108 – Gathistown, Maryland
Goldhersh waited outside while Shapiro went into the small metal building declaring itself to be Office Mid-Maryland Soaring Society. Inside were a counter and a coffee table with three ratty rattan chairs. Dog-eared copies of the journal of the Soaring Society of America covered the table. A large erasable calendar hung on the wall behind the counter. Most dates on the calendar were blank.
The office was empty. Shapiro was wondering what to do when a large, plain woman, appearing between her mid-twenties and mid-forties, wearing age-faded jeans, a blue denim shirt hanging outside her pants and a haircut best described as a “boy’s regular” walked through a door at the side of the counter. He heard the sound of a toilet flushing.
A black plastic tag pinned over her left shirt pocket said TAMMY.
“Howdy,” Shapiro said, hoping to hide his relief. “I just drove down from Massachusetts. I thought I’d get in some ridge flying.” He was met with a blank stare. “I called a few days ago,” he added.
“I remember,” she replied. “Wanted ta know when we opened?”
She had that Southern woman’s habit of ending sentences in question marks, even when she was not asking a question. “Looks like a sunny day? Whatcha flyin’?” The woman looked out a window to where the Pathfinder SUV was parked. Only the glider’s tail protruded from the trailer.
“A Grob 107, two place. New. I thought I’d fly the ridge today. I’d like to get up this morning, if possible.”
“Said that already.”
“So, how do I make arrangements? Is the tow pilot around? I’d like to speak with him and see about getting a nice high tow, 5,000 feet or so. Give me a chance to familiarize myself with the area.”
The woman gave Shapiro a blank stare. A woman of few words, he thought.
“Is the tow pilot here?”
The woman walked around the counter to stand next to Shapiro.
“You’re looking at him?” she said.
“Why don’t you get that fancy plane stuck together and we’ll talk about that tow.”
As Shapiro turned to leave, the woman spoke again.
“One thing. Gotta see your pilot’s license. New reg. FAA says so?”
I never heard of that regulation, Shapiro thought suspiciously. “Sure thing,” he said. “It’s in the car. I’ll show it to you when the plane’s assembled.”
“No prob. Don’t forget? New reg?”
Shapiro said nothing to Goldhersh about any suspicions. He backed the glider trailer onto the grass in front of the club building. The cover slid easily off the trailer, revealing the long white fuselage of the glider, the vertical tail rising at one end, the bulge of the cockpit at the front reminding Shapiro, as usual, of the time a waitress near a glider contest asked him if he flew one of “them flyin’ sperm things.” The cockpit was topped with a long Plexiglas cover, hinged at one side. The plane’s wings were stored on edge along both sides of the body, held in fabric-wrapped frames.
The two men lifted the wings and laid them on the grass. They slid the airplane backwards from the trailer, rolling on the single rubber wheel protruding from underneath the cockpit.
With Goldhersh holding the end of a wing, Shapiro carefully guided it into the narrow opening on the side of the fuselage, a long steel bar at the inner end of the wing slipping into a slot behind the rear seat. They did the same with the other wing.
Shapiro opened the cockpit cover and leaned into the far rear of the cockpit, where the ends of the wings were visible. He inserted large steel safety pins into holes in the wing ends, then spun locking nuts over the pins, finally inserting cotter pins into holes in the pins to ensure the nuts could not loosen.
He counted the threads exposed on the pins above the nuts.
Standard procedure.
All that remained was to carry the horizontal tail section to the rear of the plane and lower it over the flat top of the vertical tail. Locking pins held it in place.
The plane was ready. It had taken only fifteen minutes.
Before returning to the club building, Shapiro conducted his preflight inspection, walking slowly around the airplane, testing the flight controls to ensure that the wing flaps responded correctly to movement of the control stick in the cockpit and that the tail surfaces moved in the correct directions.
Finally, he walked to one wing tip, the wing that jutted into the air while the other wing rested on the grass He reached up for the wing tip above his head and shook it, hard. The flexible wing moved in a wave from the tip to the body. He walked to the other wing tip, lifted it and shook it, hard.
Satisfied that the plane was flight ready, he called to Goldhersh, who stood watching this ritual silently. Shapiro glanced at the large man from time to time and noticed his lips continuing to move soundlessly, without stop, as his prayers continued.
Can’t hurt, Shapiro thought.
The familiar routine of attaching the wings and tail surface and conducting the preflight inspection settled Shapiro’s thoughts. Over the years little could distract him from absolute attention to the details of those rituals, the counting of the threads was as close to a sacrament as Shapiro believed in.
The final step in the preflight brought him back to reality. Rather than buckling the rear safety belts around the cockpit cushions, Shapiro was confronted with the steel cylinder, still wrapped in blue vinyl dental blankets.
He called to Goldhersh.
“Abram, lets put these things in the car.” He lifted one of the heavy blankets. Goldhersh walked up to the cockpit and held both arms straight in front of his chest. Shapiro eyed the man skeptically but lifted the blankets, one at a time, and draped them over the man’s out-thrust arms.
Goldhersh staggered as he carried the armload of blue blankets to the SUV. He dropped them on the grass behind the tailgate, lifted it, and placed each of the blankets in the rear of the car.
Shapiro watched the man carry the blankets. As Shapiro turned to walk to the club building to summon the tow pilot, he noticed her standing at the window staring at him and Goldhersh. Her eyes were on the large man at the rear of the SUV.
Before Shapiro reached the building, the door opened and the woman came out. She glanced at his airplane and nodded.
“You said 5,000 feet?” she asked.
“That’s right. Like to have some time to get situated before hitting the ridge,” Shapiro said. That was an exceptionally high tow, twice as high as was necessary to get to the nearby ridge line.
“Can we get started soon?” he asked.
“Want me to tell ya ‘bout the landin’ pattern before ya take off, or ya gonna wait till yer close to landin’?” she asked.
“Woops, sorry,” Shapiro said, trying to conceal his nervousness. “Run me through it.”
The woman described the flight pattern at the field, pointing to the wind sock hanging from the hanger roof, telling Shapiro where the Interception Point, the beginning of the flight pattern, was located, and the familiar right turn, right turn landing pattern.
Shapiro only half-listened to her as the reality of what was about to happen surfaced.
I won’t need that information, he thought, suddenly stunned by the thought that other pilots more than a decade earlier also had not thought about how they would be landing aircraft they were about to fly. I’m not like them, he said to himself. They were terrorists, I’m …
His thoughts were interrupted when he noticed the quizzical look on the woman’s face. She’d turned to walk to the tow plane, then stopped and suddenly walked back to face Shapiro.
“Almost forgot,” she said. “Gotta check yer license?” She held her hand out.
Shapiro reached into his back pocket for his wallet and extracted his dog-eared pilot’s license. The woman examined it closely, as if it were a winning lottery card.
“Shapira. That’s a Jew name, ain’t it?” she asked, sounding more curious than anything else.
“Yes, I am Jewish. Why?”
“No reason. FBI been talking to some of the Jew power pilots, that’s all. Just wonderin’?” She paused as if trying to remember something, then swung her head to look at Shapiro. “Ready to go?”
She walked across the grass to the tow plane, started its engine and waited for it to warm up.
After glancing at the tow plane to make sure the pilot was still there, Shapiro lifted the canopy over the glider’s cockpit and leaned into the rear seat. He removed the Chemical Bank of New York credit card from his wallet and swiped it through the card reader on top of the bomb.
LED lights lit on the keypad. Shapiro carefully, as carefully as he’d counted threads on the safety pin, pushed keys. 0-9-1-1. The numbers appeared on a small screen.
The keypad beeped.
Hebrew letters glowed on the small screen. “SET DELAY” they said, Debra had told him.
Shapiro looked at Goldhersh. This time, the man was praying out loud. “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad.”
Shapiro pushed the “0” key.
The device beeped.
He looked at the red plastic cover, hinged at one end. Five Hebrew letters were on top of the cover. Reuben had told him they spelled the word for ACTIVATE. He left the cover down.
His heart began beating with the rapidity usually reserved for the moment of takeoff.
The tow plane taxied to a position a hundred feet in front of Shapiro’s aircraft. Shapiro climbed into the glider’s front seat. Goldhersh stood over him.
The two men did not speak. Shapiro slowly buckled the safety straps, snapping each end into the circular metal buckle that lay on his chest, pulling them tight. He reached forward between his legs and found the end of the aerobatic strap, pulled it up over his crotch and snapped it into the buckle.
I’ll have to free these when I reach back to set off the bomb, he thought. Doing the job, accomplishing the task, winning the trial, is all about the details, he knew, planning ahead. Leave nothing to chance.
A long rope was attached to the back of the tow plane, above the rear wheel. The pilot got out of the plane, walked to the far end of the rope and dragged it to the front of Shapiro’s plane.
The cockpit canopy was still open.
“Five-thousand feet, right?” the woman said to Shapiro. His heart stopped as he saw her eyes glance toward the rear cockpit and hesitate. Her eyes widened. She stared at Shapiro for a moment, debating what to say. “Ya might want to strap that down so it don’t come loose,” she said. “Want to do a release test first?” she asked.
“Yes, yes.” Shapiro could barely speak. He waited for the woman to bend down to attach the end of the tow rope to the release hook at the front of the glider before he turned his head to glance at the back seat.
A jacket, Goldhersh’s large jacket, covered the bomb.
They went through the routine preflight test. She pulled the rope. He pulled the release knob on his panel. The rope released from the glider’s nose. When they finished, the woman reattached the rope, gave it a tug, then walked to the tow plane and climbed in. Shapiro shoved first his right foot down, then his left foot, wiggling the plane’s rudder from side to side, indicating to the pilot that he was ready when she was.
He heard the tow plane’s engine rev.
The two aircraft rolled down the grass airstrip. After thirty seconds, Shapiro pulled back on the stick and felt his glider rise into the air. He maintained his altitude of five feet above the grass until he saw the tow plane lift, then he followed directly behind it, banking his wings as the tow plane banked its wings.
He heard his takeoff mantra as if somebody else in the cockpit were speaking. Stick forward, land straight ahead, stick forward, land straight ahead.
The tow plane leveled off as Shapiro’s altimeter crossed 5,000 feet. His left hand reached for the yellow release knob on the center of the panel, then stopped. His hand hovered over the knob. The tow plane continued flying straight and level, buzzing onward.
Two inches separated his left hand from the release knob. He looked at the hand, then at the tow plane, continuing to fly past the release point, still straight and level.
Shapiro was shocked to hear a voice over the VHF cockpit radio.
“Everything OK back there Mr. Shapira?” the voice said.
Without a word, Shapiro grasped the yellow knob and pulled it. Then pulled it again, just in case it hadn’t released the first time. That was procedure. Procedure is what keeps pilots alive.
The glider banked to the right, the tow plane to the left.
Shapiro reached forward with his right hand and pushed a small button on the Global Positioning System chart plotter on the instrument panel, a button marked Follow Route.
He’d input his course before leaving Portland, a course that took him from Central Maryland sixty-five miles to Washington D.C., directly over the White House.