“Maybe,” said Nadav. Uri Badash, as chief of Shabak counterintelligence, was tasked to suspect everyone, everywhere, all the time. “Are you?” he asked playfully.
“Well, my kids certainly treat me like an enemy agent,” Baum complained.
Yaron laughed. “That’s their job.”
“And they’re good at it,” both he and Benni punch-lined simultaneously. Nadav smiled, realizing that the two men had a history together.
“Well, Benni,” said the security chief. “Your gift has been scanned in the basement.” The package had been examined by X-ray and an electronic explosives detector. “Nothing showing, but my sapper’s still taking his time.”
“It’s all clear?” Yaron asked.
“In theory.” Nadav reached for Yaron’s pack of Time and removed a cigarette. He had quit smoking, because he had to lead his men in daily physical training and they were of a growing generation of nonsmokers. He toyed with the white stick. “But you never know. They’re making pistols out of plastic now and detonating Semtex with electronic greeting cards.”
Benni grunted. “So it could still go off.”
“Why do you think I’m up here drinking coffee?” Nadav quipped. Yaron and Baum smiled at the Shabaknik, knowing that he had hovered over his sapper until the likelihood of a detonation dropped to near zero.
Yaron turned toward Baum. “So what’s the flurry up north?”
“Well . . .” Benni relayed the recent events superficially, revealing nothing of the secret prisoner exchange or of his dualities with regard to Martina Klump, and not invoking Ruth’s name at all. When he wrapped up with the details about the map of Boston, Nadav shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“If that map points to Boston,” said the GSS man, “then I’d say Washington is the more likely target.”
Baum stared at him, suddenly aware that he should have made a similar assessment.
“I’m going to put those extra men on, Avraham,” Nadav added. Due to the bombing, he had already placed the Washington GSS on higher alert, yet Baum’s information reawakened his professional paranoia. He rose from the couch.
“We’re having Capitol Hill people here today,” Yaron warned. “Let’s not make the place look like Spandau.”
But Nadav ignored the general and headed for the door. The army had its concerns, the diplomats theirs, and Shabak had a job to do. “Don’t care if it looks like Ansar,” he said, referring to an Israeli prison that detained Palestinian terrorists. “I’ll be frisking senators by lunchtime.”
“Relax, Nadav.” Yaron’s attempt to soothe him was stopped by the appearance in his door of a young man who rarely ventured onto the diplomatic floors. He was a communications technician serving in a remote cubbyhole on the top floor of the embassy, part of a team whose function was to transmit and receive encrypted messages from Tel Aviv. As a sidebar, they intercepted transmissions to and from the embassies of confrontation states, as well as any other local traffic of interest.
The young man was short of breath. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the end of a stained brown tie as he pulled the office door closed. He hesitated, apparently frozen by the expectant stares of three superiors.
“Nu?” Yaron demanded as he came to his feet.
“Uh, Avraham,” the young man stuttered, the acceptable lack of formality failing to assuage his discomfort before the general. “We’ve just picked up something you might . . . I thought maybe you’d want to hear.”
“Yes?” Yaron put his fists on his hips.
“There’s an alert on, to all American military forces in the area. It was hard not to pick it up. It was all over the traffic.” He seemed somewhat embarrassed, like an entrapped voyeur.
“What is it?” Yaron’s annoyance was on the rise. “Are they deploying to the Gulf again? What?”
The young man sputtered more quickly now, wishing he had done this by in-house telephone.
“Apparently a terror group has attacked a U.S. Navy weapons convoy. If I’m getting the codes right, the slang, you know, a number of Marine escort guards are dead. And there seems to be a total media blackout on the event, as maybe some sort of weapon or missile might have been stolen.”
The technician had no more to relay, and his arms fell limp, as if he had finally confessed to damaging his father’s car. Yet he did not move, apparently expecting some advice, instructions, a blessed order.
“Ya w’Illi.” Nadav whispered an Arabic expression imploring God as he turned to look at Yaron. His suspicions of the Boston “decoy” had just come home to roost.
“It’s probably not connected,” said Yaron.
“And my prick’s not connected to my balls,” Nadav retorted.
Benni said nothing at all, though he had risen to his feet and the cigarette between his finger and thumb was squashed to a thin strip, the smoke curling up over his arm. He wanted to rally to Yaron’s side, to join in the assumption of coincidence, yet he could not. Images of strands of plotting string coursed across a map of the northeastern United States; clock faces and distance calculations formed flipping equations in his head. A woman flew into a night sky full of snow and corkscrewed down a lamp pole, while the charred bodies of Marines were pulled from dusty rubble, then turned to those of young Israeli men with the yellow stencils of IDF on their bloodied fatigues. A couple tangoed in the moonlight, and a pistol barrel flashed into his eyes as he squeezed them shut.
A hollow bang forced his eyes open again. Someone was rapping on Yaron’s door.
“Kaness!” the general shouted, and the communications technician jumped aside as another man entered the room. He was wearing jeans and a heavy flak jacket, his hair pasted to his scalp by sweat, but he had left his visored helmet elsewhere. The sapper carried a large padded envelope, upon which sat a shallow white box, its interior swathed in tissue paper as if it contained a dress shirt. Unaware of the dramatic news just relayed, he beamed with the pleasure of having bested the grim reaper once again.
“Who’s the birthday boy?” the sapper asked.
Yaron cocked his head at Baum, and the sapper approached Benni like a sommelier, offering the package. Baum tried to keep his fingers from trembling as he reached up and slowly unfolded the tissue paper.
In the bottom of the box was a book. It was hardbound, with a glossy black jacket. The top half of the cover showed the forehead, arching dark eyebrows, and wide, angry eyes of a female face. She stared out at him, her nose and mouth obscured by a raven veil. The bottom half of the cover was splashed with the neon letters of the title.
Shoot the Women First.
Benni stared at the gift, a published treatise on the histories of female terrorists. He was dimly aware that his compatriots had crowded in for a look.
“Book-of-the-Month Club?” the sapper joked, but Baum heard only his own blood roaring in his ears. He withdrew his hands from the paper and slowly stuffed them into his trouser pockets as he continued to stare at those eyes, and his vision blurred.
“Avraham!” Someone was yelling for Yaron. “Avraham!” Yaron spun to Sheila’s imprecations echoing from the hallway.
“What is it?” he yelled back.
“The phone, for God’s sake!”
It was only then the men realized that one of the general’s instruments was jangling in its cradle. He sprang to it as Sheila called again: “It’s patched in from the operator.”
“Yes?” Yaron pressed the handset against his head and stuck a finger in the other ear as he squinted. “What? Who?”
Then he turned to Baum and extended the phone.
“It’s for you.”
Baum walked across the floor, his shoes suddenly heavy as a pair of ski boots. He pulled a hand free from his trousers, wiping the sweat on his shirt as the black instrument beckoned him from the end of Yaron’s arm. He slowly placed it to his ear and closed his eyes.
The first sound was the warble of a satellite transmission, the pips and squeals of very long distance and
miles of air. Then the voice brought him erect as if an electrical bolt had lanced him from the floor.
“Baum?”
It was a female voice, almost friendly in its tone. For a moment, he had hope that the caller would deliver him from this frightful spiral, lift him from a vessel that thundered onward into a storm, that the voice belonged to anyone but her.
“Yes?” he whispered.
She spoke in German, and hope turned to ash.
“This time,” said Martina Klump, her voice echoing as if from the bottom of a mine shaft, “you are my prisoner. And if you do anything, anything at all—leave Washington, cancel the exchange, call in your troops—I swear, your wife will never forgive you.”
The line went dead, the sound gone hollow and devoid of electrical life. Baum looked at the receiver, replaced it on the cradle, and then his short struggle to comprehend was suddenly over as he expelled an animal sound and began to scramble inside his suit jacket for something.
“What is it, Baum?” Yaron strode back to him, seeing the flush of panic on his friend’s face. “What’s going on?” He reached out to put a hand on Benni’s arm, which flew up to ward him off.
“Outside line,” Benni croaked. “Outside!” He was flipping through his small telephone notebook like a stockbroker about to lose a fortune.
“The red phone.” Yaron pointed. “It’s direct.”
As Benni scrambled for it, Avraham turned to Nadav and mouthed, “The doctor.” The GSS man hesitated, but Avraham Yaron had known Benni Baum for all their adult lives, and he had never witnessed a reaction like this before. “Zooz!” he snapped, and Nadav sprang for the office door.
Benni dialed Ruth’s apartment in Manhattan. When her phone began to ring, he backed up to the desk and leaned on the edge, scrabbling at his tie, trying to take in oxygen. On the seventh unanswered ring, he dropped the receiver to the desktop and once more flipped through his booklet.
“Benni?” Yaron attempted again, more softly now. But Baum just shook his head violently.
He dialed again.
“Midtown North,” the desk sergeant answered.
“Detective O’Donovan,” Benni snapped.
“Who’s calling?”
“Benjamin Baum,” said Benni, then pronounced it again. “Ben-ja-min Bowem.”
“One minute.”
It was less than that, only a few seconds, until Aaron Davis’s tired and remorseful voice came on the line.
“Colonel Baum?” He waited for Benni’s response. “Aaron Davis here. Colonel?”
“Yes,” Baum whispered.
“Mike O’Donovan is in the hospital, sir. We’ve been trying to reach you.”
Benni could not speak, and there was a long exchange of breaths while Davis gathered his nerve.
“But it’s worse than that, Colonel.” The detective sighed, and his voice fell to a faint apology.
“Your daughter has been kidnapped.”
Part Two: Nylon
Chapter 13: Ethiopia
Major Eytan Eckstein’s eyes were as blue as the ripples of Lake Tana, a resemblance even more precise now that the African sun had arched into the late-morning sky and the waters sliding slowly toward the great falls of Tessissat were burnished by the windless heat. Across the vast expanse of what in other lands might have been called a sea, the yellow haze obscuring distant ridges was of the same dust that encrusted Eckstein’s brows, and the papyrus boats hovering in the shallows mirrored the pink flecks of fatigue half hidden by his squint.
He had driven south through half the night from Asmara, the only city in the land of the Lion of Judah that retained the tastes of its many failed European conquerors. He had filled the gas tank of his forest-green Renault jeep, then fueled his own belly with a bowl of pasta, yet the mountains of the Gondar Province each night abandoned their warmth, and neither the food, the jeep’s worn canvas roof, nor his woolly sweater was enough to keep his teeth still. But the cold was ally to a tired driver, and its constant jab had kept him from toppling into the gorges of Wolkefit Pass.
Now the devil of another day was well engaged, the December heat swinging toward its apogee, and the Renault’s roof was rolled onto a cross-spar, the heavy navy sweater flung into the back seat. Despite the rays that nearly beat him blind and air so thick it sluiced around the windscreen like the backdraft from a jet afterburner, Eckstein no longer felt the urge to doze, for an oppressive day was more his element than a shriveling night. He had been born in Germany, but in Israel his body had learned to blossom in sweat.
Though a field-rank officer of the Israel Defense Forces, Eckstein bore scant resemblance to his peers in other branches: no polished brown boots, epauletted olive tunic, or smartly angled red beret to hint of those nostalgic airborne days before he joined the Special Operations branch of AMAN. His hair could be properly described as “dirty” blond now, thickly dusted by the mountain track and long enough to gather into a tail held by a black rubber band at his neck’s peeling nape. The sleeves of his gray sweatshirt had been cut off at the shoulders, the fading purple letters on the chest bisected with a blade for further ventilation. Thus, NYU had been reduced to NU, coincidentally a Yiddish exhortation of impatience. A pair of cargo-pocketed khaki shorts ended at the middle of his sunburned thighs, and his tan canvas boots had been carefully purchased for their French labels. A New York Yankees baseball cap, a pair of black-framed Ray*Bans, and the blue Domke camera bag that bounced on the Renault’s passenger seat all enhanced the cosmetic image cultivated here, the accoutrements of “cover.”
Yet despite the lack of a uniform, Eckstein, like all his coworkers, continued to regard himself as a soldier. The term “agent” was rarely used by AMAN professionals, except in reference to their civilian counterparts. The word embodied questionable elements, like marketeers of theatrical talent, real estate, or life insurance.
Eckstein picked his way slowly along the only thoroughfare of Gondar, the provincial capital just north of Tana. The cluster of single-story plaster buildings with their roofs of bleached wooden slabs formed a “city” not much larger than the Shuk Hapishpishim flea market in Tel Aviv. Human and animal pedestrians ruled the road, and Eckstein held his speed to a crawl as he gently weaved between a family’s wooden cart, pulled by a mule, and a strolling pair of patriarchs poking the dust with the tips of their gnarled dulas.
When he reached the southern outskirts of the town and picked up speed, he checked the rearview and decided that no other vehicle had followed him into Gondar, or waited on the single road that was the only path through the wayna dega—the high plateaus of brown tabletops and green scrub that looked so much like the northern Negev. A small bald boy waved at him and beamed the ready smile so common to these alleged descendants of King Solomon and Sheba, queen of ancient Ethiopia. To Eckstein, the inhabitants of this cruelly climated land were unusually beautiful, their soulful eyes reflecting a difficult fate. Yet the thought that troubled him now as he returned the boy’s wave was that his Caucasian face, and his vehicle, were becoming too familiar features of the area. He wondered if the local shepherds had already anointed him with some colloquial nickname, for if so, then his operational days here were numbered.
In Addis Ababa, Bahir Dar, and Asmara, those who did address Eckstein knew him only as Anthony Hearthstone, a British-born and Munich-schooled photographer, which accounted for his perfect English tinted with hues of Hochdeutsch. Tony was a Christian moniker he had used before, having coupled it with the surname Eckhardt for work on the European continent. Yet Internal Security had decided that Mr. Eckhardt needed retiring, so another easily recallable approximation of Eckstein had to be concocted. “Cornerstone” was too blatant a translation, so Hearthstone was born in the Cover room at headquarters.
He was, to all who encountered him now in Africa, a fit and friendly photojournalist freelancing for Stern out of Hamburg. He appeared to be in his early thirties, though he was actually past thirty-eight, and his assignment for that magazine w
as to continue covering the hardships of the Horn. This made him an odd remnant of the flood of television, radio, and print people who had hovered here like desert flies when the drought was at its murderous peak, then quickly migrated to the war in the Gulf, and never returned. The journalists had left Ethiopia, but the famine had not.
That starvation, with its impact on the remaining pockets of Ethiopian Jews who had not been spirited to Israel during the airlifts of Operation Solomon, was the true focus of Eckstein’s purpose here. The Israeli government continued to view the ingathering of exiles as a mission equal in importance to any other venture, and intelligence operatives often found themselves decompressing from anti-terror operations, only to be reassigned to the extraction of a besieged Jewish enclave from some distant, hostile environment. Such missions were regarded as the purest expressions of the nation’s soul, and Israeli soldiers and agents undertook them with the same fervor they applied to thwarting a conventional enemy military assault.
Eckstein had already been in country for nearly two months, as commander of a SpecOps team tasked with the rescue of one such group of Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews more commonly known as Falashas. His operation had nearly foundered upon a number of treacherous obstacles, yet today he had set those troubles aside and drove with an urgency demanded by the message he had received in Asmara.
Each night at the stroke of twelve, no matter his fatigue or the inconvenience of location, Eckstein sought the high ground of his environment. On the top floor of a ramshackle hostel or a hilltop overlooking the Rift, he would set up his small Panasonic Single Side Band 18, drape the wire antenna over a tree limb or metal water pipe, affix his earpiece, and tune in the BBC World Service. For five minutes he would actually listen to the “main points,” for he might have to justify his eccentric habit with a recitation of the headlines. But at precisely four minutes and fifty seconds past the hour, he would punch a preset frequency and listen for another full five minutes, for that was his only link to his true self.
The Nylon Hand of God Page 30