Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  “You don’t want to be Jimmy Carter, either, General, wringing your hands and complaining that we’ve got a problem we can’t solve. This decision is in your hands because these people are in your hands. So, what’s your decision?”

  “My decision is to run this by the president and let him decide. This is too big for me on my own.”

  Gen. Paterson hung up and looked across the office at his assistant.

  “So?” Paterson asked.

  Harris Rosenberg turned and walked out, slamming the door, thinking of his grandfather, a sergeant in the US Army’s First Infantry Division, who was captured by the Germans two weeks after landing at Omaha Beach, held in the Berga slave labor camp for Jewish-American soldiers and haunted the rest of his life with dreams that left him screaming at night.

  “What was that?” the assistant yelled at Rosenberg as he stormed past her. He turned his head without stopping and said as he continued down the hall, “That was my resignation.”

  CHAPTER 28

  The crew of the Wrangel made short work of refloating the Hinckley yawl with inflatable salvage bags. The sailboat was towed to the Coast Guard station at nearby Rockland. A Department of Homeland Security Gulfstream 550 jet landed at Owl’s Head Airport near Rockland within two hours. The four members of the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, a NEST team, hurried to the Coast Guard minivan waiting to drive them to the sailboat. The team members carried innocuous-looking backpacks, but when the Coast Guard driver offered to help the one female member of the team with her bag, she angrily pushed him aside, then reacted to his hurt expression.

  “I’m sorry, sailor,” she said. “This isn’t feminism; it’s just that what’s in this bag is very expensive and very fragile. If anybody is going to drop it and get in trouble, I’d rather it be me.”

  Chief among the devices was a ten-pound battery-powered instrument called a Cryo3. It looked like little more than a shiny brass coffee can with legs on the bottom and a handle on top. In reality, the device was a sensitive radiation monitor developed by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The unit contained an extremely high-purity germanium crystal designed to absorb energetic photons emanating from radioactive isotopes. Germanium is sensitive to radiation only at extremely low temperatures. The scientists who designed the Cryo3 used a cooling system originally built for cell phone tower equipment to deep-freeze the germanium crystal. Analysis of the machine’s readout could pinpoint both the quantity and type of radioactive material present.

  Arriving at the dock, the team leader climbed onto the sailboat carrying his Cryo3 and disappeared into the cabin for five minutes. When he emerged, his face was ashen. He sat in the boat’s cockpit and looked at the anxious faces of the NEST team members.

  “What is it, boss?” the woman team member asked.

  The team leader looked up and spoke quietly.

  “U-235,” he said. “A clear, strong indication of U-235 and nothing else. This is it. The real thing.”

  He stood.

  “Get me the radio,” he said. “Things have to start happening, fast.”

  As one team member handed the team leader a high frequency satellite phone, equipped with a sophisticated scrambler, the Coast Guard driver standing next to the woman turned to her with an inquisitive look on his face.

  “What does that mean, U-235? Are we all hot or something, hair gonna fall out, or worse than that?” he asked with a worried tone.

  “No, nothing like that. We’re not in any danger, at least not from radiation,” the woman answered. “U-235 is a radio isotope. That means it is a material that is radioactive, that emits radiation. But U-235 is a fairly low-level emitter, not all that dangerous to handle. It can be blocked by something as simple as aluminum foil.”

  “Oh, so that’s a good thing,” the sailor said. “How come all the long faces, then, if this is the good radioactive stuff?”

  “It isn’t all that good,” she answered. “Most radioisotopes have lots of different uses—for medical devices or scientific instruments, for example. U-235 is different. It has only one use. That’s the problem we have here.”

  “Why,” he asked. “What the hell is the stuff used for?” The sailor laughed. “What, they make bombs from it or something?”

  The woman looked at him with a deadpan expression. “You’ve hit it right on the nose, sailor,” she said. “The only thing U-235 is good for is making bombs, very powerful bombs. Think Hiroshima. What was on board that boat was either enough U-235 to make a bomb or, God forbid, an atomic bomb itself.”

  “How can you tell whether it was a bomb or just some material?” the sailor asked.

  “Easy. Either when we find it,” she answered, “or when it goes bang.”

  NEST could call on four helicopters and three fixed-wing airplanes—a King Air B-200 twin turboprop, a Citation-II jet, and an ancient Convair 580T—all equipped with advanced radiological search systems. These aircraft could sweep a fifty-square-mile area in a matter of hours. Airborne detection of atomic radiation was a tricky business, however. U-235 was almost impossible to detect from the air unless the substance was lying on the ground in the open. Just a few inches of concrete or a solid substance like granite could totally block the radiation. Maine islands provided most of the granite used for centuries of public buildings across the United States.

  The team leader had little expectation that the material, or the bomb containing it, would be found from an aerial search, but he had to try nonetheless.

  More likely to be successful was an old-fashioned detective investigation. That began with tracing the history of the sailboat. The Coast Guard’s Vessel Documentation Office collected registration and home port information for every American boat about thirty feet. Documentation numbers were required to be engraved into a structural portion of the hull.

  The NEST team leader crawled into the forward compartment in the boat and searched the ceiling beams there for the documentation number. He found the requisite three-inch Arabic numbers on a beam running crosswise at the aft end of the cabin.

  As soon as he finished his confidential report to Washington on the encrypted high frequency sat-phone, the team leader called the Vessel Documentation Office in Falling Water, West Virginia. An official there came on the line immediately.

  “This is Commander William Jameson responding to your code-word-THOR call. To whom am I speaking, please?”

  “This is Robert Rhymes, team leader for a National Department of Energy Nuclear Security Administration Nuclear Emergency Support Team presently located in Rockland, Maine.”

  “That’s quite a mouthful of a title,” the Coast Guard officer responded. “But a very impressive mouthful. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to find the owner of a boat, a sailboat, immediately. It is without question a matter of great national security and I ask that you devote your entire resources to this. Can I have your agreement to do so, sir?”

  “Sure thing, buddy,” the officer responded. “No problem. But this won’t take anybody’s entire resources. Give me the documentation number and I’ll punch it right into my computer here. You could have done this from any computer on the Internet, you know. It’s no big secret. What’s the number?”

  “The number carved into the boat’s main beam is 1129082.”

  “Fine, hold on one second,” the officer replied. “Okay, here it is. The boat is owned by one William Appleton of Seal Harbor, Maine. That’s just down the road from where you are in Rockland. Served up there myself. Breathtaking scenery, though cold as . . . cold as, well, you know what, in the winter.”

  The team leader wrote down that information, along with the telephone number for William Appleton listed in the Coast Guard records. He thanked the officer and hung up, then dialed Appleton’s number on his cell. His fingers were crossed.

  “Appleton residence,” the voice answering the phone on the second ring said. “Abigail Appleton speaking.
”

  “Ms. Appleton,” the team leader said. He was instantly interrupted.

  “It is Mrs. Appleton, please.”

  “Mrs. Appleton, my name is Robert Rhymes. I am with—well, I am with a very important government agency and we are having something of an emergency. It is of the utmost importance that I speak with your husband. Is he available, please?” His tone of voice could not be more deferential.

  He heard the woman choke for a moment. It was several seconds before she replied.

  “I’m afraid that is not possible,” she said. “You see, my husband passed away, two weeks ago. Two weeks tomorrow, actually. I can refer you to my attorney, who is handling all of my husband’s matters. He is in Boston. If you’ll hold on for a moment, I’ll get his phone number.”

  “Wait, Mrs. Appleton. Look, I’m so sorry about your loss, but I don’t think your lawyer will be able to help. Maybe you can. I’m calling about your husband’s boat, his sailboat. It’s named Swift. Can you tell me who has been using the boat recently?”

  “Well, that I can help you with, young man,” she replied. “Our son, William, he’s actually William Junior, had been living on that boat for more than a year, doing that instead of working if you really want to know. He sailed it all over, across the ocean to England and around France and Italy and all. Then he met up with some woman. He said we’d love her and he loved her and all that trash and he couldn’t wait for us to meet her.

  “He’d finally agreed to come home, to sail the boat home and settle down, when all of a sudden we got a phone call from him that he was in some hospital in Athens with this woman. She’d been bitten by a poisonous fish or something and almost died. So he’d left the boat on some Greek island and flown with this woman to a hospital.

  “A week later he called and said the boat had been stolen. He flew home right after that, with that tramp he’d met. They’re married now. We don’t speak often. His father owned that boat for twenty years. He was heartbroken at its loss. I told my son the loss of that boat undoubtedly contributed to his father’s heart attack. He was completely unapologetic.”

  Rhymes was shocked to hear the boat was so close to the Middle East.

  “Did he mention the name of the island?” he asked.

  “Yes, he did, and I wrote it down so I could look on the National Geographic world map we have and find where he had been. I circled it on the map. It was the tiniest dot . . . I have the map in a cabinet in the next room. William and I always mark our travels on it, or we used to do so. Wait one moment.”

  The woman came back on the telephone.

  “The island is called Xanthos. That is X-A-N-T-H-O-S. Have you heard of it?”

  “No, ma’am, I haven’t,” Rhymes responded. “But I expect I will learn quite a bit about it shortly. Thank you. You’ve been extremely helpful.”

  “Wait,” she commanded in the same tone of voice she probably used with her servants. “The Greek police have been most boorish about their efforts to recover the boat. We don’t believe in paying good money for insurance, my husband and I. Insurance promotes poor seamanship, he used to say. I demand that the government find my husband’s boat. It has immense sentimental value.”

  “I will be absolutely certain that gets done, ma’am,” Rhymes said before hanging up.

  Rhymes consulted his notebook, then dialed another telephone number.

  “CIA, how may I direct your call?” the answering voice said.

  “This is a THOR call. I need to speak to the director,” Rhymes said flatly.

  “Yes sir.”

  A moment later a voice came on the phone.

  “This is the deputy director. The director is unavailable. To whom am I speaking?”

  Rhymes identified himself and briefly explained the situation. The voice on the phone was just as abrupt.

  “Thank you, Rhymes,” he said. “I’m on it. I’ll have our man in Athens get to that island immediately. Who gets the information?”

  “For right now, I’m in charge at the scene,” Rhymes said. “But I expect to be replaced as the person in charge. You’ll know who to call. This is big and I expect you folks will be brought in soon. And, Deputy Director, I’ve been in this business for twelve years. This is for real—very real. I feel that in my bones and I’m scared shitless.”

  Even though it was three in the morning in Athens, the agent in charge answered his phone on the second ring. At first light a seaplane took off from nearby Piraeus Harbor with the agent on board. The aircraft became the second plane to land in the harbor on Xanthos. The agent quickly found his way to the small building on the quay where the port police office was located. He held a photograph of the Swift emailed to him overnight.

  “I’m trying to find this boat,” he told the corporal. “You’ve seen it before.”

  “Oh yes, the American boat,” he replied. “What a beautiful boat. What a tragedy happened to it. I could not believe it myself. My own trust and good judgment had been so wrong about that man. What a shock. People are still talking about it.”

  “The man, what man?” the agent asked. “Who are you talking about?”

  “The man who stole that beautiful American boat,” the corporal said. “He just got on the boat and sailed away, gone, over the horizon and gone.”

  “What man? Who was he?”

  “The man from the Israeli Navy. The Jew; that’s who took the boat. Don’t know his name. We just called him the Jew.”

  The agent reported to the deputy director, who then called Rhymes. He was surprised by Rhymes response.

  “I expected something like that,” Rhymes said. “Not that exactly, of course, but something like that.”

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t come up with a name,” the deputy director said. “We’ll keep on it. He must have given a name to somebody. We’ll stay at this. I fully understand how important it is to identify that man.”

  Rhymes interrupted him.

  “I appreciate your efforts. But you needn’t bother. I know exactly who the Jew is. I just needed confirmation.”

  “Well, then let’s cut the crap, Rhymes. What is this guy’s name? Who is this Jew?”

  Rhymes jiggled the gold-colored dog tags he’d found lying on the navigation station of the sailboat. “His name is Chaim Levi. Lieutenant Chaim Levi of the Israel Defense Forces.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Sam Abdullah and Alfred Farouk had been close friends since they met at the Boston Islamic Society day care center fifteen years earlier. The boys were born in Massachusetts and raised in comfortable suburbs just west of Boston, where both their fathers hopped from one high-tech corporation to another. They’d resisted spending time at the Islamic Center, tired of stories from old men about how things were so much better “over there” and criticism about the evil of Americans here. Eventually, the boys’parents relented and sent them to public schools, Sam in Framingham and Al in nearby Natick.

  By the time they were teenagers, they struggled to conceal their Muslim identity. America had hardened to Muslims in the wake of Bin Ladin, the Iraq War, terror bombings and the country’s seemingly lost cause in Afghanistan.

  Sam was the first to begin, ever so gradually, to swing back toward embracing his culture and religion. He grew tired of the taunting, hard looks and racist rants on social media. Sam found himself drawn to a website called American Mujahidin as if it were pornography. He checked it daily, sometimes first thing in the morning before he went to school, reading commentaries on the day’s news or inside information telling him which TV shows were controlled by Jews, which clothing designers were Jews, which store chains were owned by Jews. The website portrayed America as a nation owned and operated by wealthy Jews who controlled the way Americans dressed and thought and entertained themselves. Sam introduced Al to the website.

  The two spent much of their weekend time, especially through the cold Massachusetts winter, surfing the Mujahidin site and others to which it was linked, joining chat groups connected with
the site and messaging with Muslim teenagers across the country.

  They absorbed the website’s concept that they could be good Muslims and good Americans at the same time. Their task was to save America from the Jews who had taken over the country’s business, cultural and political life. By any means.

  They argued about whether they had the balls to blow themselves up as their peers in Palestine had done for decades. They discussed what they’d say in their farewell videos, what their school friends would think of them afterwards. They agreed it would be “the coolest thing in the world,” in Sam’s words, to be the first Americans to sacrifice themselves.

  Al said, “My father’s construction company uses TNT all the time to blast rock ledge to dig foundations for new houses. I even got to set off a blast when I worked for him last summer. He’s got boxes of the stuff in a little steel building at his business, way out back.”

  “Yeah, but isn’t that stuff all locked up?” Sam asked. “Nobody’s going to leave TNT lying around.”

  “It sure is. There’s a big combination lock on the door and no windows,” Al replied. “It’s locked, but my dad uses the same password all over the place—on his ATM card, on his computer and everywhere. I’ll bet he set the combination on the padlock to the same code.”

  “Do you know it?” Sam asked excitedly.

  “Sure, it’s the birthday of his oldest son, me, 5-28-04. I’ll bet anything that’s the combination. You know, just for fun, we ought to go there some night and try it, just to see.”

  “I’ll do it if you’ll do it,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll do it if you’ll do it.”

  Despite the solemn nature of their dare, they didn’t attempt the padlock on the explosives shed. Fantasies about suicide bombers remained just that—fantasies.

  All that changed with the bombing of Tel Aviv, followed by the destruction of Damascus. The website contained graphic photographs from Damascus showing bodies burnt to cinders and entire blocks of buildings leveled to rubble.