This warhead, alone among Israel’s diminutive nuclear arsenal, was designed for use by a commando squad, perhaps one infiltrated into, say, Tehran. In a truck. The tube-shaped warhead was three feet long and eighteen inches across. He’d cut the water tank open, then sealed it with fiberglass and epoxy. It held water again, but Levi did not want to drink it. He was careful to leave no inspection port in the fiberglass. The tank would have to be cut open to find the warhead inside. Levi expected no customs inspector would be willing to do that much damage to such an expensive boat.
Before sealing the weapon inside the water tank, Reuben and Levi spent a morning with a young man whose English and Hebrew were equally interrupted by fits of nervous coughing. This man, a physics graduate of Hebrew University whose newly sunburned face was the recent payback from years spent mostly underground at the Dimona facility, carefully explained the workings of the arming device and the detonator. He was obviously proud.
“Even a child could use it,” he said. “It was my design the government selected as the standard detonator for nuclear field munitions.”
“Field munitions?” Levi asked. “What are nuclear field munitions?”
The technician gave Reuben an exasperated look.
“Are we really giving this man access to the device?” he asked. She nodded.
“Nuclear field munitions are small nuclear devices designed to be carried by jeep, boat or helicopter,” he explained slowly, as if speaking to a child. “There are unique problems in designing the detonator for field munitions.”
“Why not just a simple clock?” Levi asked. “Or a button to push while you kiss your ass goodbye. Why are these any different from detonators for normal bombs?”
“Do I have to go through this with this man?” the technician asked Reuben.
She waved her hand, her impatience showing.
“Because,” he said, “with nuclear devices you only want them to detonate when you want them to detonate. There is always the possibility, slim as it might be, that these devices could fall into the wrong hands and then—”
He stopped in mid-sentence, realization clouding his expression as he recalled what happened to Tel Aviv.
“I suppose we might not have made the security quite as good as necessary.”
Levi looked at the young man and shuddered. Scientists like this one made the bomb they used in Tel Aviv, he thought.
“Air-dropped bombs have fail-safes so they only detonate under specific conditions of acceleration and altitude, conditions that don’t apply to field munitions,” he said. “So on this device the timer can be set anywhere from one hundred hours to one second. Two arming codes must be entered on the keypad first, followed by the time setting, followed by the timing code. That sequence sets the trigger. Reentry of all three codes in the proper order stops the timer and disarms the device.
“Of course, you have to first insert the authorization card before entering the codes.” He looked at Reuben as she removed a Chemical Bank of New York Visa card from a chain around her neck.
Reuben looked at Levi, then at the scientist. She inserted the Visa card into a slot. Levi placed his hand on her wrist and held it away from the keypad.
“Now what would happen,” he asked with a smile, “if you have a heart attack after you entered the codes and before you have time to reenter them? Where would that leave me?”
Reuben smiled. “It would leave you to join me in heaven,” she answered. “Only I know these codes. It’s going to stay that way.”
She armed the bomb and disarmed it, twice, confirming that the detonator activated each time.
“Load it into the boat,” she told Levi. “And your job is done,” she told the scientist. “Give me your card.”
He handed her a Visa card identical to the one dangling from the chain around her neck.
“Remember, this never happened,” Reuben told the pale man. “You never met me. You will tell no one. If you do, we will find you. Not every member of Mossad was in Tel Aviv.”
Reuben and Levi watched the scientist leave. She climbed down the companionway into the boat’s cabin and emerged with a bottle of Bacardi rum, a glass and a bowl of ice cubes. Levi looked at her and frowned.
“It isn’t even lunchtime yet,” he said. “Sure you want to start that so early?”
Reuben didn’t know whether to be angry with the man or not.
“If anybody on the face of this planet has earned the right to a drink in the morning, or any time of day, or any time of night, as many drinks as she goddamn well wants, that person is me,” she said, looking vacantly at the floor of the boat’s cockpit as she drained her glass and then poured another over the unmelted ice.
Levi stared at the woman. In the week they had spent preparing the sailboat to hide the bomb and getting ready for their voyage, the two of them had had few serious conversations. She’d explained to him what the tube-shaped device was, in general terms, and she’d told him a carefully edited version of how she’d come into possession of such a lethal object. But Reuben had avoided any discussion about either the Tel Aviv bomb or the Damascus bomb, two blatantly obvious subjects for people who had a close relative of those two bombs in their personal custody. Levi sensed Reuben was struggling with something in her recent past, but he chose to wait for her to put it on the table. Whatever it was, certainly every person who’d escaped from what had been Israel had horrors behind them. Levi did not discuss the bodies he’d watched sink beneath the burning sea when his patrol boat met its end, nor did he dare to mention the family and friends he expected to never see again. Knowing who Debra had been in Israel and obviously aware of the object she’d delivered to what he viewed as “his” boat, he suspected she was connected in some way with the Damascus bomb. He had not dared to raise the topic. She’ll talk in her own time, in her own way, he decided.
He also sensed that there was a strength in this woman he had not yet seen displayed—that she was more than a beautiful woman with a weight on her shoulders. Levi was not used to dealing with women with either strength or substance. Superficial women had suited him just fine so far. That seemed about to change. Of the many words that could describe Debra Reuben, ranging from “troubled” to “intense,” “superficial” was not among that vocabulary.
Reuben lifted her gaze from the cockpit floor, drained her glass of rum, poured another one, and smiled gaily, falsely, at Levi.
“I feel like a sea voyage,” Reuben said. “Let’s discover America.
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, a fourteen-year-old English boy sailing alone, 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 giving latitude and longitude to an accuracy of ten feet. The Hinckley Bermuda 40, being top of the line itself, carried a state-of-the-art Magellan GPS and chart plotter, a high-powered computer display with digitized maps for the entire planet stored in postage-stamp-sized memory cartridges. 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. Maybe even 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, and nothing more.