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Only months earlier, Frank De Martini, construction manager for the New York Port Authority, had dismissed the notion of one of the towers collapsing. “I believe the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door,” he said in an interview. “And the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing the screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting … The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it.”

An early design study had indeed suggested that the Trade Center would survive were a Boeing 707, the largest airliner of the day—“low on fuel and at landing speeds”—to strike one of the towers. Now, the buildings had been hit by far larger, far more powerful, 767s heavily laden with fuel. On 9/11, De Martini became concerned early on, and asked that structural inspectors be summoned. He was himself to die that day.

By about 9:50, photographs analyzed much later would show, the South Tower’s 83rd floor gave the appearance of drooping down over the floor below. Video footage showed a stream of molten metal cascading from a window opening near one corner. A minute later, a police helicopter pilot warned that there were “large pieces of debris hanging” from the South Tower. They looked as though they were about to fall.

Even earlier, at 9:37, a man on the 105th floor of the South Tower had called 911 with a frantic message. As regurgitated ten minutes later by a computer, it read in part:

STS FLOOR UNDERNEATH—COLLAPSE

In the welter of calls pouring in, that message went unread—or misread. The 911 caller had in fact been referring to floors beneath him, and he had used the past tense. The floors beneath him, “in the 90-something,” had already collapsed.

That word, from many mouths, and from early on.

Collapse.

SEVEN

FOUR HUNDRED MILES AWAY, OVER OHIO, THREE DOZEN OTHER civilians remained in their airborne purgatory. From about 9:30, for some thirty minutes, fourteen passengers and crew members of United Flight 93 managed to telephone either loved ones or operators on the ground.

The first to do so long enough to have a significant conversation, public relations man Mark Bingham, got through to his aunt’s home in California. “This is Mark,” he began. “I want to let you guys know that I love you, in case I don’t see you again.” Then: “I’m on United Airlines, Flight 93. It’s being hijacked.”

Two other callers from the plane not only provided information but gleaned vital news from those they phoned—news that may have influenced their actions in the minutes that followed. Tom Burnett, chief operating officer for a medical devices firm, made a number of brief calls to his wife, Deena. Speaking quietly, he asked her to contact the authorities, and told her that a male passenger had been stabbed—later that he had died. A woman, perhaps a flight attendant, was being held at knife point, and the hijackers claimed they had a bomb.

Jeremy Glick, a salesman for an Internet services company, also managed to phone. In a long conversation with his wife, Lyz, Glick said the hijackers had “put on these red headbands. They said they had a bomb … they looked Iranian.” The “bomb” was in a red box, he said. The couple told each other how much they loved each other. Glick said, “I don’t want to die,” and his wife assured him that he would not. She urged him to keep a picture of her and their eleven-week-old daughter in his head, to think good thoughts.

Burnett’s wife, who had been watching the breaking news on television, told him that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. “My God,” he responded, “it’s a suicide mission.” By the time he phoned a third time, after news of the crash into the Pentagon, she told him about that, too. Burnett seems to have been seated beside Glick, and apparently relayed all this information to him.

Were they to do nothing, the two men must have agreed, they were sure to die anyway when the hijackers