42 – Brooklin, Maine
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 32-foot motor boat for her “guests” to use.
“They only need it for one night,” Sarah said. “But please have the boat yard fill the fuel tank and make sure the engine is OK.”
Lowenstein, sure by now she was part of something clandestine, called the Brooklin Boat Yard as soon as Sarah hung up.
The next morning, Levi and Abram Goldhersh powered up the twin 250 horsepower Honda outboards on the Lowenstein’s Boston Whaler Outrage and motored away from the boat yard 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 its 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,” Abram asked. “You’ve got to tell me how fast is a knot. This whole adventure will be a lot easier if you talk in English.”
“OK, 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 it was 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 a sailboat and a motor boat in the middle of the night.”
Once Levi was satisfied that Abram could at least point the power boat 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 Lowenstein’s house was located, the same Eggemoggin Reach he’d sailed down when he and Reuben first arrived, a week and a half earlier.
“I’ll take over here,” he said as the boat approached the Lowenstein’s dock. Levi expertly 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 motor boat arrive. She carried a back pack.
“I’ve got a thermos of Starbucks for you, and a couple of tuna sandwiches, and a bag of Hydrox cookies,” she said.
“What a wonderful invention those Hydrox are,” Levi said, laughing. “I wonder why they never exported them to Israel. Maybe they’re not Kosher. 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, a sailboat tied on the opposite side of the dock from the power boat.
Maybe he’s a nicer person when he’s on land, she thought. Or maybe it was Victoria’s Secret. Nancy Lowenstein seemed to have ordered every item in the catalog. 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 that she’d held within her closed hand. He took it and looked at the gold-colored metal tag 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, too,” 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 object 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 light, I think it’s some sort of anchor beacon, from the railing at the back. 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, shut the engines down. I’ll circle back and find you. You stay put.
“But don’t lose sight of me. 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 skipper. Just 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 already idling.
“Untie those lines, would you, Debra,” he called. “We’ll be home by dawn. Piece of cake.” He smiled, recalling the dark-haired college student from California who’d taken a week’s sailing lessons at his father’s hotel. Everything to her, everything imaginable, was, she said, a “piece of cake.”
He’d plotted his course 15 miles out to the middle of nearby Penobscot Bay, where the chart showed water depths of 135 feet. The course took him from one lighted buoy to the next and the Global Positioning System showed exactly where the pair of boats was. For a man who’d sailed across the ocean, the trip was simple. The motorboat never strayed more than twenty yards from the sailboat’s stern, especially once Goldhersh learned to control the throttle to avoid racing the engine up and down.
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.
Boats float because their hulls keep the water on the outside. A hole in the hull of a sailboat, of any boat, is generally not a good idea. Despite that, most boats have holes in their hulls, lots of holes. They need a hole in the bottom for the drive shaft that connects the engine, which is on the inside, with the propeller, which is on the outside. Other holes are needed for toilets and sinks, for seawater coming in and going out. Marine engines are cooled by seawater drawn into the engine, run through a radiator to absorb engine heat, and then discharged back to the sea. Two more holes.
Much thought has gone into devices to ensure that the water that goes through these holes in boat hulls winds up in the right place, rather than filling the boat. What has been developed, and what the Hinckley yawl used at every hole in its hull, was a device called a seacock. A long handle on each seacock swiveled through 90 degrees to rotate a shutoff on the inside of the seacock. With the handle in one position, the hole in the hull is blocked. Move the handle to the other position and the hole is open and seawater flows through the seacock.
Attached to each seacock was a specially fabricated hose designed to carry engine cooling water, sink drain water or sewage system water. These hoses were attached to their seacocks with stainless steel bands called hose clamps that tightened around the outside of the hose, holding it firmly to the seacock. Every hose attached to a seacock used two steel hose clamps, just in case one failed.
As a further precaution, tied by a thin string to every seacock on the boat was a cone-shaped wooden plug, sized to fit the hole of the adjacent seacock. If the worst happened and the hose failed and the seacock would not turn, the wooden plug could be hammered into the seacock, shutting off the flow of seawater into the boat.
Holes in hulls are serious matters.
Before leaving the dock, Levi had removed the hose from the seacock leading to the toilet, carefully moving the seacock lever to the fully closed, sealed off position.
Now, 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 the seacock lever to the open position. Freezing cold seawater - this was central Maine - leapt up from the seacock and struck him in the face. He stepped back and watched the water shoot four feet toward the cabin ceiling before falling down to flow onto the cabin floor. He backed out and climbed up to the cockpit. In a few minutes he could look into the cabin and see the wooden floor boards begin to lift and float out of position.
In his two months at sea, Levi had become accustomed to the feel of the sailboat, the ease with which it climbed over waves and settled into the troughs between waves. As the hull filled with water, the boat felt logy, heavy, rolling from side to side with a stolid, slower motion.
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. That would not be good, Levi thought.
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 trans-Atlantic voyage. He reached in his pocket and carefully placed the dog tags in the center of the tabletop working area. He stood, saluted, and quickly climbed up and back to the motorboat.
“Now we can go,” he said to Abram as he untied the line holding the boats together.
“I’ll drive us home,” he told Goldhersh, who did not complain about being displaced in command.
The two boats drifted slowly apart. Levi remained nearby to watch the sailboat sink lower and lower, until finally the water lapped over the decks and filled the cockpit, flowing through the open cabin door into the cabin. At that, with a whoosh and a fluorescence of the plankton in the cold waters, the boat settled down into the sea until the top of the mast disappeared under the waves.
“Let’s go home now,” Levi said as he started the second outboard and pushed the twin throttles forward. The engines roared and the motorboat lifted from the water’s surface as Levi followed his GPS course back to the dock.
One more job done, he thought. Now we need to find a safe place to stash that thing, he thought, still not knowing how to refer to the nuclear device in the basement of the Lowenstein’s comfortable summer cottage.
Back in the middle of Penobscot Bay, the Hinckley Bermuda 40 yawl “Swift” slowly drifted toward the sea bottom, 135 feet from the surface. “Swift” had a 6,000-pound lead keel, designed to keep the boat upright when under sail. Once the hull filled with water, the heavy keel attempted to drag the vessel downward. This boat, however, was specially modified for cross-ocean voyages. Its original owner filled every available unused space with aluminum tanks for storing water and diesel fuel. Levi ran all of these tanks dry in two months sailing, leaving the boat honeycombed with sealed chambers, now filled with buoyant air. These empty tanks provided flotation and brought the boat close to neutral buoyancy, almost to the point where the flotation effect from the tanks equaled the weight of the boat itself. Nonetheless, the lead keel was heavy enough, despite all these air tanks, to tip the equation ever so slightly toward the side of sinking rather than floating and to drag the boat toward the bottom, ever so slowly.
As the boat sank through the 50-foot level, in the farthest forward compartment of the cabin, right up near where the two sides of the boat came together at the bow, a glass vial attached to the compressed air tank on the automatic inflation system of the rubber liferaft crushed at the depth at which it was designed to pop, opening the air tank’s valve and allowing the compressed air to fill and inflate the life raft, jammed in place there since the storm off Bermuda. This automatic inflation system was designed to inflate the liferaft and shoot it to the surface in case it were dragged down by a sinking boat.
The compressed air expanded the life raft’s flotation chambers, filling the entire front cabin of the boat, driving the seawater from that cabin.
The added buoyancy of the inflated raft swung the buoyancy equation toward the flotation side. The boat’s descent stopped and it gradually started returning to the surface, the water-free forward cabin leading the way.
The bow broke the surface. The main cabin was still mostly filled with water and the stern of the boat remained submerged, but the mast stood clear of the water and the front third of the boat showed above the waves.
The two brothers who co-owned the lobsterboat Robin Mary Joseph Warren Katy - lobster boats are traditionally named after the owner’s children and two owners made for lots of kids - were out on Penobscot Bay just before sunrise, motoring at full throttle toward their private 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 lobsterboat 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 29 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 inflated liferaft coming from the forward cabin. There was at least three feet of air space beneath the ceiling in the main cabin so 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 sound filled the cabin.
“What the hell was that,” the other man asked.
Suddenly, the first Coast Guardsman 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 Polycon personal radiation monitor, the device Coast Guardsmen used to check cargo containers for signs of radioactive material hidden inside, for his buddy to see. A red LED on top of the device was flashing rapidly and the device emitted a continuous “bleep, bleep” sound.
Without hesitating, the man leapt from the cabin into the sailboat’s cockpit and screamed to the third Coast Guardsman waiting in the inflatable boat alongside.
“Call the captain. Now. Quick. We have a situation here.”