“Go look for a man with a white beard,” Andrea told them. “That’s my husband. He’d love to talk with you.”
Forty minutes later, as she neared an exit, she heard gales of laughter: Bob was leading an impromptu class, asking questions, drawing his new friends into his sphere. Andrea snapped a photograph of the Muslim teens squeezed against a smiling Bob.
Two years earlier, in Chiapas, Mexico, they had watched as leftist Zapatista revolutionaries marched through the streets. Andrea asked Bob what drove the young men to take up arms. “When people aren’t heard long enough,” he said, “they’ll resort to violence.”
During their just-completed weekend in Rochester, Andrea and her daughter Nissa had wandered around a craft fair. Andrea said: “It’s just so strange. I cannot even imagine being any happier.”
“That is so weird,” Nissa said, stopping in her tracks. “Dad said the same thing to me last night.”
In the car, drawing closer to home, Bob waited as Andrea weighed his question about their future travels together. Reflecting on the man behind the wheel, Andrea felt that he had given her so much, asking relatively little in return. She turned to Bob with her answer: “Okay, I’ll do it.”
Bob woke before dawn to catch United Flight 175. As he left their bedroom, he promised Andrea that he’d call her that night. He put a copy of his California itinerary on the refrigerator, alongside newspaper clippings of recipes he intended to try. As he moved through the house, Bob looked sharp, his thick white hair freshly cut by Andrea the night before. On his desk were plans for no fewer than five trips, starting in ten days with leading a group of older travelers to Argentina, followed by jaunts to India and Norway.
Waiting outside at 5 a.m. to drive him to Logan Airport was Bob’s daughter Carolyn. On the way, they became so lost in conversation they almost missed the exit. Bob loved airports the way some children love construction sites. Happy, he bounded into Terminal C, holding a boarding pass for seat 16G.
ON THE OTHER side of the aisle, the self-described warrior in 15A was named Brian David “Moose” Sweeney (no relation to Flight 11 flight attendant Amy Sweeney).
Brian grew up in the little Massachusetts town of Spencer, where nothing much had happened since Elias Howe perfected the sewing machine there in 1846. He earned a football scholarship to Boston University, where opposing players noticed his bright blue eyes just before they saw stars. Known as Sweenz to his friends, Brian and a fellow lineman shared another nickname: the Twin Towers.
After college, Brian searched fruitlessly for a challenge, until he saw an air show display by F-14 fighter jets. He enlisted in the Navy and graduated at the top of his class to become a naval aviator. Brian served in the Persian Gulf War, enforcing the “no-fly zones” in Iraq, then taught at the Navy Fighter Weapons School, better known by its movie title name, Top Gun. He convinced himself that generations earlier, Norse warrior blood had mixed with his Irish heritage, so he fashioned a two-bladed battle-ax and a Viking helmet, complete with horns. He wore it on Halloween and whenever the mood struck.
While teaching at the Top Gun school, Brian twisted his neck during a flight maneuver and shattered two cervical disks, leaving him partially paralyzed while in midair. The military crash-and-burn team rushed out, but it left empty-handed when Brian somehow landed safely. Brian loved the Navy, but after surgery he faced an agonizing choice between a desk job and an honorable discharge. His commanding officer told him: “You have the heart of a warrior and the soul of a poet. You’ve proven your mettle as a warrior, now go find your spirit.” Brian stayed close to military service by working as an aeronautical systems consultant for defense contracting companies.
In 1998, Brian strolled into a snooty Philadelphia bar crawling with Wall Street types in custom suits. At six feet three and a rugged 225 pounds, wearing jeans, a denim shirt, hiking boots, and a baseball cap, Brian stood out like a linebacker among jockeys. A fit, pretty young woman named Julie spotted him from across the bar. She told her friend: “That’s the kind of guy that I can marry and sit in front of a fireplace in the Poconos with, and be happy.” The attraction was mutual.
Brian handed her a business card that read LT. BRIAN “MOOSE” SWEENEY—INSTRUCTOR, TOP GUN FIGHTER WEAPONS SCHOOL, MIRAMAR, CALIF. Julie thought it was a gag he used to impress women in bars. It was real, if somewhat dated. Julie was, in fact, impressed, and seven months later she became Mrs. Brian Sweeney.
By the summer of 2001, Brian and Julie had bought a house in Barnstable on Cape Cod, where she’d been hired as a high school health teacher. They had two dogs, and their talks about parenthood had grown more frequent. More than two years into their marriage, the twenty-nine-year-old Julie remained awestruck by her thirty-eight-year-old husband. She admired his self-confidence; she loved how this large and powerful man had a gentle voice that calmed her; she treasured the way he made her feel safe; she marveled at the practical intelligence that enabled him to build a house, while his spiritual side gave him peaceful assurance about an afterlife.
During the weeks before September 11, they’d talked about death. Brian told Julie that if he died, she should throw a party. “You celebrate life,” he said. “You invite all my friends and you drink Captain Morgan and you live. And if you find somebody, you remarry. I won’t be angry or jealous or whatever.”
Julie looked straight back at him and said: “Well, listen, if I ever die, you are not to do any of that. You are not to find anybody else.”
Brian laughed. “Someday you’ll figure that out.”
Brian traveled to California for work one week per month, regularly aboard United Flight 175. He’d normally be gone Monday through Friday, but he’d decided to extend his summer weekend and instead leave on Tuesday, September 11.
The night before the flight, they ate Chinese food, then Brian gave himself a haircut before starting to pack. Several weeks earlier, Brian found a photograph of Julie when she was five years old, with wet hair and a goofy smile. “This is the sweetest picture I’ve ever seen of you,” Brian told her when he discovered it. While Brian packed, Julie sneaked the photo into his suitcase, so he’d find it again when he reached California.
The morning of September 11, Julie drove Brian to the Cape Cod airport in Hyannis for a connecting flight to Boston. He was dressed in the same “Sweeney uniform” of jeans, denim shirt, work boots, and baseball cap he’d worn when they met. Brian kissed Julie, then surprised her with news that he’d be back a day early, so they could spend the last summer weekend together.
AMID THE FAMILIES, business travelers, and tourists were five Middle Eastern men who fit none of those categories. They selected seats almost exactly in the pattern Mohamed Atta and his four collaborators used aboard American Flight 11. Once again, the tactical arrangement placed members of their group close to the cockpit, while others could cover both aisles if anyone came forward to challenge them from the rear of the plane.
The first two to board United Flight 175 were Fayez Banihammad, of the United Arab Emirates, and Mohand al-Shehri, from Saudi Arabia, who sat in first-class seats 2A and 2B. Four weeks earlier, Banihammad had bought a multitool with a short blade, called a Stanley Two-Piece Snap-Knife Set.
Next came Marwan al-Shehhi, the native of the United Arab Emirates who’d met Atta and Jarrah in Hamburg and traveled with them to the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and then to Florida for flight training. Nine months earlier, Shehhi had received his FAA commercial pilot certificate at the same flight school, on the same day, as Atta, who sometimes referred to Shehhi as his “cousin.” On the same day as Banihammad’s knife purchase, in the same city, Shehhi had bought two short-bladed knives, one called a Cliphanger Viper and the other called an Imperial Tradesman Dual Edge.
Shehhi seemed the most likely person to have made the 6:52 a.m. call to Atta’s cellphone. The call was made from Logan’s Terminal C, from a pay phone