500 Days (7 page)

“Sir, we have to turn back!” protested Aubrey Davis, Rumsfeld’s personal bodyguard.

No response. Rumsfeld kept running.

The group hustled down two flights of stairs; darkness and smoke surrounded them. They saw a door to the outside hanging open, and struggled their way through.

The western side of the Pentagon was a mass of fire and flame, bits of twisted debris, concrete wreckage, body parts, and injured people. A mangled eighteen-
inch piece of metal that was lying in the grass caught Rumsfeld’s eye. He leaned down to pick it up.

“Sir, we shouldn’t be disturbing a crime scene,” Davis said.

Rumsfeld ignored him. He turned the metal over in his hand.

“American Airlines,” he mumbled.

Rumsfeld was quiet for a moment as he surveyed the scene; there was a fire to fight and people to rescue. Someone called out—a group of rescuers were trying to move an injured man on a gurney away from danger. Rumsfeld ran over and helped push it across the road toward the emergency crews.

•  •  •  

Back inside the Pentagon, Steve Cambone was close to panic; officials from the PEOC wanted Rumsfeld, and Cambone still couldn’t reach him. He sent out an urgent appeal over the radio for someone to find the secretary.

Davis, the bodyguard, heard the plea. “We’ve got him,” he answered into his walkie-talkie.

No luck. The babble of other frightened voices on the same frequency drowned out Davis’s response.

•  •  •  

The billows of smoke pouring from the upper floors of the Twin Towers grew thicker and darker as the stage was set for an even more deadly spectacle.

The pressure on the exterior supports was growing rapidly. When the planes smashed into the towers, they ripped apart the internal core; those reinforcements of five-inch concrete fill on metal deck were used to distribute the buildings’ weight from the external box column, significantly reducing the downward pressure on the supports that ringed the structures.

With the core mostly gone on several floors—the ninety-fourth to the ninety-eighth in the North Tower, and the seventy-eighth to eighty-fourth floors in the South Tower—pressure shifted back to the external columns. The weight on those supports in the South Tower was far higher—the plane had been traveling faster, knocking out more floors, and the impact was lower, meaning the surviving reinforcements held more weight from the greater number of floors above them.

The wreckage put particular stress on the surviving external columns on either side of the gaping hole in each building. With the supports cut apart at the points of impact, the load normally held by those reinforcements shifted to a small number of neighboring columns. If those gave way, the buildings couldn’t stand.

•  •  •  

Connecting Cheney and Bush by phone had been a nightmare, with calls dropped or drowned out by static. Finally, a clear line came though while Bush was in the back of a limousine, racing toward the Sarasota Airport.

“We’re at war, Dick,” Bush said. “And we’re going to find out who did this and we’re going to kick their ass.”

The danger wasn’t over, Cheney said. A number of commercial flights were missing and might be aimed at vital centers of the federal government. With the vice president, the leaders of Congress, and many members of the cabinet all in Washington, the ability of government to continue in the aftermath of an attack was threatened. America needed to keep its commander in chief safe.

“Mr. President, I strongly recommend that you do not return to Washington at this time,” Cheney said. “I believe we are a target.”

Bush said that he wanted to reach the White House as soon as possible, but agreed to proceed carefully.

At about that moment Bush’s motorcade was pulling off U.S. Route 301 onto Desoto Road, then into the airport. The vehicles rolled onto the tarmac, coming to a stop just yards away from Jones Aviation—a school where two of the terrorist hijackers had learned how to fly.

•  •  •  

A small stream of molten aluminum flowed out of a window at the northeast corner of the South Tower’s eightieth floor. No one could see this omen of the horror that was just seconds away.

•  •  •  

A mass of officers hustled about the National Military Control Center. The smoke filling the room from the attack didn’t distract from the business at hand.

On one of the large screens in the front of the room, the South Tower buckled. It fell in a sudden, horrifying moment, crushing down in a swirl of smoke and debris.

The NMCC went silent. The hard-edged military officers all stared at the screen, motionless.

•  •  •  

Cheney and Libby made their way into the PEOC conference room just before ten o’clock. The bunker was unremarkable, just a sparse and cramped tubular space. Voices stopped flat, with no acoustic echo, muffled by the hardened structure surrounding the room that was designed to withstand the shock waves from a nuclear blast.

Cheney walked down one side of the oak conference table and sat at the center, the presidential seal hanging on the wall behind him. To his right was a bank of television sets; in front, the faces of senior officials throughout the Capitol appeared on the large projection screen used for secure video.

Just before 10:02, the Secret Service reported that, based on FAA information, another aircraft was heading toward Washington. Cheney told an aide to get Bush back on the phone.

•  •  •  

At the same moment, passengers on that aircraft—United 93—were fighting to break into the cockpit. The lead hijacker, Ziad Jarrah, had been maneuvering the plane violently, rocking it side to side, then up and down, attempting to throw the counterattackers off balance. But to no avail—they kept coming.

“Is that it?” he asked another hijacker. “I mean, shall we put it down?”

“Yes. Put it in it and pull it down.”

For a moment Jarrah delayed the final act, as the sounds of the passengers’ battle grew louder. Finally, he pushed the control wheel forward and turned it hard to the right.

•  •  •  

Just below, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Bob Blair was riding in a coal truck down Route 30 alongside a friend, Doug Miller. The two were making small talk when they heard a roar overhead.

Blair looked up and gaped as a huge, upside-down plane flew past. It headed over the treetops, spiraling down at 580 miles per hour into an empty field. A deafening explosion rocked their truck.

“My God,” Blair said. They pulled to a stop, grabbed fire extinguishers, and ran toward the crash site.

But there was nothing to be done for the passengers on United 93. The plane and everybody on it virtually disintegrated on impact.

•  •  •  

Air Force One
had reached cruising altitude but was still circling while the pilots and the Secret Service debated where to go. An aide told Bush that the vice president was calling again. This time, the connection was clear.

Cheney explained that additional hijacked planes appeared to be headed for the capital. A defense had been readied; Combat Air Patrols were flying over both New York and Washington but had not yet been given authority to act if they encountered an airliner posing a threat.

“Sir, they’re going to want to know what to do.”

Bush’s response was quick. “Well, if they don’t land,” he said, “we’ll have to shoot them down.”

“Yes, sir,” Cheney replied.

Rules were set. A fighter would give a passenger plane three chances to change course or land. If it did neither, the military jet would destroy the commercial airliner with a missile.

•  •  •  

On the third floor of the Pentagon, the armored door of the secure video teleconference room depressurized with the push of a white button. Rumsfeld stepped inside and saw a group of his top lieutenants talking to officials across Washington.

Rumsfeld had just come from his office, where he had updated the president on the status of the Combat Air Patrols. Now Rumsfeld was pacing, trying to gather his thoughts. He scribbled notes to himself on a small yellow pad, speaking out loud as each idea occurred to him.

He reminded everyone that he had been appointed in 1983 as a special Middle East envoy after terrorists used a truck bomb to kill 241 American marines in Beirut. The reaction then, he said, had been too timid; a planned air assault had been scuttled, and in just four months, all of the remaining marines were withdrawn from the country. Islamic extremists had perceived that pullout as evidence of American military impotence.

“The country can’t react this time the way we reacted last time,” Rumsfeld said. “We have to go and root these guys out. We can’t just hunker down again.”

•  •  •  

This was not a time to be out of Washington, Bush decided. He understood why Cheney and his others advisors wanted him to stay away—the most senior people in the line of succession for the presidency were in the capital. An attack that killed them all, including Bush, would leave the government rudderless. But the American people, Bush thought, needed to see that their president was in charge.

He called Rice to let her know his decision. “I’m coming back,” he said.

“You cannot come back,” she replied, her voice stiff. “The United States of America is under attack. You have to go to safety. We don’t know what’s going on here.”

Not her decision. “I’m coming back.”

Rice exploded. “You can’t!” she shouted.

Then she hung up on the president of the United States.

•  •  •  

No one in Washington knew that United 93 was gone.

Radar was no longer reliable. So many planes had been disappearing—transponders turned off, flying through uncovered areas—that the FAA was tracking flight 93 on a display that provided only route projections, based on speed and altitude. Even when the plane fell from the sky, the estimates showed it still headed toward Washington.

Shortly after Cheney received the shoot-down order from Bush, a military aide entered the room.

“Sir,” he said, “there is a plane eighty miles out coming toward D.C., and there’s a fighter near there. Should we engage?”

“Yes. Engage.”

The military aide returned several times. The plane was seventy miles out, then sixty miles out, speeding toward the capital at hundreds of miles an hour.

“Do the orders still stand?” he asked.

Cheney whipped his head around and glared at the aide. “Of course the order still stands!” he snapped. “Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

A few seats away, Josh Bolten, the White House deputy chief of staff, observed the exchange with growing alarm. He had not heard the earlier call between Bush and Cheney; for all he knew, the vice president was acting on his own. If the Bush administration was going to issue an order to shoot down a commercial airliner, if it was going to authorize the killing of untold numbers of Americans, then everyone in the room had better be damned sure that the president was certain.

Bolten hesitated, then spoke up.

“Mr. Vice President, I’d like to suggest that you contact the president to confirm the engage order.”

Cheney nodded, and another call went through to
Air Force One.
He again described the situation, and asked Bush to reaffirm his earlier decision.

“I authorized a shoot-down of an aircraft if necessary,” he said, his voice steady and without emotion.

The call ended. Cheney looked up. The engage order stood, he told the group.

•  •  •  

Hezbollah did it.

The Shia Islamist terrorist group was the culprit behind the hijackings. Or so a preliminary CIA review concluded.

From the moment of the second attack on the World Trade Center, analysts with the Counterterrorist Center had been poring through an ocean of intelligence, seeking anything that might shed light on the identity of the perpetrators.

One raw file revealed a clue: an earlier report indicating that Hezbollah had been seeking to recruit certified pilots. The information wasn’t much and hadn’t been viewed as significant when it was received. But now, with planes slamming liked guided missiles into some of America’s most symbolic buildings, it took on a more sinister cast, throwing suspicion on the militant group based in Lebanon. The CIA analysts conferred with their counterparts at the FBI; everyone agreed—the deduction made sense.

One analyst rushed to Ben Bonk, the center’s deputy chief, to report their finding. Maybe, Bonk thought. Hezbollah must at least be placed on the list of likely conspirators in the attack.

Less than an hour later, Richard Blee from the bin Laden unit walked into Bonk’s office, carrying a piece of paper.

“We’ve got something important,” he said.

An FAA analyst had obtained the manifest for American 77, the flight that had crashed into the Pentagon. The names of two of the passengers—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—showed up in a number of intelligence reports. These were two men tied to al-Qaeda.

Forget Hezbollah. Bin Laden did it.

•  •  •  

General Richard Myers, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was running up the stairs to the third floor of the Pentagon. He was the senior-most officer working in the National Military Command Center—the chairman, Hugh Shelton, was out of the country—and was responsible for keeping Rumsfeld up-to-date on how the military was responding to the attacks.

The deputy director of operations at the command center had decided immediately after the second strike on the Trade Center that the United States was under terrorist attack. With their responsibility for establishing communications along the chain of command during an emergency, the officers and staff in the center had been working at full throttle since then; their first all-purpose conference had been held almost an hour earlier to put together an action plan.

Myers briefed Rumsfeld in a voice that was steady and admirably mechanical; he was a soldier, trained to remain calm in the most chaotic situation. He told Rumsfeld that the North American Aerospace Defense Command—
NORAD—had been tracking Delta 1989, which military officials believed had been hijacked. The NORAD commander had ordered aircraft to battle stations, fully armed. The White House had requested fighter escorts for
Air Force One.