Up, down. Saeed, up, down
.
10:00:42
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? 1 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
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 which 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.”
“No way,” Clark replied. “Those are steel structures.”
HIGH IN THE TOWER the two men had just escaped, an Aon Insurance vice president named Kevin Cosgrove was on the phone to a 911 operator.
C
OSGROVE
: Lady, there’s two of us in this office … 105. Two Tower. We’re not ready to die, but it’s getting bad … Smoke really bad …
F
IRE
D
EPARTMENT OPERATOR
(joining the call): We’re getting there. We’re getting there.
C
OSGROVE:
Doesn’t feel like it, man. I got young kids … I can barely breathe now. I can’t see … We’re young men. We’re not ready to die.
911 OPERATOR:
Okay, just try to hang in there.
On the same floor, Cosgrove’s colleague Sean Rooney was still on the line to his wife, Beverly. Neither of them now hoped for rescue. “I think,” Beverly said, “that we need to say goodbye.”
• • •
FAR BELOW, on the ground near the towers, EMT Zarrillo completed his dangerous run to get to Chief Ganci and began blurting out the warning from Chief Peruggia. “Listen … the message I was given was that the buildings are going to collapse. We need to get our people out.”
“Who the fuck,” Ganci had time to say, “told you that?”
At that moment, Zarrillo would recall, there was “this thunderous, rolling roar.”
