Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

The woman in the hijackers’ hands did not keep quiet or sit down. A minute into the series of orders to the captive, a terrorist’s voice is heard to intone in Arabic the Basmala: “In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.” This is an invocation used frequently by observant Muslims, often before embarking on some action.

Next on the recording, the man exclaims: “Finish, no more. NO MORE!” and “Stop, stop, stop, STOP!” Repeatedly: “No! No, no, no, NO!” Time and time again, frantically: “Lie down! … DOWN! … Down, down, down … Come on, sit down, sit!”

For two minutes of this, the captive has not spoken. Now, however, a female American voice is heard for the first time. She begs, “Please, please, please …” Then, again ordered to get down, she pleads, “Please, please, don’t hurt me … Oh, God!”

According to Deborah Welsh’s husband, the attendant had spoken of Muslim terrorists with scorn, thought them cowards. If the captive in the cockpit was Welsh, perhaps she now tried an acid response. After another minute of being told to stay down, the female voice on the recording asks, “Are you talking to me?” Her reward, within moments, is violence.

Barely has the hijacker started in again on his mantra of “Down, down!” than the woman is heard pleading, “I don’t want to die.” She says it three times, her cries accompanied by words—or sounds—that are blanked out in the transcript as released. Then, the transcript notes, there is the “sound of a snap … a struggle that lasted for few seconds.” Moments later, a voice in Arabic says, “Everything is fine. I finished.” The woman’s voice is not heard again.

Two minutes after the silencing of the attendant, the terrorist pilot tried again to make an announcement to the passengers. He asked that passengers remain seated, adding this time: “We are going back to the airport … we have our demands. So, please remain quiet.”

About a minute later, at 9:40, a surviving flight attendant on board got through to Starfix, United’s maintenance facility in California. This was Sandra Bradshaw, probably seated toward the rear of the plane in Coach. Those who handled the call thought she sounded “shockingly calm” as she told of hijackers, armed with knives, on the flight deck and in the cabin. Bradshaw said that a fellow flight attendant had been “attacked” and—as relayed to United Airlines Operations by a Starfix operator—that “knives were being held to the crew’s throats.”

It may be that Captain Dahl and copilot Homer were not killed at once. Well into the hijack, the voice recorder transcript shows that a “native English-speaking male” in the cockpit says—or perhaps groans—“Oh, man! …” A few minutes later a hijacker is heard saying in Arabic, “… talk to the pilot. Bring the pilot back.”

A flight attendant—perhaps CeeCee Lyles, who also worked in Coach—at one point passed word that the hijackers had “taken the pilot and the copilot out” of the cockpit. They were “lying on the floor bleeding” in First Class. It was not clear whether the pilots were dead or alive.

Did the hijackers try to get the pilots, already wounded, to help with the controls? Did they then move them to the forward passenger area and leave them lying there? There is no way to know.

FAR BELOW, ALL WAS CHAOS. At the very moment that the attendant in 93’s cockpit had fallen ominously silent—all unknown to those wrestling with the crisis on the ground—Flight 77 had slammed into the Pentagon. On his first day of duty in the post, FAA national operations manager Ben Sliney and his senior colleagues had no way of knowing what new calamity might be imminent.

A Delta flight on its way from Boston to Las Vegas missed a radio call, triggering suspicion. Was this another hijack? Boston had been the point of departure for two of the planes already attacked. Then word reached the FAA Command Center that Flight 93 might have a bomb on board.

At 9:25, Sliney had ordered a nationwide “ground stop,” prohibiting any further takeoffs by civilian aircraft. At 9:42, when the Command Center learned of the crash into the Pentagon, FAA officials together decided to issue a command unprecedented in U.S. aviation history. Sliney reportedly boomed, “Order everyone to land! … Regardless of destination. Let’s get them on the ground.”

There were at that moment some 4,540 commercial and civilian planes in the air or under American control. For the more than two hours that followed, controllers and pilots would work to empty the sky of aircraft. It was the one drastic action that might avert fresh disaster.

By 12:16, the FAA was able to inform government agencies that all commercial flights had landed or been diverted away from U.S. airspace.

BACK IN WASHINGTON, Clarke’s videoconference had finally gotten under way at about 9:37. Extraordinarily, though, it would be an hour before the Defense Department fielded anyone involved in handling the situation. Secretary Rumsfeld himself was out of touch, as noted, having headed outside to view the carnage at the Pentagon.

Absent anyone with a real grasp of what was going on—let alone expertise in how to deal with it—the first matter discussed in the videoconference had been not the crisis itself but the safety of the President and Vice President. In case they were killed or incapacitated, contingency plans were in place for those next in line to the presidency to be taken to a secret underground shelter outside Washington. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Senator Robert Byrd, president pro tempore of the Senate, third and fourth in line, would soon be rushed to the shelter.

All over the capital, people were now pouring out of office buildings. Thousands rushed to get out of the downtown area. The Secret Service ordered an evacuation of nonessential personnel from the White House, and departure—already under way—became headlong flight. Agents yelled at women to take off their high heels and run, and the sidewalks were soon littered with shoes.

Rumor took hold. “CNN says car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mall near the Capitol,” read a note passed to Clarke. There was no fire on the Mall. Vietnam veteran Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary representing the Department of State on the videoconference, had a blunt response when asked about the “car bomb.” “Does it fucking look,” he asked, looming large on the monitor, “as if I’ve been bombed?”

TO THE NORTH, in New York City, humor survived in the midst of suffering. A firefighter in the North Tower—on the way up—noticed a fellow coming down toting an odd piece of salvage, a golf club. “Hey!” exclaimed the fireman, “I saw your ball a few flights down.” There were bizarre sights, too. Officers moving from floor to floor found a few people still hard at work at their computers—blind to the peril.

As in Washington, rumors flew. “There’s another plane in the air,” a senior fireman hollered into his radio. “Everybody stay put … We don’t know what’s going on.” A police sergeant told a firefighter, “They hit the White House. And we have another inbound coming at us now.” “Yeah,” a radio dispatcher confirmed, “another one inbound. Watch your back.”

There was no third hijacked airplane heading to New York. Some in the North Tower, meanwhile, were still unaware that even one airplane had hit the building. “What happened?” enquired Keith Meerholz, who had escaped with minor burns. “A plane hit each tower,” a fireman confided, “but don’t tell anyone.” He did not want evacuation to become panic.

For those still alive on the higher floors of the tower, the grim ordeal continued. They were stranded, unable to go down—because of blocked stairways and jammed elevators—or up, with the faint prospect of rescue by helicopter, because of the locked doors.