The Keeper

CAIRN-ON-THE-HUDSON, NEW YORK

Two Years Later

Chapter One

i

It stank, this bizarre fish-and-metal catch of the day, and after unloading the shad and separating them from the worthless, PCB-tainted bass, catfish and carp, Jack Trex moved off downwind, sat down on a piling and stared at the thing left tangled and dangling in his nets.

The stump of the left leg he had lost in Vietnam ached, and he absently loosened the straps of his wood, steel and plastic prosthesis as he continued to study the rotting carcass suspended over the stern of his trawler. The creature’s head and much of its hindquarters were gone, and what was left was so decomposed as to make certain identification of the species impossible, but Trex knew that the only fish of that size native to the Hudson was sturgeon, and so he assumed that was what it was. If all he had snagged in his nets was a dead sturgeon, he would have unceremoniously dumped it back in the water and gone about his business of harvesting shad, the only commercial fish left in the river, as they made their annual spring run from the Atlantic up the Hudson River to spawn. But this creature had been caught once before, and tampered with; strapped to its back was a stainless steel box the size of a briefcase. As President of the Cairn Fishermen’s Association Jack Trex considered it his responsibility, before disposing of the carcass, first to find out exactly what the creature was, and then why it had been tethered to a metal box and released into the river.

Trex was an educated man, but like most fishermen who worked the planet’s waters he believed in omens, and he had a very bad feeling about this day’s mysterious catch of flesh and steel, an irrational but persistent feeling that it could change his life forever, and he was going to be very careful how he handled the situation.

He had lived in Cairn, one of several small riverfront communities between New York City to the south and Haverstraw to the north, all his life. He lived with his wife in the same house on the banks of the Hudson where his parents and grandparents had lived. Like his father and grandfather before him, he was a fisherman, but, unlike his forebears, he was unable to make a living solely from fishing, and after the run of shad in the spring he worked the rest of the year as a carpenter and mechanic here at the Cairn Marina and in other boatyards. He had an almost mystical attachment to the river. Once, before the General Electric plant to the north had dumped into the river tons of poisonous PCBs that permeated the fatty tissue of fish and before the industries and towns that had sprung up along its banks had begun using the great waterway as a sewer and waste dump, it had been possible to harvest and legally sell dozens of the species of fish that lived in the waters. Although the problem with the PCBs remained, after more than twenty-five years of strenuous efforts by environmental groups like Clearwater and the Cairn Fishermen’s Association, the river was reasonably clean again. Jack Trex was determined to keep it that way, which was why he had more than a passing interest in the remains of the large, unidentified creature he had netted and the strange, ominous device that had been attached to it.

But the bad feeling remained. He was not certain to whom he should report his catch, or what questions he should ask. He decided he needed advice, and he strapped on the prosthesis that was his left leg and walked up the dock to a pay phone that was mounted on the outside wall of the marina’s office and clubhouse. He would ask the opinion of the only person he had ever met who seemed as at home on the water in all sorts of weather as he did, and who could handle sail as well as power boats, which he could not. He would call the association’s newly hired riverkeeper.

ii

Jahli Aden, called Jade by her friends as much for the brilliant green color of her eyes as the play on her name, was spending the late Saturday morning helping her son, Max Jr., with his homework when the call came from Jack Trex. Jade told her boss she would be at the marina in fifteen minutes, then hung up and went back into the kitchen where the seventeen-year-old sat at the table with his book in front of him, staring out the window as he waited for his mother to resume helping him. Jade went over to where the boy was sitting and gently caressed the purplish patch under his left eye where the swelling from a blow he had received at school two days before was just starting to go down.

Mom’s got things to do, my big barrel of baked beans, Jade said, kissing her son on the cheek. I’ll be back in a little while.

The tall, muscular boy with the blond hair, brown eyes and broad shoulders who reminded Jade so much of his father, looked up at her and grinned. All right, my little wagon of … warbling warthogs.

Keep working on that math by yourself for a while.

It’s hard, Mom.

"Hey, kiddo, if God had wanted everything to be easy, she wouldn’t have invented schools and homework. Now, study."

On her way out of the house Jade paused at the open door of her small office and study, where her daughter Fatima had been intently studying her Torah and Hebrew texts ever since returning from schul earlier in the morning. The girl was hunched over the rolltop desk in the office underlining passages in one of the three books she had open before her. Not wanting to disturb her daughter, Jade blew Fatima a silent kiss before leaving the house and climbing into the Jeep Cherokee parked in the driveway.

During her drive to the marina on the river road, with the blue of the Hudson on her right and rows of restaurants, art galleries, boutiques and craft shops on her left, Jade found herself reflecting on her good fortune of late, and how much she owed to the one-legged Vietnam veteran and fisherman she was on her way to meet.

She knew things could have turned out very differently, and decidedly worse.

The Navy’s offer had indeed been generous and acceptable; in fact, it had been impossible to refuse. It had been made clear to her that her military career was over, but the Navy, in light of the multiple scandals it had endured in recent years, had not wanted to pursue any course of formal disciplinary action against her that might have resulted in yet more bad publicity, or more charges of rampant sexism that could conceivably have led to the forced disclosure or leaking of very sensitive and highly classified information, including the fact that for years Jade had been a covert intelligence operative spying on friend as well as foe in the Middle East. In return for her total silence concerning not only the incident with Sergeant Henry Bolo but also virtually everything about her military career, she would be honorably discharged and receive a full pension. She would also receive her dead husband’s pension, to which she was entitled in any case, and she and her children would continue to receive all of the medical and other benefits to which a veteran with her years of service would normally be entitled.

Jade glanced out the passenger side window to watch as a trio of sailboats glided majestically through the water on the vast expanse of river between Haverstraw and the Tappan Zee Bridge that the first Dutch settlers had dubbed the Tappan Sea. Behind them, on the opposite side of the river, a huge tanker was ploughing north in the deep channel.

Oddly enough, she thought, despite what she still felt were betrayal and injustice in its aftermath, the consequences of Henry Bolo’s attack on her had turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Had the incident not occurred, she would have remained in the Navy indefinitely, probably retiring as she neared sixty only to find that her children had become complete strangers and were lost to her forever. Instead, she had returned to civilian life upwards of two decades ahead of schedule to find her children not yet total strangers and lost to her, but definitely in need of her time, love and help.

She had returned from Saudi Arabia to be mustered out from her home base in Connecticut. From there she had gone back with Max Jr. and Fatima to New York City, where she had been born and raised in a Moslem enclave in Brooklyn, where her parents still lived. Only then had she begun to realize the enormity of the personal problems her teenage children faced.

Max Jr. had been born developmentally disabled, but it was not his mild mental retardation that bothered Jade, for she considered him not much slower than many of the men she had served with in the Navy or with whom she’d dealt in civilian life. In Jade’s view it was not life in general that Max Jr. had to survive, only high school. Jade considered Max Jr.’s most severe handicap to be not retardation but a chronic passivity that was the polar opposite of the aggressiveness and competitive spirit characteristic of his father, a Naval test pilot and instructor she had met and with whom she had fallen in love at Annapolis. They had married at her graduation, and he had died eight years later when an experimental fighter he had been testing had crashed at sea. Max Jr. had his father’s height, solid, lithe build and good looks, but apparently not his heart, and this greatly saddened Jade.

At school Max Jr. allowed other boys, some of them considerably smaller and younger, to effectively use him as a punching bag, attacking not only his body but also his soul with impunity, making him the butt of countless cruel jokes. Jade, who could maim or kill an opponent with her hands or feet in a fraction of a second, had cautiously tried to teach her son a few fundamental techniques of self-defense, but the boy had seemed embarrassed by the fact that his mother possessed such skills, and he had resisted instruction.

Considering his other disabilities, Jade felt her son would never be able to live independently and with dignity unless he could somehow learn to handle the bullies he would meet in every walk of life, stalkers of the spirit who were attracted to the weak and helpless like maggots to dead flesh. He had to somehow learn to create and defend a space, however small, that was uniquely his and inviolable, and Jade had not yet found a way to teach him to do that. She desperately hoped that his passivity was the result of childhood trauma connected to the untimely death of his father and that he would one day grow out of it, but she was not optimistic.

Neither she nor her husband had spent much time with their children during their earliest, formative years; because of the nature of her assignment, she had not even been able to join with them to grieve until weeks after their father had died. There was no question in her mind but that both of her children had suffered severe emotional damage as a result of their parent’s blind dedication to their military careers. This was a fact, but it was not something Jade mindlessly feared, for she was determined to eventually repair much, if not all, of that damage. What she feared most, what cramped her heart, was the possibility that her son was simply a coward.

Fatima’s problems were altogether different. The proud and self-reliant fifteen-year-old was blessed with the piercing intelligence of her father. Jade loved both her children fiercely, yet despite the fact that she saw herself each time she looked at Fatima’s raven-black hair, olive skin and brilliant green eyes, she felt closer to Max Jr. Fatima, although lacking the maternal link considered vital by orthodoxy, was drawn to Judaism and Jewish mysticism in a way her Jewish father had never been. Indeed, Jade suspected that the girl’s ardent devotion to her faith could be as much a mechanism for maintaining an emotional connection to her dead father as it was a means for meeting her spiritual needs, but she was not sure. Jade had never been able to understand religious faith, and now this same disbelief and alienation from religion that had partly caused the schism between her and her devoutly Moslem parents was a wedge between her and her devoutly Jewish daughter. Jade felt that Fatima was constantly pushing her away, or at least keeping her at a distance, preferring the companionship of her Jewish friends and their parents, and their rabbi.

Jade found it sadly ironic that her Jewish daughter had, in fact, much less in common spiritually with her dead father than had the girl’s Arab mother. For all intents and purposes Max had been an atheist, a fact that had deeply upset his devout parents, who lived in an Israeli kibbutz only a few kilometers from the site where Jade’s grandparents had been evicted from their home thirty years before to make room for a Jewish settlement.

The fact that Max was Jewish and she was Palestinian had meant nothing to either of them, and they had married over the bitter objections of both their respective sets of parents. They had never regretted their decision; with their demanding, dual careers in the military often keeping them apart for months at a time, they had savored each moment together. They had completely met each other’s needs. But Fatima was different; Fatima’s needs, it seemed, transcended love, as they apparently transcended everything else to be found in the company of people who did not share her extreme beliefs in the powers of things not of this world and a Jew’s obligations to those things.

Jade did not care that Fatima was deeply religious, and she was likewise indifferent to the fact that Fatima had chosen her father’s cultural heritage over her own. These things were not important to her. What disturbed Jade was her daughter’s outright rejection of all things not Jewish, including her mother, and the girl’s anti-intellectual approach to the world and the people in it. Jade detested zealotry, and Fatima was most certainly a zealot. During her career she’d been forced to deal with zealots of all persuasions. She’d been tortured by zealots, and she’d borne witness to the deaths of thousands of men, women and children as a result of their thundering, mindless machinations. Now it seemed her daughter wore the emotional war paint of her enemies, and there was nothing she could do about it.

These were the deep fault lines Jade had found in her children when her military career had come to an end and she had been forced to spend sufficient time with Max Jr. and Fatima to really look at and listen to them.

She had not believed that the city environment would heal her children’s wounds or bring them closer to her. She had wanted to work, but in the two years that had passed since her separation from the Navy she had found nothing in New York that suited her. Then she had heard of a job upriver in Cairn she thought she would like; if she got it, they would be able to move from the city to live in a small, riverfront town that boasted good schools and a racially mixed population that included many artists, actors and writers. She wanted to work on the water, and Cairn seemed a place that would promote the three of them coming together as a family, and so she had applied for the position.

The job of riverkeeper for the Cairn Fishermen’s Association primarily entailed patrolling the Hudson from Palisades, New Jersey, north to West Point, monitoring the activities not only of recreational boaters and commercial shipping traffic but also of industries on the shores along that stretch of the river, reporting on and collecting evidence of illegal waste dumping which she would give to the group’s attorney, who would then take the polluters to court. In her resume she had included everything about her Naval career except for the fact that she had been a covert intelligence operative. She’d suspected that the fact she was a woman might mitigate against her, but she had been hired. She’d learned later that she’d been selected from two dozen applicants. All of the other applicants had been men, many of them local residents who thought it would be nice to be paid for motoring around on the river all day. She’d been offered the job by the association’s board of directors largely at the insistence of Jack Trex, who had argued successfully that the job required someone with professional qualifications, and Jade’s were by far the best.

Jade was grateful to Jack Trex. She knew she owed him a great deal, and this only heightened the alarm and tension she felt rising in her as she walked down the floating dock in the Cairn Marina toward where Trex was waiting for her beside his trawler, which was tied up at the end of the dock. She had immediately recognized the thing caught in his net for what it was.

Hi, boss, she said, forcing a smile as she came up to the trim man with the thinning, shoulder-length dark hair, ruddy complexion and dark eyes.

Trex nodded. Good morning, Jade. Thanks for coming around on your day off.

If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be in Cairn to come around. You may always consider me on call. She paused and feigned casual curiosity as she pointed to the rotting carcass in the net at the back of his trawler. Some pretty strange things come out of the Hudson, don’t they? Maybe that’s a GE executive. Hope you found some shad while you were out there.

Certainly not enough to brag about. I had to come in early because that damn thing got fouled in my nets and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. You have any idea what it is?

No, Jade lied.

She estimated that the decaying carcass of the sea lion had been in the water perhaps three weeks, but no more than a month, which meant that Operation Jolly Roger was not at all the ancient history it should have been. Even more troubling, she could see from where she was standing that the identification markings on the mine strapped to the animal’s back had been deliberately obliterated, probably with acid. She did not at all like the implications of what she was looking at, and her mind raced as she tried to identify the options open to her and what she could do to protect Jack Trex while at the same time protecting herself, her family and her job.

Trex grunted, then wrinkled his nose and stepped back as the wind shifted and carried the odor of the rotting flesh in their direction. It almost looks like something that could belong to the military, doesn’t it, with that steel box strapped to its back? That looks like some kind of mine. But what would the Navy be doing releasing a booby trapped fish into the Hudson River, for Christ’s sake?

I have no idea, Jack, Jade replied softly, her thoughts still racing.

She knew she was going to have to make a decision quickly, and a great deal could depend on her making the correct one. She felt numb. No good was going to come from the fisherman’s catch, and she had to find a way to minimize the danger to both of them without possibly endangering boaters’ lives.

The reason I asked you to come around and look at it is because I want my riverkeeper’s advice. I’ve got a notion I should just take the boat back out, cut the thing loose from the nets and just dump it. I’m not sure I want to risk getting involved with the people who set it loose. But that box strapped to its back makes me nervous. Even if I weight the damn carcass down before I dump it, there’s no guarantee it won’t eventually work free and float back up to the surface where some boat could run into it. What do you think I should do?

Jade very much wanted to tell her employer to follow his initial instinct to simply take the carcass out to the deep channel and dump it; reporting his catch was sure to cost him precious time he could not afford at this time of year, and could cause him a great many other difficulties. But she dared not tell him to do this. She was fairly confident that the mine was a dummy, attached to the creature’s back during an illegal practice run for a top secret weapons system that had officially been cancelled four years before, but she could not be absolutely certain that was the case. The obliterated markings further complicated matters. She could disarm the mine if it was live, but she could not afford to let people in Cairn know she had that kind of expertise, and doing so could lead to all sorts of questions she was not permitted to answer. But if the magnetic mine were indeed live, and if its dead host was dumped back into the river before being separated from it, the explosive device would eventually present a very serious hazard, not only to pleasure craft but also to the great, steel-hulled barges and tankers that plied the deep channel.

She did not have the option of telling Jack Trex what the purpose of the thing was, for Operation Jolly Roger, during its relatively brief official existence, had been highly classified. Even if she were not under a personal obligation to honor the terms of her agreement with the Navy not to discuss details of her military career, she would still be legally obligated not to disclose classified information; she could not only lose her pension and benefits, but also be sent to prison if she disclosed to Trex or the police what the fisherman had brought up in his nets.

Jade?

It definitely looks suspicious, Jade said in a flat tone, dropping her gaze to the weathered boards at her feet. You’d better notify the Coast Guard. This is their jurisdiction.

Okay. That’s what I thought I should do, but I just needed to hear it from someone who knew what they were talking about. Thanks again for driving over.

Don’t be silly. Jade paused, carefully considering what she might say to warn the fisherman, then continued, Jack?

Yeah?

"Tell the Coast Guard that you’re a professional fisherman and that every hour your boat is out of commission now during the shad run costs you money. Tell them you want this thing off your boat as soon as possible, like this afternoon, so you can go back out on the river in the morning. You’ve done your duty as a citizen; tell them that if somebody doesn’t show up to take it off your hands, then you are going to dump it. Sometimes the bureaucracy needs a little goosing to get it working at the proper pace."

Don’t I know that. You think the Coast Guard will tell me what this thing is?

Somehow I doubt it, Jade replied evenly as she turned to head back up the dock. Let me know what happens.

iii

Jade felt anxious and agitated as she drove back along the river road toward her home, and she knew she was going to continue to feel that way until Jack Trex called to let her know that the Coast Guard had removed the carcass and its steel appendage.

She was fairly certain she understood how the Jolly Roger had gotten into the river. The sea lion had been launched for a test run from a holding tank, probably from a U.S. submarine or tender operating in one of the red zones in the Long Island Sound. Unbeknownst to its handlers, the animal must have been suffering from any one of a number of parasitic infections that can cause large sea mammals to lose their natural navigational skills. The creature had become disoriented and wandered through New York Harbor and up the river, where it had died. The question was why the mined sea lion had been set loose in the first place.

Operation Jolly Roger had been a project exploring the feasibility of training various sea mammals, seals, sea lions and killer whales, to carry magnetic mines to the hulls of targeted vessels, where they would explode on contact. Rumors of such testing had circulated in the media for years, with various animal rights groups loudly protesting, and the Navy had always flatly denied engaging in any such activity. In the end Jolly Roger had been cancelled not because of bad publicity, but because of budgetary cutbacks, the impracticality of carrying around large aquariums aboard ships for any length of time, and the slowly dawning insight that trying to use unreliable sea mammals as living torpedoes in an age of laser-guided missiles was just a bit silly.

But some people, obviously, still took the idea seriously, and those people were more than likely aboard a U.S. Navy vessel. It was always possible that the Pentagon had once again given Jolly Roger a green light, perhaps for very limited types of covert operations involving sabotage, but Jade seriously doubted it; she could not think of any such operation that a Navy SEAL could not perform better than a finned one. It was inconceivable to her that the Navy would reinitiate the program without Pentagon approval, for it would put all the personnel responsible, and ultimately even an admiral or two, at risk of courts martial. An ill-conceived program that killed sea mammals had itself been killed but now Jolly Roger had apparently been resurrected, and Jade could not understand why.

When she arrived home she was surprised to find her daughter waiting for her in the driveway. Fatima’s face, with its finely chiseled features, was clenched with worry, and her bright green eyes were clouded.

Hi, babe, Jade said as she got out of her car and kissed the girl on the forehead. What’s up?

I need to talk to you, Mom.

Of course.

Alone, Mom. I tried to get Maxie to go out and play ball or something, but he’s afraid the other guys are going to pick on him again. The girl paused and shook her head, then continued, "Maxie’s got real problems, Mom. He’s becoming a hermit. The kids at school push him around and call him names, like Jewboy one day and dirty Arab the next, and he just lets them get away with it. I don’t understand why he doesn’t just deck a couple of them. If I didn’t think it would only make matters worse, I’d punch them out. You’ve got to talk to him, Mom."

I know Maxie has problems, Jade said, averting her gaze so that Fatima could not see the worry in her own eyes. She took her daughter’s hand and started walking toward the back of the house. "Come on. Let’s take a walk by the river and talk about your problems."

They walked in silence across the back lawn, which merged with a sandy beach at the rear of Jade’s property, down to the river. From Albany to New York City the Hudson River was actually an estuary linked to the Atlantic Ocean, and the outgoing tide had exposed a two-mile stretch of shore. They headed north. Jade could feel the tension in her daughter and she wanted to probe it, but she thought it best to wait for Fatima to speak first.

Mom, the girl said at last, looking out over the three-mile-wide expanse of the river toward the Westchester shore, I’ve met a man, a very holy man, and I think he can change my life.

You want your life changed so badly?

Yes, Mom. I do.

The words, delivered with utter certainty and deep emotion, struck Jade in the heart like a physical blow, suddenly making her feel short of breath. But she concentrated on keeping her tone even as she asked, Who is this man?

"His name is Yunis Dockowicz. He’s a Rebbe."

"You met Rabbi Dockowicz at schul?"

"No. I heard about him at schul, and some of my friends took me to meet him. He and his followers came here from Israel a year ago. They’ve founded a community they call Hebron Nablus. It’s near Suffern."

They’re Hasidim?

"They’re heredim—the God-fearing; they’re like Hasidim, but there are