Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11. MItchell Zuckoff

11 is still in the air,” Scoggins told Dooley, “and it’s on its way towards, heading toward Washington.”

      Dooley: “Okay, American Eleven is still in the air?”

      Scoggins: “Yes.”

      Dooley: “On its way toward Washington?”

      Scoggins: “That was another, it was evidently another aircraft that hit the tower. That’s the latest report we have.”

      Dooley: “Okay.”

      Scoggins: “I’m going to try to confirm an ID for you, but I would assume he’s somewhere over, uh, either New Jersey or somewhere farther south.”

      The confusion quickly deepened.

      Dooley: “Okay. So, American Eleven isn’t the hijack at all then, right?”

      Scoggins: “No, he is a hijack.”

      Dooley: “He, American Eleven is a hijack?”

      Scoggins: “Yes.”

      Dooley: “And he’s heading into Washington?”

      Scoggins: “This could be a third aircraft.”

      Dooley pulled away from the call and yelled to Nasypany: “Another hijack! It’s headed towards Washington!”

      “Shit!” Nasypany answered. “Give me a location.”

      Two hijacked planes had already crashed into buildings in New York. Hearing this new report of a possible third hijacked plane, Nasypany wanted to throw all available assets toward preventing a catastrophe in the nation’s capital.

      “Okay,” he told his team, “American Airlines is still airborne—Eleven, the first guy. He’s heading towards Washington. Okay, I think we need to scramble Langley right now. And I’m, I’m gonna take the fighters from Otis and try to chase this guy down if I can find him.”

      Colonel Robert Marr at NEADS approved Nasypany’s plan to launch more fighters. The two F-16s from Langley and an unarmed training jet scrambled into the air.

      As they focused on an airliner that no longer existed, neither Nasypany nor anyone else in the U.S. military knew that a different disaster was developing. A third passenger jet had in fact been hijacked: American Airlines Flight 77 out of Dulles Airport.

      AROUND 8:51 A.M., the five Saudi Arabian men aboard Flight 77 executed their plan. They used swift, coordinated takeover methods similar to those used during the previous half hour on Flight 11 and Flight 175.

      Twenty minutes later, the phone rang in the Las Vegas home of Ron and Nancy May. Nancy was getting ready for work as an admissions clerk at a community college and she missed the call. The phone rang again a minute later, and this time Nancy May heard the voice of her flight attendant daughter, Renée. They’d last spoken two days earlier, and Renée and Ron had talked the previous day. Renée had sounded happy on both of those calls.

      Now Renée sounded serious. She calmly, but erroneously, told her mother that six men had hijacked her flight and forced “us” to the rear of the plane. Renée didn’t say how she arrived at the number six, and she didn’t explain whether the people crowded together were crew members, passengers, or both. She didn’t know the fate of the pilots. Renée told her mother the flight information and gave Nancy three telephone numbers to call American Airlines.

      “I love you, Mom,” Renée said. The line went dead.

      Nancy yelled upstairs for Ron. Using one of the numbers from Renée, Nancy reached Patty Carson, an American Airlines flight services employee at Reagan National Airport in Washington, who had just returned to her desk from a staff lounge where she watched on television as United Flight 175 exploded into the South Tower. When Nancy relayed Renée’s hijacking message, along with Renée’s flight number and employee identification number, Patty Carson seemed confused. She told Nancy that she didn’t think the plane that struck the World Trade Center was an American Airlines jet.

      “No, no,” Nancy May interrupted. “We are talking about Flight 77, in the air.” She told Carson that Renée had said “We are being hijacked and held hostage.”

      Ron May took the phone and told Carson that since Renée had just called, it stood to reason that she couldn’t have been in a plane that crashed into the World Trade Center.

      Carson took the Mays’ telephone number and promised to call back as soon as she knew anything. After speaking with Carson, Nancy and Ron May tried to call Renée on her cellphone but the call didn’t connect. They turned on the television, hoping for news.

      When she hung up with Ron and Nancy May, Carson learned that she had to evacuate the airport, a precaution prompted by reports of hijackings. On her way out of the building, Carson described the call to a flight services manager, Toni Knisley, who called her boss, American Airlines base manager Rosemary Dillard. At first there was some confusion about which plane Renée was on. When they confirmed it was American Flight 77, Rosemary Dillard stumbled backward into a chair. That morning, she’d raced to Dulles Airport with her husband, Eddie, the sharp-dressing, dominoes-playing real estate investor who was going to California to work on a property they owned. She’d kissed him goodbye and told him to come home soon.

      Eddie was aboard hijacked Flight 77.

      INSIDE THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE building in Washington, a telephone rang in a fifth-floor office near a mural that depicted a robed figure protecting a cowering man from a lynch mob. Secretary Lori Keyton answered and heard the voice of an operator ask her to accept an emergency collect call from Barbara Olson.

      Keyton accepted the charges, and Barbara calmed herself enough to choke out the words: “Can you tell Ted …”

      Keyton cut her off and rushed into the ornate office of the U.S. solicitor general.

      “Barbara is on the line and she’s in a panic,” Keyton told Ted Olson.

      When Barbara reached him from Flight 77, Ted Olson was watching television, viewing a replay of a still unidentified passenger jet hitting the South Tower. When he heard that Barbara was on the phone, Olson’s first thought was relief. It meant that Barbara wasn’t on either of the planes that had crashed. Then he picked up the call.

      “Ted,” she said, “my plane’s been hijacked.”

      Barbara told him the hijackers had knives and box cutters. Olson asked if they knew that she was talking on the phone, and she answered that they didn’t. She said they’d ordered the passengers to the back of the plane. The call cut off.

      Unlike callers from the previous two hijacked planes, neither Barbara Olson nor Renée May mentioned violence against the pilots or anyone else, nor the use of Mace or the threat of a bomb.

      Ted Olson tried his direct line to Attorney General John Ashcroft, but Ashcroft was on a flight to Wisconsin. He called the Justice Department’s Command Center and reported the hijacking. For some unexplained reason, Olson’s call didn’t trigger notification of the U.S. military. Olson asked that a security officer come immediately to his office, to offer suggestions if Barbara called again. Before the officer arrived, the phone rang.

      Barbara told Ted that “the pilot” had announced that the plane had been hijacked, but it wasn’t clear if she knew whether the speaker on the intercom was one of the hijackers or the original cockpit crew. She might have been operating under the old “rules” and believed the terrorists were forcing the legitimate pilots to do their bidding. Barbara said the plane was flying over houses. Another passenger told her they were headed northeast.

      “What can I tell the pilot?” Barbara asked Ted. “What can I do? How can I stop this?”

      Ted wasn’t sure how to answer. He decided that he had to tell Barbara about the other two hijackings and crashes at the World Trade Center. Flight 77 seemed bound for the same fate; the question was where the hijackers intended to crash. Barbara absorbed the news quietly and stoically, though Ted wondered if she’d been shocked into silence.