THREE MINUTES

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Chapter 2

09:55, 11 September 2002

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Jason Clark gazed longingly at the ice in the bottom of his water glass, hoping some passing waiter would take pity on him and fill it. He looked forward to this brunch every month, even though part of the routine seemed to involve him waiting for half an hour. The restaurant this month was called Tabi, featuring "pan-Asian traditionalist fusion cuisine", whatever that was.

The beauty of this monthly lunch was that he often found a way to get his newspaper to pay for it, in exchange for a hastily written review. In fact Jason had begun writing it in his head, having already thought of a dozen phrases that all meant "bad service". From across the restaurant he finally spotted his lunch date, Peter Hayden, entering; the ubiquitous newspaper was tucked pointedly under his arm, and Peter was scanning the room.

The maitre d' pointed, and Peter stormed over to Jason's table, tossing the newspaper on the white tablecloth and grunting.

"What the hell is this?" said Peter, shaking his head and pulling out a chair. The newspaper headline read "Three Minutes Missing from Flight 93 Cockpit Tape". It was Jason's newspaper, the Times-Dispatch, and the article had Jason's byline.

"Good morning to you too."

"Good?" Peter rolled his eyes, sweeping both hands down his bald head and over his face, exhaling audibly. A moment passed. Finally he removed his hands. "Is this a career move we talked about?"

Jason put his arms on the table. "This is a story. It's huge."

"It's not a story," retorted Peter. "Stories have facts. The absence of facts is not a story. It's an investigation." Peter snorted. "And it sure as hell doesn't belong on the front page."

"It's the absence of the facts that is the story," said Jason weakly. He straightened up, meeting his mentor's gaze. "And this is shaking the tree. Someone, somewhere, will read this and contact me. Someone will come forward to explain this."

"I don't know which is worse," said Peter, picking up his menu. "I don't know if I'm more upset that you wanted to publish this, or that Brody agreed to print it."

"Brody wanted a headline that would break us from the pack," answered Jason.

This was true. Jason's editor had made him sit on this Flight 93 piece for months. Jason had explained how significant the missing three minutes could be, but Brody would have none of it. Every week Jason would badger him about it, and every week he would get shot down, and retreat to his desk to pound out local-interest stories about mildly corrupt politicians, or the occasional national piece on whatever sports figure had been caught in whichever compromising position that week. Finally, as the one-year anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks loomed large, Brody realized there was little he could do to compete with the other papers, both in Pennsylvania and around the country.

So he agreed to publish the piece.

The gist of the story was summed up in its headline; there were, as Jason interpreted things, three minutes missing from the cockpit voice recorder of United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth airliner to crash on 9/11. Like conversations lost from the Nixon tapes, Jason felt that these were the most significant missing minutes of his generation.

When hijackers took control of four commuter planes on 9/11, the world watched as they began to hit their targets. Flights 11 and 175 struck the two World Trade Center towers in New York. Flight 77 plowed through the side of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

But the fourth plane, Flight 93, ended up dissimilarly crashing in a reclaimed strip mine in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania, close to a tiny town called Shanksville. Rumors immediately started circulating that perhaps for this, the last plane, the military had not been caught so unaware, and were finally able to respond.

Some people believed, right from the start, that Flight 93 had been shot down.

As the days and weeks after the attacks unfolded, pieces of the story began to filter out through witnesses and government sources. Cell phone calls from the doomed flight suggested the passengers knew what was going on, and organized a revolt to try to wrest control back from the hijackers. The final analysis, unveiled by the FBI and repeated in the press, was that the passengers entered the cockpit, and in a struggle for the aircraft's yoke, sent the 757 spiraling into the ground.

Jason had good journalistic instincts; this meant that even in the face of this national tragedy, and even with the attractiveness of these newly-minted "Heroes of Flight 93", he was less interested in conjecture, and more interested in facts that could be confirmed. But there were startlingly few that he could verify.

For the first few days, Jason couldn't even find out when the impact took place. One official said 10:10, another 10:00, a third 10:03, a fourth amazingly 10:45! In frustration, Jason contacted a "forensic seismologist", a type of scientist known for determining when and where earth-shaking events occur. With the help of the existing system of seismic monitoring devices scattered around Pennsylvania, they were able to place the time of the crash to exactly 10:06 EST, with a margin of error of five seconds on either side.

It was the first verifiable fact, and Jason began to spread the news to his colleagues. But they were reluctant to accept the time, for by now the FBI and NORAD had sent their timelines to the press outlets world-wide. They repeatedly affirmed that Flight 93 had struck the earth at 10:03.

For several days after NORAD's press release, Jason was unconcerned with the difference. A few minutes was nothing to start a federal investigation over; indeed, he could sit in his office and cast a glance around several clocks in that one room, and discover that each one would read a different time.

But it turned out this was different. Aviation experts told him that for a crash investigation, especially of a modern airliner, times were precise and relatively indisputable things. Cockpit voice and data recorders, the near-mythical "black boxes" of the jet age, were among the chief tools crash investigators would use to determine a crash's cause. The timestamps within the "black box" were meticulously matched to air traffic control recordings, which were themselves calibrated to GPS clocks. These, Jason learned, were never off by more than fractions of a second.

And then, the Short book was published.

Philip Short, a European investigative reporter, wrote a book about his interviews with the families of Flight 93 victims. It was truly a remarkable piece of work, Jason had thought, if for nothing else the sheer effort and investment of time Short had displayed. The families had heard the Cockpit Voice Recording, or CVR, at an unprecedented FBI-hosted listening event. The families and their advocates had brought so much pressure to bear on the FBI, that in the end they capitulated and orchestrated the event, allowing no press, no cameras, and no recording devices. Although designed to help the families cope with the deaths of their loved ones, various pilot's associations were infuriated by this breach of protocol; this kind of information was usually only released to crash investigators who would use it specifically to prevent future accidents. Families were not crash investigators, and pilots feared the chilling effect such a move might have on the "last words" of future doomed pilots, and whether they might self-censor, knowing they might be heard by nonprofessionals.

Regardless, the families had been given the chance to listen; Short had pressed them for details about what they had heard on the tape, and one thing stood out for Jason.

The families (and Short) were adamant that the tape ended at 10:03.

Again Jason had consulted experts in aviation. To a man they told him that cockpit voice recorders, working properly, stopped recording at the moment of impact. That piece of information was even something crash investigators used to verify the time of impact. And that there were three minutes between the end of the CVR and the "seismic event" at 10:06 was, to put it mildly, puzzling.

There had been a few cases, his experts told him, where the CVR had stopped working before the aircraft hit the ground. They were extremely rare, and involved system-wide electrical disruptions, like an onboard fire. But the odds of Flight 93 having the poor luck to suffer an accidental electrical fire and a hijacking on the same day were too astronomical to consider.

One expert offered the explanation that the FBI had been "sloppy" with their time-synching process. But Jason dismissed that as unlikely; the hijackings on 9/11 rated among the seminal events of the new century. The crashes would probably be the most carefully investigated in aviation history.

A second explanation was that the FBI had been careless with their press release, issued only days after the attacks. Calls to the Bureau's press office confirmed only that the original report still stood, and that they concluded the crash took place at 10:03. They were unwilling to consider revising their conclusion in light of the seismic evidence, and Jason was told there would be no more information coming from that office until such time as the criminal investigation was concluded.

I won't be holding my breath, Jason had thought.

A third possibility of course was that the seismologist was wrong. Jason, in good journalistic fashion, had found another seismologist to check the work of the first. Interestingly, the man he located for his "confirmation test" had been commissioned by the Army to use the same methods to determine exactly when another flight, Flight 77, had struck the Pentagon. Since the structure absorbed most of the power of that impact, much like a collapsing frame in a Volvo, this scientist had been unable to tell the Army when the Pentagon had been hit.

The report explained all the reasons the Pentagon impact was, for seismologists, an "unknowable". Put simply, because of the building's collapsing-frame structure, the seismic waves the crash caused were indistinguishable from background noise, which the seismic instruments continually registered. In most situations that noise was predictable, and could be filtered out, but only if the seismic waves you wanted to look at were strong enough. These weren't, so there was no data to show.

The report could have ended there.

But scientists have a tendency to want to show something. In true research form, the seismologist and his staff had offered up something they could determine; after all, they were on the Army's dime. So they used their methodology, and the same existing network of instruments, to determine the exact impact time for Flight 93 for the report. That aircraft struck an open field, and with great force. The seismic signal was clear as a bell. When Jason had called, all they had to do was forward a copy of the unclassified paper they had submitted to the Army.

The report concluded, just like Jason's first seismologist had, that with a margin of error of around 5 seconds, Flight 93 impacted the earth at 10:06.

Jason had begun to feel the unmistakable tugging of a good scoop at his leg.

About a week later, a TV news network aired an interview with an air traffic controller who had been watching the flights blip across her screen on 9/11. The hair on the back of Jason's neck stood up when she said that the plane's transponder had disappeared from her scope at 10:03.

It had been the final straw. Something about the whole story was amiss. So Jason had scraped the puzzle pieces together, and written an article that had more questions than answers. Why did the CVR end at 10:03? Why did the transponder cut off at 10:03? And why, most of all, did authorities insist the crash happened at 10:03, when the seismologists agreed it happened three minutes later?

Brody had hated the piece. But when 9/11/02 came around, so had he, and it had been published. Front page.

And now Jason's mentor glared at him from behind a plated chicken breast.

"Brody's getting screamed at from all sides," said Peter. "Any questions like this, about this flight, are taboo." He wiped his mouth. "Especially in Pennsylvania. Christ, Jason, these people are heroes. And you're coming off like you're trying to ruin their memory."

"Peter, I've spoken to some of the families. They want the truth about their loved ones."

Peter grunted at him. "Did you give them the truth? No. You just stirred up emotions. That's not journalism."

Jason sat back and watched his friend eat. He had ceased to be hungry himself, and finally got the attention of a waiter. "Let me get the check," he told Peter. "I got paid today."

Peter smiled. "Let's hope you still have a job tomorrow."

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