The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [203]
Ali Soufan and a handful of other agents were in the American Embassy in Yemen. Barbara Bodine had been rotated out of the country and the new ambassador had not yet arrived. Soufan was talking to his fiancée on the phone when she told him that the Trade Center had been attacked. He asked permission of the deputy chief of mission to enter the ambassador’s office to turn on the TV. Just as he did, the second plane hit.
Valerie James was arranging flowers in her office when “the phones started ringing off the hook.” It was a little after nine in the morning. Her children were calling her in a panic. Finally, O’Neill called. “Honey, I want you to know I’m okay. My God, Val, it’s terrible. There are body parts everywhere. Are you crying?” She was. He asked if she knew what had hit the building. She told him that her son had guessed it was a 747. Then he said, “Val, I think my employers are dead. I can’t lose this job.”
“They’re going to need you more than ever,” she told him.
In Afghanistan, bin Laden also wept and prayed. The accomplishment of striking the two towers was an overwhelming signal of God’s favor, but there was more to come. Before his incredulous companions, bin Laden held up three fingers.
At 9:25, Anna DiBattista, who was driving to Philadelphia on business, received a call from O’Neill. The connection was good and then it decayed. O’Neill said he was safe and outside. “Are you sure you’re out of the building?” she asked. O’Neill replied that he loved her. She absolutely knew he was going back in.
The cloudless sky filled with coiling black smoke and a blizzard of paper—memos, photographs, stock transactions, insurance policies—which fluttered for miles on a gentle southeasterly breeze, across the East River into Brooklyn. Debris spewed onto the streets of lower Manhattan, which were already covered with bodies. Some of them had been exploded out of the building when the planes hit. A man walked out of the towers carrying someone else’s leg. Jumpers landed on several firemen, killing them instantly.
The air pulsed with sirens as firehouses and police stations all over the city emptied, sending the rescuers, many of them to their deaths. Steve Bongardt was running toward the towers, against a stream of people racing in the opposite direction. He heard the boom of the second collision. “There’s a second plane!” somebody cried. Bongardt wondered what kind of aircraft it was, perhaps a private jet that had gotten off course. Then, three blocks away from the towers, he saw one of the massive engines that had blown all the way through the tower. It had landed on a woman, who was still alive and squirming underneath. Bongardt understood then that this was the work of bin Laden.
O’Neill went back into the north tower, where the fire department had set up a command post. The lobby stank of jet fuel, which was draining into the elevator shafts, creating an explosive well. Heavily laden firemen made their way up the stairs. They were used to disaster, but their eyes were filled with awe and uncertainty. Meanwhile, a slow-moving stream of people descended the escalators from the mezzanine, like a dream. They were wet and caked in slime. Some of them had come from the upper floors and were naked and badly burned. Police directed them to the underground tunnels to avoid the jumpers. A rumor raced through the room that a third plane was headed toward them. Suddenly one of the elevators, which had been paralyzed after the strike, popped open, disgorging a dozen dazed people who had been trapped since the first plane hit and had no idea what had happened.
Wesley