The Towers (10 page)

Another groan, this time from above. He glanced up to see a woman in an Army uniform hanging from a hole in the second-story floor. Her open eyes blinked beseechingly at him. The fire was crackling above her. The ceiling was sagging. As she stretched out an arm, it collapsed. More pillars followed with a hollow roar, and she disappeared.

Chairs, copiers, file cabinets, wrapped with wire and smoldering. Everything in here was going to burst into flame, perhaps in seconds. In those seconds, anyone who was going to be saved, would be saved.

A human shape in the smoke, reclining in a chair that had been pushed back against the buckled wall by the blast. Dan climbed over a smoking, shredded desk until he could look down into its face. Only there wasn't any. Blast or flying metal had scooped it away from the forehead down: eyes, face, jaw, leaving Dan looking into a running mass of blood pulsing from bared bone and sinuses. The hair was burned to ash and the neck was charred. Bubbles worked deep in the mass. The chest rose and fell. The head slowly rolled back and forth. Dan hesitated, unable to look away. He started to reach for a shoulder, then stopped. Looked toward the now distant glow of daylight. Up, at the sagging ceiling directly above, dimly visible through the gathering smoke.

He gripped the smoking uniform at the shoulder, once, hard. The faceless one winced. But otherwise didn't respond. Dan backed away, over the desk, down the pile again. And crawled on.

Past another huge pile of toppled masonry and brick and smashed equipment. He figured he was back in the command center, but in the dark and smoke it was impossible to be sure. The space was dotted with support columns, except where some terrific force had swept them away, or left meshlike ghosts of bent rebar with all their concrete blown away. Body parts everywhere, flesh ripped from bones, smoldering torsos, heads, legs, feet, torn apart and shredded and plastered against those partition walls that still stood amid the smoldering heaps of desks, chairs, copiers, file cabinets. Some parts looked flash-charred, while an arm's length away a checkbook fluttered untouched on a desk. Soon it would all be engulfed, that was clear. Twenty feet away a stream of pure fire arced down onto a file cabinet, which burst into flame. The smoke hurt. It was freighted with burning plastic, off-gassing insulation, burning fuel. Tears and snot streamed down his face. A red-hot band was tightening around his heart. His feet were strapped with lead, like an old-fashioned helmet diver's.

“We better get out of here,” the airman yelled. Dan coughed, nodded, started to pull back. Then heard the groan again.

The whiteboard was pinned under a huge chunk of jagged concrete. They pulled that off, then the board, to find two bodies in Navy khaki. The watch captain's back was charred black, as if he'd taken the full force of the wave of fire. The other body was unmarked, but they were both dead. No; the one on the bottom stirred. They got him up between them and hauled him back over the pile to where the others hustled him off.

Dan was backing away when he saw a shape moving deep in the murk. No, two shapes, stumbling along, hands groping out. Wandering blindly in the smoke. One fell. The other helped him up. One of the shadows was huge, distorted, inhuman, humpbacked. They were headed across his front, away from the exit. He screamed after them, but a wall collapsed and more fire poured down, blotting out his puny cry. The smoke ate them.

“Let's go,” his partner yelled.

Dan pulled out of his grip and slid back down the pile, feeling sharp edges X-Acto hands and legs but without pain. “Over here!” he screamed again, crawling across smashed tables, body parts. The smoke was blanketing right down to them, black, thick, solid as tar. He caught sight of one of the figures again and lifted the bar in his hand and pitched it as hard as he could. He couldn't see where it went. It disappeared into the murk. But it must have struck one of the shadows because the next thing he knew, the big figure blundered out of the smoke and into him. Dan seized it and yelled into its ear, “Follow us. We know the way out.”

“Lenson?” the shadow rumbled.

Niles had looked humpbacked because he was carrying a sailor. The admiral turned and shouted, “Over here. All of you, come to me.” To Dan's astonishment, more figures emerged, creeping over the wreckage, crippled, smoking, burned, but still moving. One even dragged a briefcase.

They were all crawling toward the distant daylight when with a muffled
whoomph
the ceiling collapsed. A ball of flame ignited, kicking Dan into a wall as if he'd been pitched into it by two linemen. He almost blacked out, then felt a big fist clutch his shirt. The fabric tore and the fist shifted to his web belt, lifted, then threw him toward the light.

He crawled out hacking, drooling black snot, collapsing against the outer wall and vomiting into a black puddle of oil-coruscating water. Others stood aside until he straightened, then led him back toward the corridor.

He collapsed there for some minutes, trembling so hard it was close to convulsing, examining the blood dripping off his palms, which were black with soot and ash and fuel. He ought to feel something. Rage? Sorrow? But it wasn't here yet. A headache pounded like barbarians slamming a ram into a castle gate. Someone held out a bottle of water and he poured it over his head, sluicing off soot, and drank the rest. It almost came back up, but he breathed slow and closed his eyes and kept it down.

He kept coughing up black phlegm and spitting it onto the muddy tile. A smoky haze lay over the drive, above the heads of men bringing out more bodies. Now and then one would move or cry out. Medics bent over these and got them onto backboards, and others carried them off down the corridor. Two men were talking. They said the Twin Towers had collapsed. Dan thought that unlikely. Blair was there. But there was something odd about that because he wasn't really sure who this “Blair” was. His brain seemed to be calling in long distance. The men said the Sears Tower in Chicago had been hit too. They said a truck full of explosives had gone off outside the State Department.

Someone blocked in his light. Army, a light colonel. “We okay, Commander?”

“Just getting my breath.”

“Were you in there?” Pointing to the blown-out hole.

“Just came out.”

“Any more in there?”

“If there are, we're not going to get to them.”

“How about this corridor? Is it clear?”

Dan tried to concentrate. “Four. This is four. It's clear a little ways. Up till the C ring, I think.”

“Can you get into the spaces that are on fire?”

“I don't think so. Either the walls are blown out or the doors are buckled.”

“How about on the second floor? That's Army Personnel. Did they get out? Do you know?”

That explained the bodies in army uniforms, and the woman who'd fallen through the hole in the ceiling. He said he didn't, but they could go look. Where was the emergency response? But when he looked at his watch, only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed like much longer. Still, there should be firemen. Police. When he stood, the corridor reeled. He steadied himself against the wall. Made himself take a step. Then a couple more.

He and the colonel found a stairway and went up.

On the second floor the smoke was even worse than it had been down below. The heat scorched Dan's cheeks and forehead and he pulled his undershirt up over his mouth. They went down the corridor trying to get doors open, but all were either locked or jammed. The colonel pounded on the doors but no one responded. Dan took a knee, then went to all fours, gagging. His throat was closing up. His hands and legs kept cramping and a red thread was lacing itself across his visual field. He rubbed his face, but that only scrubbed in some kind of grit that was all over him.

“You don't look so good,” the colonel said. “Can you walk?”

“Can't breathe. May have to … have to pack it in.” He gagged again on something deep in his throat that didn't belong there. He struggled to get air, then coughed until the red thread got larger, much larger, and somehow sucked him down into it.

He must have passed out again. When he came to, he was still in the corridor, looking up at the ceiling tiles, being carried between two men. A smoky pall drifted between him and the ceiling. His skull was being compressed in a hydraulic vise, but much worse was the thing blocking his airway. He could only get a breath now and then and, in between, had to cough out thick, sticky mucus. He got out, “… going?”

“Got to evacuate,” one of his bearers said without stopping. They were really humping along; the doors were flying past. He caught the number on one; they were almost to the A ring. “Another plane on the way.”

“… 'nother?”

“Four minutes out. Got to get you out of here.”

The thought barely registered, as if there were so much horror in the day already any addition was high on an asymptotic curve. He marveled vaguely at how well someone must have planned, to strike the most powerful country on earth such savage and unexpected blows. He turned his head and gagged, then concentrated on getting the next breath. It didn't come, that thing in his throat was blocking it, and he twisted and threw his arms out, panicking, as a black, rotating tunnel opened and sucked him down.

*   *   *

THEY
must have carried him all the way out to the courtyard because the next time he came to, a brilliant blue sky lay looking flat just above his eyes, and dappled shadows of trees with smoke rising behind them. People were running and shouting all around. Another plane had hit Camp David, a woman called. Sirens ululated. Firemen jogged by. He stared up at the smoke. Terrified. Like trying to breathe through a pipe straw. The harder he tried, the tighter his throat closed.

What he'd been trying to feel in the corridor came through just for a moment then.
Find out who did this, and kill them all.
But then his airway closed again, and he had to put everything into the battle for one more lungful. The thing in his throat was growing. Choking off his last bit of air.

He passed out again, and when he came up this time, not only couldn't he breathe, someone had forced the spigot of a gas pump into his mouth. It was rigid and sharp-edged, and they were jamming it down his throat, talking urgently in some foreign language. He fought them with his last strength, sobbing. The black came in again, sweeping him around the toilet bowl in tightening circles. Then a wasp stung his arm, and he tipped up on end, like a torpedoed ship sliding under, and went down for good.

10:00 A.M., EST, ABOARD UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 93

After taking control the four hijackers warn the passengers to stay in their seats. The young, clean–shaven men inform them there's a bomb aboard. They're returning to Newark, where they'll present their demands. This feels so familiar from a hundred movies the passengers obey. In all their lives, most have never been physically threatened. They've been told over and over that if they are, they should not resist. “If confronted by a criminal, a weapon, a threat, do as you're told; cooperate; do not anger them.” The police, the courts, the government, the military, detectives, fire crews, SWAT teams will rescue them. This too they've seen on a million television screens.

Do what you're told. Don't resist.

Comply.

Their new pilot climbs to forty thousand feet and heads toward Washington.

The FAA and the Command Center are trying to get jets in the air, but the air defense system, unalerted and geared to intercept threats approaching the Atlantic coast, is slow to reorient.

Meanwhile the passengers are on their cell phones. The news filters from seat to seat. Two airliners have crashed into the Twin Towers. A third has hit the Pentagon.

Someone isn't just hijacking airliners. They're crashing them into buildings. Turning them, and their occupants, into flying bombs.

A new understanding filters through these average citizens.

Within ten minutes, something within them shifts, changes. Doing nothing will end in their deaths, and those of others. They may die. But first, as Americans were once used to doing, they will fight.

A little before ten o'clock, led by a few men, they mass in the rear of the plane, getting ready to rush the cockpit.

A passing National Guard transport reports the aircraft waggling its wings. Shortly thereafter, it crashes south of Johnstown, near a little town called Shanksville.

Everyone aboard dies. But whatever the intended target—the White House, the Capitol, a second blow at the Pentagon—by the passengers' sacrificial bravery, no one else is killed.

7:25 P.M., YEMENI TIME, SANA'A, YEMEN

The embassy cafeteria was packed with staff Aisha had never met; she hadn't known there were this many Americans in Sana'a. Strangely, not one Yemeni, though dozens were attached to the embassy—drivers, maintenance people, translators. As if they knew this wasn't where they wanted to be. Not today.

The televisions were tuned to different channels, CNN, the BBC World Service, but for some reason the one with the biggest crowd was Al-Jazeera. Maybe the picture was better. Though by now the images were burned into her mind. Smoke pouring from the towers; a vast holocaust staining the sky. She watched each time the airborne cameras panned, relieved each time to see that as best she could tell, the pall was drifting southeast, across to Brooklyn. Not that she didn't care about people who lived in Brooklyn, or the thousands who must have died when the towers collapsed; but Tashaara and her mother lived to the north, three blocks above Central Park.

The flower-flame logo of the Arabic satellite channel flashed, and a modestly clothed, dark-haired commentator began speaking excitedly. Beside Aisha, Doanelson, the FBI agent, was breathing hoarsely. Sweat darkened the armpits of his gray suit. He nudged her. Muttered, when she frowned at him, “What's she saying?”