A perfect sideslip. Wish Willy could see this.
Ben turned his head, staring out across the length of the right wing, pointing toward the center of the Mall and the Capitol 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, he 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 spot where Shapiro had sat so recently facing a crowd of half a million people.
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.
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. 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.
He stood on the grass, next to his sailplane, next to an atom bomb, and slowly raised both hands over his head, watching as a park service police officer cautiously walked toward him, gun in hand.
Shapiro smiled. Content. Proud. I just saved the lives of a million people. I’m a hero, he thought. A tzadik. A righteous man.
EPILOGUE
Abram Goldhersh drove the Nissan Pathfinder into his driveway in Portland. Exhausted. Emotionally drained. Dejected. He’d driven from the glider field due east, toward Washington, waiting to see the flash.
It never came.
He listened on the radio for news of the bomb.
He heard nothing.
Fox Radio News reported that a glider landed on the National Mall in Washington. Nothing was known about the pilot, the reporter said. Park police and the Secret Service had surrounded the plane and quickly removed it, saying nothing about it.
That was all he learned.
He parked the SUV and entered his house. It was after eleven. Sarah ran to the door. She opened her arms for her husband and attempted to surround the huge man with herself, unsuccessfully. Home, with his wife, he finally let loose. Sarah felt his body shaking and heard his sobs. After five minutes of silently holding her husband, she released him and walked him into the living room.
“He lost his nerve,” Abram said. “He let us down. He let Israel down. Why does God do this to us?”
Sarah led him into the living room.
“Abram,” Sarah said to him. “Debbie has something to tell you.”
“I don’t want to hear anything more. Israel is lost. Who knows when there will be another chance like this one?”
Reuben stood in the living room, next to the fireplace, watching him and Sarah. He looked at her sadly, the tracks of tears still on his face. He looked at her and said nothing.
“Abram,” Reuben said, sounding excited rather than despondent. “There’s another bomb, Abram. A bigger bomb. In Africa. In Ethiopia. I sent the other pilot there to wait.
“Judy is going to the pilot. She had to get away from what we were doing. I told her to take a message to him. But I didn’t tell her about the other bomb—just to find the pilot and deliver my message. That’s why she left.”
Reuben walked to the table where she’d left her drink, poured more vodka into the glass and downed it in a long, desperate gulp.
Goldhersh stared at the woman for a long moment, smiled, then walked to the closet he used as an office. He powered up his computer and started typing.
“Dear President Quaid,” he wrote. “We showed we can deliver a bomb to your doorstep. Now let me tell you about our other bombs.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Never Again came about as a result of my visit to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where I represented two young Saudi Arabian men. I interviewed them while they were shackled to a ring on the floor. I heard screams from the next room, but my clients comforted me it was just a recording meant to intimidate me. Or them. Guantanamo shocked me to the core (although it didn’t stop me from buying Gitmo T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs at the gift shop. I did wonder whether Dachau, too, had a gift shop or whether that was just an American thing.)
I flew home through Miami, where I visited my father. He had been captured two weeks after landing on Omaha Beach and held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. After I described Guantanamo to him he was silent, then said, “Imagine that, Americans are treating their boys worse than the Nazis treated me, a Jew.”
Imagine that. Americans acting worse than Nazis. My father’s comment inspired me to come up with a plausible scenario in which something like the Holocaust could happen in the United States. Thus, Never Again.
I’m not saying these events would happen in these circumstances, only that, you know, they could happen.
After all, ask yourself, if I were a character in this book, what would I do? Would I do nothing? How far would I go? There’s no right answer, I know. But there are right questions to be asked.
Copyright
Never Again
by Harvey A. Schwartz
© Copyright 2018 Harvey A. Schwartz
ISBN 978-1-63393-731-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Review copy: this is an advanced printing, subject to corrections and revisions.
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