was next to a stairwell leading out of Sandler’s offices. Opening the door, he smelled what he believed were the first few wisps of smoke. He saw a few people quickly moving toward the stairs, and assumed it was a fire.

  At the same time, Stephen Joseph, one of the firm’s managing directors, heard an unusual sound from his spot at the trading desk, but quickly dismissed it. The firm’s trading floor faced away from the North Tower, and he’d learned long before to block out distractions during the workday to concentrate on the cascade of decisions and calculations that governed market hours. But when he heard an announcement from Ken McBrayer, principal in charge of mortgage finance and a Naval Academy graduate, Joseph heard the angst in his voice. He got up immediately and headed for the windows. Even before getting there, he knew: I’m not staying. Walking back to his desk, he turned to Andy Cott and Jace Day, two of his colleagues on the desk, and was blunt.

  “You’ve got little kids,” Joseph said. “I have little kids. We should leave. Now.”

  For many of the firm’s veteran employees, like Karen Fishman, the announcement triggered memories of the terrorist attack in 1993, and the conflicting sets of directions they’d received in its immediate aftermath. Even though it was more than eight years before, the anxiety of the day never completely faded.

  “I was there,” Fishman recalled, “and even though you were better off doing nothing, I knew you couldn’t trust the building. You couldn’t trust its management. The whole place was just a mess.” Eight years earlier, she and thousands of others in both towers received contradictory orders on when to evacuate, or whether to leave at all. For those on the highest floors, like Sandler, the result was a long and confusing day, waiting to learn what to do. It ended with a harrowing walk down the building’s stairwells in the pitch dark, many holding on to the shoulders of those directly in front of them to follow their lead.

  Herman Sandler tried to be clear and calm in the instructions he gave to all in the office this morning. They had not been given any official evacuation order yet. No one had to leave. But anyone who felt uncomfortable at all and wanted to leave should absolutely go.

  • • •

  And so the boundary line was drawn, though no one could see it.

  To stay or leave, to follow an instinct or adhere to a schedule—this, now, was the hinge point between living and dying.

  For the eighty-three people in the office, what voice inside spoke to them, and what did it say? Some dropped everything and exited. Others called or heard from loved ones while at their desks. Who was guided by the immediate reactions of those next to them, and who made the choice independently and quickly?

  No one could know, not in the ways knowledge presents itself to us—in facts and proofs, with data or experience—none possessed the truth that every additional second spent on the floor was a move closer to death. On the 104th floor, some heard a voice or had a sense or made a choice before or after hearing Herman Sandler issue his instructions. Already, they were making their way toward the elevators or into the stairwell near Fitzgibbon’s office.

  They were taking the first steps to their survival.

  • • •

  Before nine A.M., Welles was at his desk when the phone rang.

  It was his friend and former roommate Johnny Howells. Howells was in Boston, at work in his home office. Minutes earlier he’d been on a conference call when his housemate interrupted to tell him a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Howells muted the line, looked to the television, and saw smoke pouring from one of the buildings. Oh my God.

  He got back on the line, telling others on the call he had a friend working in the towers. He had to go. Despite the visit he made with Welles to the offices at Sandler on that quiet Sunday afternoon a year before, when Welles was so proud to show off the views from the 104th floor, Howells couldn’t remember which tower they visited. Where was the office? Was it the North Tower or the South? Where was Welles right now?

  He picked up the phone and, still watching the dark clouds surging out of the building on his television screen, dialed Welles’s desk number. Almost immediately, the line picked up. Welles answered. Howells was stunned.

  “Welles,” he said, “are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Welles replied. His voice was clear. “It was the other building.”

  “Get out of there,” Howells said, without hesitating.

  “I think we’re okay,” Welles answered. If there was any edge in his voice, Howells didn’t hear it. “Something hit the other building. You could feel it, but I’m all right.”

  Howells, along with millions of others across the country and around the world, were seeing the first images of the devastation to the North Tower, the first seeds of catastrophe unfolding in real time in their living rooms and kitchens and offices. One hundred two minutes after being struck, the building would collapse to the ground.

  But when Howells called Welles was 131 feet away from the burning North Tower, and had only a vague sense of its condition or the chaos spreading through its upper floors. He couldn’t see people breaking out the tower’s windows, some perched there, others leaping to their deaths.

  Howells repeated himself, more forcefully this time.

  “Get out of there.”

  “Actually, they’re coming on now,” Welles said, referring to an announcement being made over the office speakers. “They’re saying we are going to get out of here so . . . I’ll give you a call later.” The call ended there.

>   The evacuation order came across the public address system in the office.

  It was 9:02 A.M.

  Through the South Tower’s PA speakers, the Port Authority broadcast the message:

  “May I have your attention, please. Repeating this message: the situation occurred in Building 1. If the conditions warrant on your floor, you may wish to start an orderly evacuation.”

  • • •

  One minute later.

  9:03:02 A.M.

  United Airlines Flight 175, another Boeing 767 jet out of Boston, flying northward at a speed estimated between 540 and 590 miles per hour, losing altitude at a rate of 5,000 feet per minute during its final nosedive, banked at the last second before slamming into the South Tower. Upon striking the south side of the building, all sixty-five on board were killed instantly. The oldest passenger was eighty years old; the youngest, not yet three.

  The plane, carrying a nearly full load of 10,000 gallons of fuel, tilted its left wing down just as it hurled itself into the building. The wings sliced through seven floors of the tower at the initial crash point, the impact zone running from the 78th to the 84th floors. Upon hitting the façade, its jet fuel ignited, spreading across space, bursting into savage fires and sending out waves of broiling heat.

  The entire tower rocked with the force of the crash, shaking from its top floor down to its foundation and below, pulsing into the bedrock. The building pitched hard in one direction before its steel core bent back the other way, swaying violently from side to side. Eventually the vibrations subsided and the tower remained standing, regaining its central balance.

  The plane’s nose crashed into the 81st floor at the first point of impact, a place in the tower holding a concentration of heavy elevator machinery. The fuselage rapidly disintegrated as it plowed into the machinery’s immense bulk. Through most of the building, the three main stairwells were bunched close to one another, and close to the building’s center. Here, in the impact zone, the stairwells were spread out, closer to the edges of the tower, to make room for the hulking elevator machinery, which took up so much space on these floors.