Salem arrived about two in the afternoon that Sunday with at least four or five of his traveling party. Ian Munro, his patrician British business partner, was one of them. His half-brother Tareq was also along. They ate a big breakfast. Hinson drove Salem to his house so he could wash and use the bathroom. Salem wandered into Hinson’s garage and saw a Yamaha 1500cc motorcycle. He begged to ride back on the bike. Hinson climbed on and motioned Salem to get on behind him.
“No, I want to be on the front,” Salem said, as Hinson remembered it.
“You will kill me!…Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I used to own motorcycles—I had Harleys, I know how to ride a motorcycle…I will not show off or do anything.”11
He kept his word, at least until Hinson climbed off at Kitty Hawk, after which Salem promptly roared around pulling wheelies out in the field. Finally he set the motorcycle down, found a dune buggy with big rubber tires, and raced around in that. All the while, one of the Alamo-Arrow fliers was buzzing overhead in a new single-seater model, called a Sprint, which had just a few hours of flying time on it.
The Sprint came in for a landing and Salem decided to take a turn. A light rain had cleared, and the day had turned bright and sunny, with good visibility. The wind was blowing at about twenty to twenty-five miles per hour, brisk but not fierce. Salem emptied his pockets of coins, keys, and cigarettes, and climbed in.
He was wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeve, blue-and-white striped shirt. He had a pair of sunglasses tied around his neck on a chain, but no helmet or visor. Salem’s eyes tended to tear up badly in the wind; according to his friend Thomas Dietrich, he sometimes skied accidentally into trees because the tears would blur his eyesight. He used the sunglasses to protect his eyes, but they were not as effective as a visor. Somebody asked Salem if he wanted a helmet, but he said no; at that time, helmets were not required.12
He powered down the runway, tilted back, and climbed to about fifty feet. Then he leveled off and turned toward the power lines. The standard flight path at Kitty Hawk, particularly for new or inexperienced fliers, lay in the opposite direction—a westward turn, and eventually, a loop back around for a landing. It was not unusual for a veteran flier to turn southwest, however, and Salem had done this before, according to Hinson; the alternate path simply required a little more care because you had to climb quickly to an adequate height.
Salem’s friends watched him from the snack bar and the picnic tables. One person had climbed onto the cantina roof, from where he tracked Salem’s flight with a handheld video camera. The ultralight’s engine whined steadily. There were no signs of mechanical distress—no waggling of the wings, no audible change of power, no yaw or struggle to hold altitude. Salem flew straight and level—directly into the power lines.13
There was no sound, no pop or crackle, no shower or spark of electricity. The entangled aircraft tilted forward, nose down, as if in slow motion, and then it plummeted to the ground.
Amid stunned shouts and gasps, somebody called 911. It was a few minutes before 3:00 P.M. Earl Mayfield jumped in a golf cart and raced toward the tree line. Hinson and others ran behind him.
When they found Salem, he was strapped into his seat, facing down toward the ground. His eyes were open. Blood trickled from his ears. The engine had struck his head from behind. Both his legs were visibly broken.
They pulled him free, cradling his head. They laid him on the ground and tried to perform CPR while they waited for the ambulance from the Schertz Area Facility for Emergency Services. It arrived in about fifteen minutes. Two paramedics administered oxygen and continued to perform CPR. They loaded Salem into the cabin and drove away, lights flashing and sirens wailing. One of the paramedics scribbled notes: “Unable to find a good airway…No change on monitor.” The note taker checked boxes on the ambulance run report, indicating the subject’s condition: “Convulsing…nonreactive…critical.”14
The nearest trauma center was at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, the command headquarters of the Fifth U.S. Army. It was less than fifteen minutes’ drive away.
It was there, about an hour later, that American military doctors formally pronounced Salem Bin Laden dead.
THE GLOBAL FAMILY
24. WRITER-DIRECTOR-PRODUCER
THE NEWS ARRIVED in Saudi Arabia in the nighttime. King Fahd called Bakr to offer his formal condolences. Some of Salem’s friends and relatives had forecasted his death in an airplane crash, but as Mohamed Ashmawi put it, few of them imagined that he would die in a “Mickey Mouse plane.” The Bin Ladens, a second person close to them observed, had a way of experiencing such events with particular acuteness, as if they were succumbing to a collective illness. They felt Salem’s death as an overwhelming “family tragedy,” recalled Abdullah, one of his youngest half-brothers. There was also a pervasive confusion about how such an accident could have happened. Was suicide a possibility? Had he suffered an incapacitating heart attack or stroke while airborne? Had someone drugged or killed him? Conspiracy theories were commonplace in Saudi Arabia, where free discourse was forbidden and history was a narrative punctuated by genuine hidden conspiracies. Even if one presumed an accidental cause, Salem’s death marked the second time in two decades that the Bin Laden family had been decapitated by an aviation disaster with an American connection.1
After telephone calls between Texas, Jeddah, Riyadh, and the Saudi embassy in Washington, Khalid Bin Mahfouz dispatched his private 707 to San Antonio to retrieve his friend’s body. The Bexar County Medical Examiner had taken possession of Salem’s corpse after his death; the office was required to perform an autopsy in a case of this type. Tareq and other family members pleaded with their San Antonio friends to call in local favors to minimize the autopsy’s visible effects. Once Salem’s body was returned to Saudi Arabia, it would be washed, in Islamic tradition, in the presence of Bin Laden brothers and male friends. Gerald Auerbach and Jack Hinson contacted a mortician they knew in San Antonio; he agreed to pick up Salem from the medical examiner and prepare him cosmetically for his journey home.
Family members called Salem’s friends and relatives in Europe to say that if they wished to attend the burial and mourning services, they could converge on Geneva, where the Bin Mahfouz plane would make a stopover. When the 707 lumbered into the airport’s private aviation terminal above Lake Geneva, Yeslam was waiting, along with Shafiq, another half-brother who spent most of his time in Europe. Baby Elephant and several of Salem’s other friends and relatives were there, too.2
Yeslam found himself gripped by paralyzing anxiety; he became so concerned about the prospect of flying with Salem’s coffin that he was unable to walk up the jet’s stairs. His siblings tried to comfort him, but he was stricken. When the plane finally rolled away, Yeslam remained behind.3
Ali, Salem’s estranged former rival for family leadership, and once a favorite of their father, flew to Saudi Arabia on his own private jet to pay his respects. From Jeddah, a group of relatives and friends drove to Medina to await the arrival of Salem’s body. A burial permit for Medina, where the Prophet Mohamed had also been laid to rest, required royal approval, which Fahd’s office readily provided. The group waiting at Medina’s VIP terminal called up to the air traffic control tower for word about the 707’s arrival time, just as they had always done when Salem’s private flights were due. They went outside to watch the landing. Salem often kept his friends waiting for hours, and when his jet would finally appear on the horizon, he often teased them with a touch-and-go—he descended until his wheels touched the runway, then pulled up, flew off, circled around, and landed on the second try. That night, his friends watched in astonishment as the Bin Mahfouz plane badly overshot the runway; the pilot had no choice but to pull up, fly around, and land again. The pilot later said it had been a genuine if rare error on his part; Salem’s entourage agreed that their friend’s spirit had awoken long enough to play one last practical joke on them.
They loaded the coffin into a General Motors Corporation ambulance. The full-bearded Mahrouz was among the brothers who climbed inside; he chanted a prayer for the dead. One of Salem’s friends recalled being hoisted
