Bashert

by Lior Samson

  “No, I think I prefer this one. I like the message. Zachor. Bashert. And last but most decidedly not least, I wear my sunglasses at night.”

  Shira laughed and wiped at her tears.

  “You know,” he said, putting his arms around her waist, “I’ve been thinking. I think he always had more in mind than just leading us to the fuel. It’s almost as if somehow he knew that it would work between us, yet he barely knew me—just for a few months and that was more than forty years ago. We were just kids.”

  She put her head against his chest, as if listening to his heart. “You’re a lot taller than Migdal, you know.” She pulled back a little to look up into his face, “Didn’t you once say that you had a crush on that girl who died on the boat? Well, so did Migdal. We were all part of the same karass, doing the same piece of God’s work. We already had some connection. And we are both artists. So, how could it not work?”

  “Well, what I think is that when he read the writing on the wall, he set out to make sure you and Bini would be all right, taken care of. So he just thought about the most obsessively over-responsible person he had ever known. And here I am, just as he figured.” He reached down and fingered the mezuzah through his shirt. “You know I can’t wear this.” He started to slip it off over his head.

  “Why not? Because it was Migdal’s?”

  “No, because I’m not Jewish.”

  “That’s what you think. That’s what Migdal once thought. But just wait.”

  “No, you just wait. If you think I’m going to,” he glanced toward Bini, “well, have a mohel do plastic surgery below my waist, you better think again.” He looked back toward Bini, who was rolling his eyes.

  “Don’t mind him,” she said. “It’s a ten-year-old boy thing. He does that to me, too.”

  “It’s not true, Abba Karl. I would never disrespect my mother. Only you.” He ran from the living room glancing over his shoulder to make sure Karl was behind him.

  ~ ~ ~

  They saw Bini off to school, then Shira went down to her studio and Karl set up his laptop on the kitchen table. He was just getting organized—still trying to make up his mind whether to be responsible and write his next blog posting or do what he really wanted to do and resume working on his novel—when she returned to the kitchen.

  “It’s too hot to work, today,” she said. “Let’s go to the beach. We can go to Ga’ash. It’s a drive but we have time. Bini won’t be back from school until 15:30.”

  “I’ve never been there. I hear it’s beautiful.”

  “Yes, it is, and full of surprises. You’ll like it.”

  “Great. Let me grab a towel and try to find my bathing suit.”

  Shira laughed.

  “What?”

  She came over to his chair and sat, facing him, in his lap. “Like I said, it’s full of surprises.”

  ~ ~ ~

  ~ ~ ~

  Read all seven of the Homeland Connection novels:

  Bashert

  The Dome

  Web Games

  Chipset

  Gasline

  Flight Track

  Exit Plans

  Author’s Note

  Although this is a work of fiction, I did not make it all up. This much is true. In 1963, a clever and inquisitive student—who had doctored his own high-school records to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a year early—was working in a part-time custodial job when he stumbled on an unmarked and unguarded room in which was stored a cache of nuclear fuel for MIT’s research reactor. Much later, in 1969, MIT actually discovered that a quantity of highly enriched uranium, along with depleted uranium, had indeed gone missing at some point in time. A graduate student had apparently used a master key to obtain the unsecured material, which was, according to some reports, recovered later.

  Construction on Israel’s first nuclear reactor, at Dimona in the Negev desert, was already completed by 1964, and it is now believed that as early as 1968 the CIA had concluded that Israel was producing nuclear weapons on a regular basis. Indeed, some experts suggest that Israel already possessed at least two fully functional atomic bombs by 1967, which were, it has been claimed, ordered to be armed during the Six-Day War. Many observers have speculated that Israel’s nuclear weapons program was fueled, at least in part, by significant quantities of MUF—nuclear “Material Unaccounted For”—from the United States.

  The speed at which Israel had entered the nuclear club, without an invitation and without ever applying for an official membership card, impressed many politicians and scientists alike. However, even after dissident Mordechai Vanunu in 1986 revealed photographs and other details about the Dimona operation, Israel still did not acknowledge its nuclear program or admit to possessing nuclear weapons. Vanunu was abducted in Rome by Mossad in September of that year and returned to Israel to stand trial. He remained in prison until 2004.

  Although sundry bits and pieces have been assembled over the years, the full story of Israel’s nuclear program is still substantially unknown. As for the what-if story in this book, it began as a solo exercise in speculation inspired by an isolated memory and quickly became a collaborative work that bears the marks of many minds. Lucy, my bashert, helped from the beginning when it was no more than a scenario in my head and guided me through the false starts and the numerous drafts that “needed work,” as she would so bluntly but gently put it, all the way to the end and back to the beginning—more than once.

  And we were not alone on this extended journey. Others—my “subject matter experts”—joined along the way to help me with fact checking and educating me in the many areas of my inadequate knowledge about firearms, about sailing, and about Israeli intelligence, and to assist with my clumsy German and Hebrew. I cannot thank them enough. Dale Constantine, Jim Hawkins, Alexandra Levich, Barak Turovsky, and Helmut Windl all did their best to keep me from egregious technical errors and, along the way, made suggestions that also helped me to improve the story and the storytelling. As well, Ed Powers answered my questions about police practices in Massachusetts, and Bill Eldridge set me straight about the Boston harbor. In all, it is a much better book for all their generous input, and what missteps remain or may have crept into the manuscript despite their generous advice are my responsibility alone.

  I am grateful also to Tom Newton, with MIT’s Nuclear Research Lab, for responding to my many emails with vital historical information, and to Amy Stout and Chris Sherratt with the MIT libraries, for going beyond their duties as librarians to deliver important tidbits to an alum burdened by imperfect memory.

  And to my old college friend, Dave Tutelman, who surfaced suddenly and unexpectedly from my own dim MIT past, whose sharp observations and pointed suggestions helped add the final precision and polish and who managed to find typos that had eluded us all, I add one more toda raba. Thank you. Thank you one and all.

  Heidelberg, Germany, November 2007

  Funchal, Portugal, March 2010

  Appendix:

  An Inspiring Hacker

  Hackers. In contemporary use, a hacker is someone who gains unauthorized access to computer systems or resources, and the term “hacking” has been generalized to refer to nearly any clever scheme or workaround that manipulates a system or situation—or even a person. But the word has morphed in meaning over the past half century. When I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early Sixties, a hack was a prank or stunt. An elegant hack was one that was inventive, intelligent, caused no harm, and, ideally, received wide attention. There is a long history of hacking by students at MIT (see references below), everything from disassembling a car and reassembling it atop the Green Earth Sciences Building to transforming “The Great Dome” into an R2D2 replica. Although the people and events in this novel are fictitious, behind the fiction are facts as well as inspiration from the short but eventful life of my friend Dave Hahn, a master of the elegant hack and in whose memory the book is dedicated.

  Dave and a few co-conspirators
actually pulled off the hack recounted in the story involving the first Boston-bound morning train into Kendall Square, the subway station adjacent to MIT in Cambridge. Owing to a measured application of lithium grease over a precisely calculated stretch of the tracks, the train slid through the station without stopping until reaching the midpoint of the Longfellow bridge over the Charles River. Although the transit authorities and police ranted about how dangerous the stunt was, the students had done their physics homework, taking into account all the parameters—mass of the train, its speed, brake efficiency, coefficient of friction, and the like—to predict the exact point where the subway train would safely come to a stop.

  That was possibly the last of Dave’s hacks in the older sense of the word, but that was not the end of his inventive and idiosyncratic approach to life. Dave was a do-it-all-yourself entrepreneur whose business interests were usually well outside the mainstream and whose practices often played loose with commercial convention.

  He once worked a deal to buy scrapped polarized plastic lenses from the company hauling the trash from Cambridge-based Polaroid. These he sold to an Italian sunglasses company by operating an import-export business for a time out of the basement of my Boston apartment. But he was a restless operator who moved quickly from one opportunity to the next. He helped found The Boston Tea Party, a legendary venue in the local rock scene and early influence on the evolution of the so-called Boston sound. Using his engineering and hacking skills, he patched together one of the first computer-controlled light shows, then soon sold his share to move on to other projects.

  He developed an interest in government surplus and worked out a scheme for gaming the auction system to buy serviceable equipment for low-ball bids. Some of his winning bids had surprising outcomes.

  In the predawn dark of one spring morning, a light but insistent rap on my apartment door tugged me awake. It was, Dave. “I’ve just driven through the night from Philadelphia. I’m exhausted. Can I crash here for a few hours?” I let him in, tossed an extra pillow and blanket on the couch for him, and went back to bed.

  Bright sun was streaming in by the time of the second round of knocks, a thunderous pounding accompanied by a commanding voice. “Open up, police. Open up.” I scrambled for my bathrobe and opened the door to be greeted by two of Boston’s Finest. “Is that your boat downstairs?” one officer said.

  “What? A boat?” I mumbled.

  Dave was now sitting up. “That’s mine.”

  “Well, you got two minutes to get it out of there. You’re blocking the street. Move it, now, or I’m going to bury it in so many tickets you won’t even be able to see it, and it’ll be towed at your expense. And that ain’t going to be cheap.”

  I accompanied Dave downstairs to find that our narrow, one-way Peterborough Street was completely blocked by a double-parked beatup flatbed truck with a gray Navy surplus whale boat listing to port on the back, held in place by jury-rigged ropes the size of my wrist.

  That boat lived for a time in a disused parking lot on MIT’s West Campus while Dave built a cabin and added a mast and sail to the open-hulled motor launch. His plan, to use the small craft to film a circumnavigation of the globe for National Geographic, was eventually scrapped in favor of trying his hand at fishing for king crab off the coast of Alaska. After hauling the boat cross-country on the same rickety rig that had showed up outside my apartment, that plan, too, was abandoned.

  This is not to say that his business plans went nowhere. Using patched-up government surplus buses that he bought on the cheap, he started the first regular rural bus service in Belize in what was then called British Honduras. He later rehabilitated a navy surplus coastal mine sweeper, converting it into a cargo vessel to establish an import-export shipping business in Central America. While working on repairs to the boat, he suffered a heart attack and died. He was thirty-one.

  Of all Dave’s early money-making schemes, the one that inspired this novel ranks among the wildest. After discovering that MIT was holding highly-enriched nuclear fuel in an unguarded storeroom—to which he had a key—Dave became the focus of a group of friends who fantasized about how the situation could, in theory, be exploited. Dave eventually concluded that the risks were not worth the rewards for him, since he was certain he would make many more millions from countless other business deals over his lifetime.

  Oh, yes, the fantasy plan was to deliver the nuclear goods to Israel, and yes, the group really did have access to an ocean-going yacht converted from a surplus destroyer escort.

  Rowley, Massachusetts, March 2020

  Leibowitz, B. M. The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery & Pranks at MIT. MIT Museum, 1990.

  Peterson, T. F. Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT. MIT Press, 2011.

  About the Author

  Lior Samson is the pen name of a former university professor who has won awards for both fiction and non-fiction writing as well as for his innovative work in industrial design. He has more than two dozen published books, including thirteen novels and two collections of short fiction. As a consultant and teacher, he has traveled the world, lived in Australia and Portugal, and served on the faculties of two international universities.

  He resides in Massachusetts with his family, where he cooks creative fusion cuisine and composes serious choral music. He is a freelance journalist and photographer and one-man technical support team for the three students in his life.

  The readers who write with questions, kudos, and criticism are vital parts of the dialogue he seeks to spark through his writing. He enjoys hearing from readers and appreciates those who take the time to post reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. He can be reached by email at: lior@liorsamson.com