Among the Heroes by Jere Longman

Author:Jere Longman [Longman, Jere]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-202865-5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

At one point, Lyz Glick began to lose it on the phone. “Oh, my God, they’ve got a bomb and Jeremy’s on the plane,” she said, the dam of her emotions starting to break. But Jeremy said something comforting, and her father heard her say, “I’ll be strong, I’ll be strong.”

Jeremy told Lyz he loved her and he said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it out of here.” Lyz had seen him cry only when his daughter was born, and now he seemed to be crying again.

Lyz tried to comfort her husband, to give him hope that he would come through this ordeal safely. “You’re being silly,” she said. “That’s not going to happen.”

They kept saying “I love you,” over and over, “I love you,” until it seemed as if they had said it two hundred times. The words seemed to calm them.

“I need you to be happy in the rest of your life,” Jeremy told Lyz. “I’ll support any decisions that you make.” He told her to love their baby and to tell Emerson how much he loved her.

Lyz’s father retrieved the cell phone from the car and her mother dialed 911. What was the flight number? the 911 dispatcher wanted to know.

Where was the plane headed?

How many passengers?

What was the nationality of the hijackers?

What did they look like?

What did the ground look like beneath the plane?

Were they circling?

The plane had made a turn, Jeremy said. They were somewhere around Pittsburgh, still high in the air. About thirty-five passengers were onboard. He could see a rural landscape.

At some point, the New York state police seemed to patch in. Lyz heard a click late in the conversation. Questions were being asked and relayed, and answers were being handed from person to person, like buckets of water being used to fight a fire.

Jeremy seemed bewildered. The hijackers said they had a bomb, but passengers were hearing on their phones that planes were crashing into the World Trade Center. Was it true about the Trade Center? Were the hijackers blowing planes up?

He didn’t say it, but he seemed to think that if the terrorists intended to blow the plane up, it might be futile to rush the hijackers. If the terrorists were going to crash it into a building, maybe the passengers had a chance to do something.

“Are they going to blow this plane up?” Jeremy asked.

She didn’t know, Lyz said, but, yes it was true that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. By now, it was almost ten o’clock. At nine fifty-eight, the south tower collapsed in a telescoping of smoke and metal and glass and crumbled rescue.

Were they going to crash his plane into the World Trade Center? Jeremy wanted to know.

“No,” Lyz said, almost laughing. “They are not going there.”

Why? Jeremy asked.

One of the towers had just fallen.

“They knocked it down,” Lyz told him. The north tower was wounded, too. Be strong, she said. The hijackers could be taking the plane somewhere else.

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