Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (104 page)

Nearby in another car was Aydan
Kizildrgli, a student from Turkey who was just learning English. "Did you
see that?" he shouted to the next car. Traffic along the highway came
immediately to a halt as people jumped out of their cars and began putting
their cell phones to their ears. Stunned and dazed, Kizildrgli left his car on
the road and began walking aimlessly for half an hour.

Minutes later, in the Dulles
Airport tower, the words of an air traffic controller at Reagan National
Airport came over the loudspeaker. "Dulles, hold all of our inbound
traffic," said the voice. "The Pentagon's been hit." "I
remember some folks gasping," recalled O'Brien. "I think I remember a
couple of expletives." "It's just like a big pit in your stomach
because you weren't able to do anything about it to stop it," said Tom
Howell. "That's what I think hurt the most."

Twelve minutes after the crash,
the three Air National Guard F-16s from Langley finally arrived. Too late to
save the Pentagon, they were ordered to patrol the airspace over the White
House. "A person came on the radio," said National Guard Major
General Mike J. Haugen, "and identified himself as being with the Secret
Service, and he said, 'I want you to protect the White House at all costs.'
"

At the Justice Department, Ted
Olson heard on television that an explosion had taken place at the Pentagon.
Although no one identified the aircraft involved, he knew it was Flight 77
carrying his wife. "I did and I didn't want to," he recalled,
"but I knew." Late that night, when he finally got to bed around 1
A.M., Olson found a note under his pillow that Barbara had left for his
birthday. "I love you," she had written. "When you read this, I
will be thinking of you and will be back on Friday."

*    
*     *

As rescue workers began racing to
the Pentagon, it was quickly becoming clear to air traffic controllers in Cleveland
that yet another passenger jet—a fourth—was in the process of being hijacked.
This time it was United Flight 93, which had taken off at 8:42 that morning
from Newark International Airport en route to San Francisco. Shortly after
nine, following the attacks on the World Trade Center, pilot Jason Dahl had
heard a brief ping on his company computer. It was an electronic alert
notifying him of a message from United's operations center near Chicago. In
green letters on a black background came a warning to be careful of someone
trying to break into the flight deck.
Beware, cockpit intrusion,
it
said.
Confirmed,
typed one of the pilots, acknowledging the message.

At about 9:28, as the plane was
flying near downtown Cleveland, Captain Dahl radioed Cleveland Control a
cheerful greeting. "Good morning, Cleveland. United ninety-three with you
at three-five-zero [35,000 feet]. Intermittent light chop."

But back in the main cabin there
was pandemonium. Three men who had tied red bandannas around their heads were
taking over and herding the passengers to the back of the plane, near the
galley. One of those passengers, Tom Burnett, managed to pick up a phone
without being noticed. He quickly called his wife, Deena, in San Ramon,
California, where she was preparing breakfast for the couple's three young
daughters. "We're being hijacked!" he said. "They've knifed a
guy, and there's a bomb on board! Call the authorities, Deena!"

Seconds later, the Cleveland
controller heard the frightening sound of screaming in the cockpit.
"Somebody call Cleveland?" he asked. There was no answer, just the
muffled sounds of a struggle, followed by silence for about forty seconds. Then
the Cleveland controller heard more struggling followed by someone frantically
shouting, "Get out of here! Get out of here!" Finally, the microphone
once again went dead.

Unsure of what he had actually
heard, the controller called another nearby United flight to see if they might
have picked up the broadcast. "United fifteen twenty-three," he said,
"did you hear your company, did you hear some interference on the
frequency here a couple of minutes ago—screaming?" "Yes, I did,"
said a crew member of the United flight. "And we couldn't tell what it was
either." The pilot of a small executive jet had also heard the commotion.
"We did hear that yelling, too," he told the Cleveland controller.

"Any airline pilot with any
experience, and I've had quite a bit," said veteran commercial pilot John
Nance, "who sits up there strapped into a seat knows what happened here:
two of my brethren being slashed to death. In the cockpit, I think what
happened is the pilots had been subdued. I think their necks had been slashed.
And they're strapped in, they've got no way of defending themselves. You can't
turn around and fight. They're just sitting ducks."

Suddenly the microphone aboard
United Flight 93 came to life again, but this time with a foreign-sounding
voice. "Ladies and gentlemen, here it's the captain. Please sit down. Keep
remaining sitting. We have a bomb aboard." Startled, the Cleveland
controller called back. "Say again slowly," he said. But silence
returned to Flight 93.

In New York, the twin towers had
become twin infernos. Nearly ten million square feet of vertical space was
converted into burning torches.

Completed in 1974, the nearly
1,300-foot towers had become modern-day temples of wealth and commerce.
Unencumbered by interior columns or load-bearing walls, they were tubes of
metal and glass containing 200,000 tons of steel, 425,000 cubic yards of concrete,
and 600,000 square feet of glass in 43,000 windows. The wide, file cabinet and
desk-clogged floors on which the pools of jet fuel were burning were designed
to hold tremendous weights. Made of reinforced concrete pads on metal decks
supported by cross beams, each floor covered about an acre and weighed nearly
4.8 million pounds. Much of this weight was transferred to a series of exterior
columns by a complex network of beams and slabs connecting to and spanning the
distance between the columns.

But it was also made of flesh.
Like an upright city, the towers housed 55,000 workers. On a typical day the
buildings had about 90,000 visitors. The complex had its own subway station,
and in place of taxis, nearly a hundred elevators whisked people from the
seven-story entrance to the 107 floors of offices. Some people there made
millions and had endless, heart-thumping views, while others hustled, toiled,
and scraped by, never seeing much more than blank walls.

As in life, economic
stratification is also often present in death. Those in the higher, more
expensive offices stood less of a chance of surviving. With a stairwell in all
four corners, the towers were designed to be evacuated in an hour. Although
theoretically designed to sustain a hit from a Boeing 707, it is clear that the
architects never anticipated that the towers would survive an attack by
fuel-laden, wide-body jets. Those in the area of the direct hits and above were
trapped, prevented from going down by the damage to the stairwells caused by the
exploding fuselage and the fuel-filled wings. They could only go up, but that
was where the searing heat and smoke were accumulating. Below the impact zone,
the fuel not expended in the original explosion poured down on lower floors
like flaming waterfalls.

The World Trade Center had become
a place were life or death would be decided not by the laws of man but by the
laws of physics, where massive steel columns would turn to liquid and solid
blocks of reinforced concrete instantly revert to dust.

At 9:24, fire rescue received a
call from a frightened man who said that the stairway had collapsed on the
105th floor of Tower Two. It would be an omen.

About 9:30, aboard United Flight
93, Tom Burnett again picked up his phone and called his wife. At that moment
Deena was passing his message on to the FBI, but when she heard the
call-waiting click, she switched to the other line. "They're in the
cockpit now," said Burnett. Then, as the hijackers began vectoring toward
Washington, he noticed the plane shifting course. "We're turning back to
New York," he said. "No, we're heading south." Deena then
connected him to the FBI on the other line.

Others also began calling loved
ones. Back in the coach galley, flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw called her
husband, Phil, in Greensboro, North Carolina. "Have you heard?" she
said. "We've been hijacked." Passenger Jeremy Glick called his wife,
Lyz, and she told him of the hijacked planes that hit the World Trade Center.
"Is that where we're going, too?" he wondered out loud. But Lyz
doubted it. There was nothing left to destroy. Then she questioned him about
whether the hijackers were using machine guns. "No machine guns, just
knives," he said.

Todd Beamer managed to get through
to an Airfone operator at the GTE Customer Center in Oakbrook, Illinois, and he
described the tense situation. Hearing about the hijacking, the operator
switched him to her supervisor, Lisa Jefferson. "He told me that there
were three people taking over the flight," she said. "Two of them
have knives and they locked themselves in the cockpit. One had a bomb strapped
around his waist with a red belt. He [Beamer] was sitting in the back of the
plane, and he could see in the front of the plane there were two people down on
the floor. He couldn't tell whether they were dead or alive." The two were
likely the captain and first officer.

As word spread through the plane
of the World Trade Center crashes, a number of the passengers began discussing
taking matters into their own hands. One of those was Jeremy Glick, a six-foot
one-inch, 220-pound former NCAA judo champion. He told his wife that he and
several others were talking about "rushing the hijackers." Among the
passengers were a former paratrooper, a brown belt in karate, a rock climber,
and a former Scotland Yard prosecutor. One woman, a sky diver, had a note stuck
to her refrigerator at home. "Get busy living," it said, "or get
busy dying."

At about 9:45, Tom Burnett again
checked in with his wife, Deena. Now she had even worse news. Sobbing, she told
him of the plane that had crashed into the Pentagon. "My God!" he
said. Deena added, "They seem to be taking planes and driving them into
designated landmarks all over the East Coast. It's as if hell has been
unleashed." The hijackers had claimed that they had a bomb on board. But
Tom Burnett was now skeptical. "I think they're bluffing," he said.
"We're going to do something," he said. "I've got to go."

Using everything they could muster
as improvised weapons— plastic knives, broken dishes, boiling water—a number of
passengers began rushing the cockpit, where the hijackers had, apparently,
barricaded themselves in. With the angry mob on the other side of the door,
they may have realized that they had waited too long to take over the plane. As
Flight 93 began slowly making its way back toward the East Coast from
Cleveland, the passengers had had time to organize.

In the cockpit there was frantic
discussion of how to fight back. One of the hijackers suggested turning off the
oxygen—they themselves could breathe through their face masks. As the confusion
increased, the plane began to wobble and then lose altitude.

Soon after, people for miles
around could see a cloud of gray smoke rising above the trees and low-rise
buildings of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. This cloud, billowing from a fifty-foot
crater, was all that remained of United Flight 93. One hundred and ten minutes
after taking over American Airlines Flight 11, the terrorist attacks of
September 11 at last came to an end amid the red barns, white churches, and copper
pastures of rural Somerset County.

By 9:30, the situation in Tower
Two had grown even more critical and the calls to fire rescue more desperate.
At 9:36 a woman called from an elevator saying she and others were trapped
inside. Another was from a woman named Melissa. The floor was very hot, she
said. There were no available doors. She was going to die, she said, but first
wanted to call her mother. Still another call transmitted only the sound of
people crying.

The jet fuel had now been burning
for more than half an hour, reaching temperatures exceeding the 1,400 degrees
Fahrenheit needed to melt steel, the same kind of steel on which the floors
sat.

People were continuing to jump out
of windows in even greater numbers—heart-wrenching attempts to shorten their
suffering. "People still jumping off the tower," said a fire rescue
report at 9:42. "A man waving a jacket," said another, followed a few
seconds later by, "Man just jumped."

Among those who rushed to Tower
Two was Captain James Grillo, a veteran of the New York City Fire Department.
"It was terror, sheer terror,'" he said. "Bodies were falling
out of the sky. They were jumping off the 105th floor, and they were landing
all over the street and the sidewalk. I was trying to avoid looking up and watching
it. ... It was horrible. I saw dozens of people jumping."

Many of those jumping off the
105th floor worked for Aon, a worldwide insurance and risk management company.
In Gaelic, "aon" means "oneness," and at the time, more
than 170 of the company's employees were trapped together—between the fire
below and no escape above. At 9:38 Kevin Cosgrove, the company's
forty-six-year-old vice president of claims, called fire rescue once again
trying to get help. "Can't find staircase to get out!" he said.
"People need help on 105th floor!"