Free A Pretext for War by James Bamford Page B

bad the smoke was now. “It’s getting bad,” said Rooney. “The windows are getting hot.” Eckert asked him if anyone else was there. Rooney said there were other people nearby but he was alone. Gathered in a conference room on the same floor were at least two hundred other people who had also hoped to escape to the roof and be rescued. Instead, like Rooney, they were all trapped.
    By now Eckert knew there was little hope left. “Sean,” she said with great sadness, “it doesn’t seem to me that they are going to be able to get to you in time. I think we need to say good-bye.” For the next few minutes, the two talked about their love and the happy years they had spent together. Eckert said she wished she were there with him. Rooney asked her to give his love to everyone. “I love you,” he said.
    The time was getting very short in Tower Two. At 9:47, in an office near Rooney on the 105th floor, a woman called fire rescue with an ominous message. The floor underneath her, she said, was beginning to collapse.
    About the same moment, Ronald DiFrancesco, who had changed his mind after climbing to the ninety-first floor and turned around and headed back down through the smoke, finally emerged from Tower Two. A short while before, fellow worker Brian Clark and Fuji Bank’s Stanley Praimnath had also made it out successfully. But just then, a short distance from the entrance, DiFrancesco saw a fireball racing toward him and he tried to block it with his arms in front of his face.
    Over the phone, Eckert suddenly heard an enormous explosion followed by a crack and then a roaring sound. “The floor fell out from underneath him,” she said. “It sounded like Niagara Falls. I knew without seeing that he was gone.” With the phone cradled next to her heart, she walked into another room and on the television she could see Tower Two collapsing—the first tower to go down.
    “I will always be grateful that I was able to be with him at the end and that we had a chance to say good-bye,” Eckert said. “He was so calm. It helped me in those final moments. So many people missed the last phone call. So many are saying, ‘If only I had a final chance to say good-bye.’”
    DiFrancesco was thrown to the ground, bones were broken, his arms were burned, and his lungs were singed, but he was alive. Rescue workers quickly gathered him up and took him to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he later recovered. He would be the last person out of Tower Two.
    Mable Chan, the NBC
Dateline
producer, had just spotted a police helicopter near the top of Tower Two. “I thought to myself that it must have been the rescue chopper trying to save people trapped inside. I wanted that shot, I needed that shot.” Then she suddenly let out a chilling scream. “Ahhhhh—Oh my God! Oh my God!” She recalled, “Everyone around me started screaming and squealing.”
    “It’s down!” shouted a reporter in a helicopter. “The whole tower, it’s gone! Holy crap!” The time was 9:59:04.
    A stampede began on the streets as everyone began pushing and rushing to escape the collapsing skyscraper. Producer Mable Chan, wafer-thin with black flowing hair, was immediately swept up as if caught helplessly in a raging rapid. “Soot and fragments were gushing out and the crowd was about to run me over,” she recalled. “I finally turned around and started fleeing for my life, but thick layers of charcoal gray dirt came over me.”
    She was knocked facedown on the hard cement, and a shoe kicked her in the side, another crushed her left knee, and still another struck her neck. Bleeding, her jeans ripped, she looked up. “I only saw feet running in front of my eyes and heard screaming men and women swirling around me. I asked myself, ‘Is this it?’” But she struggled to her feet and found temporary safety in a satellite truck owned by the local cable televison channel, New York One.
    At that moment, F-15 pilots Daniel Nash and Timothy Duffy, who had