Shapiro’s glider was, for the moment, state of the art, delivered from Germany the previous winter. With its ninety-foot wingspan, wings smoothed to a tolerance of a thousandth of an inch, and the latest high-tech tubes and turbulators designed to squeeze every ounce of available lift out of the air, the plane had a glide ratio of seventy-five to one, meaning it went forward seventy-five feet for every foot it dropped. From 6,000 feet up, that meant the plane could glide for seventy-five miles even if it found no lift.
The glider could carry a 200-pound passenger in the rear seat. Shapiro had flown two 500-mile cross-country flights in it already, and he was still learning how to press the plane to its limits.
The glider floated over the moored sailboats and fishing boats filling Plymouth Harbor. He spotted the canopy over Plymouth Rock and pictured the crowd of disappointed tourists surrounding the rock, expecting something like Gibraltar and finding an ordinary boulder with a crack down the center.
He gazed at Cape Cod hooking out into the ocean, its tip swirling around at Provincetown like a cat’s tail curled up for the night. To his left he saw Boston, a layer of smog hugging the ground for a thousand feet above glass towers reflecting sunlight. He flew silently for two hours and let the altitude and solitude disconnect him from whatever was waiting for him on the ground—anxious clients, an increasingly distant wife and a marriage that seemed to have passed its expiration date, law partners worrying about collecting fees. Shapiro sometimes wished he could fly off and never land, impossible as that was. Eventually, as always, he steered for the interception point and flew the landing pattern.
Willy helped him pull the glider into the club’s hanger, next to the custom trailer Shapiro used for towing his disassembled plane to other flying areas.
Shapiro, his mind eased by the medicine of the sun, the wind and the sky, opened his car door, sat down, started the engine with its reassuringly powerful Mercedes turbo hum. He rolled down his window, not yet ready to give up the feel of the wind for the sterile coolness of the air conditioner.
As the electric antenna whirred up, the radio came on.
“Two ships carrying thousands of Jewish refuges illegally entered Boston Harbor early this morning,” the radio announcer said. “The Coast Guard ordered the ships quarantined. President Quaid personally directed that nobody be permitted ashore. Spokesmen for the Jewish community in Boston expressed outrage.”
I’d better stop by the office on the way home, Shapiro thought.
CHAPTER 3
Three weeks after the Tel Aviv and Damascus bombs, the anchorage area in Boston Harbor next to Logan Airport’s runway 4R/22L sat empty as Boston went to bed. By dawn two elderly freighters, Greek-owned but flying the Israeli flag, the Iliad and the Ionian Star, swung from their anchors a thousand yards from Downtown Boston.
The ships arrived with between 1,500 and 2,000 passengers each. Their cargo holds, ventilated only when the overhead hatches were left open to the rain and spray, were filled with miserable people, cold, wet, hungry, using buckets for latrines and seawater for washing. The decks, too, were crammed with people lying on every horizontal surface, crowding the railings for fresh air and a place from which to vomit from seasickness, bad water, spoiled food.
The captains had listened to radio reports of countries throughout the Mediterranean blocking their harbors to Israeli refugees. They’d decided to head directly for the United States, one country where they felt sure of finding a welcome.
The ships were immediately quarantined, supposedly for health reasons, in the anchorage area adjacent to the runways of Logan International Airport. They sat at anchor, the miserable, exhausted people on board not understanding why America, a country of immigrants, barred its door to them.
The ships presented a problem—not because America could not absorb three or four thousand refugees, but because it did not know if it wanted to.
By 2021, years of massive budget deficits, soaring oil prices and healthcare costs, and record-high immigration from Mexico, Central America and Asia brought the US to its knees. Wall Street was a wreck as banks again collapsed and real estate values crashed.
Congress responded by demonizing newcomers, in much the same way Hitler blamed Jews for Germany’s economic hardships after World War I. Turning their backs on the Statue of Liberty and egged on by the former president, Congress passed the American Pride Identification and Display Act, a law that created a national identification card program, a law aimed at identifying the millions of Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, Thais, Chinese, Nigerians, Somalis, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and other people who had come to the country by one means or another for thirty years.
“Americards” were issued to every person who could show proof of citizenship: a birth certificate, a passport, naturalization papers. Within a month, some 275 million Americans were registered. At least thirty million others—people who could not prove citizenship or legal residency—were not and could not be registered. Like credit cards, Americards included a computer chip encoded with the person’s name and registration number, plus physical data such as height, weight, eye and hair color and, most powerfully of all, a digitized photograph, fingerprints and a retina scan.
The enforcement phase took longer, but the public was behind that effort, too. Employers were required to print workers’registration numbers on their paychecks. Paying workers in cash was prohibited. Employees with no registration number were not allowed to be paid. Payroll checks with no numbers could not be cashed. Employers hiring unregistered workers were fined. Repeatedly.
Welfare workers were required to verify that recipients were registered. No Americard, no welfare.
Schools checked students’registration, with the threat of having federal subsidies cut off if they refused. Unregistered students could not attend school. The law’s intent was brutal and obvious: to ostracize immigrants and starve them out of the country. No work, no food, no housing, no education, no health care. The system worked. The cards were issued in January 2021, and by May the nation’s workplaces, schools, welfare rolls and most public places were purged of illegal aliens.
The backlash stunned people. News stories told of immigrant families hiding in their apartments, of mothers, fathers and children slowly starving to death; of mothers walking the streets as prostitutes because that profession did not require registration cards; of shoplifting arrests in supermarkets. Crime, always an alternative way to get by, became the only way for millions of people locked out of the American dream to feed themselves and their children.
That wave of crime, of course, created yet one more backlash. Get these people out, send them back where they came from. The deportation planes and ships left New York, Miami and Los Angeles daily. The overcrowded, impoverished countries these people fled from were forced to reabsorb them.
Then the Iliad and the Ionian Star limped into Boston Harbor and became the focus of national debate.
“Let them in. These people are different; they are victims of war,” some said. “They are good refugees, not bad ones—not Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Mexicans.” “These refugees are Jews, like so many powerful and famous Americans.” “America has always accepted Jewish refugees,” the historically ignorant said.