Ground Zero(64)
Despite everything that had happened, everything Pasoon had done, Reshmina’s heart still ached at the sight of him. He was her twin, after all. A piece of her would always be missing when they were apart. But apart they would always be, as long as Pasoon chose revenge.
Pasoon raised a hand to wave to her, but Reshmina turned away.
“Come, Baba,” Reshmina told her father. “I’ve found another path.”
On September 11, 2001, I was an eighth-grade English teacher in Tennessee. When news of the attacks in New York City hit our school community, we collected the students in the gym, wheeling in blurry TVs with bad reception as all of us—teachers and students—struggled to understand what was happening. No one had a smartphone. There was no Facebook, no Twitter. Instead we turned to one another with the questions we were asking: What was going on? Why would someone do this? Would there be more attacks? Were we now at war? And with whom? What would happen next?
There was only one thing we knew for certain: Nothing would ever be the same.
I tried to write about 9/11 in the years right after 2001, but it always felt too soon. Nearly twenty years later, when my editor and I were discussing what my next novel would be, I finally felt like I was emotionally ready to tell the story of that day—and how the world is different now because of it.
Brandon and Reshmina, along with all the people in their respective stories, are fictional characters. But everything they see and do is based on actual events. Reshmina’s village is fictional but is located in the real Kunar Province, a mountainous part of Afghanistan where the US and its allies have fought a bitter war with the Taliban since 2001. For the sake of story, I have combined a few events from different years in the War in Afghanistan into a single day. The US forward operating base that Pasoon targets with his rifle, for example, would have already been abandoned a few years before he was hired to shoot at it.
Similarly, in Brandon’s story, I took the liberty of incorporating a few incidents that took place in the South Tower into the North Tower.
A note on language: Pashto, the language of more than forty million people throughout the world, uses an alphabet based on Arabic script, and there are many different spelling options when transliterating Pashto words into written English. When choosing how to spell a Pashto word in the text, I used the spelling I found most commonly online and in my research.
Made up of seven buildings, the World Trade Center complex opened in 1973 in Lower Manhattan. Its two tallest structures, the 1,368-foot-tall 1 World Trade Center and the 1,362-foot-tall 2 World Trade Center—known as the North and South Towers—immediately became the tallest buildings in the world. By the time of the attacks in 2001, the complex was home to more than 430 businesses. An estimated 50,000 people worked there, with another 140,000 people passing through as visitors each day—more than the populations of 29 state capitals. The World Trade Center was so big it had its own zip code!
Windows on the World, the restaurant on the top two floors of the North Tower, was a popular dining destination. I went to Windows on the World in February 2001, just seven months before the attacks, when my wife and I were visiting New York City. The views were indeed spectacular. The kitchens in Windows on the World were, in reality, on the 106th floor. I took the liberty of putting them on the 107th floor in Brandon’s story.
The World Trade Center symbolized the height of American business and achievement. Perhaps that’s what made it such an appealing target for terrorist attacks. In 1993, terrorists detonated 1,500 pounds of explosives in the parking garage underneath the North Tower, with the intention of bringing down both towers. The buildings survived, but the blast destroyed five underground levels of the North Tower, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists again tried to bring down the towers, and this time they succeeded. Nineteen terrorists armed with box cutters hijacked four passenger planes and deliberately flew two of the planes into the World Trade Center.
The first of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11, slammed into the 96th floor of the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., traveling close to 450 miles per hour and carrying 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, which ignited on impact. The crash instantly killed the 92 people on board the plane and every person on floors 94 to 99 of the tower. Many people on floors right above and below the crash found themselves trapped. None of the 1,402 people stuck on floors 92 through 107 would survive.
Like Brandon, thousands more people below the impact zone were stunned and shaken but alive. No one yet understood just how dangerous the situation was. Emergency operators answering 911 calls that day gave people the same instructions they would give in a regular emergency: Stay where you are and wait for the fire department. In the South Tower, employees who had begun to evacuate when they saw and heard the explosion in the North Tower were told that everything was all right and that they could return to their offices.
Most people thought the crash of Flight 11 was an accident until seventeen minutes later, when United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The plane came in at an angle, destroying most of floors 77 to 85. Hundreds of people were killed instantly, including all sixty-five people on board the airplane. Incredibly, one of the South Tower’s three stairwells survived the impact, and eighteen people from above the 77th floor were able to make their way down and around the impact zone to safety. Another 614 people who never found the open staircase were not as fortunate.