He was surprised at how disappointed he was to find an email from the young Assistant US Attorney saying she was going to take a few days off. Could they meet for lunch next week, she asked.
CHAPTER 26
Nancy Lowenstein’s suspicions that something deliciously mysterious was up with the people staying in her Brooklin cottage increased when Sarah Goldberg-Goldhersh called to ask Nancy to have the boatyard launch her thirty-two-foot motor boat for her guests to use.
“They only need it for one night,” Sarah said. “But please have the boatyard fill the fuel tank and make sure the engine is okay.”
Lowenstein, sure by now she was part of something clandestine, called the Brooklin Boat Yard as soon as Sarah hung up.
The next day, Levi and Abram Goldhersh powered up the twin 250-horsepower Honda outboards on the Lowensteins’Boston Whaler Outrage and motored away from the boatyard at little more than an idle. Goldhersh had never been on a boat, any boat. Levi gave him a crash course in boat handling.
“You will follow me the whole way,” Levi said. “I’ll be in the sailboat going about six knots. This boat can do six knots while it’s still tied to the dock. The hardest thing for you will be going slow enough so you stay behind me. Steering is easy, just like a car. Here, give it a try.”
“First, you’ve got to tell me how fast is a knot. This whole adventure will be a lot easier if you talk in English.”
“I get it. Keep it simple,” Levi said. “Assume a knot is the same as one mile an hour. So we’re going to be zooming around at just about a fast walk. Does that make you feel better?”
“Actually, it does. That’s pretty slow,” Abram replied. “I can handle that—a fast walk? I can do that.”
It was not quite like driving a car, at least unless the car was driving down a road a hundred yards wide and negotiating a slalom course from one side to the other. After a while, however, Abram learned that a little turn on the wheel went a long way toward turning the boat.
“What about navigation?” he asked, looking blankly at the bank of electronic instruments behind the steering wheel.
“Don’t worry about it,” Levi said. “I’ll be right in front of you. I’ll do all the navigating. All you have to do is follow me. If you get lost, I’ll show you how to call me on the radio, but I’d rather not use that. We’re on a mission, remember. A secret, quiet mission. I expect that people around here listen to the marine radio for entertainment. I don’t want anybody wondering why we’re going on a pleasure cruise in the middle of the night.”
Once Levi was satisfied that Abram could point the powerboat in the direction he wanted it to go and could control the engine speed, he had him take the boat up the long, thin body of water on which the Lowensteins’house was located, the same Eggemoggin Reach he’d sailed down when he and Reuben arrived a week and a half earlier.
“I’ll take over here,” he said as the boat approached the Lowensteins’dock. Levi steered the boat next to the dock, quickly reversing the engines to drive the rear portion of the boat lightly against the float. He jumped out and secured the mooring lines to the float.
Reuben walked down the dock from the house when she saw the motorboat arrive. She carried a backpack.
“I’ve got a thermos of Starbucks for you, and a couple of tuna sandwiches, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies,” she said.
“Chocolate chip cookies. How American I’m becoming,” Levi said, laughing. “Thank you, Debra. I appreciate your thoughtfulness in making this for us.”
Reuben had difficulty believing that the present person who called himself Chaim Levi was the same surly sailor she’d spent two months with cramped on that sailboat, which was tied on the opposite side of the dock from the powerboat.
Maybe he’s a nicer person when he’s on land, she thought. Or maybe it was Victoria’s Secret. Reuben, after months of grubbiness on the boat, was working her way through the collection and enjoying it thoroughly. Apparently, so was Levi.
Tonight, though, the two men were going to get rid of the sailboat. Levi saw the boat as his last link with Israel. He planned on sinking it to the bottom of nearby Penobscot Bay. While Abram fiddled with the motorboat, Reuben took Levi aside. She handed him something from her pants pocket, two gold-colored metal tags on a linked chain.
“My dog tags,” he said. “So you’ve had them all along. I wondered where they’d gone. Why give them to me now?”
“Lt. Levi of the Israel Defense Forces, I thought since you were getting rid of our boat, maybe you’d also want to get rid of this,” she said. “I don’t see them being much good to you here. Maybe they’d better go down with the ship.”
“Thank you, Debra,” he said. “I appreciate that. Of course, you’re right.”
He looked at the glittering gold objects in his palm.
“I’ll miss this, but you’re right.” He put the dog tags in his pocket. “I’m going to turn off all the navigation lights,” Levi explained to Goldhersh. “I’m hanging this one little light from the back railing. It’s not too bright, but you should be able to keep it in sight. Stay close, not too close, but close enough so you can see the light. If you get lost, if you lose sight of me, just stop. I’ll circle back and find you. I’ll be going as fast as this sailboat can motor, which means you’ll be using one engine and not getting it much above an idle. Got all that?”
“Yes sir, Captain. I’m on your tail the whole way.” Abram tried to hide the nervousness in his voice. It would soon be fully dark on a moonless night. He could not believe he was about to be out on the ocean in this darkness, all by himself in a boat he could barely control.
Levi climbed into the motorboat, fiddled with the controls, and one of the two large outboards roared to life.
“She’s all yours. Stay close to me.”
Levi leaped from the motorboat to the dock, untied the docking lines and pushed the boat from the float. He then walked quickly to the sailboat, where the diesel engine was idling. He’d plotted his course fifteen miles out to the middle of nearby Penobscot Bay, where the chart showed a depth of 135 feet. The course took him from one lighted buoy to the next and the GPS showed exactly where the pair of boats was.
Two and a half hours later, Levi waved to Goldhersh to cut his engine. The powerboat drifted up next to the sailboat and Levi tossed a line from his vessel around a cleat on the powerboat, tying the two boats side by side.
“Now we play Titanic,” he said to Goldhersh.
With Goldhersh standing by in the Boston Whaler tied to the sailboat’s side, Levi went into the forward head, the boat’s bathroom, and moved a device called a seacock lever to the open position. He’d removed the rubber hose from the seacock to the boat’s toilet. Moving the lever let off a geyser of freezing seawater. He watched the water shoot four feet toward the cabin ceiling. He backed out and climbed up to the cockpit. In a few minutes he looked into the cabin and saw the wooden floorboards begin to lift and float out of position.
Levi fought an urge to wade forward through the icy water and close the seacock, regretting how he was paying back this beautiful vessel, this wonderful work of craftsmanship that safely carried him and Reuben from a world of troubles to this peaceful corner of the world. Then he realized what could happen to them should this boat be discovered and traced back across the ocean.
As the boat settled lower into the water, Levi climbed across to the Boston Whaler. He reached for the rope tying the two boats together, then paused.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I almost forgot something.”
Levi climbed back onto the sailboat and stepped down into the cabin. The water was already above his bare feet and ankles. His eyes settled on the navigation table, where he’d spent so many hours in the transatlantic voyage. He reached in his pocket and carefully placed the dog tags in the center of the tabletop. He stood, saluted, and quickly climbed up and back to the motorboat.
He watched the boat slowly sink below the ocean surface.
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sp; “Let’s go home,” Levi said as he started the second outboard and pushed the twin throttles forward.
As the sailboat settled toward the ocean bottom, at a depth of fifty feet, a glass vial on the automatic inflation system of the life raft jammed into the forward compartment burst, as it was designed to do. The inflation valve on the compressed air cylinder was triggered. The raft instantly inflated, filling the forward cabin. The additional buoyancy was enough to stop the boat’s descent and slowly return it to the surface, masts waving in the air.
The two brothers who co-owned the lobster boat Robin Mary Joseph Warren Katy were out on Penobscot Bay just before sunrise, motoring at full throttle toward their lobster grounds, 400 pots to pull that day. Their view of the mast and partially submerged bow of the Hinckley drifting dead ahead of them was blocked by the rising sun. The lobster boat was almost on top of the hulk of the sailboat before they saw it. They cut their engine and slowly circled the sailboat, looking to see if anybody was on board.
Not seeing anybody, they radioed the Rockland Coast Guard station and reported what they’d found. The Coast Guard ordered them to stand by the vessel until assistance arrived. Lobstermen being lobstermen—no great fans of authority or the Coast Guard—they radioed the GPS coordinates of the boat and took off once again at full throttle.
The Coast Guard’s 110-foot Island-class coastal patrol boat Wrangell was returning to Rockland after a one-week VBST, vessel boarding and security team, patrol off the Maine coast, inspecting container ships bound for Portland and Boston. The radio operator at Coast Guard Station Rockland diverted the Wrangell to the coordinates given by the lobstermen.
It took the patrol boat, traveling through the flat water near its top speed of twenty-nine knots, less than an hour to reach the Hinckley. The captain ordered three men to lower a rigid-bottom inflatable boat and inspect the sailboat. Arriving alongside, two of the men hopped into the sailboat’s cockpit, which was full of water. The men were thankful they wore full immersion suits in the cold water. Clipped around their waists were utility belts with the full VBST pack of equipment they wore when boarding suspicious boats, including their sidearms.
Looking into the boat’s cabin, they observed one end of the life raft coming from the forward cabin.
There was three feet of air space beneath the ceiling in the main cabin. The two men climbed into the cabin, intending to inspect the boat for survivors, hoping they would not find any bodies. The main cabin and the forward cabin were both empty. One man forced open the door to the head compartment, where the toilet was located, and glanced inside. Nobody was there. He did not notice the open seacock beneath the water.
The men were puzzled but relieved that they’d found nothing especially gross, no decomposing bodies, to report. Looking around the cabin, one man noticed that the cushion on the starboard settee had floated free. The top of the settee looked as if it had been ripped open, exposing the water tank beneath. On closer inspection, he saw the top of the water tank had been smoothly cut out.
“What do you suppose caused that?” he asked his buddy, who shook his head and leaned forward to look into the opening. As he did so, a loud bleeping filled the cabin.
“What the hell was that?” the other man asked.
The first coastguardsman reached toward his belt and lifted a small, rectangular black device on which a red light was flashing and from which the bleep, bleep, bleep sound was coming. He unclipped the device from his waist and held it close to the opening in the settee. The sound increased and the red light flashed more rapidly.
“Holy fucking shit,” he muttered, holding his Polimaster personal radiation monitor, the device coastguardsmen used to check cargo containers for signs of hidden radioactive material. A red LED on top of the device was flashing rapidly and the device emitted a continuous bleep, bleep.
The man leaped from the cabin into the sailboat’s cockpit and screamed to the third coastguardsman waiting in the inflatable boat alongside.
“Call the captain. Now. Quick. We have a situation here.”
CHAPTER 27
Enclosed stadiums, fine as they were for sporting events, don’t work as detention centers. That lesson was learned in New Orleans. The Agganis Arena, to put it bluntly, stunk. There were no showers. The miasma of 4,000 people living together twenty-four hours a day, cooking food on hotplates when they tired of trying to eat what was trucked in to the concession stands, settled down from the domed ceiling like a fogbank over the surface of the ocean, gradually lowering until it hovered just over the heads of the people on the floor, engulfing those families who’d staked out higher sections of the seating area.
Something has to be done with these people, thought retired General Hutchings Paterson, director of the Department of Homeland Security. Gen. Paterson was responsible for housing the Israeli detainees. He knew he had a problem but was at a loss with what to do with the people he was holding. There was not enough prison space in the Northeast to house them, even if prison were the solution. After all, they had not been charged with any crime. From what he’d heard, they would be dealt with by the military, not the criminal system, not even by Immigration and Customs. That was fine with him. He just wished somebody would come up with a bright idea. Soon.
Harry Wade, the wonder-manager recruited from Honda Motors USA to revitalize the moribund Federal Emergency Management Agency, had won wide praise the past year for FEMA’s response to what was dubbed the Twin Hurricanes, which resulted from Hurricane Jack branching into two separate cells tracking side by side. This had never happened before. Because Hurricane Karla was already forming, claiming the K name, the twin cells were named Hurricane Jack and Hurricane Jill. The storms struck southern Florida from both the east and west simultaneously, causing record property losses and loss of life. Wade telephoned Gen. Paterson.
“General, I understand you have a few thousand people on your hands in Massachusetts and no place to put them,” Wade said. Problems, to Wade, were like daisies on the lawn—something to be dealt with, plucked and displayed.
“Nice to hear from you, Harry,” Gen. Paterson said into the telephone, signaling his first assistant director to pick up the extension next to the sofa in the director’s office. “Haven’t spoken with you since that reception at the British Embassy, when the prince introduced the new wife, that third one. Let’s hope he got it right this time, them being our one and only ally in Europe.”
“His problem isn’t in outliving his wives,” Wade joked. “His problem is that it looks like his mother is going to outlive him.”
Gen. Paterson laughed politely.
“I’m calling about your situation in Boston, General. You’ve got thousands of people trying to live in a basketball stadium, with more being arrested every day.”
“Yes, Harry, it was my people who stopped that Amtrak train heading to Montreal and checked Americards. We picked up a dozen Israelis trying to get out of Boston.”
“And what a good job that was. But where are those people, General? Cooped up in that basketball stadium at Boston University. That’s a problem.” Wade had a solution. “Here’s my suggestion. You can’t take all those Jews and hand them over to the Arabs, like the Arabs want us to do. Not after the TV coverage of those camps over there. Wouldn’t look good. Time for that is past. Agree with me so far?”
“The president tried getting those ships out of our hair and he failed,” Paterson said. “We’ve lost the option of returning these people to their homeland, like we did with all the other illegals in the past, since their homeland no longer exists—at least, as their home. So go on.”
“General, FEMA’s got access to a former military camp with housing for five thousand people in more comfort than any other federal detention facility,” Wade said happily. “It’s right in Massachusetts, a military place with loads of security, but a place with enough comforts so the liberals won’t scream too loud. We just removed the last of our Jack and Jill refugees from Camp Edwards at Otis
Air Force Base on Cape Cod. Great facility. We left it all spiffed up. Why don’t you ship ’em down there, General?”
“What about security, Harry?” Paterson asked. “Your hurricane folks weren’t trying to escape.”
“No problem with security. The Air Force stored nukes there. Best security in the world. Triple razor wire fences all around, guard towers, the works. If it was good enough to keep terrorists out, it’s good enough to keep terrorists in. Right? So, what do you say?”
Gen. Paterson paused to think. Any place was better than the basketball stadium. Then he pictured the military base, coils of barbed wire. Old women, children inside. He looked at his assistant. The man’s eyes were closed. All color had left his face. Paterson knew why. He picked up the phone again.
“I can’t make a decision like this on my own, Harry.” He paused for an acknowledgement. Hearing nothing, he continued. “I don’t have to tell you that shipping Jewish refugees to a military detention camp surrounded by barbed wire has a pretty bad historical precedent for some people.”
“General, I’m well aware of historical precedents, but we live in the present. We have people in our custody, people who just happen to be Jews. We’re not holding them because they’re Jews, we’re holding them because we can’t do anything else with them. Which do you think would cause more of a fuss? Handing a bunch of Jews over to the Arabs or moving them into comfortable housing on Vacationland Cape Cod?”
“Agreed, Harry. I’ve gotta tell you, though, I get a sick feeling with the idea of me being in charge of a military detention camp filled with Jews. There are going to be photos of Jewish kids staring through barbed wire, American barbed wire. You know that. I don’t want to be America’s Adolph Eichmann.”
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