The Red Bandanna

by Tom Rinaldi

  As a result, Stairway A, the stairwell in the northwest corner of the tower, farthest from where the plane entered the building, withstood the devastating effects of the crash. It remained intact. These stairs were the sole path down. For most in the impact zone and above, those who survived the obliterating violence of the crash, the stairs could reset the boundary.

  They were the way out—if anyone could find them.

  • • •

  Mark Fitzgibbon, John Kline, and Karen Fishman were already well on their way down that stairwell. After the first plane hit the North Tower, each made the decision to leave quickly. Fitzgibbon hesitated for a moment, but saw Fishman in the hallway, and she urged him to go. She also told him not to take the elevator. She remembered people being stuck inside the cars for hours, having to be discovered and freed during the 1993 attack. In the blast, a truck bomb detonated in a garage beneath the complex, killing six and injuring more than a thousand.

  If Stephen Joseph, Jace Day, and Andy Cott shared Fishman’s misgivings about the elevators, they ignored them. Joseph, a Harvard graduate and Vietnam veteran, heard the echo of his military training: in a crisis, get to a position of safety first. Only there can you best evaluate the threat and be in position to react and respond. Less than ten minutes after Flight 11 struck the North Tower, Joseph and his colleagues stepped into an elevator outside Sandler’s offices and went directly down to the sky lobby on the 78th floor.

  Stepping off, they looked to transfer to a different bank of cars heading the rest of the way down to the ground floor. The first car was full. They moved to another car, which quickly filled up as they stepped inside, and went directly down to the tower’s lobby.

  More than sixty floors above, Fishman and Fitzgibbon were continuing to make their descent through Stairway A. The stairwell was growing more crowded, but the atmosphere wasn’t edgy or panicked. Fishman also saw a smaller group of civilians, office workers who were climbing back up. They had reversed course from their descent. Likely, some had heard the Port Authority’s announcement at 8:55 A.M. instructing tenants to remain in the building:

  “Your attention, please, ladies and gentlemen. Building 2 is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building 2. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may use the reentry doors and the elevators to return to your office. Repeat. Building 2 is secure.”

  On the 68th floor, Fishman saw a fire marshal echoing the message, telling people in the stairwell it was safe to go back upstairs. The incident was confined to the other tower. She paused for a moment, then disregarded the instruction, walking past him and continuing downward.

  Just a few floors farther down on her trip, a few moments later, Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower. Sixteen minutes had passed since the first plane struck the North Tower. Mark Fitzgibbon, also in the stairwell, was immediately thrown from his feet, his body crashing into a wall, as the building shook from side to side. He could sense the entire structure around him rocking back and forth, and briefly wondered if the tower could stand. Eventually, he found his way back to his feet and, along with the others around him, regained his bearings and began moving down the flights as fast as he could, with urgency now, taking the steps three and four at a time.

  John Kline was also moving as quickly as he could, now sensing with a terrible clarity that the buildings were under attack. Even as he gained ground, moving closer to the ground-floor lobby with each step, the stairwells were growing more crowded, the pace slowing, the line backing up, and people pressing into one another. His prime thought was that he wouldn’t make it. He would never get out, never reach home. He would die in the tower. He thought of his wife and his children, of what they would do without him.

  Soon, he, Joseph, and Fishman would reach the lobby, and despite the debris raining down from the skies outside and those who were leaping to their deaths from the fires of the North Tower, they would push forward to safety. They didn’t know it, but they were no longer just part of Sandler’s eighty-three, the number of people who were in the office that day; they’d joined a very different group, the seventeen who survived.

  • • •

  After dialing his father’s office line there was no obvious note of panic in his voice as he left a message with a secretary to assure him he was all right. Jeff would certainly check in upon hearing about the plane crash, and he’d have the message waiting.

  Next, he called his mother on her cell phone. For some reason, Alison never heard the call. It went straight to voice mail. Welles left a short message.

  “Mom . . . this is Welles. I . . . I want you to know that I’m okay.”

  The time was 9:12 A.M. They were the last words his family would ever hear him speak.

  • • •

  There, a curtain falls. Behind it dwell uncertainty and mystery. Beyond the last calls taken, the last messages left, the last words heard, there is a gulley, where hope and belief mix in the shadows. There, it’s guesswork. The unknown pushes and taunts, driving investigation, but only so far, until it reaches the curtain. Past it, there is ether and theory, not the truth of fact. So much lies past knowing.

  When Flight 175 tore its way through the floors beneath him, when the tower reeled back and forth, testing the limits of its steel skeleton and the principles of its design, what went through his mind then? The instant the jet made impact with the south face of the building, did he allow himself to think that it was too late? Was he already looking backward, regretting his decision not to leave when the others left?

  Why didn’t he go? Perhaps those around him, the ones who endured the 1993 attack, advised against it. Many felt the best course then had been to stay put, to continue working. It was those who left sooner who endured a harder, longer slog down the stairs. There were also those who went up to the roof only to freeze in the February air, and then be forced to make their way back down the stairs anyway.

  Why didn’t he go? It could’ve been the undefeated faith of the young, the wrap of impregnability that comes from being vital, strong, ascendant. He knew about danger, not from some action movie or drama series. He’d lived it with Empire, answering the calls and donning the gear. He wasn’t made or trained to run away from peril but to go toward it.

  Why didn’t he go? There is the simplest reason. Because he didn’t know, because there was no way to understand, that moments away, a 767 jet was bearing down on the piece of sky where he and thousands of others stood at the beginning of their day.

  Why didn’t he go? Later, he did. He left the office on the 104th floor, heading down. The path appeared clear. He was in Stairway A.

  • • •

  Soon after hearing the boom from the first plane striking the North Tower, Ling Young felt heat penetrating the department offices on the 86th floor of the South Tower. She didn’t know what happened, but feeling the heat was trigger enough. She and others around her made the decision to leave.

  The small group got in an elevator on 86, heading down to the sky lobby on the 78th floor, for the transfer to the express elevators to the lobby. The elevators were enormous, the size of a room, with enough space to fit fifty-five people. The cars were designed to cover the 78 floors down to street level, 844 vertical feet, in less than a minute. Crowded with people just arriving for the day’s work, there were perhaps a hundred or more in the area ready to switch to local elevators for the upper floors, and others, like Young, looking to go back down.

  There were no cars open for the trip down. Young’s group waited among the larger crowd, and began to talk. Like everyone in the lobby, they were stalled there, suspended between going up and coming down. Some of her colleagues were trying to figure out the cause of the explosion in the North Tower. No one knew for sure. One suggested going back up to 86, to see if they might call the governor’s office for more information. They also heard the announcement over the building’s PA system telling people to return to thei
r offices, as the incident was confined to the other tower. Young was firm. The burning smell was growing a bit stronger, faintly like burned rubber, or at least that was the sense she had. She was going down.

  A car appeared, its doors opening. As she and the others stepped toward it, the wing of Flight 175 burst through the wall. The lobby exploded.

  • • •

  Whatever the dimensions of hell, Young landed inside them. The impact had thrown her from one end of the elevator lobby to the other. Uncertain if she’d ever lost consciousness, she lay on the floor nearly smothered in dust and debris for what felt like minutes before trying to lift herself up. Fires burned a small distance away, in the middle of the lobby, and flames were shooting out from the elevator shafts. There was black smoke choking the air, and piles of what looked like shattered plaster scattered everywhere. The walls and ceiling of the lobby vaporized, huge banks of windows shattered, the entire space disintegrating at the moment the plane entered, its force an obliteration. She wondered if she’d been blinded, only to realize her glasses were covered in blood, like much of the rest of her. She reached down to her shirt, using the fabric to wipe them off. When she put her glasses back on, the sight overwhelmed her.

  She was surrounded by scores of the dead and dying. Next to her was a man whose facial features had been shorn off his skull. A few feet away, she saw a woman whose legs had been severed. Bodies filled the remnants of the floor, stacked atop and beneath the shattered walls. There were limbs and torsos torn apart by the jet’s impact, others charred beyond recognition by the explosion of the jet fuel. Moments earlier, she had been waiting to board the open elevator, hearing conversations course and echo through the lobby. Now so many of those lives were silenced, motionless. The massacre was beyond understanding. Nearly everywhere she looked was death. She gazed down at her body. Her own injuries and severe burns didn’t register; there was no pain, the hurt smothered by shock.

  She continued to sit where she was, on a portion of the floor still intact, uncertain what to do. If she moved, she worried the entire floor would collapse beneath her. She heard sounds, signs of life, and understood she wasn’t alone. There were others around her in her immediate group, colleagues from her office, all badly injured, but some still alive. No one moved. They were either limited by their injuries or trapped in fear.

  She didn’t know her body was suffering excruciating burns, the skin on one of her arms bubbling and falling away, likely from the jet fuel’s exploding spray. The pain had yet to process. She knew only that she and a few others around her were somehow still among the living. What should they do next? How could they survive? Where to escape?

  There was no way for her to know then that only a dozen people from the hundred or more in that sky lobby would make it off the floor alive.

  Young sat for what she believed was ten minutes, perhaps longer, paralyzed by fear. Then she heard a voice calling out, clear and strong. Instantly she turned toward the sound. “I found the stairs,” the voice said. “Follow me. Only help the ones that you can help. And follow me.”

  For the first time, Young stood up. There was something she heard in the man’s voice, an authority, compelling her to follow. She moved toward one of her colleagues from the 86th floor who had traveled down in the group, Dianne Gladstone. Gladstone was injured and unsure she could walk. Young reached down to help as Gladstone tried to put her arms around Young. Pain burst through Young’s body for the first time, leading her to realize she was badly burned. She couldn’t help Gladstone up from the floor.

  Young continued toward where the man had called from and, for the first time, saw him.

  “It was a young man,” she recalled a decade later. “Not very husky. Very short hair.” She remembered he was wearing a white T-shirt and appeared to be uninjured. She thought she saw him with a red bandanna.

  She paused, nodding, as if seeing the man before her right then. “That image has stuck with me,” she said. “Almost on a daily basis, that image has stuck with me.

  “A bunch of us just picked ourselves up and followed him right to the stairs.”

  Young couldn’t tell how many were with her as she entered the stairwell. The smoke and dust on the floor persisted. She moved forward slowly, struggling to walk, holding her arms out in front to steady herself. Still in deep shock, the pain was there but dull, not approaching the full rage she would feel later. As she walked, she noticed a man behind her whom she described as tall and thin. She didn’t know who he was. The man who steered her toward the stairwell was also with the group, walking behind her, urging her to move forward and not to stop.

  They continued down the flights of stairs until the air began gradually to clear, the smoke dissipating. At one point, Young turned to see the young man behind her, the one who led her to the stairs, and for the first time she noticed he wasn’t alone. He was carrying someone over his shoulder as he walked down.

  “It was a very light-skinned black woman,” Young recalled. “She was tall. He was holding her across his back.” Young didn’t know who the woman was, only that the man had apparently been carrying her the entire way down since leaving the 78th floor.

  They reached what Young believed was the 61st floor, and then the man stopped. He lifted the woman from his shoulder and carefully put her down on the stairs. She sat down immediately. Young looked at the man. She remembered thinking that he had a baby face.

  The man asked Young to take the fire extinguisher he’d been carrying. It looked heavy, impossible, but she lifted it. He urged her and the woman sitting on the stair to continue downward. Then he reversed course.

  “I’m going back up,” he said.

  Young understood at once what he meant. He was going back up, seventeen flights, to the 78th floor. He was going back to the sky lobby. The man turned and, without saying another word, left her behind.

  • • •

  Going back up.

  What went through his mind on the seventeen-flight climb? Every crushing breath of the ascent, each landing and turn, every foot gained and every step taken? What passed inside him each second with time disintegrating as the smoke thickened and the heat rose, as the steel melted and the jet fuel leaked? His lungs could have been failing, his strength fading.

  He went back up, stepping into the fire and death, pushing through smoke and blood, bound for the sky lobby.

  Why?

  Maybe because he understood that if he went down, and left now, and looked away, they would be with him forever. Any of them, all of them, one of them. They were up there. He might make it down, he might rush out, he might gain the light. He might live.

  But would they?

  • • •

  Ling Young exhorted the woman beside her to get up and keep going down. To move even a single step at a time. The woman said she couldn’t. Young left her, carrying the fire extinguisher the man had given her for a short distance, uncertain where she found the strength, before setting it down. She walked carefully, her pace slowing, until she encountered an FDNY fire marshal, Jim Devery.

  Devery and fellow marshal Ron Bucca had rushed to the scene from their headquarters in Lower Manhattan after the first plane hit. Pulling up to the Trade Center, they saw the second plane fly into the face of the South Tower. They shed all thought as instinct took over. Rushing directly into the tower’s lobby as the fire and smoke began to spread far above, they began making their way up the stairs. A former Green Beret and a veteran marathon runner, he was in better shape than Devery, gaining ground faster as the two climbed. Forty-six years old, Bucca would never return. People on their way down, frantic to get out, passed the two men as they ascended. Somewhere between the 40th and 50th floors, Devery saw the stairwell empty. No other civilians were coming down.

  Near the 51st floor, more than 550 feet into the climb, he saw Ling Young on the stairs near the landing. She wasn’t moving.

&
nbsp; “She had her arms out. Her eyes were nearly closed, she was bleeding,” Devery said. “I couldn’t leave her there.”

  He reached out and picked up Young, carrying her as best he could down the next ten flights. Devery couldn’t remember her saying anything as they climbed down. When they reached the 40th floor, exhausted, a fireman opened a door to the stairwell, asking if they needed an elevator. They left the stairs and followed the fireman into a service elevator that was still working. Seconds later, they were on the ground floor.

  Devery wanted to get Young to triage, or to an ambulance, to get her medical care as soon as he could. But as he walked toward the West Street side of the building, he saw the horrible remnants of those who had leaped from the North Tower’s upper floors, desperately fleeing the fire and smoke. He saw a leg still inside its red high-heeled shoe, a severed head, body parts strewn across the plaza. He took Young out a different direction, toward Vesey Street, and eventually placed her in an ambulance.

  Judy Wein, the executive from Aon Corporation who saw the fireball from her window, had left her office on the 103rd floor almost immediately afterward. She too was in the sky lobby when it exploded. She was thrown through space across the floor before landing hard, her arm crushed, three ribs broken, and one of her lungs punctured.

  Wein somehow made her way out, and was placed inside an ambulance with a Chinese woman. The woman was caked in dirt, bloody, and badly burned. She was clearly in shock. Wein didn’t know her name. She’d never seen her before. It was Ling Young.

  The ambulance carrying them pulled away. Moments later, the two women heard a fearsome roar. They turned to look out the back window.

  The South Tower was falling.

  • • •

  Jeff was in the house alone, looking at the television.

  After his brother called to tell him a plane hit the North Tower, he ran to the screen and turned it on. He fought to calm himself, to slow his heart, knowing Welles was in the South Tower. He was in a different building, separate from the images being broadcast. He was safe. He had to be. If anyone would understand how to react, it was Welles.