The Morning Of ... More pages from "Triple Cross" by Peter Lance

By the morning of September 11, FDNY fire marshal Ronnie Bucca had long since given up trying to alert the FBI to the dangers of al Qaeda. After his brief nine-month assignment as a terrorism adviser to the FDNY had run its course, he returned to the Bureau of Fire Investigation full-time. He had recently told his wife Eve and two children, Ronnie and Jessica, that he was thinking of returning to a rescue company, where saving lives was a daily routine.

That morning he'd arrived to work early at Manhattan Base, the fire marshal's headquarters, located above Ladder 20, a firehouse on Lafayette Street in Soho. Then, at 8:46 AM, when Mohammed Atta crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Canter, Ronnie heard a noise that another marshal later described as "the sound of a dumpster hitting a pot hole." He ran to the window and asked fire-fighters in the street down below what it was. One of them yelled up, "The Trade Center's on fire."

Moments later, Bucca and his boss, Supervising Fire Marshal Jimmy Devery, were roaring south in Ronnie's Chevy, "lights and sirens" toward the Twin Towers. "Christ, you called it," said Devery, but Ronnie didn't respond. He just stayed focused and pushed the pedal to the floor. Apart from warning his firefighter "brothers" throughout the city for years that the Trade Center was "vulnerable", Ronnie had also made regular visits to "Ten and Ten" (Engine #10 and Ladder #10), the firehouse on Liberty Street at the southern perimeter of the WTC complex. On an almost monthly basis he talked to security people at the Towers, asking if there were any new means of entrance or egress that might make the Towers vulnerable.

Mindful of the blueprints that Egyptian accountant Ahmed Amin Refai had taken from the FDNY before the first bombing in 993, Bucca figured that the next attack would come from below. But just after he and Devery screeched up to the firehouse on Liberty Street, and they pulled on their turnout coats and Cairns helmets, they heard an enormous explosion above them. UA Flight 175, piloted by Marwan al-Shehi, had just sliced through the South Tower. Ronnie Bucca wasn't a member of a fire suppression unit. He had no responsibility to enter the complex. But Bucca knew the Towers better than he knew the FDNY headquarters at Metrotech in Brooklyn. So he and Devery strapped on their Scott's airpacks and headed up a side stair-well.

A five-mile-a-day runner, Bucca soon outdistanced Devery, who was a heavy smoker. By the fiftieth floor, the supervisor was ready to collapse, but just then a woman in her mid-forties came down the stairs, badly burned. Her name was Ling Young. "She practically fell into my arms," Devery told me later. "So I yelled up to Ronnie, "I'm gonna take her out.". Bucca yelled back that he was going to try and make it to the "fire floor" on seventy-eight, where the 767 had hit. "I hear people screaming," he said, and that was the last that Jimmy Devery saw of him.

Barely able to get Ms Young out to safety, as bodies dropped into the Plaza around them, Devery looked back up toward the smoke billowing from the South Tower, Radio broadcasts later recovered from that day showed that Ronnie Bucca had made it up to the seventy-eight floor. There he lined with a battalion chief named Oreo Palmer. As it turned out, the two men had climbed higher than any other firefighters in either tower. Together, Bucca and Palmer raced against time to help those trapped on the seventy-eighth floor lobby, but the flames were so intense that the tower's structural steel began to melt. Fifty-five minutes after UA 175 had pierced the building, the 110 storey tower began to collapse.

Days later, the depth of Bucca's heroism was underscored when his remains were discovered. He had taken off his fire retardant Nomex turnout coat and used it to shied some of the office workers who had huddled amid the flames. In perhaps the cruelest of all the 9/11 ironies, Ronnie Bucca, the fire marshal who had tried to warn the FBI's JTTF about al Qaeda's threat to the Trade Center, had now himself gone down in Yousef's second attack, executed by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Patrick Fitzgerald had arrived in Chicago that day. Promoted to US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois after his successes in New York's Southern District, he was being shown around town by an SDNY alumnus when he got the news that America was under attack. One can only imagine how Fitzgerald, the Justice Department's bin Laden expert must have felt. He knew that back east in some federal detention facility, sat a man who could have warned him that this latest attack in Osama bin Laden's thousand-year war had been coming.

What would Fitzgerald, the man Vanity Fair later anointed "the best prosecutor in the United States", say now to Ali Mohamed?

Note: if you want more info about this book and the author and why some people want it off the shelves, check my earlier post here .