Campaign ยท 9/11: Three Days
You start at five in the morning. Nothing has happened yet, the first aircraft is not hijacked for another three hours, and nobody has told you anything. There is no threat on any desk you can point at. Whatever you are going to do about it, you have to do it now, on a morning that looks exactly like every other Tuesday.
Start the campaignMost historical scenarios give you a script on a timer. Events fire whether you act or not, and your job is to react faster than the clock.
This one doesn't work that way. The cell is a power in the game with its own aims, its own resources and its own timetable. It believes it is undetected. It cannot see what you are doing, and it has no way to adapt once the day begins. Hold the right flight on the ground, get a warning to a cockpit, change what boarding looks like at the right counter, and the plan bends. Do nothing and it proceeds on schedule.
You don't get told it exists. You will not see it listed anywhere. The first you hear of it is whatever your own people manage to notice.
From a played game, unedited. Times are in-world. None of it is what happened in 2001. It is what one player's decisions produced instead.
The Otis lead acknowledges, calls "Fox," and engages the wide-body over the Hudson corridor short of the dense skyscraper core; NEADS confirms weapons release and loss of the track.
Debris falls across the lower Hudson, the Jersey City waterfront and the harbor rather than the financial district; Coast Guard cutters already repositioned into the approach corridor are first on scene, and no survivors are reported among those aboard.
Cleveland Center reports a transcontinental departure that has stopped answering and has deviated from its clearance with no transponder; NEADS holds a single primary return and asks the Situation Room for direction.
On presidential order the Guard lead fires and the transcontinental aircraft comes down in open farmland in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, well short of Pittsburgh, with no survivors and no reported casualties on the ground.
Word of a downed airliner reaches jammed Pittsburgh bridges before any official statement does, and the unguided evacuation turns into gridlock that blocks the very ambulances Harrisburg is trying to push toward Somerset County.
Three aircraft came down that morning and the towers were still standing. On the real 11 September, 2,977 people died. Here the dead were the passengers and crew of three airliners, and nobody in New York ever found out how close it had come.
What the country saw was its own air force killing civilians on three separate occasions before lunch, ordered each time by a President with no name to give them and no proof of anything. You cannot show people the disaster you prevented. There is no footage of it.
CIA, FBI and NSA stand up an emergency attribution fusion cell and begin cross-checking airline manifests against watchlists, cautioning that a name will take hours and that the ground stop remains the better check against unknown aircraft.
Ottawa states publicly that Canadian aircraft flew the intercept under shared NORAD tasking and that no Canadian weapon was released, closing its written-tasking file without comment on the outcome.
By that afternoon the campaign's own scoring had the response at full marks and domestic stability at seven out of a hundred. Both were true at once. That is the scenario.
Turns run at five, ten, thirty or sixty minutes of game time, and you pick the length each turn. A quiet hour can pass in one. When something starts, you drop to five-minute turns and argue with NORAD about engagement authority a few minutes at a time.
You can also set a stopping condition before you advance. Give the turn an hour and tell it to stop at first contact, and it will hand the clock back the moment a controller loses a transponder, rather than running the hour out around you.
The force structure is the real one. Seven alert sites across the continental United States with fourteen armed fighters between them. Two F-15s at Otis, two F-16s at Langley. No AWACS on airborne alert anywhere, the fleet sitting at Tinker in Oklahoma, twelve hundred miles from a northeastern orbit. No tanker on air-defence alert, which is what turns an interception into a patrol you can hold. No shared radar picture between the FAA and the military, so the only thing NORAD knows is what somebody reads down a telephone.
Engagement authority rests with the President and the Secretary of Defense, and with nobody else. Standing practice is to escort and report. An interceptor without that authority can fly alongside an aircraft and do nothing else.
Sources are the 9/11 Commission Report, chapter 1. The scenario is a counterfactual rather than a reconstruction. It doesn't dramatise the attacks, and it doesn't give you advance knowledge of them.
American 11 leaves Boston at 07:59 Eastern. The clock starts three hours before that, and almost everything you can still change happens in them.
Start the campaign