Scott Auker's 9/11 nightmare started in a large trading room in midtown Manhattan.

Auker, a former wrestler and football player at Manheim Central, sold securities for J.P. Morgan. He was at work, like always, on that gorgeous Tuesday morning a decade ago.

His workplace was a huge room ("probably as big as a football field," he said by telephone Thursday), filled with traders on phones, sitting in front of computers, doing their frantic, hyper-drive, greasing-the-wheels-of-capitalism thing.

They were a few miles from the World Trade Center, but in a sense, an electronic sense, they were much closer than that.

"The telecommunications in a place like that are very quick, lots of lines that are directly tied in to places," Auker said. "It's the kind of thing where you hit one button and a customer, or whoever, is right there."

Seated next to Auker was another trader, on the phone with a customer from Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond-trading firm with offices in the World Trade Center.

Cantor Fitzgerald was located on the 101st-105th floor of the building, two to six floors above where the first plane hit.

And the first plane hit while Auker's colleague was on the phone.

"The line went dead," Auker said. "Then [the colleague] said, 'Something just happened at the World Trade Center.' "

The phone call was probably the last act of that Cantor Fitzgerald employee's life. The company lost 658 employees, about two-thirds of its workforce, more than the New York City Fire Department, the NYC Police Department or any other WTC tenant.

"Suddenly," Auker said, "the room got super-quiet."

Yet the baroque electronic systems that connect New York's financial behemoths were still computing. Exactly six seconds after the first plane hit, a Goldman Sachs server sent out an alert page saying its computer trading apparatus had gone offline because it was unable to interface with a Cantor server.

Getting out

Literally within seconds, Auker said, traders were dumping stocks in lieu of government bonds.

(So when it appeared that the stuff could really have hit the fan, when an existential threat to our very civilization seemed possible, the most sophisticated trading systems on earth began frantically betting on the U.S. government. Another column, but interesting.)

The second plane hit soon after. It began dawning on Auker and his co-workers, sitting on the seventh floor of a building, that getting out of there was a priority.

Auker and a buddy got to the street. The buddy lived in New Jersey, and it quickly became clear that he wasn't getting out of Manhattan that evening.

Auker's wife worked about 10 blocks north, so they hiked there, located her and another friend, and the group headed to Auker's apartment, on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

The walk across Central Park to the West Side was like something out a movie. Military planes screamed overhead. Groups of people huddled around radios. In the capital of the world, everything was spookily, impossibly quiet.

"That's when you thought, 'This is bad,' " Auker said. "Then we heard that the Pentagon had been hit. At that point, it was like, 'Holy… .' "

They got to the apartment, and post 9/11 began. They studied the surreal footage on TV, and called all the family and friends they could think of including, in Auker's case, Manheim Central football coach Mike Williams.

Auker knew so many people who'd been hit more deeply than he had. Two of his brothers-in-law worked at the WTC. They got out. One of his wife's best friends — they had been in each other's weddings — was the daughter of a fireman who went in and never came out.

The coming days were spent waiting, hoping, and then attending funerals.

"Even though I wasn't right there, I was close enough," Auker said.

"You could feel the impact in a lot of ways. You could smell it."

Auker was the 1991 Class AA state 135-pound wrestling champion, and wrestled at F&M. He played on Central's district-champion football teams on 1989 and '90, although he said "I'd probably have to carry the water now, as big and fast as the guys are today."

He no longer lives in Manhattan, but in the leafy commuter town of Larchmont, N.Y. He has small children, who of course weren't around in 2001, who would have added an even scarier element to that beautiful September day.

It's quiet in Larchmont, but not spooky-quiet. There's order. Everything's OK.

"The kids are down for the night," Auker said.