Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  Finally, he threw the remote across the room and turned to face the others.

  “So much for demands,” he said. “I’ve said it before. I’ll say it one more time. Use it or lose it. I’m not ready to lose it. God gave us this thing for a reason. The time has come.”

  Suddenly, there was pounding at the front door and a muffled voice shouting, “Let me in, let me in.”

  Sarah screamed. Debra Reuben rose and stared toward the front door, ready to meet whatever was on the other side. Ready to accept whatever punishment was coming to her.

  Only Shapiro reacted quickly. He ran to the door, checked to make sure it was locked, then stepped to the side to look through a window to see who was outside. He threw the door open.

  A hysterical Judy Katz ran in, babbling.

  “I’ve never driven so fast in my life but I was afraid the police would stop me and that couldn’t happen because you have to see this you just have to see it.” The words shot from her mouth with no spaces between them.

  Shapiro put his hands on her shoulders and shook her.

  “Judy, stop it,” he said. “What happened? Tell us what happened.”

  She walked into the living room and dropped the black nylon carrying case for her laptop on the coffee table.

  “You have to see this,” she said. “Somebody, somebody at the camp must have put it in my computer. Here, look. It’s horrible.”

  She removed the computer from the case as she spoke, lifted the screen and pressed the power button.

  “I went to the camp,” she said. “I didn’t see much, but when I got home I was so angry. I took a shower. Searched the fridge. Then sat at the table to check email. When I turned on the computer, there was an icon on the screen that said Untitled CD. I hadn’t put any CD in the computer. I hardly use that drive. So I clicked on it and, and, this happened.”

  She slid her forefinger around the mouse pad and tapped twice. A video began to play.

  It was shot from above, looking down onto a desk. A young woman lay on top of a board on the desk, wrapped like a mummy in gray tape. An older woman in a white coat stood at the young woman’s head. Three men, two in uniform, stood around the desk.

  Katz pointed at the third man, wearing jeans, who stood at the young woman’s feet.

  “I saw him at the camp,” she said. “He took my computer. I wasn’t allowed to carry it there. I think he put the disc in it.”

  She glanced at the screen, then turned away.

  “I’ve seen it twice,” she said. “I can’t look again.

  The sound was fuzzy, but the words could be made out.

  The brief video ended with the young woman’s body being carried from the room. The man in civilian clothes was left alone. The last scene showed him glance up at the camera, then walk quickly from the room.

  Katz closed the lid on the laptop computer.

  “Mengele,” Abram whispered, as if speaking to himself. “Mengele.”

  Katz’s face was white, her eyes wide, darting to her computer. “You . . . you don’t think this doctor is doing experiments, do you?” she stuttered.

  “No, not experiments. Interrogation,” Shapiro said coldly.

  Abram pounded his hand against the wall to get their attention.

  “Enough. How much more do we have to see? Did you hear the question that woman, that Mengele asked?” Abram’s voice was strained, his throat tight. “She asked about the bomb, the bomb that God put in our hands. They’ll do anything until they find it. I tell you, use it or lose it.”

  “God didn’t give you that bomb,” Reuben retorted. “I did. I got that thing out of the desert. I found a boat to take it to Spain. Chaim and I brought it here. Chaim gave his life to bring that thing here. It was Chaim, not God, who brought that bomb to this country.”

  “God directed him,” Abram said calmly. “It was God’s will that it come here. How could it have happened if it were not God’s will?”

  Abram looked at the others.

  “The Arabs used their bomb. It worked. They won. They wiped away Israel and its people. Now we use our bomb to save what’s left of our people. It will work. Quaid will have to give in. He doesn’t know how many bombs we have. Simple.”

  “Enough talk,” Shapiro interrupted. “We have to make a decision. I’ve thought about this long and hard. I’ve come to my peace. Here’s what I think. America should be ashamed of itself. This was a great country. They said they wanted to make America great again, but it only got worse.”

  “Much worse,” Reuben mumbled.

  “America is far from great now,” Shapiro said. “Not today. Not with what is happening here; in fact, not for a long while now. America once held itself out an example to the world. Now what are we an example of? We’ve lost our way. Just like the Roman Empire. Just like the British Empire. Just like every great power in history. America’s time has passed.”

  He paused, the enormity of what he’d said striking him momentarily speechless.

  “There is a right course for America to take and a wrong course. Standing by and watching Israel die is wrong. Standing up to intimidation, saving people herded into concentration camps, reestablishing the State of Israel as a Jewish homeland, those are the right things to do. I’m ready to send a message to America that there is a price to pay for doing nothing in the face of injustice. I’m with Abram. We use it or we lose it.”

  He’d risen to his feet, an old habit of a trial lawyer who never addressed a judge and certainly never addressed a jury while seated.

  “Debra,” he said. “You brought us this thing. What do you think?”

  “I already had to make this decision once. Damascus. It’s the same decision. Why should it be more difficult to kill innocent Americans than it was to kill innocent Syrians? They’re all human beings.”

  “And they’re all innocent,” Sarah interjected.

  “They’re all innocent, I agree,” Reuben said. “I say we use the bomb. Harry Truman dropped two bombs. You don’t burn longer in hell for a second bomb, do you?”

  “We gave them a choice,” Sarah said. “They could have released the people; they could have done that. What would be the harm from setting innocent people free? I don’t understand them. I hate it. I absolutely hate it, but I understand why we have no choice now. I agree.”

  She turned to her husband. “We all know what your position is, Abram.”

  “Use it or lose it, and teach that Quaid a lesson.”

  Katz leaped to her feet and ran from the room, her feet pounding on the stairs up to her room.

  “I’ll talk with her,” Reuben said. She followed Katz up the stairs.

  Abram looked at the stairs, then back to the others.

  “Let’s make plans,” he said.

  Not even Reuben knew much about the workings of the bomb. None of them had any idea how powerful it was, except that it was atomic. They assumed, since it was designed to be carried by a person rather than placed on top of a missile or dropped from an aircraft, that it was a relatively small atomic bomb.

  But that was like confronting a small elephant. You wouldn’t want it to sit on your lap.

  Reuben went to her room and came back with a Chemical Bank of New York Visa credit card. She passed it around to the people sitting at the kitchen table. Katz had joined them.

  “Are you going to do some shopping before we start World War III, Debbie?” Katz asked.

  Reuben explained how the card was used to arm the detonator. She had debated with herself whether to disclose the arming code to be punched into the bomb’s keypad after the card was read. She decided these were the only people she could trust. Besides, should something happen to her before she gave them the password, the bomb would be useless to them.

  “It’s 0-9-1-1,” she said to their shocked faces.

  “That is so inappropriate, Debbie,” Katz said.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Reuben said. “Remember, when we set the code I expected that Ame
rica was going to be Israel’s savior. Back then—God, it seems so long ago—back then the Arabs were the only bad guys. Besides, I thought it would be an easy number to remember.”

  She explained how the detonator could be set for a time delay anywhere from instantaneous to twenty-four hours. That left them considerable discretion in their planning.

  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.”

  Shapiro reported that he’d fo
und a glider field about sixty miles west of Washington. He could launch from there.

  “Sixty miles in an airplane without an engine?” Sarah asked. “Is that really possible?”

  Shapiro laughed.

  “Sixty miles is a training flight,” he said. “I do that before breakfast. Speaking of which, we’ve been at this all night. Let’s go to bed and sleep on this decision. We need to have another long, serious talk. We’ll talk over breakfast.”

  The others went up to bed, leaving Shapiro in the living room for another night on the sofa.

  Shapiro was surprised to see Katz sitting on the sofa when he returned from the bathroom. He sat next to her.

  “Ben, are we doing the right thing? Is it even a sane thing?” she asked, keeping her voice down so none of the others, upstairs, could hear. “Everything happened so fast. It seems out of control. I can’t believe what we’re talking about doing. How do you feel about it?”

  He took both her hands in his. They were ice cold. He lifted his right arm and invited her to snuggle against him, lifting the blanket from the sofa to cover both of them. She rested her head on his shoulder. He inhaled the clean fragrance of her hair.

  “Judy, that’s why I went into the other room. I knew all about flying in Pennsylvania and Maryland. I’ve gone there on glider vacations. It really is the best gliding around. I needed some space to think, that’s why I went away for a bit.” She snuggled closer to him.

  The two sat quietly, immersed in their thoughts and fears but relishing the comfort of each other. Shapiro pulled her closer; her body felt warm and he began to stir. But a chill quickly overcame him—a chill from fear. A chill from knowing that his future was likely to be short; a chill at the loss of his wife and child. He wondered whether his determination to go through with the plan would survive the night.

  “Ben,” she whispered. “Do you mind if I stay here tonight? We can just cuddle if that’s all you want. I’d rather not be alone.”

  He hesitated, sorting his thoughts. Since learning of his wife’s death, he had not so much as looked at Katz with the admiring eyes he’d devoured her with from the first time they met for lunch. It felt more like cheating to be holding her now, so soon after Sally’s death, than it would have seemed when they were on the brink of a divorce.