Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  JoAnne told Lyz: “Make him . . . make him brave.”

  She repeated the phrase, almost like a benediction: “Make him brave.”

  Soon the 9-1-1 tape picked up the sound of Lyz’s voice, speaking to JoAnne: “Some guys are rallying together, and they want all the men to go and attack these . . .” Lyz said Jeremy wanted to know if she thought that was a good idea. She said she didn’t know. Lyz asked him if the hijackers had guns. Jeremy said no, then he tried to ease Lyz’s fears. In a joking tone, he told her that he and four other men were “going to get butter knives.”

  JoAnne told the dispatcher about a possible counterattack, then added: “And Jeremy doesn’t know whether it’s a good idea.” The dispatcher changed the subject. He asked JoAnne to spell her name and to have Lyz ask Jeremy what he could see out the window, land or water, and whether the plane was circling or banking to turn.

  Jeremy grew serious. He told Lyz that he and the other men had voted, and they’d reached a decision. Aware of the potential consequences, Jeremy asked for Lyz’s reassurance. JoAnne’s message about how Lyz could help Jeremy took root just when he needed it most.

  Lyz told Jeremy: “I think you need to do it. You’re strong, you’re brave. I love you.”

  Jeremy told Lyz he loved her, too. “You’ve got to promise me you’re going to be happy,” he said. Jeremy asked Lyz not to hang up the phone.

  Tom Burnett reached his wife, Deena, again. He told her the passenger who’d been knifed had died. The victim likely was import consultant Mickey Rothenberg, who’d been seated among the hijackers and was the only first-class passenger who didn’t try to make a phone call. When the plane took off, hijacker Ahmed al-Haznawi sat directly behind Mickey. On American Flight 11, virtually the same seating arrangement had placed terrorist Satam al-Suqami behind the tech wizard and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin.

  Tom knew about the Pentagon. He asked Deena, a former flight attendant, if she thought the hijackers had been able to smuggle a bomb onto the plane or whether they were bluffing. She didn’t answer. Tom said he doubted they had a bomb. Only knives.

  At 9:43 a.m., software salesman Todd Beamer tried to call his wife, but it didn’t go through. He dialed 0 on an Airfone in Row 32 and reached an operator. Todd explained the situation and asked her to get a message to his wife that he loved her. The operator grew upset and called over her supervisor, who coincidentally had the same first name as Todd’s wife: Lisa.

  “I’ll finish the call,”40 supervisor Lisa Jefferson told the operator. She and Todd established an immediate rapport. Todd told Lisa that two people were on the floor of the first-class cabin, injured or dead. Lisa overheard a flight attendant tell Todd they were the captain and first officer. Todd asked Lisa if she knew what the hijackers wanted. Lisa answered that she didn’t.

  Todd described a hijacker with a red belt and what looked like a bomb strapped to his waist. He said two hijackers with knives had entered the cockpit and closed the door behind them. As the call continued, the plane dived sharply.

  “Oh my God, we’re going down!”41 Todd yelled. “We’re going down. Jesus help us.” Lisa heard a man in the background cry, “Oh my God, Jesus! Oh my God!” A woman screamed. Todd yelled again: “Oh, no! No! God, no!”

  The plane leveled off and Todd regained his composure: “Wait, we’re coming back up.” He asked Lisa if she would say the Lord’s Prayer with him. From a call center outside Chicago and from a hijacked plane over Pennsylvania, Lisa and Todd prayed together: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.” They wouldn’t be the last to recite those words this day.

  “Jesus, help me,” Todd said. “I just wanted to talk to someone, and if I don’t make it through this, will you do me a favor? Would you tell my wife and family how much I love them?” Lisa promised she would.

  She offered to connect Todd with his wife, but he declined. Todd explained why he hadn’t already asked for that. “I don’t want to upset her unnecessarily,” he said. “She’s expecting our third child in January, and if I don’t have to upset her with any bad news, then I’d rather not.”

  Tom Burnett reached his wife, Deena, again, this time with a momentous decision: “A group of us are getting ready to do something,” he told her.

  Tom said he might not be able to call back.

  Some passengers tried calls that didn’t connect, while others reached answering machines. Advertising executive Lauren Grandcolas, pregnant with her first child, chose words she thought would comfort her husband, Jack. In a soothing tone, she told him in a voice message: “Okay, well, I just wanted to tell you that I love you. We’re having a little problem42 on the plane. . . . I’m comfortable and I’m okay for now. I’ll, I . . . just a little problem. I love you. Please tell my family I love them, too. ’Bye, honey.”

  Attorney Linda Gronlund left a message for her sister, Elsa Strong. “Apparently, they, uh, [have] flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already, and it looks like they’re going to take this one down as well.” Her voice choked with emotion. Linda fought tears as she told her sister that she’d miss her. She sent her love to their parents and gave Elsa the combination to a safe containing her important papers. With a deep sigh, Linda said, “Mostly I just love you43 and I wanted to tell you that. I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not.”

  Flight attendant CeeCee Lyles tried using an Airfone to resume her never-ending conversation with her police officer husband, Lorne. Roused from sleep after his overnight shift, Lorne saw unavailable on the caller ID, so he rolled over and didn’t answer. CeeCee left a message: “Hi, baby.44 I’m . . . Baby, you have to listen to me carefully. I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked. I’m on the plane. I’m calling from the plane. I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much, and I’m so sorry, babe. I don’t know what to say. There’s three guys. They have hijacked the plane. I’m trying to be calm. We’re turned around, and I have heard that there’s planes that have been—been flown into the World Trade Center.” Her voice, steady until then, began to crack. “I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you. Goodbye.”

  Census worker Marion Britton reached an old friend, Fred Fiumano. He tried to comfort her by saying the hijackers would probably land in another country.45 Struggling to hold her emotions in check, Marion said she didn’t buy it. She told Fred she knew about the World Trade Center, and she predicted that her plane would crash, too. Marion’s census coworker Waleska Martinez called a friend’s Manhattan office, but the call didn’t go through.

  Marion shared the Airfone with Discovery Channel Stores’ district manager Honor Elizabeth Wainio, whose friends called her Lizz and who looked younger than her twenty-seven years, with big hazel eyes and brown hair framing her fair, lovely face. She reached her stepmother, Esther Heymann, at her home outside Baltimore: “Hello, Mom,”46 Elizabeth said. “We’re being hijacked. I’m calling to say goodbye.” Through her shock, Esther suggested that they find a way to be together in the moment. “Let’s just be in the present,”47 Esther said. “We don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Let’s look out at the beautiful blue sky and take a few deep breaths.”

  Their call continued for four and a half minutes. Esther told her: “Elizabeth, I’ve got my arms around you,48 and I’m holding you, and I love you.” Elizabeth said she could feel Esther’s embrace, and she loved her, too. Like several others, Elizabeth focused not on herself but on the pain she anticipated among the people she feared she’d be leaving behind: “It just makes me so sad knowing how much harder this is going to be on you than it is for me.”49 They remained silent for a while, then Elizabeth said, “I shoul
d be talking. I’m sitting here being quiet, I’m not even talking.” Esther reassured her: “We don’t have to talk, we’re together.” After another pause, Elizabeth seemed at peace. She told Esther she knew that her late grandmothers were waiting for her.

  Joseph DeLuca called his father to say he loved him and goodbye.

  Flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw told her husband, Phil,50 a US Airways pilot, that she saw three hijackers put red bandannas on their heads as the attack began. He told her what happened in New York. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “We’re over a river,” Sandy said.

  “Which way are you headed?” Phil asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Phil thought a moment and asked, “Well, where’s the sun?”

  “It’s in front of us,” Sandy said.

  “All right,” Phil said. “You’re headed east.”

  She told him that passengers were getting hot water from the galley as they prepared to take action. She asked him for any suggestions for fighting hijackers, but Phil’s mind went blank. But he did have an idea if they regained control: Phil told Sandy to call him back when they seized the cockpit from the terrorists. He knew how to fly a 757, and he’d talk someone through it. They expressed their love for each other. Sandy told him to raise their kids right.

  Andrew “Sonny” Garcia, the former air traffic controller, connected with his wife for only one second before the call dropped. He spoke her name: “Dorothy.”

  The plane descended to an altitude low enough for computer engineer Ed Felt to use his cellphone to dial 9-1-1 from inside a locked lavatory. Felt’s call connected to an operator in the Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, emergency dispatch center. “Hijacking in progress,” Felt said, his voice shaking.51 He provided the flight number, the aircraft type, and its original itinerary, from Newark to San Francisco.

  CeeCee Lyles couldn’t stop trying to reach Lorne. With the plane flying low, she caught a cellphone signal. This time Lorne saw CeeCee’s number on the caller ID and picked up, still in bed, half-asleep after his overnight shift.

  “Babe, I need for you to listen to me,” CeeCee said. “My plane has been hijacked.”52

  “Stop playing,” Lorne said.

  “I’m not playing.”

  In the background, he heard people yelling.53 He thought he must be having a nightmare, but CeeCee’s voice made it all too real.

  She told him the plane had turned around and that she didn’t know what would happen. CeeCee told Lorne she hoped she’d see his smiling face again. She asked him to tell her sons that she loved them. “I love you, I love you, Babe,” she said. “Take care of the kids.”

  Lorne heard an edge of panic in her voice. They prayed together.

  But CeeCee wasn’t giving up. Before the call ended, she told Lorne, “We’ve got a plan.”54

  Chapter 10

  “Let’s Roll”

  United Airlines Flight 93

  While Flight 93’s passengers and crew members strategized and made phone calls, drawing insight and inspiration from their connections on the ground, in the cockpit Ziad Jarrah worked to control the big plane as he pushed it lower and lower, flying eastward.

  As the descent continued, the mystery deepened as to whether Captain Jason Dahl or First Officer LeRoy Homer Jr. might have survived the initial attack. During an exchange in Arabic at 9:45 a.m., one hijacker, likely Saeed al-Ghamdi, badgered Jarrah about whether to open the cockpit door to the other two hijackers: “How about we let them in?1 We let the guys in, now. . . . Should we let the guys in?”

  “Inform them,” Jarrah answered, “and tell him to talk to the pilot.2 Bring the pilot back.”

  The hijackers said nothing more about a pilot, and the native English-speaking man who’d moaned “Oh, man!” in the cockpit several minutes earlier wasn’t heard from again. Jarrah wouldn’t be getting any expert help; he was on his own at the controls.

  Although no one at the FAA had informed the U.S. military about the hijacking of United Flight 93, at 9:45 a.m., controllers at the FAA’s Cleveland Center warned officials at the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport that their radar showed that an unresponsive plane would soon pass nearby or directly overhead.

  Inside the airport’s air traffic facility, FAA watch supervisor Mahlon Fuller had just heard about the crash into the Pentagon. A controller called him to a radar scope. Within two sweeps of the radar, Fuller knew two things: the unresponsive plane was moving very fast, and it was headed right for them. Fuller grabbed the intercom at his desk and announced: “Evacuate the facility.3 There’s a 757, thirty miles northwest of the airport, with a suspected bomb on board.”

  At roughly the same time, not as a direct result of Flight 93, but in response to rumors of more attacks, lawmakers, staffers, and visitors evacuated the White House and, for the first time in history, the U.S. Capitol, where Congress was in session. A Capitol police officer ran through the marble halls shooing people outside and shouting: “There’s a plane coming.4 Get out!” Women ran out of their shoes to escape the threat. Sirens wailed as some members of Congress clustered under trees. Heavily armed security officers rushed high-ranking U.S. Senate and House leaders to a Cold War–era bunker,5 where a set of federal lawbooks waited in case they needed to legislate from underground during the emergency. Bags of potato chips awaited them, too, for nourishment.

  As news spread, a wave of evacuations swept from New York to Washington to cities across the country as workers and visitors ran from federal buildings, state capitols, and many of the nation’s iconic landmarks, including the Washington Monument, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Space Needle in Seattle, the John Hancock Tower in Boston, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, and many more.

  Around 9:46 a.m., apparently worried that they were losing altitude too quickly, Jarrah jerked the plane’s nose6 upward, then put Flight 93 into another dive. The herky-jerky roller-coaster effect coincided with Todd Beamer’s shout, “Oh my God, we’re going down!” Muffled screams from the cabin were heard inside the cockpit.

  Jarrah sought divine intervention to compensate for his anemic flying skills. Although he’d impressed7 the owner of a Florida flight school where he’d trained as someone with the potential to become an airline pilot, Jarrah completed only one hundred hours8 of flight training, and he didn’t have either a commercial pilot certificate or an instructor’s endorsement to fly multiengine planes. He was in over his head. The voice recorder microphone at the pilot’s seat picked up whispers in Arabic of the Shahada, an expression of faith that is one of the Five Pillars of Islam: “In the name of Allah. In the name of Allah, I bear witness that there is no other God but Allah.”

  The plane’s descent continued, but at a slower rate.

  Air traffic controller John Werth tried to reach the cockpit by radio. A half dozen times he asked some version of the same question: “United Ninety-Three, do you hear Cleveland Center?”9 Still NORDO.

  Also, at 9:46 a.m., the FAA’s operations center in Virginia updated officials at FAA headquarters that United Flight 93 had turned around and was headed toward Washington. Based on its estimated speed and projected flight path, the hijacked plane, being flown by a terrorist who claimed to have a bomb, would reach the nation’s capital in twenty-nine minutes. Three minutes later, as Flight 93 drew closer, an official at the FAA’s Virginia operations center spoke again with FAA headquarters.

  “Ah, do we want to think about, ah, scrambling aircraft?”10 he asked.

  The answer was vague and noncommittal.

  “Ah,” the FAA headquarters official said. Then he sighed. “Oh God, I don’t know.”

  The FAA operations center official tried to emphasize the urgency. “Uh, that’s a decision someone is gonna have to make probably in the next ten minutes.”

  The headquarters official shrugged. “Uh, you know, everybody just left the room.”

  Inside the upstate New York headquarters of the Northeast A
ir Defense Sector, minutes crept past. Major Kevin Nasypany and his team remained wholly unaware11 of the hijacking of United Flight 93. As Jarrah flew toward Washington, D.C., and as passengers and crew members called the airline, 9-1-1, and their families and friends for advice and comfort, Nasypany focused on trying to redirect the F-16s from Langley to where he wanted them: over the nation’s capital.

  Officers and technicians at NEADS also kept watch on the Las Vegas–bound plane from Delta Airlines, Flight 1989, that controllers in the FAA’s Boston Center feared might be another hijacking. Those worries continued despite key facts to the contrary: the pilots never stopped responding to ground controllers, never turned off their transponder, and never deviated from their flight path. But after three hijacked planes had already crashed into terrorist targets, NEADS couldn’t take any chances.

  They spotted the Delta plane on radar at 9:41 a.m. NEADS Senior Airman Stacia Rountree called out: “Delta [19]89, that’s the hijack.12 They think it’s possible hijack.”

  Master Sergeant Mo Dooley: “Fuck!”

  Rountree: “South of Cleveland. We have a code on him now.”

  Dooley: “Good. Pick it up! Find it!”

  All the NEADS-controlled fighter jets were already engaged, so Nasypany and his team sought help from military bases in the Midwest. NEADS staffers contacted the Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan, which diverted two unarmed fighters13 on training missions to intercept Delta Flight 1989. Calls to other bases produced offers of more fighters14 from Toledo, Ohio; Sioux City, Iowa; and Fargo, North Dakota.

  A half hour earlier, before American Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, Nasypany had mused aloud about what he’d tell fighter pilots if they engaged a hijacked commercial airplane that terrorists intended to use as a guided missile: “[I]f we have to take anybody out . . . we use AIM-9s in the face.” 15 Since then, he’d already replaced one young NEADS technician who’d hesitated when Nasypany asked if he’d be capable of relaying a shootdown order.16 Now, he wanted clearly defined answers from his superiors, specific orders known as rules of engagement, on whether they were still operating under the old policy of “ID, type, and tail,” which called on military fighter pilots to only identify, intercept, and escort a hijacked plane.