A new video appeared on the website, on the password-protected section, showing a sermon by a man identified as Mullah Abu Hamzah. He spoke in a rapid, singsong Arabic translated in English captions flowing across the bottom of the screen. He swayed from side to side as he spoke, his words hypnotic.
“The battlefield has moved to America itself,” the mullah said. “Allah gave us victory over the infidel in the Holy Land. Only the Great Satan America can snatch that victory from us. But the Great Satan is also the Great Coward. We must encourage fear in the American cowards. We pass the sword to our Muslim brothers in America to fight against the Jew infidels in their country, to take action to turn the cold heart of the Great Satan against the Jews in its midst.
“For this reason I issue a fatwa for our American brothers. Listen to me, brothers. I teach to you that it is allowed to jeopardize your soul and cross the path of the enemy and be killed, if this act of jeopardy affects the enemy, even if it only generates fear in their hearts, shaking their morale, making them fear Muslims. Only if it does not affect the enemy, then it is not allowed.”
The two teenagers debated the meaning of Mullah Abu Hamzah’s sermon, especially the meaning of his fatwa. Finally, Sam put an end to the discussion.
“I can tell you what it means,” he said. “It means we can stop saving for the airfare to Israel. The battle is here, in this country. We need to save America from the Jews. That is our battle.”
Al looked at his best friend with a startled expression as he realized that what he had viewed as a fantasy, as role-playing, his friend was deadly serious about. He felt a cold sweat on his forehead as the image of the two of them wearing the belts they’d viewed on the website came into his mind—belts covered with what looked exactly like the sticks of TNT he knew were stored in wooden crates at his father’s business.
“Hey, hold on, man. Are you really serious about all this stuff? I mean, is this really for real for you?” Al asked incredulously.
Sam turned to look at his friend. His eyes were cold, hard, mature. Different. “I understand that Allah placed us here as Muslims in America for a holy purpose,” he said. “With one action we can do the work of Allah as good Muslims and do the work of America, as good Americans. We can steer our homeland from the course of evil and snatch it from the grip of the Jews.”
“Man, you sound like Mullah Abu Hamzah,” Al said.
“I don’t know what our action will be, but I know that our path will be shown to us. We will each have to decide whether to follow that path or whether to turn away in fear. I know I have courage and faith. Do you, brother?”
Al hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said softly. “I think so, but I’m not sure. I need more time to think.”
“The time for action is near,” Sam said. “We only have to wait for that action to become clear. But while we are waiting, now is a good time to test the combination on that padlock at your father’s business. Will you take that first step with me, or should I go alone?”
“Okay, I’ll do that,” Al replied cautiously. “When do you want to go there?”
“Tonight.”
“Okay, tonight, but just to test it, not to take anything.”
“Deal. We don’t take anything. Not tonight.”
CHAPTER 30
Levi and Reuben sat on the cottage’s porch overlooking the water, watching the parade of lobster boats, sailboats, motor yachts sailing past, traveling from one end of Eggemoggin Reach to the other.
“I feel better that the boat is gone,” Levi said. “And that thing is hidden until when, or if, we need it.”
Levi had noticed a low wooden door in a basement wall and was curious to see where it might lead.
The door was locked. Ten minutes of yanking and prodding with a crowbar and the door opened. An overhead light revealed a twenty-foot-long chamber with walls, floor and ceiling of solid granite, a tunnel blasted into the bedrock. Lining the sides of this tunnel were wooden racks, from floor to ceiling. The racks held wine bottles, hundreds of them. The air inside the tunnel was moist and chilly. There must be twenty feet of granite above the far end of this fancy wine cellar, he thought.
Levi walked to the workbench where the nuclear device rested. It had an aura about it—the souls of thousands of innocent people, available for the taking at any instant. It is an evil object. It deserves to be locked away in a cave, he thought. He was about to lift it when he paused. Perhaps I’ve been too cavalier with this thing.
He looked around the basement and found a pair of thick gloves covered in hard rubber tossed into a plastic milk crate containing the mixings for epoxy resin. They were bright orange and came halfway to his elbow. The label identified them as Nitrile Chemical Gloves.
“Just in case,” Levi said to himself, donning the gloves before he lifted the bomb and carried it to the far end of the wine cellar.
Later, sitting with Reuben on the porch waiting for sunset, Levi sucked down his third Tanqueray and tonic so quickly that Reuben stared at him questioningly.
“Something bothering you,” she asked. “Or just thirsty?” She was used to outpacing him, two drinks for each of his.
“Nothing special,” he answered, looking out at the water. “This place is so peaceful I sometimes forget why we’re here and what we left behind.” He pointed at the water, at the horizon to the east.
“I know what you mean,” Reuben said. “I forget sometimes, too, but not for long. Not when I turn on the television and see what is happening in Israel—I mean, I guess, in Palestine. Do we have to start calling it that?”
“Never,” Levi retorted.
Reuben looked closely at the man in the wooden rocking chair. I’ve hardly been out of his sight for two months, yet I know almost nothing about him, she thought. Nothing except that he carried me across the ocean and that I feel safe when I am with him.
“Tell me about what you left behind,” she said softly.
Levi turned toward her, startled. Despite all the weeks they’d been isolated with only one another for company, Levi had barely opened up about himself.
Maybe he is just shy, she’d thought. Maybe, perhaps, when you’ve lost everything in life, it’s too painful to think about, much less to talk about loss.
“My eema—my mother—and my abba, my father, met on a kibbutz in the Galilee. They were both orphans, their parents were killed in the 1948 war. They never talked about their childhoods. I used to wonder why they never spoke. Now I know why. The dead are dead, gone. Speaking about them won’t bring them back.”
“Are you sure they are dead?” Reuben asked, desperate to keep him speaking.
“Sure? I don’t know. I had breakfast with them a week before the bomb, before I returned to duty. I saw a photograph in a news magazine in Spain. It was taken from an airplane. It showed the bomb crater in Tel Aviv. It showed the shorefront. It showed rubble where my parents’hotel had been.”
“Do you have brothers, sisters?” she whispered.
“My sister, Leah, was supposed to visit them that week, with her baby, with six-month-old Aaron.”
“Maybe they survived,” Debra said, looking at Levi, struggling to see if he held any hope.
“No. I know they are gone, all of them. I hope it was fast for my sister. She would not do well in a camp. She would not have done well being raped by Arabs, watching her son being slaughtered. I am all that is left of my family, and I am alone in a strange land.”
Debra had been so consumed by her own guilt over Damascus that until that moment she had not thought about Levi’s loss. He was so strong, so impenetrable. Suddenly, his loss put a face for her on what all Israel had lost. She shot from her chair and turned her back on him, then spun around to stand facing Levi.
“I get so fucking angry at America I can hardly control myself,” Reuben screamed. She turned her head from side to side, then hurled her glass. “Look, this is where I was born, where I grew up. For as long as I’ve been alive, America sent soldiers all ov
er the world for the dumbest reasons imaginable. What the hell do we have to do to convince this goddamn government to do something to put Jewish people back in control of the only place on this entire planet where we can be absolutely certain we’re safe? One little tiny bit of real estate on the face of the whole planet is all we want. What the hell is wrong with those idiots in Washington?”
“Evidently, even that one place was not safe,” Levi said. He turned when he heard a car on the dirt drive leading up to the cottage. He walked to the end of the porch. “Sarah and Abram,” he said to a worried Reuben. Her face cleared. “I expect they’ll have some ideas about how to attract the attention of the president of the United States.”
“A march,” Sarah said. “Just about every congregation in the country will be sending people, some of them busloads. There are six million Jews in America. It’s beginning to seem like an awful lot of us are going to be in one place at one time. I can’t tell you how excited I am.”
THWACKA-THWACKA-THWACKA-THWACKA.
“What’s that?” Levi asked, interrupting Sarah. He looked up. A helicopter hovered directly overhead, then disappeared from sight. “I don’t like that. There have been airplanes and helicopters flying around the past few days. Something is happening.”
“It can’t concern us,” Abram said as he joined them on the porch. “I don’t see how it could.”
“I don’t either,” Levi said. “But it is odd. Maybe I’m just imagining.”
CHAPTER 31
The White House Situation Room was in the basement of the West Wing. The president sat in the middle of the long cherry table that dominated the room.
“Here is what is troubling me the most, keeping me awake through last night, to be perfectly frank,” Quaid said. He reached into his jacket pocket and dropped a handful of gold-colored objects on the table. Each was a flat metal plate, two inches wide by four or so inches long, containing a Star of David, the letters IDF and some writing in Hebrew.
“These are twenty Israel Defense Forces dog tags. Divers salvaging the two Coast Guard boats that sank in Boston Harbor recovered these from the bottom of the harbor underneath where those two freighters were anchored,” the president said. “Quite obviously, they were thrown overboard by people on those ships, military people, almost certainly the people who fired the rocket-propelled grenades that sank our two Coast Guard boats. Twenty Israeli military commandos—special forces, probably. And they are in this country. Somewhere. We have no idea what weapons they took with them off the ships.”
“Mr. President, chances are we have them in custody right now, sir, along with all those other people we grabbed from the ships, right?” Attorney General McQueeney said.
McQueeney was unsure where the president was heading with this meeting. She’d learned that he’d met for hours with his own counsel, Carol Cabot. What worried McQueeney more, however, was that she’d also learned that her deputy, Wilson Harrison, had met privately with the president too. That troubled her the most. At a minimum, it was a breach of White House etiquette.
“Well, dammit, Queen, we don’t know that, now do we?” the president retorted. “We don’t know who we have in custody, and we don’t know who is on the loose from those ships. And we certainly don’t know if any of the people we have in custody are the military people who sank our Coast Guard boats.
“All we know is that at least twenty members of a foreign military snuck into this country, armed to the teeth, it appears, and killed Americans and attacked our military vessels. And we’ve done squat to either retaliate or protect ourselves. Now doesn’t that make us look like a fine collection of horses’asses? Anybody disagree with that analysis?”
There was no comment from around the table.
“Well, gentlemen and ladies, that isn’t the half of it. General, give everybody the bad news.”
Paterson, head of the Department of Homeland Security, stood and reached into his pocket and removed a single gold-colored object and tossed it on the table.
“That is one more IDF dog tag, identical to the ones recovered from Boston Harbor,” he said.
“Tell everybody where that came from, General. But let me tell you, folks, as scary as the first set of dog tags is, this one is going to make you wet your pants,” Quaid said. “Go ahead, tell them everything. That’s what we’re here for.”
“This dog tag was recovered from a sailboat in Maine—a sailboat that somebody intentionally scuttled in the middle of Penobscot Bay. Whoever sank the boat bungled the job. A life raft inflated automatically and provided enough buoyancy to float the boat. A couple of lobstermen spotted it and called the Coast Guard.”
“So we’ve got twenty-one Israelis rather than twenty running around,” McQueeney said. “What’s so significant about that?”
“What is so significant is that the Coast Guard found that the top of a water tank on the sailboat was cut open so something inside the water tank could be removed. Somebody rigged up the water tank to hide something.
“Now, what is so scary about all this is that whatever was inside that water tank, whatever was recently removed from that water tank was a strong emitter of U-235, a radioactive isotope of uranium. There is only one use for U-235, which is damned near impossible to manufacture. It is the primary ingredient in atomic bombs, right from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima up to many of our present bombs. We don’t know whether what was in that boat was a functional bomb or enough U-235 to make a bomb. Either way, this is a serious problem.
“If it is only the U-235, then it could make a dirty bomb using conventional explosives to spread radioactive material for miles in some city center. If it is an operational bomb, all bets are off. For the first time, we have confirmed evidence that an enemy of this country has managed to smuggle nuclear material across our borders. We’ve dreaded this day coming. Well, it’s here.”
The Situation Room was silent.
Air Force general Ricardo Cruz, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nodded to his adjutant, who sat with an open notebook computer in his lap. A greatly enlarged photograph of the IDF dog tag appeared on a screen covering one wall.
“The dog tag recovered from the sailboat belongs to an Israeli Navy lieutenant named Chaim Levi,” Gen. Cruz said. “We know absolutely nothing about his military service or training. The Israeli military is, or was, exceptionally secure about identifying individual soldiers. They had to be careful, considering that their enemies’families could have been living down the block from their soldiers’families. We do know that when he wasn’t in the navy, he worked at a beach resort. He was a sailing instructor, among other things.”
“How in the hell did you learn that?” Quaid huffed. “You can’t tell me whether this guy was a nuclear spy, but you know he taught sailing,”
Cruz whispered with his aide.
“Evidently, sir, we googled him.”
President Quaid slammed his hand on the table.
“Well fuck me to high heaven,” he said. “How many trillions of dollars have we spent on intelligence gathering and all we can do is the same thing a twelve-year-old would do. Let’s keep this bit of information to ourselves. Is that understood?”
“Uh, Mr. President, we do have a photo of Levi,” Gen. Cruz said. “The hotel was affiliated with a Swiss hotel chain and they never removed it from their website.” It showed Levi on the beach, sailboats visible over his shoulder. He was smiling and tanned, and wearing the skimpiest of bathing suits. The photo caption identified him by name.
“That is our nuclear terrorist?” Quaid said. “He looks like he’d be happier on a surfboard than a warship. Okay, we know the guy’s name. We know what he looks like. Let’s find him and question him. Gen. Paterson, I take it you are about to take this man into custody.”
“Actually, Mr. President, if he is on US soil, jurisdiction belongs to the FBI, not Homeland Security. We’ll fully brief them.”
“Okay, Mr. President,” McQueeney said. The FBI fell under the Departmen
t of Justice. “We’ll get started immediately. It will be massive, Mr. President. Unprecedented.”
“Good. What about the rest of the Israelis, the ones we’re holding?” Quaid asked.
Gen. Paterson spoke. “We’ve located a facility, Camp Edwards on Cape Cod. Just cleared out the last hurricane refugees. It’s a fully secure facility. Otis Air Force Base there used to stock nuclear weapons. It’s tight, sir, triple razor wire circling the entire installation. Just waiting for your go ahead.”
“You’ve got it. Is there any indication the military from the two ships hooked up with this Levi guy or with the bomb?” Quaid asked.
“No proof, sir,” Gen. Paterson said. “Actually, we don’t know one way or the other since we don’t know who they are or even if we are holding them. I can tell you that nobody we have in custody matches any of the names on the dog tags we recovered from the harbor.”
“With all due respect,” Gen. Cruz interrupted, “is there some rule that says spies have to give their real names when they are captured? Of course these people won’t voluntarily tell us who they are, especially if they’re involved with a nuclear bomb being smuggled into the country. We’re going to have to get it from them through interrogation, which is one more reason to have them in military rather than civilian custody.”
“That brings me to my next point,” Quaid said. “I’ve received legal guidance from people I trust on this point.”
The attorney generaland Carol Cabot glared at each other, each suspecting the other. Both were wrong.
“Immediately after this meeting I will be issuing a presidential finding and directive that the people taken from those two freighters are declared to be, uh, enemy combatants. Every one of those people joined an operation that included taking up arms against the United States and killing US military personnel. They are each to be considered enemy combatants and to have only the rights of enemy combatants. They are now under military jurisdiction. Not the immigration service. Not the Justice Department. Is that clear?
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