Lead-Nose
This is based on a true story. While it is a dramatization, all information is true and based on their personal accounts.
The second plane hit the south tower on the TV in the squadron bar.
Nobody said anything at first. There were a dozen of them from the 121st crowded around the set, still in flight suits from the morning brief, watching the smoke smear across lower Manhattan. Penney felt the cold start at the small of her back. She was twenty-six. She had been a Guard pilot for less than a year.
Then the phone in ops started ringing and didn’t stop.
The Pentagon was hit at 9:37. Somebody yelled it from the hallway. Somebody else was already sprinting for the ready room. Sass grabbed her by the shoulder and moved her toward the door without a word, and she went, because that was what you did.
Pre-flight took twenty minutes when you did it right. They had none.
Down in the arming pits, the load crews were dragging pallets and cursing. AIM-9s. AIM-120s. The missiles that made an F-16 what it was. Nobody had jets hot on the ramp that morning. Nobody had needed to. The DC Air National Guard flew training out of Andrews. They didn’t stand air-defense alert.
Sass was already zipping his G-suit when he turned to her.
“I’ll take the cockpit,” he said.
Get Jordan Strickler’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Something went still inside her. It wasn’t fear. Fear would come later, in the truck on the way home, when her hands wouldn’t stop shaking on the wheel. What she felt now was the calm you get when the problem in front of you becomes very simple.
“I’ve got the tail,” she said.
That was the plan. That was the whole plan. No missiles. A hundred and five lead-nosed training rounds in the M61, useless against the airframe of a Boeing 757 except at a range so close she’d already be dead. So they would fly into it. Sass would go for the flight deck. She would come in behind him and shear off the empennage. Without a tail, an airliner tips over and goes into the ground. That was aerodynamics. That was arithmetic.
She wondered, buckling in, whether she’d have time to punch out. She decided she wouldn’t try. If she flinched at the last second and missed, the plane would keep going, and it would keep going all the way to the Capitol.
The canopy came down. The engine wound up. She could hear her own breathing in the mask.
They rolled together, wingtip to wingtip, and lifted off Andrews into a sky that was already wrong. No airliners. No contrails. Just the two of them climbing, and the smoke from the Pentagon smearing across the horizon to their south.
Sass’s voice came through the headset, flat and calm. Vector northwest. Look for a widebody, low, transponder dark. She rogered him and pushed the throttle up.
She thought about her father, who had flown for United, and about the passengers on the jet they were going to find, who would never know she was there. She thought about the flight deck she was going to shear off, and about the people sitting in the seats behind it. She did not let herself think about them for long.
They ran their orbits over Pennsylvania. They flew until fuel bingo. They found nothing.
It was hours before anyone told them why.
A field near Shanksville. Passengers had gone up the aisle. The men she was hunting had put the airplane into the ground themselves rather than let it be taken back. Forty people she never saw and never would see had done the thing she had lifted off to do, and they had done it first, with their bare hands.
Penney taxied in. The crew chief was waiting on the ramp. She sat in the cockpit a long time before she opened the canopy.
