Who Financed 9/11? (page 4 of 7)

The Heroes

When Tom hung up, Deena called Beverly and gave her the news. Tom Sr., standing nearby, yelled out "NO! NO!" Martha and Mary Margaret rushed to the house, and the family prayed together, then stood in front of the television, flipping channels. Tom Sr. went out onto the back patio, where countless times he'd thrown baseballs and footballs with his son, and then to the front walk, where he paced, sent up prayers to Mary, promised God he'd do anything, anything, if his son got safely off that plane.

As the family watched, reports began to come on the TV that a large plane was down in Pennsylvania. "They didn't say 'crashed,' " Mary Margaret remembers. "They said, it 'was down.' I kept holding out hope." But just after 10 a.m., Tom Sr. was on the front walk when he heard a scream and wailing from inside the house. He knew instantly what it meant.

Exactly what happened on United Flight 93 will never be known. Scheduled to depart Newark at 8:01 a.m., it was delayed for 41 minutes in heavy runway traffic. It finally took off approximately four minutes before American Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

After that, the details become less clear. Breakfast had been served in first class by the time the hijackers made their assault on the cockpit. Tom made his first call to Deena at 9:27. Controllers at the Cleveland traffic control center heard the pilot or co-pilot say, "Get out of here! Get out!," then a gasping sound such as a man would make if his throat had been cut. They next heard someone with an accented voice telling the passengers that there was a bomb on board, that the plane was headed back to Newark. We know that one person was killed immediately after the hijacking. "I tried to help him," Tom said in his second call to Deena, "but I couldn't get a pulse."

The 41-minute delay meant that those on Flight 93 would hear about the other hijackings and be able to guess the hijackers' real plans. Between his calls to Deena, Tom passed on news to fellow passengers, who had been herded to the back of the nearly empty coach section. In later calls, Deena could hear him exhorting them to action. Tom was 6'2", 205 pounds, and accompanied by a group of other large men with similar athletic credentials. Mark Bingham was 6'5", 230 pounds, and a champion rugby player; 6'1" Jeremy Glick, also thought to be involved in the attempted takeover, had won a national collegiate heavyweight judo championship. Todd Beamer was 6', 200 pounds, and Lou Nacke was a 200-pound weightlifter. One passenger, Don Greene, had extensive flying experience, including some jet-simulator training, and was likely the one who would have taken over the controls, had the revolt been successful.

At 9:36, when it had been in the air almost an hour, Flight 93 turned abruptly south above Ohio. At 9:57 the sounds of a scuffle were recorded on the cockpit voice recorder. Probably a group of passengers used the food service cart as a battering ram to crash through the cockpit door, and then utensils, trays, boiling water, and their bodies as weapons. Certainly they were close to achieving their goal because those family members who gathered to hear the cockpit voice recording in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18, 2002, said the hijackers were arguing among themselves as they realized the passengers were about to take back the plane. Deena, Tom Sr., Beverly and Tom's sisters are sure beyond a doubt that they heard Tom Jr. yelling, "In the cockpit! In the cockpit!," and then someone else saying, "Pull up!"

Eyewitnesses in and around Shanksville, Pennsylvania, say Flight 93 was flying upside down as it came in low over the tree line. On the cockpit voice recorder you can hear the screaming of the wind; the plane was moving at almost 600 mph when it hit a reclaimed strip mine on a forlorn hillside in the Allegheny Mountains at 10:06 a.m.

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