Salem knew the place; he had flown there several times before. “We’re going to come out,” he said, according to Hinson. As for the breakfast, Salem joked, “You tell everybody with me it’s beef…I know I’m going to hell anyway.”9
The Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams lay about twenty miles northeast of San Antonio, on the edge of Schertz, an undistinguished town of several thousand people that was being slowly consumed by San Antonio’s far suburbs. A tattooed former U.S. Marine named Earl Mayfield had created the flying field about seven years earlier. He owned a small restaurant near San Antonio, took up ultralight flying as a hobby, and decided that he needed some land to fly properly. He bought a plot of fifty-seven acres off the Old Nacogdoches Road. He cleared the cedar trees himself with a bulldozer and built a few light metal hangars. One of his clients was AlamoArrow Ultralights, the local retailer whose salesman, George Harrington, had accompanied Salem all the way to Peshawar, Pakistan, in early 1985. AlamoArrow kept some rental aircraft at the field. It was a relaxed, casual place. In the open grass, Mayfield had built a small asphalt runway; it was about twenty feet wide. Nearby he had erected a snack bar with picnic tables and barbecues. The field lay flanked by scrubland—tall grasses and thorny mesquite trees bent by the wind. To the south, beyond a line of brush and trees, power line towers shaped like giant metallic scarecrows traversed a cleared right of way, running west to east; these towers rose more than one hundred feet into the air.10
Salem arrived about two in the afternoon that Sunday with at least four or five of his traveling party. Ian Munro, his patrician British business partner, was one of them. His half-brother Tareq was also along. They ate a big breakfast. Hinson drove Salem to his house so he could wash and use the bathroom. Salem wandered into Hinson’s garage and saw a Yamaha 1500cc motorcycle. He begged to ride back on the bike. Hinson climbed on and motioned Salem to get on behind him.
“No, I want to be on the front,” Salem said, as Hinson remembered it.
“You will kill me!…Do you think I’m crazy?”
“I used to own motorcycles—I had Harleys, I know how to ride a motorcycle…I will not show off or do anything.”11
He kept his word, at least until Hinson climbed off at Kitty Hawk, after which Salem promptly roared around pulling wheelies out in the field. Finally he set the motorcycle down, found a dune buggy with big rubber tires, and raced around in that. All the while, one of the Alamo-Arrow fliers was buzzing overhead in a new single-seater model, called a Sprint, which had just a few hours of flying time on it.
The Sprint came in for a landing and Salem decided to take a turn. A light rain had cleared, and the day had turned bright and sunny, with good visibility. The wind was blowing at about twenty to twenty-five miles per hour, brisk but not fierce. Salem emptied his pockets of coins, keys, and cigarettes, and climbed in.
He was wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeve, blue-and-white striped shirt. He had a pair of sunglasses tied around his neck on a chain, but no helmet or visor. Salem’s eyes tended to tear up badly in the wind; according to his friend Thomas Dietrich, he sometimes skied accidentally into trees because the tears would blur his eyesight. He used the sunglasses to protect his eyes, but they were not as effective as a visor. Somebody asked Salem if he wanted a helmet, but he said no; at that time, helmets were not required.12
He powered down the runway, tilted back, and climbed to about fifty feet. Then he leveled off and turned toward the power lines. The standard flight path at Kitty Hawk, particularly for new or inexperienced fliers, lay in the opposite direction—a westward turn, and eventually, a loop back around for a landing. It was not unusual for a veteran flier to turn southwest, however, and Salem had done this before, according to Hinson; the alternate path simply required a little more care because you had to climb quickly to an adequate height.
Salem’s friends watched him from the snack bar and the picnic tables. One person had climbed onto the cantina roof, from where he tracked Salem’s flight with a handheld video camera. The ultralight’s engine whined steadily. There were no signs of mechanical distress—no waggling of the wings, no audible change of power, no yaw or struggle to hold altitude. Salem flew straight and level—directly into the power lines.13
There was no sound, no pop or crackle, no shower or spark of electricity. The entangled aircraft tilted forward, nose down, as if in slow motion, and then it plummeted to the ground.
Amid stunned shouts and gasps, somebody called 911. It was a few minutes before 3:00 P.M. Earl Mayfield jumped in a golf cart and raced toward the tree line. Hinson and others ran behind him.
When they found Salem, he was strapped into his seat, facing down toward the ground. His eyes were open. Blood trickled from his ears. The engine had struck his head from behind. Both his legs were visibly broken.
They pulled him free, cradling his head. They laid him on the ground and tried to perform CPR while they waited for the ambulance from the Schertz Area Facility for Emergency Services. It arrived in about fifteen minutes. Two paramedics administered oxygen and continued to perform CPR. They loaded Salem into the cabin and drove away, lights flashing and sirens wailing. One of the paramedics scribbled notes: “Unable to find a good airway…No change on monitor.” The note taker checked boxes on the ambulance run report, indicating the subject’s condition: “Convulsing…nonreactive…critical.”14
The nearest trauma center was at the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, the command headquarters of the Fifth U.S. Army. It was less than fifteen minutes’ drive away.
It was there, about an hour later, that American military doctors formally pronounced Salem Bin Laden dead.
PART THREE
THE GLOBAL FAMILY
June 1988 to September 2001
24. WRITER-DIRECTOR-PRODUCER
THE NEWS ARRIVED in Saudi Arabia in the nighttime. King Fahd called Bakr to offer his formal condolences. Some of Salem’s friends and relatives had forecasted his death in an airplane crash, but as Mohamed Ashmawi put it, few of them imagined that he would die in a “Mickey Mouse plane.” The Bin Ladens, a second person close to them observed, had a way of experiencing such events with particular acuteness, as if they were succumbing to a collective illness. They felt Salem’s death as an overwhelming “family tragedy,” recalled Abdullah, one of his youngest half-brothers. There was also a pervasive confusion about how such an accident could have happened. Was suicide a possibility? Had he suffered an incapacitating heart attack or stroke while airborne? Had someone drugged or killed him? Conspiracy theories were commonplace in Saudi Arabia, where free discourse was forbidden and history was a narrative punctuated by genuine hidden conspiracies. Even if one presumed an accidental cause, Salem’s death marked the second time in two decades that the Bin Laden family had been decapitated by an aviation disaster with an American connection.1
After telephone calls between Texas, Jeddah, Riyadh, and the Saudi embassy in Washington, Khalid Bin Mahfouz dispatched his private 707 to San Antonio to retrieve his friend’s body. The Bexar County Medical Examiner had taken possession of Salem’s corpse after his death; the office was required to perform an autopsy in a case of this type. Tareq and other family members pleaded with their San Antonio friends to call in local favors to minimize the autopsy’s visible effects. Once Salem’s body was returned to Saudi Arabia, it would be washed, in Islamic tradition, in the presence of Bin Laden brothers and male friends. Gerald Auerbach and Jack Hinson contacted a mortician they knew in San Antonio; he agreed to pick up Salem from the medical examiner and prepare him cosmetically for his journey home.