Bashert Page 13

  “That’s not what I meant, you idiot. Mitch, you tell me what’s happening.”

  “Well, the storm turned north last night, then started really picking up speed early this morning. At this rate I’d guess the edge of it could be right on our tail by nightfall.”

  “Well, we can’t guess.” He walked over to the chart table where a pen plotter was making small dots on a vellum overlay, marking their path across the ocean. Jef slid a parallel ruler across the chart, lined it up, then grabbed a mechanical pencil from Mitch’s pocket and made a mark. He repeated it at another point on the chart, then drew a line. “That’s the eye of the storm now,” he said. “That’s where it was this morning, and that, over there, is my best estimate of where it will be by midnight.” He punched a couple of buttons on a control panel, then entered a number on a keypad, and the plotter suddenly sent its pen skidding across the chart and back. “We should be there.” He pointed to the new mark. “At our present pace, and assuming the storm doesn’t accelerate, the eye should be more than a hundred miles behind us. We could still get some wind and high seas, but we should be okay.”

  “Should be, but the weather report says it’s accelerating,” Mitch said. “What’s the worst case scenario?”

  “Okay, if it picks up to say 26 knots and tracks like this.” He traced a faint line on the vellum. “We would be in the soup.”

  “What are the options?” asked Deb.

  “We could head for Halifax, ride out the storm there, but the way I see it, that’s how the storm is tracking. Besides, we could lose a day or more, which we don’t have. Look, I think we can outrun it. If we keep on the current bearing and go flat out, we should be able to squeak through with just a spanking from behind.”

  “And if we can’t, or we’ve miscalculated?”

  “Then we take a hell of a beating and hope and pray for a miracle, because that baby is already kicking up winds of a hundred miles an hour and the radio just reported thirty-foot seas. So,” he crossed over to the engine controls, “so it’s full speed ahead.” He shoved the two handles all the way forward.

  “That’s 34 knots, right? Under the best conditions, in calm seas, right? And how long can we push the engines like that?”

  Jef pursed his lips. “Don’t know. Never asked my uncle.”

  ~ ~ ~

  By early evening, the cloud cover had thickened and the seas had picked up. At full speed, the ship slammed into the waves, sending spray exploding high over the foredeck. Wasserman stood at the window, holding the railing, rocking and mumbling.

  “What’s he mumbling about?” asked Jef. “Gives me the creeps.”

  “Leave him alone,” Deb said. “He’s scared. Me, too. Some.”

  Wasserman turned to Deb. “The important thing is not to be afraid,” he said. “Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav. All the world is a narrow bridge.” He looked around. “Hey, that’s funny. Get it, a narrow bridge?” He went back to his rocking.

  Jef shook his head again. “No, Mister Quotations and Quantities, I don’t get it.”

  Deb scowled at Jef. “I said leave him alone. He’s talking about a famous saying in Hebrew. All the world is a narrow bridge; the important thing is not to be afraid.”

  “Whatever. Look, Wasserman, if watching is bothering you, why don’t you go below. Pick a room, any one of the rooms on the second deck, and close your eyes and get some nice sleep. Mitch will show you the way.”

  “I know the way,” he said. “I studied the plans of the ship when you brought them over to the apartment to show Mitch. I know where to go.” He made his way, hand over hand, along the railing and reached for the door to the exterior stairway.

  “You sure you’re all right pal?” Mitch asked. “I’ll walk down with you if you’d like.”

  “No, that’s okay. I remember where things are. I like the room named Jaclyn. That’s like Jacqueline. Like Missus Kennedy. It’s on the port side, at the end of the passageway. I’ll find it.” He opened the door, stepped through, and was gone.

  26

  The seas picked up even more over the next few hours. Jef and Deb eventually headed down for the comforts of the stateroom and each other’s arms, but Mitch never left the bridge. There was nothing for him to do but sit in the padded leather captain’s chair and watch the blinking lights and listen. Against the sound of wind and waves muted by the thick glass was the nearly constant whine of the servomotors that spun the wheel first left, then right, then back again, responding to silent instructions from the rack of computers tirelessly crunching numbers to maintain their heading against the shifting winds. The rocking of the ship and the pounding of the spray that sometimes clattered against the windows kept him from sleeping most of the night, but he finally drifted off as the winds began to subside and the seas calmed.

  The sky was already lightening when he awoke with a start to find Deb leaning over him. She kissed him slowly, gently on the forehead. “Rise and shine, bos’n. You’re not supposed to sleep on the watch.”

  “Hey, didn’t Jef say this thing could run itself?” He stretched and looked around. “Where are we? How are we doing?” He stood to get a better view.

  “We’re in the middle of the North Atlantic, right there.” She pointed to a spot on the chart where the plotter pen had just made a tiny cross at the end of a long string of them.

  “Right. But where is that, and is that where we are supposed to be?”

  “Jef says he thinks so, but we need to shoot the sun to be certain. Unfortunately, it’s overcast this morning.”

  “Wait a minute. I thought this thing did everything itself. Do any of us know how to, what did you say, ‘shoot the sun?’ Don’t you need an astro-something to do it with?”

  “It’s just a check. Jef says we’ll probably be all right without it, but he doesn’t want to miss Santa Cruz. Jef says there’s this telescope thingy that is linked to the navigation computers, so you just spin those dials to aim it at the sun, and, since the computers know exactly what time it is, they can figure out where we are and correct any errors that might have crept in. Jef says…”

  “Jef says,” Mitch echoed. “Jef says a lot. What does Jef say about breakfast? I’m starved. I haven’t had anything since that sandwich yesterday afternoon.”

  “Jef’s out looking for Wasserman. He said to meet up in the lounge, and we could all have breakfast together. He …”

  The rest of her sentence was drowned out by a discordant blast of an alarm horn. Mitch and Deb pitched forward, as if the ship had hit something. They both looked around, trying to figure out what might have happened. Mitch reached over and punched a button on the main console and the alarm stopped. Deb, who had gone around the corner to look astern, called out, “The engines must have stopped. There’s hardly any wake trailing us.”

  “I think I found the problem,” Mitch answered. “Something to do with the turbines, something overheated.” He pointed to one of the gauges.

  Deb came over next to him. “Great, what do we do now?”

  Just then Jef threw open the door. “Which one of you turkeys did that?” he said, crossing the room and elbowing them both aside. He looked down at the instruments. “Shit. Gobble, gobble. I’m the turkey. I should have cut back the engines once we were in the clear from the hurricane. Now, I’m not sure what to do. We need to be underway or we just drift.”

  Mitch cleared his throat. “There’s an auxiliary system of some kind. If the main turbines fail, you can turn on this little extra engine, but you can only do something like five or six knots with it, just a crawl.”

  “Since when are you the nautical expert, Mitch?”

  “Since reading all the manuals, which Captain Turkey should have done, too.”

  “Okay, genius, how do we turn on this spare engine?”

  Mitch went over to one of the relay racks and slid out a keyboard just below a small monitor screen. He typed a few things, and letters appeared on the screen. He waited, then typed some more, waited and watc
hed for a while, then pressed one key dramatically. They could hear a distant growl as the ship slowly started to make headway again. “See, just like that,” he said, bowing with a flourish.

  “Alright, already, I’m impressed, but what did you do? And how did you know what to type?”

  “I didn’t. Your grandfather wouldn’t have either. But he had the engineers who built the control system create what they called a help tape. You type ‘help’ on the keyboard and then type what you want help about, and it reads the tape until it finds what you are looking for and tells you what to do. Cool, huh?”

  “Cool. We’re moving. But we ain’t moving very fast. At this rate it will take weeks to get to Israel. We’re going to have to fix those engines. And I for one don’t know the first thing about engines.”

  “I do,” said Mitch. “I’ll go down to the engine room and see what I can figure out.” He left through the inside stairwell.

  Deb was leaning on the railing, staring out over the ocean. Jef went up behind her, reached around, and cupped her breasts.

  “Is your middle name Randy?” she asked, squirming out of his grasp. “Why don’t you do something useful and find Wasserman so we can all eat breakfast.”

  Jef walked over to the console and picked up a microphone attached by a coiled black cord. “Theo Wasserman, paging Theo Wasserman.” His voice boomed out over the whole ship. “This is the Captain speaking. Report to the lounge immediately. Report to the lounge immediately. That’s an order. Theo Wasserman, report to the lounge immediately.” He slipped the microphone back into its cradle on the console. “There,” he said to Deb. “Let’s go wait in the lounge.”

  They had just reached the lounge, with its big picture windows on three sides, and were about to sit down at the ebony bar when the ship shuddered and creaked. The main engines had started again. A few minutes later, Mitch walked in, grinning.

  Jef spun around on his barstool. “Okay, mechanical mastermind, what did you do? And how did you do it so fast?”

  “I just pushed a big orange button marked ‘Restart.’ It seemed like the logical thing to try.”

  Jef slid off the stool and started toward the door. “I better get up to the bridge and throttle back on the engines so we don’t overheat them again.”

  “Don’t bother,” Mitch said, walking up to the bar and twisting a handle just under the lip. A section of the bar top sprung up an inch, and Mitch swung it all the way open to reveal a set of controls. “You can do most anything you want from here. And from duplicates in the night stand next to your bed and a couple other places on deck. Permission to speak frankly, Captain? You really should have studied those manuals, sir.” He smirked.

  Wasserman didn’t show up for breakfast, so after they finished, Jef suggested they start a stem to stern search. Mitch agreed. “If I know Wasserman, he’s in some hidey hole somewhere, pissing in his pants. He looked pretty green last night. We just need to check all the places he might be huddled. My guess is he didn’t answer your page, Jef, because it sounded like you were ticked off. Wasserman is scared of you.”

  They started at the stern, checking every hatch and door and calling out as they made their way along. As they rounded onto the starboard side, Deb, who was in the lead, gasped.

  “It’s gone!”

  “What?” shouted Mitch, who was just behind her. Then he saw. Some splintered pieces of plywood and a length of chain hanging over the side were about all that was left of The LCVP. “God, we’re screwed.”

  Jef came up behind them and looked over their shoulders. “Shit. We must not have lashed it down properly. It must have worked loose and gone overboard in the storm. And we didn’t even hear it.”

  The three of them walked listlessly toward where the LCVP should have been. It was clear from the wreckage strewn on deck that it had come loose and been battered repeatedly against the ship before finally being washed or blown overboard. Mitch kicked at the few pieces that by chance remained. “We are screwed,” he said slowly and emphatically.

  Deb and Jef stared in silence as Mitch bent to pick up something wedged in a fitting. He turned away and pressed his forehead against the side of the stairs to the upper deck. No one moved or said anything. Finally, Mitch raised his head, looked skyward, and then turned back to them. “We don’t have to keep looking for Wasserman,” he said, his voice so quiet that it was almost lost in the wind.

  “Why,” asked Deb. “You don’t think …”

  Mitch held something out toward her. She took it, turned it over in her hand. “Wasserman’s?”

  “Yeah. His slipstick case. Open it up, and you’ll find a broken Keuffel and Esser log-log duplex decitrig slide rule, a birthday present from his parents who thought he needed something like that. He was never without it. Never. He carried it hanging from his belt. It must have gotten caught when … when …” He covered his mouth with his hand.

  “Couldn’t we go back for him?” Deb asked.

  Jef shook his head. “Don’t be silly. Back where? We don’t know where or when this happened. Could be anywhere over hundreds of miles of open ocean. And this is the North Atlantic. It’s the end of October. You fall in and you don’t last a long time, even if you are alive and conscious when you hit the water. Most likely from the look of this mess, he was already dead.”

  They stood in silence for several minutes just looking out over the waves.

  “Poor Wasserman,” Deb said. “He was a little weird but he didn’t deserve to drown at sea. Barely more than a kid. How old was he? He thought he could win the Fields Medal someday. He thought he could prove the Four-Color Theorem. Conjecture. He corrected me on that.” She started to cry. Through her tears, she continued, “We never should have come. We never should have done this. This whole thing is crazy. We’re college students, for God’s sake. What the hell are we doing stealing nuclear fuel? This is stupid. We could go to jail. We could,” she choked, “we could die. We could all die, like Wasserman. What have we done?” She pushed past Jef. He tried to hold her, but she shrugged him off and ran down the deck.

  Jef started after her, but Mitch reached out and stopped him. “Let her go. Let’s clean up this mess and figure out what we do next.”

  ~ ~ ~

  They found Deb at the rail on the upper deck, holding an egg carton bound with string, staring down at the water rushing by below. Jef walked up beside her, and Mitch went around to the other side. “What are you doing?” he asked gently.

  “It’s his slide rule. I thought he should have it.” She held the carton straight out over the side. “We should have a minyan. He should have had a son. But, here we are.” She closed her eyes. “Yitkaddal v'yitkaddash sh'meh rabba,” she began. Jef started to ask what she was saying, but Mitch put his fingers to his lips, and they both just stood and listened until she finished. “Oseh shalom bimromav hu ya oseh shalom alenu v’al kol Yisrael, v’imru amen.”

  “Amen,” they said, as she threw the carton out as far as she could. It blew, tumbling, back in against the side of the ship, then into the water, where it shot backwards and disappeared in the churning wake behind.

  “Kaddish,” she said. “You were going to ask. That’s the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer for the dead. He was Jewish, too, you know. He should have made it to Israel.”

  Mitch didn’t know what to say, so he put his hand on Deb’s shoulder. She turned into him and started to cry again as he held her. Jef gave him a disapproving look, but Mitch ignored him and gently stroked her hair.

  “Well,” said Jef, “we have a ship to run and uranium to get to Israel. The sun’s finally out, so we can check our position. Let’s go, guys.”

  “I’m not a guy,” Deb said with an edge to her voice. “And I don’t think we’re going to Israel. We lost our LVDP or whatever it’s called. We have no way to deliver the fuel. We can’t row it ashore one rod at a time. Let’s just dump it here and go back and hope no one ever saw Wasserman anywhere near the boat. Anyone asks and we’ll just sa
y we don’t know where he is. He’ll be just another missing college student. Maybe they’ll connect him with that missing Vespa you rode into the harbor. We go back now and people may still believe we just had this thing out for a joy ride, an extended party. Nothing we can do now. This will just have to be something we live with. For the rest of our lives.”

  “Deb, we don’t have to go back. There’s no problem. Everything is fine.”

  “Everything is not fine,” she said, spitting out the words.

  “Everything is fine,” Jef repeated. “The ship carries two LCVPs, one on each side.”

  Mitch and Jef looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. They took off together at a run, heading for the port side to check if the second LCVP was safe. Deb slumped down by the rail and started to cry again.

  27

  2003 — Shortly after takeoff on the flight from Tel Aviv to Vienna, Migdal looked out the window at the crowded shipping lanes of the Mediterranean below and thought back to the voyage on the Delft that had started it all. He may have changed his name, but inside he knew he was still that kid, Mitchell Rossing, who bluffed his way through life.

  After Wasserman had been washed overboard, it seemed like none of them had much to say to each other, at least when all three of them were together, which was not a lot, since Deb and Jef spent much of the time holed up in the master stateroom. Mitch finally had to switch bedrooms to one farther away from the sounds from above that kept reminding him of where and with whom he really wanted to be.

  The crossing had been dramatic, at least at the start, but threading their way through the Mediterranean ultimately proved far more challenging. They slipped through the Straits of Gibraltar nearly half a day behind their original plan, which forced them to plow ahead almost recklessly. He remembered more than one near miss with a tanker or a cargo ship and one time off Cyprus when they almost ran right over a trawler after Jef decided to change course somewhat abruptly. As it turned out, it was a good decision, because they narrowly avoided running aground.