Fall and Rise Read online

Flight 175 completed a fishhook turn18 over Allentown, Pennsylvania, banking to the left and descending as it crossed back over New Jersey, and headed toward New York City. The pilot almost certainly was Marwan al-Shehhi, the companion of Mohamed Atta and the only one of the five Flight 175 hijackers trained to fly a passenger jet.

  Nothing was safe in their path. A New York Center controller watched as the United plane turned toward a Delta 737 flying southwest at 28,000 feet.

  “Traffic two o’clock!19 Ten miles,” the controller warned the Delta pilots. “I think he’s been hijacked. I don’t know his intentions. Take any evasive action necessary.”

  The Delta flight ducked away from United 175, but soon after, the hijacked plane put itself on a collision course20 with a US Airways flight. An alarm sounded in the US Airways cockpit, and the pilots dived to avoid a midair crash.

  After dropping her husband, Brian “Moose” Sweeney, at the Hyannis airport, Julie Sweeney got ready for her fifth day of work as a high school health teacher on Cape Cod. She’d already left for work when the phone rang in the home she shared with the former Navy F-14 pilot, Top Gun instructor, “Twin Tower” college football player, and costume-party Viking.

  Brian’s call, at shortly before 8:59 a.m., went to their answering machine.

  He spoke in a calm, serious tone, and his message echoed what he’d told Julie weeks earlier about how he wanted her to “celebrate life” if anything happened to him:

  “Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and [anticipating heaven or an afterlife] I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”

  Brian hung up. Then he punched in the numbers for another telephone call.

  As Louise Sweeney prepared to leave home to run errands,21 the phone rang. She picked up to hear her son’s voice: “Mom, It’s Brian. I’m on a hijacked plane and it doesn’t look good. I called to say I love you and I love my family.”

  Brian told his mother that he didn’t know who the hijackers were. Calling from the rear of the plane, he said he thought they might come back, so he might have to hang up quickly. He told her he believed that they might be flying somewhere over Ohio. Brian said he and other passengers might storm the cockpit.

  Louise knew her son, and she recognized how he sounded when he became “pissed off.” He had that tone.

  Before ending the call, Brian told her, “Remember Crossing Over. Don’t forget Crossing Over.”

  Louise remembered, and she wouldn’t forget. As Flight 175 streamed toward New York City, descending by the second, flying erratically, the original pilots apparently dead and a flight attendant wounded, Brian tried to comfort his mother. Crossing Over was a book and television program featuring a self-professed psychic named John Edward, who claimed to communicate with the dead. Brian wanted his mother to know that somehow, someday, he would see her again.

  Now Brian had to go.

  “They are coming back,” he said. Brian told his mother goodbye as he hung up.

  Louise Sweeney turned on the television.

  At nine o’clock, Peter Hanson called his parents’ home a second time from Flight 175.

  “It’s getting bad, Dad,”22 Peter told his father, Lee. “A stewardess was stabbed. They seem to have knives and Mace.”

  “They said they have a bomb. It’s getting very bad on the plane. Passengers are throwing up and getting sick.”

  “The plane is making jerky movements. I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane. I think we are going down.”

  “I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building.”

  Peter’s description of the hijackers’ weapons, claims, and tactics echoed the calls only minutes earlier from Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney on Flight 11.

  Then, just as Brian Sweeney had tried to reassure his wife and mother, Peter Hanson sought to comfort his father: “Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast.”

  At 9:01 a.m., as United Flight 175 rapidly descended, Peter Mulligan, a flight control manager at New York Center, told the FAA Command Center in Virginia: “We have several situations going on here. It’s escalating big, big time. We need to get the military involved with us.”23

  As it barreled toward the World Trade Center, already the scene of disaster from Flight 11’s crash, United Flight 175 looked as though it might hit the Statue of Liberty.

  Air traffic controllers stared rapt at their screens, even as they continued to warn other nearby planes. Everything in their long years of training and experience channeled their minds toward the hope and expectation that hijacked planes would land and passengers would be held hostage until demands were met, or until the military either forced the hijackers to surrender or killed them. To the very last moments, some controllers held tight to the notion that the pilots were racing toward the nearest airport, beset by a routine24 mechanical or electrical emergency.

  Reality overtook that fantasy.

  United Airlines Flight 175 flew low and fast, banking toward the southern twin of the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center. Flight controllers, airline officials, government and military experts, and everyone else would need to accept a new script for hijackings, one that featured a multipronged murder-suicide plot designed to maximize civilian casualties and terrorize survivors through the destruction of physical and symbolic pillars of America’s power.

  The evidence flashed on the air traffic controllers’ radar screens.

  “No!” a New York controller shouted. “He’s not going to land. He’s going in!”25

  From the back of the plane, with his wife and daughter pressed against him, Peter Hanson spoke his final words to his father: “Oh my God. . . . Oh my God, oh my God.”

  Lee Hanson heard a woman shriek.

  At that moment, a battalion of television and still cameras on the ground and in helicopters trained their lenses on Lower Manhattan. Every network joined CNN live on the air, yet still almost no one knew what was happening or what kind of planes were involved.

  On ABC’s Good Morning America, the smoke-obscured North Tower filled the screen while hosts Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson interviewed reporter Don Dahler on the scene. As Dahler described scores of fire crews and other first responders rushing toward the World Trade Center, a Boeing 767 zoomed into view on the right side of the screen.

  At 9:03:11 a.m.,26 Lee and Eunice Hanson, Louise Sweeney, and millions of others became witnesses to murder. They watched live on television as United Flight 175, traveling between 540 and 587 miles per hour, slammed on an angle into the 77th through 85th floors of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. A bright orange fireball exploded. The building rocked and belched smoke, glass, steel, and debris. The plane and everyone inside it disappeared forever.

  In her kitchen, Eunice Hanson screamed.

  In her television studio in New York, Diane Sawyer gasped, “Oh my God.”27

  “That looks like a second plane,” her colleague Charles Gibson said.

  “That just exploded!” said reporter Don Dahler, still on the phone to the studio, his location preventing him from seeing the crash.

  Gibson composed himself. On some level, every professional broadcaster feared becoming known for a histrionic narration of a terrible event, like the radio reporter who nearly fell apart while witnessing the crash of the German airship Hindenburg in 1937.

  “We just saw another plane coming in from the side,” Gibson said soberly. “So this looks like it is some sort of a concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that is under way.”

  After replaying the video to be certain about what they’d seen, Gibson’s voice went slack.

  “Oh, this is terrifying. . . . Awful.”

  Sawyer spoke for Eunice and Lee Hanson, Louise Sweeney, and
countless others who saw United Flight 175’s final seconds. “To watch powerless,” she said, “is a horror.”

  The toll was incalculable, just as it had been less than seventeen minutes earlier from the crash of American Flight 11. The immediate victims of United Flight 175 were two pilots, seven crew members, and fifty-one passengers, including three small children. All of them slaughtered in public view, preserved on film, by five al-Qaeda terrorists.

  Two-year-old Christine Hanson and four-year-old Juliana McCourt would never visit Disneyland. Neither they nor David Gamboa-Brandhorst would know first days of school, first loves, or any other milestone, from triumph to heartbreak, of a full life. Andrea LeBlanc would never again travel the world with her gregarious, pacifist husband, Bob. Julie Sweeney wouldn’t bear children, grow old, and feel safe with her confident warrior husband, Brian.

  Delayed passengers wouldn’t hear recitals of Forrest Gump dialogue from Captain Victor Saracini. First Officer Michael Horrocks’s daughter wouldn’t rise from bed with the promise that her daddy loved her to the moon. Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis would never again share their gifts with young hockey players or with their own families.

  Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi, who’d fled Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini, wouldn’t see her grandsons grow up as Americans. The Reverend Francis Grogan, who survived World War II on a Navy destroyer, would never again see his sister or comfort his flock. Flight attendants Alfred Marchand and Robert Fangman, who’d changed careers to fly, wouldn’t see the world or their loving families. Flight attendants Michael Tarrou and Amy King would never marry.

  Lee and Eunice Hanson would never see Peter and Sue Kim fulfill their professional promise or expand their loving family with more children. Christine would never again visit “Namma’s house” or insist that her grandparents sing the correct words to Barney’s “I love you” song.

  And still the day had just begun.

  At almost precisely the same time28 as United Flight 175 hit the South Tower, a Boston Center flight control manager named Terry Biggio reported to a New England FAA official that his team had deciphered the hijacker’s first accidental radio transmission from American Flight 11, spoken nearly forty minutes earlier.

  Biggio said: “I’m gonna reconfirm with, with downstairs, but the, as far as the tape . . . [He] seemed to think the guy said that ‘We have planes.’ Now I don’t know if it was because it was the accent, or if there’s more than one, but I’m gonna . . . reconfirm that for you, and I’ll get back to you real quick. Okay?”

  To be certain the message came across loud and clear, Biggio repeated himself and emphasized: “Planes, as in plural.”

  Unknown to Biggio, during the previous ten minutes29 strange and suddenly familiar events had begun aboard a third transcontinental passenger jet.

  Chapter 6

  “The Start of World War III”

  American Airlines Flight 77

  After a celebratory dinner the night before, Barbara Olson woke beside her husband, Ted, on his birthday, just as she’d planned. The lawyer, author, and conservative activist got ready for an early flight to Los Angeles, where she was to appear on that night’s edition of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.

  Before leaving her Virginia home for Dulles International Airport, before Flight 11 or Flight 175 met their fiery ends, Barbara placed a note on Ted’s pillow: “I love you.1 When you read this, I will be thinking of you and I will be back on Friday.”

  As the morning progressed, the defenders of American airspace were forced to rely almost as much at times on television news updates as on their radar scopes and official reports. From their limited vantage point inside the NEADS bunker in upstate New York, Major Kevin Nasypany, Colonel Robert Marr, and their team struggled to make sense of confusing, conflicting, inaccurate, and occasionally devastating information about events in New York and whether more threats loomed.

  When a NEADS technician saw the burning North Tower on television shortly before nine, those images marked the first notice anyone there received about what had happened. The technician gasped, “Oh God!”2 Her colleague answered, “God save New York.”

  A report soon reached them that the plane was a Boeing 737, perhaps as a result of the CNN broadcast that mentioned that model. Otherwise, the plane that struck the North Tower appeared to match the Boeing 767 passenger jet they’d been trying without luck to find: American Flight 11. The NEADS team still hadn’t heard about United Flight 175 or any other hijacked planes. When they confirmed that the North Tower crash involved Flight 11, that presumably would mean the end of NEADS mission. NEADS staffers asked Nasypany what he wanted to do with the two F-15s they’d scrambled from the Otis base on Cape Cod.

  Unsure whether the CNN report and other information they’d received was accurate, concerned that the plane they sought was a Boeing 767, not a 737, and lacking official confirmation, Nasypany continued to play defense. “Send ’em3 to New York City still,” he ordered. “Continue! Go!”

  A NEADS identification technician, Senior Airman Stacia Rountree, sought more information about the crashed plane from the FAA Boston Center’s military liaison, Colin Scoggins. The call4 initially seemed to confirm the loss of Flight 11, but soon it did the opposite, increasing confusion about which plane had struck the tower.

  Scoggins: “Yeah, he crashed into the World Trade Center.”

  Rountree: “That is the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center?”

  Scoggins: “Yup. Disregard the tail number [for American Flight 11].”

  Rountree: “Disregard the tail number? He did crash into the World Trade Center?”

  Scoggins: “That, that’s what we believe, yes.”

  Another NEADS technician interrupted, saying that the military hadn’t received official confirmation that the North Tower crash involved American Flight 11. Media reports still mentioned a small Cessna that had supposedly gotten lost over Manhattan. To top it off, American Airlines officials had yet to confirm to anyone that Flight 11 had even been hijacked, much less that it had crashed. Rountree’s supervisor, a no-nonsense master sergeant named Maureen “Mo” Dooley, took over the call.

  Dooley: “We need to have—are you giving confirmation that American 11 was the one?”

  Scoggins: “No, we’re not gonna confirm that at this time. We just know an aircraft crashed in and—”

  On the other hand, Scoggins acknowledged, that didn’t mean they had any idea where to find American Flight 11. Dooley asked him: “[I]s anyone up there tracking primary [radar] on this guy still?”

  Scoggins replied: “No. The last [radar sighting] we have was about fifteen miles east of JFK [Airport], or eight miles east of JFK was our last primary hit. He did slow down in speed. The primary that we had, it slowed down below, around to three hundred knots.”

  Dooley: “And then you lost ’em?”

  Scoggins: “Yeah, and then we lost ’em.”

  With incomplete information, Nasypany couldn’t rule out the possibility that American Flight 11, with a hijacker at the controls, remained airborne and hiding from radar with its transponder off, somewhere over one of the most heavily populated areas of the United States. Meanwhile, Nasypany and the NEADS team didn’t learn5 about United Flight 175 until 9:03 a.m.

  Rountree cried out: “They have a second possible hijack!”

  But again, just as with Flight 11, the notification came far too late. At almost that exact moment, Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower. Colonel Marr and others at NEADS watched it live6 on CNN. The two F-15 fighter jets from Otis still hadn’t reached New York.

  America’s air defense system couldn’t stop those crashes, but Nasypany still wanted the F-15s in the sky over New York. The United States had just experienced its first simultaneous multiple hijackings, and no one could say whether the terrorists had more planned. As he prowled the room at NEADS, bottling his frustration while he pressured, calmed, and cajoled his team, Nasypany hadn’t yet heard Mohamed Atta’s omino
us statement, “We have some planes.” But he didn’t need to.

  “We’ve already had two,”7 Nasypany thought. “Why not more?”

  Earlier that morning at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., before either Flight 11 or Flight 175 was hijacked, passengers walked calmly onto the sparsely filled American Airlines Flight 77. The plane was a Boeing 757, a single-aisle passenger jet smaller and slimmer than the wide-bodied 767, but nonetheless a large plane suited to transcontinental flights. Bound nonstop for Los Angeles, Flight 77’s fuel weighed just under 50,000 pounds, more than a fully loaded city bus.

  Two Flight 77 passengers, one in first class, the other in coach, represented the two distinct worlds of Washington, D.C. One, Barbara Olson, enjoyed great celebrity and clout as a member of the capital’s ruling elite. The other embodied great possibility.

  Bernard C. Brown II8 stepped aboard Flight 77 with a complete set of useful tools: looks, brains, charisma, an eye for sharp clothes, and a fair shot at fulfilling his dream of becoming either a professional basketball player or a scientist. But Bernard was still only eleven, which meant that his nimble mind sometimes wandered to subjects other than school.

  Fifth grade had gone well, and Bernard’s parents and teachers wanted him to remain on a high-achieving trajectory at the Leckie Elementary School in the southwest corner of Washington, D.C., near what was known as Bolling Air Force Base. Some students at Leckie lived in a homeless shelter, but Bernard was among the fortunate ones: he lived in military housing with his younger sister, his mother, Sinita, and his father, Bernard Brown Sr., a chief petty officer in the Navy who worked at the Pentagon. The two men of the family were known as Big Bernard and Little Bernard.

  As the new school year began, Little Bernard’s fifth-grade teacher successfully urged her best friend at Leckie, sixth-grade teacher Hilda Taylor, to pick Bernard to join her for a special treat: a four-day trip to study marine biology at a sanctuary off the California coast. A native of Sierra Leone, Hilda Taylor believed that American children needed to look beyond their borders to gain a deeper understanding of the wider world. With that goal in mind she’d become involved with the National Geographic Society, which sponsored the trip.