102 – Portland, Maine
Not even Debra Reuben knew much about the workings of the bomb. None of them had any idea how powerful it was, except that it was an atomic bomb. They assumed, since it was designed to be carried by a person, rather than placed on top of a missile or dropped from an aircraft, that it was a relatively small atom bomb.
But that is like confronting a small elephant. You still wouldn’t want it to sit on your lap.
Reuben went to her room and came down with a Chemical Bank of New York VISA card with her name on it. She passed it around to the people sitting at the kitchen table. Judy Katz had joined them.
“Are you going to do some shopping before we start World War Three, Debbie?” Katz asked.
Reuben explained how the card was used to arm the detonator. She had debated with herself whether to disclose the passcode that had to be punched into the bomb’s keypad after the card was read. She finally decided that if she could not trust these people, there was nobody she could trust. Besides, should something happen to her before she gave them the password, the bomb would be useless to them.
“Its 0-9-1-1,” she said to their shocked faces.
“That is so inappropriate, Debbie,” Katz managed to say.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Reuben said. “Remember, when we set the code I expected that America was going to be Israel’s savior. Back then, God, it seems so long ago, back then the Arabs were the only bad guys. Besides, I thought it would be an easy number to remember.”
She explained how the detonator could be set for any amount of time delay, from instantaneous to twenty-four hours. That left them considerable discretion in their planning.
Their first decision was the target. Sarah made a tentative proposal.
“Look,” she said. “They can’t be sure how many bombs we have. What if we put it in a boat and set it off on the ocean, close enough so they can see it from shore but far enough so nobody gets hurt. Don’t you think that would scare them enough to change their minds about Israel, or at least about closing those damned camps?”
“Quaid hasn’t shown any interest in giving in to our threats,” Shapiro said. “Besides, I don’t think they have any doubts about whether we have a bomb. It isn’t like this is a secret from them and we have to convince them that we can do what we threaten to do.
“Besides, this is the only bomb we’ve got. To paraphrase Abram, once we use it, we lose it.”
“I know all that, Ben,” Sarah said softly. “I’m struggling with this. I thought I could try something that didn’t involve killing people.”
“I love you for your gentleness, my dear wife,” Abram said. “But sometimes killing people is what it takes to change minds. Terror is all about killing people and as you’ve heard me say enough times to make you sick, terror works. Always has. Always will.
“You’ll see. We’ll use this bomb and things will change. Americans won’t have the stomach for what we will be feeding them. With that thought in mind, let me say out loud what we all know is the only logical target. Washington. That’s where Quaid is. That’s where Congress is.”
“I was waiting for you to say that,” Shapiro said. “I suppose the other reason for choosing Washington is that it is a relatively small city, at least compared to, say, New York or LA. If what we have is a small bomb, we’d do better picking a smaller target. D.C. has my vote. What about the rest of you?”
Reuben raised her hand, as if waiting to be called on in class.
“Washington will be the hardest city to get the bomb into, won’t it?” she asked. “Don’t you think they’ll know that would be our first target? Don’t you think the roads are filled with those detectors that find radiation and whatever else they have.
“They were able to find Chaim with just a pair of gloves in his car. I’m afraid they’ll find us if we try to drive into Washington with the bomb.”
“I agree that the roads are too dangerous,” Abram said. “But what about a boat? There’s a river there, isn’t there?”
“River won’t work,” Shapiro said. “Its not like what Debra and Chaim did, smuggling something into a 3,000 mile long coast, filled with all sorts of coves and harbors. The Coast Guard will have the Potomac bottled up tight. We wouldn’t be able to get in with even a kayak, and don’t think I didn’t consider that.”
They sat glumly in the living room, each holding his and her own thoughts. The decision to use their bomb was the soul-searing one. Facing the reality that they might not be able to carry through on that decision was humiliating.
“Aren’t you some sort of a pilot, Ben?” Judy Katz finally asked. “Didn’t you say something about your airplane when we were driving down to D.C.?”
Abram looked at Shapiro in astonishment. He was angry.
“You’re a pilot, Ben, and you own an airplane and you never told us? I have trouble understanding that, Ben,” he said.
“Hold on, Abram, calm down,” Shapiro said quickly. “Do you know what a sailplane is?”
“An airplane with sails on it?” he replied. “No, I never heard of such a thing.”
“How about a glider,” Shapiro asked. “Do you know about gliders?”
“You mean a plane with no engine? I’ve heard about them, never seen one,” he said. “Do they still have them? I thought that was something they used to invade Normandy on D-Day. Why, is that the kind of pilot you are?”
Shapiro reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet. He shuffled through his credit cards, his drivers license and his Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers lawyer’s registration card. Finally, he removed a dog-eared rectangle of white paper.
“Here it is,” he said, showing it to the others. The paper, the size of a credit card, said Federal Aviation Administration across the top. Below that was printed Private Pilots License, then Shapiro’s name and a set of numbers. Prominently printed under the heading, “Restrictions” were the words “aerotow only.”
“That’s my glider pilot’s license,” he said. “And I happen to own one of the best gliders in the world, but like just about all other gliders, the only way to get it off the ground is to pull it up with a rope tied to a plane that has an engine.”
“So what does this glider look like,” Abram asked. “Wings and a tail and stuff like a real plane?”
“Just like a real plane, Abram,” Shapiro said. “Only much sleeker. If things were different I’d be pleased to strap you into the rear seat and take you around for a few hours.”
Goldhersh stood up from the table and walked away from the others, pacing back and forth. He returned to the table.
“Ben, this glider, you say it has a back seat?”
“Yes.”
“Big enough to hold the bomb?” Abram asked.
Shapiro considered for a moment. “Debra, how much does that thing weigh?”
“I don’t know, Ben,” she answered. “But Sarah and I were able to carry it from the basement out to her car.”
“I can put two hundred pounds in that seat with no problem,” Shapiro said. “Let me think for a minute.”
Shapiro left the table and went into the living room. He returned several minutes later carrying a National Geographic atlas. It was opened to a map of Maryland.
“This could work,” he said.
Shapiro lectured about gliders. They have long thin wings that generate tremendous amounts of lift, he said, enough to allow the planes to fly in tight circles within thermals, rising columns of warm air that go thousands of feet into the air.
But the best soaring, he told them, comes along mountain ridges where prevailing winds hit the face of a ridge and are deflected upwards.
“You can ride a ridge for hundreds of miles, one wingtip just a few feet out from the trees, flying in lift the entire way,” he told them.
“I’d lock into rising air and fly on for hours,” he said, his mind drifting as easily as his sailplane traveled from cloud to cloud. His days of hopping into the glider to shed stress from time in court seemed like another life. They were another life, he realized with a jolt, my life with a family, with a wife, with the best kid in the world.
The reality struck Shapiro that he was not planning a personal-best cross-country flight. He was going on a bombing mission. And while nobody came out and said it, it was a one-way mission.
Shapiro needed time alone. He told the others he wanted to access the Internet. They argued about that for a while but then consented after he said he would be looking only at gliding web sites and would stay away from anything that could be tied to anything suspicious.
He used Abram’s computer, located in the enlarged closet space he called his office.
It took Shapiro less than an hour to become confident that he could do what he proposed. The first problem was finding a place where he could get his glider towed into the air. That meant either a commercial glider field or a club. It was common for pilots to show up with gliders in their specially designed trailers. Many glider clubs supported themselves on the tow charges visiting pilots paid.
The countryside north and west of Washington provided some of the best soaring east of the Rockies. Long lines of ridges stretched from Central Pennsylvania almost to the Florida border. Record distance flights followed that route, which took the planes a few dozen miles from Washington.
“One record flight of almost 900 miles has stood since 1994,” Shapiro said after he returned to the living room to speak with the anxious people waiting there. “He left from Pennsylvania and flew almost to Florida. And that was in a much smaller plane than my beauty.”
Shapiro reported that he’d found a glider field about sixty miles west of Washington. He could launch from there.
“Sixty miles in an airplane without an engine?” Sarah asked. “Is that really possible?”
Shapiro laughed.
“Sixty miles is a training flight,” he said. “I do that before breakfast. Speaking of which, we’ve been at this all night. Let’s go to bed and sleep on this decision. We need to have another long, serious talk. We’ll talk over breakfast. OK?”
The others went up to bed, leaving Shapiro in the living room for another night on the sofa.
Shapiro was surprised to see Judy Katz sitting on the sofa when he returned from the bathroom. He sat next to her.
“Ben, are we doing the right thing?” she asked, keeping her voice down so none of the others, upstairs, could hear. “Everything seems to have happened so fast. It seems out of control. I can’t believe what we’re talking about doing. How do you feel about it?”
He reached out and took both of her hands in his. They were ice cold. He lifted his right arm and invited her to snuggle against him, lifting the blanket from the sofa to cover both of them. She rested her head on his shoulder. He inhaled the clean fragrance of her hair.
“Judy, that’s why I went into the other room. I knew all about flying in Pennsylvania and Maryland. I’ve gone there on glider vacations. It really is the best gliding around.
“I needed some space to think, that’s why I went away for a bit,” he said, feeling her snuggle closer to him.
“What is unreal is not so much what we are doing, Judy, but what this country is doing. Can you believe that Quaid is rounding up Jews and holding them in concentration camps? We’re like the Jews in Germany before the war,” he said. “I’ll bet they thought they were living in a dream, too. They couldn’t believe what was happening around them. I’m sure that’s how it was. Why else would they have gone like sheep to those camps?”
“I know all that intellectually, Ben,” she said, speaking without lifting her head from his shoulder. “God knows, I’ve been doing nothing but watching TV the past week. I’ve seen the camps in Florida and Georgia. And I’ve seen the camps in Palestine, too. The scary thing is they don’t look all that different, the same frightened faces, the same mothers holding their children, the same Jewish faces. That’s what scared me the most. The people in all the camps, the ones here and the ones over there, they all look so ordinary, like people on the street, like people I went to school with.
“I can’t deny that reality has changed from what it was a short time ago. I know that. But Ben, bombs? Especially that bomb in the pool. I haven’t even been able to go and look at it.”
“Judy, soldiers use bombs,” Shapiro said. “Right now, we’re soldiers. I didn’t quite volunteer. I was forced into this by the government, by the FBI at my house, by Quaid. If there were an alternative I’d take it before doing anything this drastic. Of course I would. But Judy, can you imagine filing a lawsuit to make things better, to make all this horror go away? That would be a fantasy. They’ve yanked the plug on that option, banning judges from even hearing that kind of case.
"There's no political answer. It would be political suicide for any Congressman to oppose Quaid when he is protecting the country from nuclear terrorists.
“As Quaid showed us, marches and demonstrations and politics won’t do any good. That would just place more Jews behind barbed wire. Judy, I’d take any alternative before doing what it seems like we are about to do. But I don’t see what that alternative can be, except letting Israel die, leaving those people in those camps, letting history repeat itself.”
He held her closer. Her body felt warm now. He was chilled, though, chilled at his center, chilled from loss, chilled from fear, chilled from knowing that his future was likely to be short. He wondered whether his determination to go through with the plan would survive the night.
“Ben,” she whispered. “Do you mind if I stay here tonight? We can cuddle if that’s all you want. I’d rather not be alone.”
He hesitated, sorting his thoughts. Since learning of his wife’s death, he had not so much as looked at Katz with the admiring eyes he’d devoured her with from the first time they met for lunch. It felt more like cheating to be holding her now, so soon after Sally’s death, than it would have seemed when they were on the brink of a divorce.
On the other hand, his body recognized that he was alone with an extremely attractive woman, decades younger than him, and that she was asking to spend the night with him. He felt more than stirrings in his body, he felt a hardening in his groin that had been absent for weeks.
I don’t know how many nights I have left, he thought.
As he was about to let his body win its struggle with his mind, he heard the first of a series of tiny snores on his shoulder. He did not move until his right arm was entirely numb, then slipped it from under her head carefully, slowly, so as not to wake her. He lowered her gently onto the sofa and covered her with the blanket.
Shapiro slept on the floor next to the sofa, his hand resting on her hand where it dangled from the couch.