The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [204]
At 9:38 a.m., the third plane had crashed into the headquarters of American military power and the symbol of its might. When news came of the Pentagon strike, bin Laden held up four fingers to his wonder-struck followers, but the final strike, on the U.S. Capitol, would fail.
Ali Soufan called O’Neill from Yemen, but could not get a connection.
Steve Gaudin, just back from language school in Vermont, picked up a piece of an airplane on the corner of Church and Vesey Streets and helplessly thought, “I just didn’t ask enough questions.” A few feet away, Barry Mawn was walking west on Vesey Street, toward the police emergency command center. He saw a woman’s foot in the street with a pink sock and a white tennis shoe. Suddenly, the ground trembled. He looked up to see the south tower collapsing on top of itself, gathering momentum and force as it threw off a great gray cloud of pulverized concrete that spilled over the surrounding office towers in a massive cascade. It sounded like an express train roaring through the station, chased by a huge wind. Mawn, plagued by a herniated disk, hobbled after two firemen who ran through the shattered windows of 7 World Trade. There were six or seven men pressed together in the lobby, sheltering behind a single column. One of the firemen cried out that they should hold on to each other and not let go. Just then, the debris blew in like a bomb. If they hadn’t been behind a column they would have been shredded. The room blacked out and the men choked on the acrid dust. Outside, everything was on fire.
Half a block away, Debbie Doran and Abby Perkins, who were on the I-49 squad, were in the basement of a building on the corner of Church and Vesey. They remembered Rosie, the woman rescue workers had failed to save in the rubble of the Nairobi bombing in 1998. She had died of dehydration. Now they expected to be buried under a building themselves, and they began filling trash cans with water.
Dan Coleman was in his bureau car next to St. Paul’s Chapel, waiting for another member of the I-49 squad, when he saw a tornado coming up Broadway. It was incomprehensible. His partner ran past him, headed north. “Get in the car!” Coleman called out. Four policemen also jumped in; one of them was having a heart attack. Then the blackness of the cloud engulfed them. “Turn on the air conditioning!” one of the cops gasped. Coleman turned it on, and the car filled with smoke. He quickly switched it off.
Everybody was yelling at him to get out of there, but he couldn’t see anything. He backed up and almost rolled into a subway entrance. Then an ambulance appeared and the cops got out. Coleman abandoned the car and went to find the rest of his squad.
He walked inside the cloud against the stream of fleeing people who were like ash-covered ghouls, as if they had been exhumed. He also was as white as a snowman, and the dust was beginning to harden, turning his hair into a helmet. The dust was a compound of concrete, asbestos, lead, fiberglass, paper, cotton, jet fuel, and the pulverized organic remains of 2,749 people who died in the towers.
Valerie heard screams in the rental office next