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flatly and with no emotion, as if describing a passing city bus. “I just saw another plane coming in from the side. That was the second explosion—you could see the plane come in, just on the right-hand side of the screen. So this looks like it is some kind of concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that is under way in downtown New York.”
    High in the sky, Officer Timothy Hayes, a helicopter pilot for the New York Police Department’s aviation unit, noticed something out of the corner of his eye. He was the first to arrive at Tower One after it was hit by Flight 11 and was reporting on the fire back to his headquarters when he saw another jet coming right at him. “I realized how close it was coming to us,” he said. “I thought it was going to impact our aircraft. So we climbed. He went underneath us.” Then he realized what was happening. “Jesus Christ,” he yelled to his partner, “there’s a second plane crashing.”
    On the phone, sitting at his desk on the eighty-first floor, was Fuji Bank loan officer Stanley Praimnath. “What I saw was the biggest aircraft ever, bearing down towards me, eye level eye contact. It’s coming towards me. I can still see the letters on the wing and the tail; big red letters. I screamed, dropped the phone, and dove under my desk.”
    In Newark’s tower, Rick Tepper was still holding on to the telephone as he followed Flight 175 up the Hudson River into Manhattan. “Oh my God!” he shouted. “He just hit the building.’’
    “It was the most excruciating sound you could ever hear,” said Stanley Praimnath as the plane sliced into his office. “It was like steel ripping against steel. And the revving of the engine just before it hit—it’s like the sound is still in my ears, it’s ringing. The wing was stuck in the office door, twenty feet from where I was.” Trapped, Praimnath began yelling. “Oh please, somebody help me,” he cried. “Help me, help me, don’t leave me to die, I don’t want to die.”
    Three floors above, on the eighty-fourth floor, Brian Clark, executive vice president of Euro Brokers, dropped into a football stance when a wing of the Boeing 767 smashed into his floor. “Boom, boom,” he recalled. “There were these distinct two noises right after one another and in an instant our room just fell apart.” The tower shuttered, floors buckled, and walls collapsed. “For ten seconds,” he said, “it felt like ten seconds, the building swayed toward the Hudson River, just one way, it kept going and I thought it was never going to stop. I thought the building was going over.” But it suddenly snapped back.
    At the time of the impact, NORAD’s two fighters from Otis Air National Guard Base were still seventy-one miles away—seven minutes’ flying time.
    When United 175 rammed into Tower Two, NORAD’s public affairs officer, Maj. Don Arias, was talking to his brother in the building. “Well, I better get out of here,” his brother said quickly, then hung up. He never made it out.

 
    CHAPTER 2
     
    DULLES
     
    Hearing of the second explosion, Beverly Eckert once more grabbed the phone to call her husband, Sean Rooney. Again, another message was waiting—but it had come in prior to the most recent event. “Just letting you know I’ll be here for a while,” Rooney said. “They’ve secured the building.” After trying unsuccessfully to call him, she rushed home to Glenbrook, Connecticut.
    By then, the two had been married for twenty-one years, and had known each other since meeting in their native Buffalo in 1967. For Rooney, it was a long commute to the World Trade Center every day, but he greatly enjoyed playing carpenter, plumber, electrician, and mason at his home in Connecticut. Since buying the house fourteen years earlier, he had added cement steps to the front door, built a fireplace mantel in the living room, and laid marble floors in the master bathroom. He even cultivated an herb garden. Eckert especially