The 9/11 Machine

by Greg Enslen

  Atta climbed down the steps of the plane, pulling his jacket tighter around him. An airport security guard at the bottom of the stairs glanced at the faces of the passengers as they disembarked. The guard took a long look at Atta and then waved him on to the terminal.

  Atta hurried to catch up with the others.

  2.24

  Black Friday

  Tina was looking out the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

  The city was spread out below her like a play mat—the river to one side and the buildings and cars in a grid below, looking like tiny toys. She could see planes and helicopters buzzing across the sky. Smoke poured from the top of the other glittery metal tower, the one next door that looked just like the building she was in.

  “Mommy, are those people OK?” she said, pointing, but her mom didn’t answer. Sometimes, when Tina asked questions, her mom didn’t answer right away. “There’s more smoke now,” turning to see her mother, who was talking with Mrs. Clausen. They were whispering, their voices low. She knew that grown-ups sometimes whispered, when they didn’t want kids to hear what they were talking about.

  Her mom and Mrs. Clausen both turned to Tina.

  “Sure, honey,” her mom answered. “They’re working on evacuating those folks right now—it’s a big fire, so they’ll make sure everyone leaves.”

  Tina nodded, looking back at the smoke. She could see fire coming out of the sides of the building, between the thin metal pieces. She remembered that the buildings looked exactly the same.

  “What about us?” Tina asked. “Should we leave?”

  “We’re not sure,” her mom said. “We’re waiting to find out.”

  Tina turned and got out her Powerpuff Girls backpack. She loved her backpack, carried it with her everywhere. On the floor by the windows, there were a bunch of brown boxes full of books and papers. Tina’s mother had said that Mrs. Clausen had just gotten a job here in the Trade Center and was still moving in. Tina wondered what grown-ups used to decorate their offices—her dad’s office at the university was pretty boring, all books and papers and nothing at to play with.

  Behind her, she heard her mom and Mrs. Clausen talking.

  “Anyway, it sounds pretty nice,” her mother said to Mrs. Clausen, who was gathering up her purse. “And they’re giving you a 401(k), too, which is nothing to sneeze at.”

  “And I’m getting lots of vacation time, too,” Mrs. Clausen answered. She stepped to the window out into the hallway and looked at the other employees. “Much better than at Basics—there you had to work three years to get any vacation.”

  Tina was sitting on the floor by the windows, playing. In the distance, she saw another plane, a big one.

  Her mother spoke up again. “Elaine, should we leave? I’d feel better if we left, with the fire next door.”

  Tina heard Mrs. Clausen start to speak, and then a loud voice came over some speakers in the hallway outside Mrs. Clausen’s office.

  “Please excuse this interruption, but the North Tower is being evacuated due to a fire on the top floors. As a precaution, the South Tower is also being evacuated at this time. Please proceed to the nearest stairway and begin an orderly descent to the ground floors, where emergency personnel will direct you away from the buildings.”

  Out the window, Tina watched as the plane starts to bank, headed toward the building.

  “Sorry about the rotten luck,” Mrs. Clausen said to both of them. “It’s the first day I’ve had visitors and then there’s a fire next door. I guess—”

  Outside, the plane banks and approaches silently.

  Tina pointed.

  “Mommy. See that plane? It’s getting bigger.”

  “Pick up your things, Tina,” her mother said, turning to look. “we’re leaving—”

  Sarah turned to see that the plane was flying right at them. Tina turned to her mother, seeing a look of shock and horror on her mom’s face.

  A moment later, the plane smashed into the windows. There was nothing but fire and pain and destruction.

  Ellis sat up.

  He had been sleeping. He was splayed on the same black couch in his office. His heart was racing.

  The nightmares were coming more often, now that 9/11 had come and gone. Ellis was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  He stood, wavering, and walked to the break room for a cup of coffee. He was exhausted. Too many late nights, too many days out on the riverbank, staring at the Twin Towers…

  Ellis had ended up spending the last few months holed up in the warehouse. But he had been out a few times, including a few trips downtown. He’d gotten up the courage to visit the Trade Center and had even enjoyed a quick lunch at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the South Tower.

  “Enjoyed” probably wasn’t the best word choice—he’d felt like a visitor from another planet, nervously glancing at the greeters and wait staff. They had no idea that they were supposed to be dead—they were all living on borrowed time, time that he had given them.

  They had no idea that they should all be dead.

  The staff didn’t know that the space taken up by the restaurant should have been just another empty space in the sky, a cube of windy nothingness, high above an open pit filled with twisted steel and pulverized human remains.

  It was strange, not seeing Ground Zero. There was no massive, fenced-off pit, where they were trying to reconstruct lower Manhattan’s subway system. There were no chain link fences, covered with posters and hand-written memorials to all the people that had died. He was used to seeing the open pit in the ground and chain-link fences and hearing the scrape of metal on metal as volunteers removed massive chunks of steel, all the while hopelessly looking for survivors. Futilely searching the rubble for a body, any kind of physical object, to give a family comfort.

  In July, he’d traveled by train—he would never fly in a plane again—to Washington, D.C., to visit the Capitol building and the Pentagon. One of his bogus sets of identification was as a defense contractor who worked for MacMillan Architecture, an actual firm in Los Angeles, so he’d been able to get a VIP tour of the Pentagon.

  He’d walked the halls of the massive building with his young military escort, who had pointed out the 1940s-era construction techniques as if they were something to be proud of. It was all that Ellis could do to stop himself from pointing out that, without reinforced concrete and explosion-proof windows, the building was a sitting duck. Planes landing at National Airport (here in this timeline it was still called National and would not be renamed Reagan National Airport until 2005) banked right over the Pentagon. It had been just a matter of good fortune that a plane hadn’t already accidentally crashed into the building. And with the 60-year-old building techniques and construction materials, if there ever were a crash, half of the place would burn. And the building’s bold and unique shape made it even more identifiable from the air.

  Ellis didn’t have the heart to tell the escort that thousands would die because of the substandard sprinkler system. The boy had proudly told him that after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the War Department, the predecessor to the Department of Defense, had managed to build the massive structure in less than seven months. Ellis did not burst the kid’s bubble—putting up the building so fast had been possible, because they’d slapped it together. Over the past 60 years, no one had ever gotten around to updating it—even though it represented the center of the United States’ military power.

  In another reality, half of it had gone up in flames.

  Ellis glanced down at the papers he’d been looking at when he’d dozed off. It was Black Friday—he’d given everyone yesterday off for Thanksgiving, but now that the machine was almost done, he’d wanted people to work as much as they could before the Christmas break, when he was closing the warehouse for a week. Today, Ellis was reviewing an ongoing thorn in the side of the project—he and the other Ellis were working on tracking down The Washington Post reporter who had caused all the trouble, leaking the o
riginal story and then following it up with actual pieces of the real 9/11 evidence he had brought back from the future. She was a dogged reporter and had pieced things together with remarkable speed.

  The White House had pulled together a report on her, and Ellis had been looking through it. The woman’s picture showed her to be small and thin, with dark hair. The report used the word “tenacious” six times—evidently, she’d made her name in investigative journalism in Florida and Ohio. Now, it looked like she was digging into this story. If so, it would only be a matter of time before she figured out enough to expose their operations. He would need to talk to the younger Ellis soon—

  Terry burst into the room.

  “Mr. Raines!”

  Ellis sat up.

  “A plane—a plane crashed into the World Trade Center! It’s all over the news!” Terry shouted, his face white.

  Ellis felt his entire body drain of blood—it was like a shadow had passed over the sun. This world would never be the same. The downward spiral—

  “No.” Ellis said as he flipped on the TV.

  The screen filled with the image of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, smoke streaming from a jagged whole near the top. He remembered—it was so familiar—but different somehow. The plane had hit lower on the North Tower.

  “...and then smoke started coming out of the building,” he heard the announcer say on the TV. Terry sat heavily on the couch next to him.

  “Oh, Christ,” Ellis said heavily, the tears coming instantly. “Not again.”

  He felt Terry turn and look at him, but he ignored it, looking at the screen. The building punctured by a jagged hole, broken girders like metal teeth in the opening...

  Several other interns and technicians ran into the room. One of the young women was crying.

  “They said it might be an accident,” she said hopefully.

  “It was no accident,” Ellis said. “The Pentagon plane is coming soon and then the other tower.”

  Several people in the room looked at him strangely, but he had nothing to say. Stevens and several of the guards came into the room and watched the broadcast.

  “What do you mean, a ‘Pentagon plane?’” Terry asked. “And what you said earlier—you said ‘not again.’”

  Dr. Ellis started to answer, but on the TV, the announcer was interrupted by another reporter.

  “Ted?” the other reporter broke in. “Ted, we’re getting word of another plane crash.”

  “Here it comes,” Ellis said, shaking his head. “Another plane has hit the Pentagon in D.C.” All the work getting in with the Bush administration, all the warnings—it had all been for nothing. It was all happening, all over again. Technically, it was happening again, for the first time.

  Terry looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  “Let’s go to Kentucky,” the reporter said.

  Ellis stood suddenly, his brow furrowed. “Kentucky?”

  On the screen, the scene switched to a massive stone building that looked like a maximum security prison, solidly built with multiple rows of tall fences surrounding it. Flames and smoke poured from the building, and plane debris was scattered about. On a pristine lawn nearby, an airplane engine smoldered. The news report was showing a helicopter shot of the burning building, and a massive column of smoke rose from a crater in the roof of the building.

  Ellis was confused.

  “What is that? Is that a prison?”

  The others shushed him as the news report switched to a reporter on the ground near the building, burning in the background. He shouted to be heard over the wailing sirens.

  “A large jet, possibly a 747, crashed minutes ago directly into the Federal Reserve building here at Fort Knox, Kentucky. At least 130 people were onboard the plane—it was evidently hijacked this morning from St. Louis. Treasury officials are not commenting yet on the nation’s second-largest stockpile of gold and other valuables, which were stored in the National Gold Bullion Repository, more famously known as Fort Knox. We’re being told that the repository holds about 148 million ounces of gold, so at $275 an ounce, the gold inside the burning building is worth somewhere north of $40 billion.”

  “This isn’t right,” Ellis said. “This didn’t happen. Why would they be attacking Fort Knox?”

  “Who?” Terry asked. “Who’s attacking?”

  “Al Qaeda. Agents of Osama bin Laden,” Ellis snapped at him. “They’ve hijacked planes and are crashing them into structures.”

  Everyone in the room was listening to him.

  “So,” Terry said, “you’re saying this is a terrorist attack?”

  Ellis nodded, and the young woman burst into tears and ran from the room.

  On the TV, the reporter resumed speaking.

  “As you can see, the building was surrounded by large open areas and fencing to protect it from being robbed, but nothing could stop the massive airliner from crashing into the building. Officials say—”

  The anchorman came back on, cutting him off.

  “Brian, let me stop you. We’re getting conflicting reports here in the newsroom that the plane crashes at the World Trade Center and Fort Knox may be deliberate acts, a coordinated terrorist attack, where unknown persons are using commercial planes as suicide weapons. We have just learned there are several planes unaccounted for in U.S. airspace. The FAA has announced that they are closing down all airspace over the United States, ordering every plane to land immediately.”

  Terry nodded. “Good. They need to get those planes down.”

  “It won’t matter,” Ellis said. “The hijackers are already in control of the planes by now—nothing can stop them—”

  “We’re getting another report of two more attacks, this time in D.C.,” the reporter cut in again.

  Ellis wanted to look away, but he couldn’t.

  The screen switched to a smoking Capitol building, the remnants of a large plane resting on the front steps of the huge building. Portions of the Capitol appeared to be on fire, and people streamed from the building, rubble everywhere. In the distance, the Pentagon was on fire.

  “Oh my God,” Terry said quietly. The others gasped, seeing the destruction. Several of them began to cry, hugging each other. Trish stood behind the couch, her face a mask of grief.

  “It’s… it’s all the same,” Ellis said, the color drained from his face. “No, it’s worse this time, somehow.”

  A reporter began speaking on the TV, her face and hair streaked with black. Smoke billowed behind her. “Witnesses say that about ten minutes ago, two planes approached the D.C. area from the west. One plane turned and flew in low over the National Mall, barely missing the Washington Monument before crashing to the ground in front of the Capitol building. It is impossible to estimate the number of casualties—”

  “This can’t be happening,” Ellis said, and then suddenly remembered.

  He bolted from the room, racing to the front of the warehouse, searching for the crates. Terry, Trish, and Stevens ran after him, and after he explained, they helped him find what he was looking for. Moments later he was running again, the object in his hand. Ellis ran, bursting out through the loading dock doors that faced the river and ran down to the edge of the water.

  The North Tower of the World Trade Center was on fire.

  “No!” Ellis screamed at the site of the building afire. So much effort, so much work, lost. Wasted. The others raced up behind him. Ellis knelt by the edge of the water, unpacking the device.

  “Mr. Blaine,” Stevens shouted. “It’s connected? The World Trade Center—”

  “Will be destroyed,” Ellis said. “The North Tower is on fire—it will collapse in less than an hour.”

  “Collapse?” Terry asked incredulously. “How could it collapse—?”

  “The jet fuel,” Ellis said. “The plane was out of Boston and heading cross-country with over 10,000 pounds of fuel on board. A full tank. It ignited, and right now it’s burning through the floor supports, weakening the metal c
onnections. The supports that attach the floors to the metal curtains will bend and give way, and the building will pancake all the way to the ground, each floor crushing the one below it. Everyone inside will die.”

  He set the bulky bag down on the grass and began unwrapping it.

  “I’ve only made it worse,” Ellis said, hurrying. “Somehow. I guess I gave them more time to plan, more time to get things in order and make this version of history somehow even worse.”

  Stevens bent to help Ellis take the items out of the bag—the pieces of a small, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. Ellis unwrapped the tube-like launcher, pulling off the plastic coating and uncapping both ends of the device, then held it out so Stevens could snap on the aiming apparatus on top. Trish and Terry unrolled three smaller tubes, these with pointed tips on one end and short, aerodynamic fins on the other. They waited until Ellis was ready, then loaded the barrel with a projectile.

  Helicopters buzzed around the North Tower—Ellis knew that some of them would try to rescue people from the roof, but the terrible heat and wind would make it impossible for the helicopters to hover for more than a few seconds in place.

  “It should come in from the southwest,” Ellis said, pointing the surface-to-air missile into the air and watching the sky. “Help me watch for it!”

  “Watch for what?” Terry shouted.

  “The other plane! There’s another plane, one that will hit the South Tower. It should come in from the southwest!”

  A huge fireball erupted over the skyline.

  Ellis turned—the South Tower had been hit. Fire and debris rained down on the streets below. Behind him, Terry screamed. Stevens stared at the fireball and the debris, falling on the buildings below the tower. Trish stood silent, her eyes wide, her hands at her mouth.

  Ellis shook his head and started screaming at the fires and the burning buildings.

  “No! Oh, Christ! Different flight path—they came in from the west, not the southwest! Why? Probably a different plane altogether,” he yelled, looking at the burning buildings. “Maybe from a different airport.” Ellis sank to his knees, dropping the shoulder launcher. “It… it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore.”