The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden

by Anthony Summers

  Even earlier, at 9:37, a man on the 105th floor of the South Tower had called 911 with a frantic message. As regurgitated ten minutes later by a computer, it read in part:

  STS FLOOR UNDERNEATH—COLLAPSE

  In the welter of calls pouring in, that message went unread—or misread. The 911 caller had in fact been referring to floors beneath him, and he had used the past tense. The floors beneath him, “in the 90-something,” had already collapsed.

  That word, from many mouths, and from early on.

  Collapse.

  SEVEN

  FOUR HUNDRED MILES AWAY, OVER OHIO, THREE DOZEN OTHER civilians remained in their airborne purgatory. From about 9:30, for some thirty minutes, fourteen passengers and crew members of United Flight 93 managed to telephone either loved ones or operators on the ground.

  The first to do so long enough to have a significant conversation, public relations man Mark Bingham, got through to his aunt’s home in California. “This is Mark,” he began. “I want to let you guys know that I love you, in case I don’t see you again.” Then: “I’m on United Airlines, Flight 93. It’s being hijacked.”

  Two other callers from the plane not only provided information but gleaned vital news from those they phoned—news that may have influenced their actions in the minutes that followed. Tom Burnett, chief operating officer for a medical devices firm, made a number of brief calls to his wife, Deena. Speaking quietly, he asked her to contact the authorities, and told her that a male passenger had been stabbed—later that he had died. A woman, perhaps a flight attendant, was being held at knife point, and the hijackers claimed they had a bomb.

  Jeremy Glick, a salesman for an Internet services company, also managed to phone. In a long conversation with his wife, Lyz, Glick said the hijackers had “put on these red headbands. They said they had a bomb … they looked Iranian.” The “bomb” was in a red box, he said. The couple told each other how much they loved each other. Glick said, “I don’t want to die,” and his wife assured him that he would not. She urged him to keep a picture of her and their eleven-week-old daughter in his head, to think good thoughts.

  Burnett’s wife, who had been watching the breaking news on television, told him that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. “My God,” he responded, “it’s a suicide mission.” By the time he phoned a third time, after news of the crash into the Pentagon, she told him about that, too. Burnett seems to have been seated beside Glick, and apparently relayed all this information to him.

  Were they to do nothing, the two men must have agreed, they were sure to die anyway when the hijackers crashed the plane. They resolved to fight for their lives. “A group of us,” Burnett told his wife, “are getting ready to do something.” “I’m going to take a vote,” Glick said on his call. “There’s three other guys as big as me and we’re thinking of attacking the guy with the bomb.”

  So began the minutes of brave resistance, the clearly defined act of courage that has lived on in the national memory. Glick and others were equipped in more ways than one to confront the hijackers. He was six foot one and a former college judo champion. Burnett, at six foot two, had played quarterback for his high school football team. He admired strong leaders, had busts of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Churchill in his office, liked Hemingway’s books and Kipling’s poetry. Mark Bingham was a huge man, six foot four and at thirty-one still playing rugby. A few years earlier, he had fended off a mugger who had a gun. His mother got the impression, as he talked from Flight 93, that her son was talking “confidentially” with a fellow passenger. She felt that “maybe someone had organized a plan.”

  At 9:42, a GTE-Verizon supervisor based near Chicago began handling a call from yet another powerfully built Flight 93 passenger. Todd Beamer, a star Oracle software salesman, was married with two sons, and his wife was expecting again. He first dialed his home number, but either failed to get through or thought better of it. Instead, explaining that he did not want to upset his pregnant wife, he asked phone supervisor Lisa Jefferson to pass on a loving message.

  As they talked, Beamer suddenly exclaimed, “Shit! … Oh, my God, we’re going down … Jesus help us.” From the passengers around Beamer came prolonged shrieks of terror. Then he said, “No, wait. We’re coming back up. I think we’re okay now.”

  Today we have an explanation for those moments of panic. The Flight Data Recorder shows that, as Beamer and operator Jefferson talked on, the plane had gone into a rapid descent.

  Shaken, Beamer asked Jefferson to say the Lord’s Prayer with him. “Our Father, who art in heaven …” Across the airwaves, they prayed together. Then Beamer began to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want … Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”

  Just before Beamer and the operator had begun talking, Cleveland control lost Flight 93’s transponder, the signal that indicates an airplane’s location and altitude. “We just lost the target on that aircraft,” controller John Werth exclaimed, and began struggling to find it on radar. He was in contact, too, with an executive jet still in flight in the area, which reported sighting 93. At 9:55, the recovered flight recorder shows, the hijacker pilot dialed in a navigational aid relating to the plane’s direction. He was heading, it indicated, for Washington, D.C.

  For some six minutes, a female passenger named Marion Britton had been talking to a friend on one of the seatback phones. She said she thought the plane was turning and going to crash. There were sounds of screaming again, and the plane did turn. But there was no crash, not yet.

  Jeremy Glick, still on the phone to his wife, Lyz, said, “I know I could take the guy with the bomb.” Then, joking—he had mentioned that the hijackers had knives—“I still have my butter knife from breakfast.”

  Todd Beamer, continuing his conversation with GTE supervisor Jefferson, told her that he and a few others were getting together “to jump the guy with the bomb.” Was he sure that was what he wanted to do? “Yes,” came the response. “I’m going to have to go out on faith … I don’t have much of a choice.”

  There was, it seems, more to the passengers’ plan than merely overpowering the hijackers. If the legitimate pilots were out of action, that alone would have been pointless. Beamer, however, talked as if there was someone on the plane who could act as pilot if they overpowered the hijackers. He gave Jefferson “the impression their plan would be to try to land it safely.”

  There was indeed a pilot among the passengers. Donald Greene, a senior executive of Safe Flight Instrument Corporation, was licensed to fly single-engine four-seaters or copilot a King Air twin-engine turboprop, and flew regularly. To fly and land a Boeing 757 like Flight 93, though, with its complex systems and massive power—40,200 pounds of thrust—would have been another matter. Could Greene have pulled off such a feat? The weather, a key factor for any pilot flying visually rather than on instruments, was perfect, with excellent visibility. It was possible, given time and painstaking instructions radioed from the ground, that a pilot with Greene’s experience could do it. Those hoping to overpower the hijackers well knew, after all, that they had nothing to lose.

  The plane was flying erratically again. Operator Jefferson heard the sounds of an “awful commotion”: raised voices, more screams. Then: “Are you guys ready?” and Todd Beamer’s voice saying, “Let’s roll!”—a phrase that, in family life, he liked to use to get his children moving.

  “OK,” Jeremy Glick told Lyz, “I’m going to do it.” His wife told him he was strong and brave, that she loved him. “OK,” he said again. “I’m going to put the phone down. I’m going to leave it here and I’m going to come right back to it.” Lyz handed the phone to her father, ran to the bathroom, and gagged.

  For some minutes, passenger Elizabeth Wainio, a Discovery Channel store manager, had been on the line to her mother. She had been quiet, her breathing shallow—as if she were already letting go, her mother thought. Her deceased grandmothers were waiting for h
er, Wainio said. Then: “They’re getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you. Goodbye.”

  Sandra Bradshaw, the flight attendant who had earlier phoned to alert the airline, now got through to her husband. She was in the galley, she said, boiling water for the passengers to throw on the hijackers. Then, “Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye …”

  CeeCee Lyles, Bradshaw’s fellow crew member, also got through to her husband, told him rapidly about the hijacking, that she loved him. Then, “I think they’re going to do it. Babe, they’re forcing their way into the cockpit …”

  The Cockpit Voice Recorder registered the moment the hijackers realized what was happening. At just before 9:58, a hijacker asks, “Is there something? … A fight?” There is a knock on the door, followed by sounds of fighting. Then, in Arabic, “Let’s go, guys! Allah is Greatest. Allah is Greatest. Oh guys! Allah is Greatest … Oh Allah! Oh Allah! Oh the most Gracious!” Then, loudly, “Stay back!”

  A male voice, a native-English-speaking voice that Tom Burnett’s wife has recognized as that of her husband, is heard saying, “In the cockpit. In the cockpit.”

  Followed by a voice exclaiming, in Arabic, “They want to get in there. Hold, hold from the inside … Hold.”

  Then, from several English speakers in unison, “Hold the door …” And from a single English speaker, “Stop him,” followed repeatedly by “Sit down! Sit down!” Then, again from an English speaker, “Let’s get them …”

  Flight 93, now down to five thousand feet, had begun rolling left and right. The pilot of a light aircraft, on a mapping assignment for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, saw the airliner at about this moment. “The wings started to rock,” he recalled. “The rocking stopped and started again. A violent rocking back and forth.”

  Jeremy Glick’s father-in-law, listening intently on the phone his daughter had handed him, now heard screams in the background. On the Cockpit Voice Recorder, there is the sound of combat continuing. Then, in Arabic:

  “There is nothing … Shall we finish it off?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “When they all come, we finish it off.”

  Then, from Tom Burnett: “I am injured.”

  The Flight Data Recorder indicates that the plane pitched up and down, climbed to ten thousand feet, turned. Glick’s father-in-law, phone clapped to his ear, heard more shrieks, muffled now, like those of people “riding on a roller coaster.”

  In Arabic, on the voice recorder, “Oh Allah! Oh Allah! Oh Gracious!”

  In English, “In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die!”

  In Arabic, “Up down. Up down … Up down!”

  From a distance, perhaps from Todd Beamer, “Roll it!”

  Crashing sounds, then, in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! … Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?”

  “Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.”

  “Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! Cut off the oxygen! … Up down. Up, down … Up down.”

  More violent noises, for as long as a minute, then—apparently by a native English speaker: “Shut them off! … Go! … Go! … Move! … Move! … Turn it up.”

  In Arabic, “Down, down … Pull it down! Pull it down! DOWN!”

  Apparently from an English speaker, “Down. Push, push, push, push, push … push.”

  In Arabic, “Hey! Hey! Give it to me. Give it to me … Give it to me. Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me … Give it to me.”

  Intermittent loud “air noise” on the cockpit recorder.

  Moments later, in Arabic, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”

  Sounds of further struggle, and a loud shout by a native English speaker, “No!!!”

  Two seconds later, in Arabic, in a whisper now, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!”

  Jeremy Glick’s father-in-law, still listening on the ground, heard high-pitched screams coming over the line Glick had left open when he left to join the rush to the cockpit. Then “wind sounds” followed by banging noises, as though the phone aboard the plane was repeatedly banging on a hard surface.

  After that, silence on the phone. Silence on the Cockpit Voice Recorder. Then, in less than a second, the recording ended.

  NEAR THE LITTLE TOWN of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a man working in a scrapyard had seen an airliner, flying low but seemingly trying to climb, just clear a nearby ridge. The assistant chief of Shanksville’s volunteer fire department had been talking on the phone with his sister, who said she could see a large airplane “nosediving, falling like a stone.” A witness who saw it from his porch said it made a “sort of whistling” noise.

  Half a mile away, another man saw the final plunge. It was “barely fifty feet above me,” he said, “rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed … There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke.”

  United Airlines Flight #93 Cockpit Voice Recorder Transcript

  Key:

  Bolded text = English translation from Arabic

  10:00:06 There is nothing.

  10:00:07 Is that it? Shall we finish it off?

  10:00:08 No. Not yet.

  10:00:09 When they all come, we finish it off.

  10:00:11 There is nothing.

  10:00:13 Unintelligible.

  10:00:14 Ahh.

  10:00:15 I’m injured.

  10:00:16 Unintelligible.

  10:00:21 Ahh.

  10:00:22 Oh Allah. Oh Allah. Oh Gracious.

  10:00:25 In the cockpit. If we don’t, we’ll die.

  10:00:29 Up, down. Up, down, in the cockpit.

  10:00:33 The cockpit.

  10:00:37 Up, down. Saeed, up, down.

  10:00:42 Roll it

  10:00:55 Unintelligible.

  10:00:59 Allah is the Greatest. Allah is the Greatest.

  10:01:01 Unintelligible.

  10:01:08 Is that it? I mean, shall we pull it down?

  10:01:09 Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.

  10:01:10 Unintelligible.

  10:01:11 Saeed.

  10:01:12 … engine …

  10:01:13 Unintelligible.

  10:01:16 Cut off the oxygen.

  It was 10:03. Thirty-five minutes had passed since the hijackers struck, four minutes since the passengers counterattacked.

  The grave of Flight 93 and the men and women it had carried was an open field bounded by woods on the site of a former strip mine.

  “Where’s the plane crash?” thought a state police lieutenant, one of the first to reach the scene. “All there was was a hole in the ground and a smoking debris pile.” The crater was on fire, and the plane itself had seemingly vanished. On first inspection, there seemed to be few items on the surface more than a couple of feet long. The voice recorder, recovered days later, would be found buried twelve feet under the ground. There were no bodies, it appeared, only shreds of clothing hanging from the trees. For a while, a white cloud of “sparkly, shiny stuff like confetti” floated in the sky.

  Three hundred miles away in the little town of Cranbury, New Jersey, Todd Beamer’s wife, Lisa, saw the first pictures of the crash site on television and knew her husband was dead.

  In Windham, New York, someone told Jeremy Glick’s wife, Lyz, that there might be survivors. Then her father returned from the garden, where—at the request of the FBI—he had kept open the line on which Jeremy had called. He had waited, waited, for an hour and a half. Now, as he came back in, Lyz saw that her father was weeping.

  Hundreds of miles apart, the two wives, now widows, sank to their knees in grief. Sudden, unforeseeable grief was invading homes across the country, across the world.

  EIGHT

  AT THE TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK, UNSEEN BY THE CAMERAS, A lone fire chief was grappling with the possibility for wh
ich no one had planned. John Peruggia, of Medical Services, was at the mayor’s Office of Emergency Management—in normal times, the city’s crisis headquarters.

  By an irony of history, though, the office was located in the Trade Center’s Building 7. That was too close to the North Tower, and Building 7 had been evacuated within an hour of the initial strike. Peruggia was one of a handful of officials who remained. He was still there, standing in front of the building and giving instructions to a group of firefighters, when an engineer—he thought from the Building Department—made a stunning prediction.

  Structural damage to the towers, the official told him, was “quite significant … the building’s stability was compromised … the North Tower was in danger of a near imminent collapse.”

  This was a warning Peruggia knew he had to pass urgently to the very top, to chief of department Ganci, now at his command post opposite the North Tower. With the usual command and control system out of action, the only way to get word to him was the old-fashioned way—by runner. Peruggia’s aide that day, EMT Richard Zarrillo, set off on a hazardous five-hundred-yard journey.

  AROUND THAT TIME, Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath, on the final lap of their escape from the South Tower, reached the concourse at plaza level. “We stared, awestruck,” Clark remembered. “What we looked at was, normally, a flowing fountain, vendors with their wagons … tourists … a beautiful ‘people place.’ Yet this area, several acres, was dead … a moonscape … it looked like it had been deserted for a hundred years.”

  No one was running or obviously panicking. Clark and his companion were told to proceed “down to the Victoria’s Secret shop, turn right, and exit by the Sam Goody store.” Then a policeman urged them to get moving and not look up. They ran a block or so, and turned to look back. “You know,” Praimnath said, “I think those buildings could go down.”