“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 landing pattern, was located. 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. One-way trip.
He noticed the quizzical look on the woman’s face. She’d turned to walk to the towplane, 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 towplane, started its engine and waited for it to warm up.
After glancing at the towplane 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.
The towplane 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 his 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.
Goldhersh reached into the rear seat, doing something Shapiro couldn’t see.
A long rope was attached to the back of the towplane, 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?”
“Yes, yes.” Shapiro could barely speak. He waited for the woman to bend down to attach the end of the towrope 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 release 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 towplane 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.
The towplane’s engine roared. 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 towplane lift, then he followed directly behind it, banking his wings as the towplane 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 towplane leveled off as Shapiro’s altimeter crossed five thousand 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 towplane 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 towplane, continuing to fly past the release point, still straight and level.
Shapiro was shocked to hear a voice over the VHF cockpit radio.
“Everything okay back there, Mr. Shapira?”
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.
The glider banked to the right, the towplane to the left.
Shapiro pushed a small button on the GPS 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, directly over the White House.
Tammy was agitated the entire flight back to the airstrip.
“Somethin’off about that guy with him. He looked like a Jew, too. Why go to five thousand feet for a ridge ride?” she said aloud. She dialed her cell as soon as she landed. “Hello, FAA, this here’s Tammy Beaujot at the Mid-Maryland Soaring Society, over in Gathistown? No, jerkball, that’s Bu Jot, like it’s spelled, not Bu Joe, like that fancy wine.”
Enough of trying to get these idiots to pronounce her name the way her daddy taught her to say it. She wouldn’t give her name.
The woman was in telephone hell for twenty minutes, handed off from one bureaucrat to the next at the FAA regional office in Baltimore.
Five more minutes of listening to instrumental music.
Finally an intelligent-sounding voice, a woman, came on the phone. “Regional security, Rivkin here.”
“Look, Rivkin here, I run the glider operation? At Mid-Maryland Soaring? At Gathistown? Maryland, ’bout sixty miles west’a DC, you know?”
“How can I help you, Mizz… sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Ya didn’t catch it cause I didn’t toss it. Look, ma name don’t matter none. I gotta tell ya ’bout somethin’fishy what just happened.”
“I need your name to complete my report, ma’am. It’s regulations.”
“Well, I don’t wanna give ya ma name. It ain’t none’a yer bizness. Do ya wanna hear what I gotta say or not?”
“I can’t take a report without a name. I’m sorry, I must insist on a name. That’s regulation, ma’am.”
CLICK.
CHAPTER 69
Air parted around Shapiro’s sailplane as easily as water around a fish, causing almost no sound. The Maryland countryside flowed beneath the thin white wings, curved gently upward at their tips from supporting the weight of the aircraft. Sunlight shining through the clear canopy warmed Shapiro’s chest.
He glanced at the GPS, displaying a map of the area between his position and downtown Washington. Digital readouts flanked the map. Distance to Waypoint 59.4 miles. Altitude 4,890 feet.