A Pretext for War (2 page)

Then another troubling message. “Okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.” And finally, at a second before 8:34, came one more. “Nobody move, please,” said the voice. “We are going back to the airport. Don’t try to make any stupid moves.”

Six minutes later, at 8:40, the military liaison at Boston’s FAA notified NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector Operations Center at Rome, New York. “We have a hijacked aircraft and I need you to get some sort of fighters out here to help us out,” he told Dawne Deskins. The transponder on Flight 11 was no longer working, he said. Also, the Los Angeles–bound plane had suddenly made an unexpected left turn toward New York City. And then there were the frightening transmissions. Get “some F-16s or something” airborne, he pleaded. Deskins asked for Flight 11’s latest position, but when the operator looked for it, it had disappeared. “American 11 heavy, Boston Center. Your transponder appears to be inoperative. Please recycle,” said one of the controllers, repeating it several times. “American 11 heavy, how do you read Boston Center? Over.”

As the plane was crossing from Massachusetts into New York, Atta turned off the plane’s transponder, the device that transmits the plane’s identification, speed, altitude, and location to the FAA’s radar systems. Without the transponder information, Boston could still track it on its primary radar using faint “skin paint” returns, but for the technicians in Rome, like Jeremy Powell, finding the dot in the maze of moving and blinking images on his screen would be very difficult. At that moment, there were approximately 2,500 planes in the air over the Northeast alone. “We were going by the old-fashioned method of ‘what was his last known speed, his last known heading, his altitude?’” said Powell. “And we were trying to kind of map it out on the scope.”

“We’ll direct the intercept,” said the Boston liaison officer. “Just get something up there.” Deskins rushed up a short flight of stairs to the weapons desk in the “Battle Cab,” a glassed-in balcony that overhung the Ops Room like a corporate suite at a football stadium. Her commanding officer, Air Force Colonel Robert Marr, was in the room working on the drill. “I have FAA on the phone, the shout line, Boston Center. They said they have a hijacked aircraft,” she told him. “He says it’s going to New York.” Suddenly, she wondered why a large jet would be commandeered to go such a short distance.

As American Flight 11 continued tearing toward New York City, two courageous flight attendants, huddling out of sight, managed to telephone fellow colleagues with key details of what was taking place. “Listen, and listen to me very carefully. I’m on Flight 11. The airplane has been hijacked,” said Amy Sweeney, a thirteen-year veteran of the airline. She was talking to American Airlines ground manager Michael Woodward at Boston’s Logan Airport. Nearby, another flight attendant, Betty Ong, who had been with the airline a year longer than Sweeney, was also able to call an airline official on the ground. She reached Vanessa Minter, an agent at the airline’s reservation center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

For twenty-five minutes, both flight attendants were able to communicate over crew telephones in the coach section of the plane. They relayed key details of the hijacking in real time, including the bloody way in which the men took over the cockpit. From the seat numbers Sweeney was able to pass on, airline officials were able to pull up such vital details as the hijackers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and credit-card information—including that of Mohamed Atta. She said they were all males and appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent. While calm, Sweeney and Ong were also very concerned. “Pray for us,” Ong said repeatedly. “Pray for us.”

Up in the Battle Cab, Colonel Marr called the man in charge of NORAD for the continental United States, Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. Thin, with short brown hair, Arnold was a command pilot with more than 4,000 hours flying nine different aircraft, including the F-16 and F-15. As he was walking out of a teleconference, someone came up and told him Rome was on the phone. “Boss, I need to scramble Otis,” Marr said, referring to Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod. Normally, the Secretary of Defense is the one who must give the approval to intercept a hijacked plane, but Arnold decided to make the decision on the spot. “Go ahead and scramble them, and we’ll get the authorities later,” he said.

As with most of the East Coast that Tuesday morning, the sky over Cape Cod was cloud-free and royal blue. Tucked away in the seaside resort community of Falmouth, Massachusetts, Otis Air National Guard Base was home of the 102nd Fighter Wing. Out on the tarmac, two F-15s sat “cocked and loaded” with weapons and extra gas on board. The two pilots on alert that morning, Maj. Daniel Nash and Lt. Col. Timothy Duffy, were in the control room scanning the charts and schedules that lined the walls, when the traffic control tower at Otis told them of a possible hijacking of an American Airlines flight out of Boston.

Although no scramble alarm had yet been received, the two quickly put on their flight suits and began walking to the waiting fighters. Duffy was a part-time Guardsman who just happened to be on duty that day. The thirty-five-year-old Nash, a beefy pilot with neatly trimmed brown hair, had joined the 102nd about a year and a half earlier. He had been on a number of alerts, but they usually turned out to be false alarms, such as an unknown aircraft approaching the coast that turned out to be a military plane. But he had a different feeling about this one.

On board Flight 11, it was obvious that the plane’s movements were becoming more erratic; the aircraft was descending rapidly, almost in a dive, as it neared New York City. Nevertheless, the passengers, perhaps out of fear, remained relatively calm, with no hysteria or screaming. Over the crew phone, Woodward asked flight attendant Sweeney to see if she could spot anything familiar. “I see the water. I see the buildings. I see buildings,” she said, adding that the plane was flying very low.

In Manhattan, forty-eight-year-old Steve McIntyre left his Upper West Side home a good half hour earlier than usual and was just arriving at the World Trade Center. The Director of Regulatory Affairs for the American Bureau of Shipping, his office was on the ninety-first floor of Tower One. For nearly a quarter of a century, since graduating from the University of Michigan’s Naval Architecture School, he had worked for the company, which sets standards for maritime safety.

By 8:46
A.M.
on September 11, between five and seven thousand other people were at work in each of the two towers. Few tourists had arrived, and the observation deck wasn’t scheduled to open until 9:30.

From McIntyre’s north-facing office, the entire city was laid out below him. Silver towers and glass walls radiated in the sun, and flat, tar-covered rooftops with stubby chimneys stretched to the arched horizon. The glare was so great that he had to close the blinds before sitting down at his computer to begin plowing through his e-mail. Suddenly, he heard what he thought was the roar of jet engines followed by a shadow crossing the blinds.

Another employee of the American Bureau of Shipping, George Sleigh, a British-born naval architect, was talking on the phone when he, too, heard the roar of jet engines. He glanced out his window and a thought instantly crossed his mind:
The wheels are up, the underbelly is white, and man, that guy is low.

Nearby in the office, Claire McIntyre, no relation to Steve McIntyre, was checking her e-mail when she heard the same sound—the blast of a jet engine.
Impossible,
she thought. Then, to her horror, she looked up to see the wing and tail of a colossal plane coming right at her at nearly the speed of sound.
Oh my God, all my people,
she thought. Screaming, she bolted from her office and raced into the hall to alert the rest of the staff. “Everyone, get out now,” McIntyre yelled at the top of her voice. At the same moment, Steve McIntyre also realized it was a plane but had no idea of its size.
Oh, shit,
he thought to himself.
Someone’s lost control of a private Learjet.

Nearly one hundred floors below, French filmmakers Jules and Gedeon Naudet were shooting scenes for their documentary about a typical day in the life of a rookie New York fireman. As they were zooming in on men closing a sewer grate, they heard the sound of a low-flying plane. Curious, they pointed the camera almost straight up as American Flight 11 streaked across the lens headed directly for the building.

At Boston’s Logan Airport, ground manager Michael Woodward was still holding the telephone to his ear, listening to flight attendant Amy Sweeney describe the approaching buildings before she took a very slow, deep breath. “Oh, my God!” she said quietly, calmly. And then there was just very, very loud static.

For a fraction of a second, the event seemed almost graceful. At 8:46:26, the building simply swallowed up the plane. But in the blink of an eye, when the jet’s tanks containing 10,000 gallons of fuel suddenly compressed like crushed Coke cans, a massive fireball exploded with a force equal to 480,000 pounds of TNT. So powerful was the explosion that it registered a .09 on the Richter scale, used to measure earthquakes.

Flight 11 entered between floors 93 and 98, just two floors above the heads of Steve McIntyre, Claire McIntyre, and George Sleigh, shaking and oscillating the entire building as if an earthquake had struck. In the American Bureau of Shipping, an interior wall and ceiling crumbled. One employee, encased in debris, had to be extricated from his cubicle. People began grabbing fire extinguishers while another person had the presence of mind to soak a fat roll of paper towels. Sleigh crawled out from the rubble while Steve McIntyre left to check the fire exits.

The three had no idea how lucky they were. The concrete slab above their heads would become the dividing line between survival and tragedy—a ceiling of life for those below it, a floor of death for those on top of it. None of the 1,344 people then struggling on the floors above them would make it out alive.

Seconds after the blast, the cockpit crew aboard U.S. Airways Flight 583 heard Flight 11’s eerie final gasp. “I just picked up an ELT on 121.5,” the pilot told New York air traffic control, referring to an emergency locator transmitter and its frequency. “It was brief, but it went off.” The sound probably came from the black box aboard the doomed American flight in the second before it vaporized. “We picked up that ELT, too,” reported a pilot on Delta Airlines Flight 2433. “But it’s very faint.”

Slowly, it was beginning to dawn on New York Control just what had taken place. “Anybody know what that smoke is in lower Manhattan?” asked another pilot flying over the area. “A lot of smoke in lower Manhattan coming out of the top of the World Trade Center—a major fire.”

At the Rome Ops Center, somebody ran into the room and said they had just heard about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, Boston Center was called with the news that the plane was American Flight 11. Dawne Deskins picked up the telephone and called Maj. Don Arias, the public affairs officer for NORAD. “We think the aircraft that just hit the World Trade Center was American Airlines Flight 11,” she said. In response, Arias gasped. “Oh, God. My brother works in the World Trade Center,” he said.

Arias, a former New York City firefighter, called his brother immediately. What his brother related was bedlam in hell. “He says, ‘You’re not gonna believe what I’m looking at here.’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘People are at the windows.’ He says, ‘There’s a guy falling out of the building next door.’ He says, ‘There are people jumping.’ And I said, ‘You know, I—I think, I just got a call from the Northeast Air Defense Sector. There’s a hijacked plane. I think that’s the plane.’”

At about the same moment that Flight 11 slammed into Tower One, a Klaxon at Otis Air National Guard Base let out a series of deafening blasts and red lights began flashing in the corner of the alert barns, sending a flock of seagulls flapping into the air. “This is an official military scramble,” said the public address system. “Alert pilots report to your battle stations.” Already halfway to their jets, Nash and Duffy began racing as crew chiefs quickly pulled protective covers from the two vintage F-15 Eagles, built in 1977. Chocks were yanked from beneath the wheels and the heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles were armed. At 8:52
A.M.,
a red light turned green and the F-15s screamed down the tarmac.

Ten minutes earlier, at 8:42
A.M.
, concern had deepened when a flight controller at Boston Center suddenly became concerned about another plane, United Airlines Flight 175. Like American Flight 11, it was a Boeing 767 destined for Los Angeles. “Looks like he’s heading southbound, but there’s no transponder, no nothing, and no one’s talking to him,” he told his supervisor. A minute later, Deskins at the Rome command center received the new alert on the “shout line” from Boston Center.

Sitting in the pilot’s seat was Victor Saracini, a fifty-one-year-old Navy veteran from Pennsylvania who often took his guitar along with him on flights. Saracini had also heard the troubling messages from Flight 11 and notified New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma, New York. “We heard a suspicious transmission on our departure from Boston,” said Saracini. “Sounds like someone keyed the mike and said everyone stay in your seats.” What Saracini did not know was that he had his own set of hijackers on board.

By the time Duffy and Nash were airborne, they were already too late for Flight 11. Nevertheless, the fighter pilots still had a chance of catching up to United Flight 175. But distance and time were critical factors. Cape Cod was nearly two hundred miles from downtown Manhattan. Duffy pushed his throttle to Mach 1.2, nearly 900 miles per hour. Going at such a supersonic speed was normally something for which they needed permission. Nash called Duffy on the radio. “Duff, you’re super,” he said. “Yeah, I know,” said Duffy. “You know, don’t worry about it.” Duffy then called for a location of the target. “Your contact’s over Kennedy,” came the response. “Okay, I know where that is,” said Duffy and they turned toward New York’s Long Island. At that moment, they were 153 miles from the World Trade Center.