17 – At sea
Sailing across the Atlantic Ocean ahead of the Trade Winds from east to west was no longer the epic adventure it was when Columbus first journeyed. The trip had been made by a German paddling a kayak in the 1930s, by an 18 year old woman sailing alone, by thousands of retired sailing couples returning from a season on the Mediterranean, and, of course, by countless private yachts.
Being lost was no longer an option. The planet was circled by an armada of Global Positioning System satellites that transmitted to GPS receivers as small as transistor radios, giving latitude and longitude to an accuracy of 10 feet. The Hinckley Bermuda 40, being top of the line itself, carried a state of the art Magellan GPS and chartplotter, actually a high-powered computer display with digitized maps for the entire planet stored in postage stamp sized memory cartridges. Thirty seconds after the device was powered up it displayed a nautical chart of the area in which the boat was sailing, zoomed closely enough to navigate through a complicated anchorage or zoomed out to display the entire Atlantic Ocean. In the center of that chart a small image of a boat blinked on and off, indicating exactly where “Swift” was located on the earth’s face, give or take three yards.
So long as the GPS worked, Levi could determine the boat’s position as easily as he could locate a bar of soap in a bathtub.
It would have made the vacation of a lifetime, sailing from Spain to the Caribbean, then north to New England, an idyllic eight weeks at sea, well before the hurricane season, not at all dangerous with the autopilot handling the routine task of keeping the boat on course, with the reverse osmosis desalinator keeping the water tanks topped up, with the solar panels charging the bank of deep storage batteries that powered the stereo and the 12-volt DC refrigerator.
As a military invasion of the United States of America by the Israel Defense Forces, it was somewhat low key.
What it should have been, Levi thought, was a honeymoon. She isn’t at all bad looking, Levi thought, checking out Debra Reuben for the umpteenth time. She was lying on the foredeck, the forward area of the sailboat she’d claimed as her own space. I’m checking her out, Levi thought, and nothing more.
If she’d only loosen up a bit, he thought, this trip would be a lot more interesting. I’m the only guy within a thousand miles and, hell, we both have nothing to lose from a little companionship. He’d tried being soft and gentle, listening for hours as she finally told him about Dimona and the air force pilots. She explained again and again that she had no choice about sending the jet toward Damascus. It wasn’t her decision at all, in fact, since she was just following orders, she’d told him. He’d decided not to point out the irony of her excuse, “just following orders,” ironic especially for a Jew, especially for a Jew responsible for what was already being called the Islamic Holocaust.
He’d tried being domestic, whipping up the last of the fresh meat into a beef Wellington that would have impressed the guests at his parents’ hotel. He tried being the tough soldier, telling her tales - mostly true - about manning the inshore patrol boat, dropping commandos on the beach in Lebanon.
But all they’d done was talk. He talked. She listened. She talked. He listened.
Levi was surprised during the first three weeks of their crossing at the quantity of rum Debra put away. She drank without pleasure, as if she were taking medicine. Some days she started at breakfast and kept a glass going through the entire day, like a chain smoker lighting one cigarette from the previous one. Levi assumed this drinking was something new to her. She could not have drunk like this for many years, he thought, not and maintained her appearance, her health, her sanity.
It came to a head after three weeks, when Reuben stormed on deck swearing.
“Where the fuck is that second case of Bacardi,” she screamed at Levi. “I bought two cases myself. I told you to load them into the forward cabin. The first case is gone and I can’t find the second fucking case. I need it. Now. I need it.”
“There was only room for one case,” Levi answered. “It was that or the carton of extra provisions and I made a decision. Hey, look, I never thought we’d go through even the first case of rum.”
Levi’s answer did not satisfy Reuben. She tried to speak, tried to yell, but only sputters came from her mouth. Instead, she stormed to the bow of the boat, stamped her feet on the deck and lay down, rolled into a ball, hugging her knees, rocking slowly from side to side.
Levi chose to leave her alone.
That evening, over dinner in the cockpit, a bluefish he’d caught with the trolling rod he left dangling from the boat’s stern rail, she tried to speak to him, failed, was silent, then sobbed. Levi rose from his seat and sat next to her, his arm around her shoulder. Debra leaned into him, her head against his chest.
Without the alcohol to dull her pain, to kill her thoughts, she ceased fighting and gave in to the fist that had been clamped on her stomach since she awoke at Dimona with the planes gone. Levi held her tightly as her body shook, sometimes softly as the pain drained from her, sometimes so violently he feared she’d fling herself over the side of the boat. He did not know what to say, so, uncharacteristically for him in such a situation with such a beautiful woman, he said nothing, just held her as the sun splashed into the western sea and the boat, leaning gently with the wind in its sails, followed Columbus’ wake toward the sunset.
Eventually, her body and mind both tired. He carried her to the bunk in the forward cabin she had claimed for herself and, for the first time since he’d met her in Marbella, she slept through the night. He chose not to wake her for her late night watch, but remained in the cockpit himself until dawn.
Whether it was that night or the missing second case of Bacardi, Reuben seemed eased the next morning. Neither acknowledged what had happened the previous night, although both realized they had shared an intimacy more intense than simple intercourse would have been. Nonetheless, despite Levi’s hints, Debra rebuffed any further steps toward physical closeness. Levi felt like a teenager, taking pleasure from accidentally brushing against Reuben in the cramped cabin, thrilled by a goodnight peck on the cheeks from her. He sensed that she was not rejecting him, she was rejecting life itself, rejecting it as a gift she did not know if she deserved after what she had done.
So she claimed the foredeck during the day and the forward cabin at night. He ruled the cockpit. Inside the boat they were each shielded by an invisible zone of protection that the other was forbidden from entering. In that way, they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, more like brother and sister than two young, healthy people, people who had both lost important parts of themselves, he, his country and his family, she, her belief that she was a good person.
The first landfall was the tiny island of Jost van Dyke, a speck of land north of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, where they tried to blend in with the fleet of sailboats on bareboat charters filled with idling Americans trading several thousand dollars for a week of sunshine and warm breezes, beach bars and snorkeling. Levi and Reuben inflated the dinghy and rowed ashore, where they stretched their legs on the walk to the only grocery store in the small harbor, buying overpriced apples, oranges and potatoes shipped in from Florida for sale to American sailors. Before rowing back to the Hinckley, Levi persuaded Reuben to sit with him under a palm frond umbrella at Binky’s Peace and Love Beach Bar.
“At least have a pina colada with me to celebrate our transatlantic crossing,” he urged her. “This isn’t something you’re going to do every day.” It had been a week since she ran out of rum. He knew she would not refuse the opportunity to dull her pain with alcohol.
“OK,” she said warily, looking at the group of Americans at the next table, glowing red from days of tropic sun blasting on their winter pale skin. “Ply me with rum.” Maybe she was a bit severe with him. After all, the man had just brought her - and a tactical nuclear weapon - safely across the Atlantic Ocean. She smiled at him. “And sing the Banana Boat song to me.”
Levi’s mouth raised into a grin. It took long enough, he thought, but then, patience is a virtue, appreciating once again the power he had with women, with all women.
Four pina coladas later he really did stand in front of her and warble, with not a hint of any accent heard on any Caribbean island, “Hey mister tally man, tally me bananas.” Reuben looked at him softly, smiled to herself, smiled at him and said slowly, “Lets row back to our boat, banana boy. Its feeling crowded here.”
Before she could stand up, however, a loud, grating voice reached from across the thirty feet of sand and six tables making up Binky’s Peace and Love Beach Bar.
“Debbie Reuben. My gawd, is that Debbie Reuben from Great Neck? Wait till I tell yaw motha where I saw you I haven’t seen you in yeahs and yeahs come and give me a great big hug.”
Reuben turned and saw a vaguely familiar woman, hidden behind yard-wide sunglasses, head wrapped in a yellow scarf, bathing suit covered by what looked like the greater portion of a white parachute. Rising from her table and flapping her arms out wide, surplus flesh palpitating below her arms, this apparition from her Long Island childhood stood waiting for Reuben to cross the hot sand.
“Debbie Reuben I haven’t seen you since you were in that wondaful high school play I forget its name with my daughta Miriam. You look older but not so much is that yaw husband sitting there with you invite him ova.”
Miriam Babinsky’s mother, Reuben thought. Funny, I never would have thought of her as a sailor. She started walking slowly toward the woman.
Levi leapt up on suddenly wobbly feet and mumbled loudly to Reuben, “Honey, I don’t feel so good. I think I drank too many pina colladas. I think I’m going to be sick.”
He sat back down with a thump, dropping his head to the table. Reuben did an about face, running thankfully back to Levi.
“You don’t look well, dear,” she said a bit too loudly. “I’d better get you back to the boat.”
She dragged him to their dinghy.
“Good bye, Mrs. Babinsky,” Reuben shouted to the woman still standing at her table, who’d watched this scenario in shocked silence. “Good to see you again.”
“Good to see you Debbie. I never see yaw motha anymaw since we moved to Syosset but if I run inta her at the mall I’ll tell her I saw you hee-yah.”
Please don’t do that, Reuben prayed to herself. I’m ready to deal with the United States Coast Guard or even the Egyptian Navy if I have to. But please don’t start my mother looking for me. The last email Reuben sent to her mother from Spain hinted vaguely at a long trip through Europe with a “very interesting man I just met, more later.”
“Thanks,” Reuben said to Levi as they arrived at the Hinckley, waiting quietly at anchor for them. “That was quick thinking.”
The incident evaporated any trace of Jamaican rum from her brain. Reuben was back to all business.
“Let’s get out of here right now, before they decide to drop by for a visit to see how my ‘husband’ is doing so they can gossip about the lush I married.”
Levi stood at the boat’s bow, his foot holding down the button that operated the electric anchor windlass as the anchor chain noisily wound up from the water and down into it’s storage locker in the boat’s bow, until the anchor was yanked into its holding bracket and the boat drifted freely.
“Anchor’s up. Let’s go,” he shouted back to Reuben, standing at the wheel. She pushed the engine shifter forward, engaging the gears and driving the boat forward around the point of the harbor entrance.
“What’s our course,” she asked Levi, who went into the cabin and powered up the GPS. “Find us a course well clear of everybody, and far away from Long Island, New York.”
“Swing us north, due north,” Levi said, climbing out of the cabin into the boat’s cockpit. “Eight-hundred-and-twenty-two” he stuck his head into the cabin for a second glance at the GPS “point three miles due North is Bermuda. We’ll head that way and decide what to do before we get there.
“With what we have on board, we can’t risk any more chance meetings with ladies from Long Island.”
“OK, we’ll head for Bermuda,” Reuben responded, “but just where are you thinking of entering the U.S.?”
“I don’t know yet,” Levi answered. “We’ll have to do some thinking. I don’t have any idea what sort of patrols there are. One thing is sure, though, we’re going to have plenty of time to think about it. We’ve got another two weeks at least of looking at nothing but each other and lots of saltwater.”
He raised the main sail, unrolled the genoa jib and the boat heeled over in the warm trade wind breeze. Levi connected the autopilot, dialed in the heading and sat back in the cockpit.
Two days later, as the boat continued to sail under blue skies before moderate trade winds, Levi climbed up the ladder from the cabin, where he’d been perched at the chart table working with the computerized plotter for most of the past two hours.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he told Reuben, who was stretched on one of the cockpit benches as the autopilot steered the sailboat. “We’re going to sail one straight shot up the whole east coast, no stops, no islands. I’ve plotted a course that takes us past Bermuda. From Bermuda we’ll sail due north and land somewhere on the American northeast coast.
“This will take us two weeks of straight night and day sailing. We’ll be staying out of the normal shipping lanes on most of this course.”
“You’re the great sailor, buddy. I don’t care how you do it. Just get us there,” Reuben responded.
“I’ll get us there all right,” he answered. “But what happens then? When do you fill me in on your plans for that deadly toy we have hidden away? Even after what . . . happened at home, I have limits as to what I’m willing to do.”
Levi gave a nervous laugh. “I won’t blow up New York City, you know.”
“Blow up Noo Yawk?” Reuben, too, laughed, putting on her best Long Island voice. “Blow up Bloomies? Blow up the Central Pok Zoo? Blow up, oh my God, Saks Fifth Ave-a-noo? I may be desperate, may be a bit crazy, but I’m not sick.”
She dropped the accent.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when we get to shore,” she said. “I’m hoping there will be people there, Jews, American Jews, who’ll take us in, take that thing off our hands. I don’t want to have to decide what to do with it.”
She paused, her eyes taking on a faraway look.
“I did enough during those days in the desert. If what I’ve done becomes known, I’ve already earned a dark place in the history books. I expect millions of people hate me already.”
Nobody had ever hated her before.
She stopped speaking suddenly, her eyes clouding, her breath stopping, her shoulders shaking. Levi looked at the woman, opened his arms wide and she flung herself against his chest, sobbing. His arms surrounded her, pulling her close, tight against his chest, as her body was shaken by her heaving sobs.
After several minutes with no words exchanged, Reuben pulled back and looked Levi in the face. She spoke quietly.
“I’m a mass murderer. I am, right? I sent that bomb to Damascus. A billion Muslims believe if they kill me they go straight to heaven. Right?” Levi did not respond. She made a fist and pounded on his chest.
“Right? Right? They kill me and they go to Paradise. I know that, at least I know they think that. Why do you think I stay awake all night and drink myself unconscious all day? I don’t know what we are going to do with that thing.” She pointed into the cabin. “I don’t know what we’ll do with it. But it’s the property of the State of Israel, the property now, I guess, of the Jewish people. It’s better to still have it than to have lost it to the fucking Arabs, right?”
She looked at him, waiting for a response. He nodded, barely moving his head. That wasn’t enough for her, he sensed. He spoke up, in a whisper first, then repeating himself firmly.
“You did the right thing, Debbie. You followed orders. You had no choice. And this one.” He nodded his head toward the boat’s cabin. “This one will be somebody else’s choice. We’ll hand it over and be done with it. We won’t do anything stupid with it.”
His words comforted her, whether or not he believed what he was telling her. Reassured, she smiled at Levi. “New York? Blow up Lord and Taylor? My mother would kill me. She’d have to go naked the rest of her life.”
The autopilot whirred as Levi loosened the main sheet to ease the sail as the Trade Wind veered slightly. They sailed onward toward New England, the three of them, the last sailor in the Israeli Navy, the last member of the Israeli government, and the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the (former) State of Israel.