16 - Marbella, Spain
Lt. Chaim Levi applied the last brush strokes of WEST System epoxy to the water storage tank under the main cabin settee, then scrambled up the cabin ladder into the boat’s cockpit, drawing deep breaths of fresh air after breathing epoxy fumes in the closed cabin all morning. He regretted losing the forty gallons of water storage from the starboard water tank - he’d have to find some place to put collapsible plastic water bags for the crossing - but he was terrified of what filled the tank now.
This warhead, alone among Israel’s diminutive nuclear arsenal, was designed for use by a commando squad, perhaps one infiltrated into, say, Tehran, in a pickup truck. The tube-shaped warhead was three feet long and eighteen inches across. It fit in the water tank. He’d cut the tank open and then sealed it with fiberglass and epoxy. It held water again, but Levi did not want to drink it. He was careful to leave no inspection port in the fiberglass. The tank would have to be cut open to find the warhead inside. Levi expected no customs inspector would be willing to do that much damage to such an expensive boat.
Before sealing the weapon inside the water tank, Reuben and Levi spent an afternoon with a young man whose English and Hebrew were equally interrupted by fits of nervous coughing. This man, a physics graduate of Hebrew University whose newly sunburned face was the recent payback from years spent mostly underground at the Dimona facility, carefully explained the workings of the arming device and the detonator. He was obviously proud.
“Even a child could use it,” he said. “It was my design the government selected as the standard detonator for nuclear field munitions.”
“Field munitions?” Levi asked. “What are nuclear field munitions?”
The technician gave Reuben an exasperated look.
“Are we really giving this man access to the device?” he asked her. She nodded.
“Nuclear field munitions are small nuclear devices designed to be carried by jeep, boat or helicopter,” he explained slowly, as if speaking to a child. “There are unique problems in designing the detonator for field munitions.”
“Why not just a simple clock?” Levi asked. “Or a button to push slowly while you kiss your ass goodbye. Why are these any different from detonators for normal bombs?”
“Do I have to go through this with this man?” the technician asked Reuben.
She waved her hand, her impatience showing.
“Because,” he said, “with nuclear devices you only want them to detonate when YOU want them to detonate. There is always the possibility, slim as it might be, that these devices could fall into the wrong hands and then ...”
He stopped in mid-sentence, realization clouding his expression as he recalled what happened to Tel Aviv.
“I suppose we might not have made the security quite as good as necessary.”
Levi looked at the young man and shuddered. Scientists like this one made the bomb they used in Tel Aviv, he thought.
“The timer can be set anywhere from one hundred hours to one second. The two arming codes must be entered on the keypad first, followed by the time setting, followed by the timing code. That sequence sets the trigger. Reentry of all three codes in the proper order stops the timer and disarms the device.
“Of course you have to first insert the authorization card before entering the codes,” he looked at Reuben as she removed a Chemical Bank of New York VISA card from a chain around her neck.
“Try it,” he told her.
Reuben looked at Levi, then at the scientist. She swiped the VISA card across a slot in the side of the device.
“You’re sure we can turn this off if we turn it on,” she asked.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said, then grinned slyly. “I did it myself twice this week. But that was before you changed the codes on me.”
Reuben reached for the device. Levi placed his hand on her wrist and held it away from the keypad.
“Now what would happen,” he asked her with a smile, “if you have a heart attack after you entered the codes and before you have time to reenter them. Where would that leave me?”
Reuben smiled. “It would leave you to join me in heaven,” she answered. “Only I know these codes. It’s going to stay that way.”
She armed the bomb and disarmed it, twice, confirming that the detonator activated each time.
“Load it into the boat tonight,” she told Levi.
“And your job is done,” she told the scientist. “Give me your card.”
He handed her a VISA card identical to the one dangling from the chain around her neck.
“Remember, this never happened,” Reuben told the pale man. “You never met me. You will tell no one. If you do, we will find you. Not every member of Mossad was in Tel Aviv.”
Reuben and Levi watched the scientist leave. She climbed down the companionway into the boat’s cabin and emerged with a bottle of Bacardi rum, a glass and a bowl of ice cubes. Levi looked at her and frowned.
“It isn’t even lunch time yet,” he said. “Sure you want to start that so early?”
Reuben didn’t know whether to be angry with the man or not. She took a deep breath and made a decision.
“If anybody on the face of this planet has earned the right to a drink in the morning, or any time of day, or any time of night, as many drinks as she God damn well wants, that person is me,” she said, looking vacantly at the floor of the boat’s cockpit as she drained her glass and then poured another over the still-unmelted ice.
Levi stared at the woman for thirty seconds. In the week they had spent preparing the sailboat to hide the bomb and getting ready for their voyage, the two of them had had few serious conversations. She’d explained to him what the tube-shaped device was, in general terms, and she’d told him a carefully-edited version of how she’d come into possession of such a lethal object. But Reuben had carefully avoided any discussion about either the Tel Aviv bomb or the Damascus bomb, two blatantly obvious subjects for people who had a close relative of those two bombs in their personal custody. Levi sensed that Reuben was struggling with something that had happened in her recent past, but he chose to wait for her to put it on the table. Whatever it was, certainly every person who’d escaped from what had been Israel had left horrors behind them. Levi did not discuss the bodies he’d watched sink beneath the burning surface of the sea when his patrol boat met its end, nor did he dare to mention the family and friends he expected to never see again. Knowing who Debra had been in Israel and obviously aware of the object she’d delivered to what he viewed as “his” boat, he suspected she was connected in some way with the Damascus bomb. He had not yet dared to raise the topic. She’ll talk in her own time, in her own way, he decided.
He also sensed that there was a strength in this woman that he had not yet seen displayed, that she was more than a beautiful woman with a weight on her shoulders. Levi was not used to dealing with women with either strength or substance. Superficial women had suited him just fine so far in his life. That seemed about to change. Of the many words that could describe Debra Reuben, ranging from “troubled” to “intense,” “superficial” was not among that vocabulary.
Reuben, startled, lifted her gaze from the cockpit floor, drained her glass of rum, poured another one, and smiled gaily, falsely, at Levi.
“I feel like a sea voyage,” Reuben said. “Let’s discover America.”