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,” Abram said. “But sometimes killing people is what it takes to change minds. Terror is all about killing people. 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. DC 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,” Reuben said. “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 radioactive 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, the Potomac.”
“River won’t work,” Shapiro said. “It’s not like what Debra and Chaim did, smuggling something into a 2,000-mile-long coast filled with 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.
“Aren’t you some sort of a pilot, Ben?” Katz finally asked. “Didn’t you say something about your airplane when we were driving down to DC?”
Abram looked at Shapiro in astonishment. Suddenly angry.
“You’re a pilot, Ben, and you own an airplane and you never told us? I have trouble understanding that, Ben,” Goldhersh 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 driver’s 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 Pilot’s License, then Shapiro’s name and a set of numbers. Prominently printed under the heading Restrictions were the words aero tow 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 rose from the table and walked away from the others, pacing back and forth.
“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 had long, thin wings that generated tremendous amounts of lift, he said, enough to allow the planes to fly in tight circles within thermals—rising columns of warm air that went thousands of feet into the air.
But the best soaring, he told them, came along mountain ridges where prevailing winds hit the face of a ridge and were 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 for hours.” His mind drifted 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 websites and would stay away from anything suspicious. He used Goldhersh’s computer, located in the enlarged closet space he called his office.
It took Shapiro less than an hour to become confident 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 nine hundred 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.”