111 – Washington, D.C.
The skies over Washington, D.C., crackled with electronic beams from dozens of radars. When one of these signals encountered a metallic object, it bounced back, like a wave striking the side of a swimming pool, reflecting an echo that was picked up by the receiving antenna. These invisible electronic signals created an impenetrable defensive wall mightier than any surrounding a medieval castle.
Jet fighters at nearby Bolling Air Force Base stood on constant alert, armed with missiles and cannon, and also with orders to turn away errant pilots, orders to shoot down any plane that failed to instantly obey.
However, just as the air parted smoothly around the glider, the electronic waves from the search radars passed through the plastic skin of the sailplane as easily as light penetrates window glass. Shapiro entered the capital city’s airspace undetected.
He could see the White House straight ahead, off in the distance. At just more than 3,000 feet altitude, he was well above the highest buildings, but close enough to the ground to begin to attract attention.
A few people pointed up at the strange aircraft, its long thin wings distinguishing it from any other type of airplane except, oddly enough, from Cold War U-2 spyplanes, which had been nothing more than jet-powered sailplanes. The silent flight of the glider allowed it to slip over most people unnoticed, however.
Calm enveloped Shapiro, the calm he felt as he rose from the attorney’s table in court to give his closing argument to a jury. Too late for doubts in the righteousness of his client’s cause by then, it was all a matter of winning.
Or losing.
This time, though, the doubts persisted. Has there ever been a bomb-throwing tzadik, he wondered. He could make out individual cars, people below him.
They have less than ten minutes to live.
I’m going to kill a lot of children.
Like Adam.
Adam. He felt tears filling his eyes and he wiped them abruptly. Not now. Focus. He turned his head around to glance again at the bomb. He’d yanked Goldhersh’s jacket off the device miles back. The cold, shiny cylinder was bathed in sunlight coming through the canopy, illuminating the red cover over the final button. The red plastic seemed to pulse in the bright sunlight.
A panicked thought. I haven’t made sure I can reach the button. Shapiro twisted his body and strained to reach behind him in the narrow cockpit. His right hand stopped six inches from the red cover. He slapped his left hand to the round buckle on his chest holding the ends of the safety straps and gave it a savage twist, freeing the straps.
That’s better. His right hand rested on the red cover. He lifted it slowly. Strange. The button is red, too, he thought.
He carefully lowered the cover over the button and twisted back into his seat, then reattached all the safety straps. He could no more fly an airplane with his straps unbuckled than he could drive a car without a seat belt. That was not procedure.
Another thought came. I should have worn a yellow star. That would have been appropriate.
Symbolic.
That would show Quaid.
He pictured Lawrence Quaid, a brush of a Hitler mustache under his nose.
That picture was replaced by an image of Catherine Quaid pinning a yellow Star of David to her blouse. He smiled as he recalled telling her about the King of Denmark.
She is a tzadik, he thought. She knew right from wrong. She did right, rather than wrong.
There’s a non-Jew who took a personal risk for a cause in which she believed.
He paused in his thinking.
She’s probably in the White House now.
Am I a tzadik if I kill a tzadik?
He looked at the ground. This low, the plane’s speed was exhilarating. He usually liked flying low and fast.
Nobody is looking up at me, he thought. They don’t know I’m here. Nobody knows what I’m carrying.
The Angel of Death is passing over their houses and they don’t know it. I am the Angel of Death. Like in Egypt. At Passover.
Can the Angel of Death be a tzadik?
Didn’t the Angel of Death free the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt? Isn’t that the Passover story? That rabbi, at the March, didn’t he say that God sent the Angel of Death to slay the enemies of Israel?
And after the slaying, don’t they always strike back, those enemies of Israel, strike again at God’s Chosen People?
Who then strike back themselves. All in God’s name.
So I’m doing God’s work, igniting an atom bomb over the nation’s capital, the capital of the country in which I was raised?
This could be a foolish time to start believing in God.
He smiled. The same God who never let the Red Sox win the World Series when I was a kid. The God who let such awful things happen to good people.
Like Sally.
Did the man who killed Sally believe he was doing a righteous deed? Did he believe he was doing God’s work, Israel’s work? Or did he follow some other God and do that God’s work? Did he care that he was going to kill innocent people?
And children.
Adam. I’m fighting back for Adam’s sake, in Adam’s memory. Right?
Did Adam’s murderer, too, think of himself as a righteous man?
He probably did.
Does Quaid think he’s doing the right thing?
Children.
Children in Damascus. How many children died there? From that bomb?
How will their fathers retaliate?
Like sunlight streaking between parting clouds the realization struck Shapiro that he was just another bomber, just one bounce of a ping pong ball of perpetual retaliation, in a match that had been playing for centuries. Longer.
Not a hero executing Hitler. Simply a teenager with an explosive vest in a café. One firecracker in a string.
He was going to kill some other man’s wife, some other father’s Adam. Some other woman’s Chaim. Some other child’s grandparents.
A coward murdered Sally and Adam. Not a hero.
Not a tzadik.
Shapiro stared straight ahead over the airplane’s rounded nose. There was the White House.
Men stood on the roof. They pointed at the glider, still three miles away.
Suddenly a streak of white smoke rose from the White House roof and flew directly toward Shapiro, then another streak next to it. Then another. And another.
They’re shooting missiles at me.
Will the bomb go off if a missile hits it, he wondered. Well, we’ll see soon enough.
The white trails behind the ground-to-air Stinger missiles twisted into corkscrews as the heat-seeking electronics in their noses searched ahead of the missiles for hot engine exhaust.
The sailplane, of course, had no engine.
Instead, the missiles locked onto the hottest object in the sky, turned upward, and climbed toward the sun, falling to the ground when their fuel was exhausted.
Shapiro pictured Catherine Quaid standing at one of the second floor windows he could see, looking out at the strange airplane flying toward her.
Catherine Quaid. America’s royalty.
I’m about to kill the King of Denmark. I can’t justify that.
I can’t kill Catherine Quaid. That realization settled on Shapiro as an absolute certainty, as certain as gravity.
I can’t kill other fathers’ Adams.
Their fathers will retaliate. Like I’m doing. Who would they kill? Jews? They’ll kill more Jews?
Who’ll then strike back.
I can’t do this thing. I can’t.
I won’t. The right thing is to break the chain, to stop the ping pong match.
He pictured Catherine Quaid smiling at him.
The national mall was to the right, 3,000 feet below. The White House seemed to rush toward him, rather than he toward it.
Now is the time, he thought, reaching for the safety belt buckle.
He stopped.
I can’t do this. It isn’t right.
He slowly moved the control stick as far to the right as it would go, dropping the plane’s right wing straight toward the ground. His left leg straightened, swinging the plane’s nose to the left.
A perfect sideslip. Wish Willy could see this.
Shapiro turned his head to the right, staring out across the length of the right wing, pointing straight toward the center of the mall and the Capital building.
Instantly, the silent flight was broken by the noise of air battering the side of the plane. The controls, the stick and rudder pedals, rattled. The glider dropped from the sky toward the grass below, flying wingtip first, sideways to the air.
At fifty feet above the ground, Shapiro swung the stick to the left and straightened his right leg, depressing the right rudder pedal. The wings leveled. The plane’s nose pivoted quickly to the right and pointed straight ahead, straight down the grassy mall, straight at the Capitol building, straight at the spot where Shapiro had sat so recently facing a crowd of half a million Jews.
He skimmed just feet above the grass now. People turned and pointed. People directly in front of the plane threw themselves flat on the ground and felt the breeze from his wings on their backs.
Finally, he thrust the stick fully forward and felt the single wheel bounce onto the grass. He reached down with his left hand for the wheel brake and lifted it, pulling hard.
The plane slowed to a halt. The left wing dropped to the grass, the right wing pointed at the sky.
Shapiro reached for the lever that unlocked the canopy, then lifted the clear plastic over his head and swung it open to the right. He twisted the round buckle on his chest to release the ends of the safety belts, then used both hands to lift himself from the seat and climb out of the glider.
Ben Shapiro stood on the grass, next to his sailplane, next to an atom bomb, and slowly raised both hands in the air over his head, watching as a Park Service police officer cautiously walked toward him.
Shapiro smiled. I just saved the lives of a million people. I’m a hero.
A tzadik. A righteous man.