On most nights he simply stared into the darkness, hearing blank static as he chewed a flap of the sourdough pancake called injera or sipped a barely alcoholic bottle of talla beer. Then he would pack up the little civilian receiver and go about his business.
But on the previous midnight plus five, as he squatted on the dark balcony of a pension, he had suddenly straightened up and nearly dislodged the plug from his ear. The voice was very faint, a sandy whisper in the night, but its slow and careful American tones were directed unmistakably at him.
“Bavaria, this is Modigliani Art. Call the ball, man, at two-niner-zero, two-seven-six, two-four-one-four. I repeat . . .”
Eckstein scrambled in his cargo pocket for a notepad and a pencil, jotting down the proper name and numbers, which at first glance confused him. The message was repeated twice more, while he closed his eyes and tried to make out every nuance of the words oscillating with the mountain winds and weather. Then the hollow static returned, and he waited out the remainder of the five minutes, though he expected no repeat performance.
Bavaria.
It was certainly directed at him, for he had used that code name for one long, turbulent period of his career. Yet only a select group of his comrades was privy to that knowledge, and this bass American voice bouncing from the stratosphere could not be matched with any other in his mind’s roster.
Modigliani Art.
The contact had identified himself as if expecting Eckstein’s recognition. Yet to the best of his knowledge, he had never encountered such an odd moniker—except perhaps as the title to a museum exhibition, where the words would have been ordered more gracefully.
And Call the ball, man? He repeated the phrase in a half-whisper, yet the only identification he could make was with the common radio instruction given to American naval aviators as they approach an aircraft carrier, an order to the pilot to declare that he was on course to set his plane down. So what was the intention here? That Eckstein should “come in for a landing”? The lack of clarity was maddening.
And finally, the numbers: 290-276-2414. They resembled no familiar telephone listing of any continent, but in keeping with departmental wireless practice, Eckstein added a digit to each numeral and came up with: 301-387-3525.
He sat down on the cool plaster balcony, produced a Mini Maglite, and cupped the bulb, staring at the numbers. Three-zero-one. An American area code, followed by seven more digits.
And then it came to him.
Modigliani Art. Italian Art. How many men did he know who fit that description and whose voice rang so familiar now? Just one. Art Roselli, former CIA Jerusalem chief of station.
And it was not “Call the ball, man,” Eckstein realized as he slapped his forehead and silently chastised himself in Hebrew, a language he had not used in sixty days. Rather it was “Call the bald man.”
An urgent message, so categorized because it broke over a frequency reserved for his ears only, authenticity confirmed by the use of his very private code name. A plea reaching out through a million other bits of floating impulses, a message from Art Roselli to call Benni Baum at a telephone number in the United States.
Eytan was somewhat stunned by his decryption, and as he removed the earplug, wound the wire, and packed the Panasonic back into its case, his train of thought wound through a pass of questions. What sort of event would have brought Benni Baum to contact him here in Africa? Baum had no part in Eckstein’s Mivtzah Yermiyahu—Operation Jeremiah—so the need was probably unrelated. Had Baum in fact discovered something relevant to his mission, he would have relayed a standard encryption through the major’s commo link from Jerusalem.
Ever since being separated by Itzik Ben-Zion, Benni and Eytan had secretly supplied each other with the points and modes of contact for whatever missions to which they were assigned. Yet each knew that the other would only break into that compartmentalization under emergency circumstances. Could this have something to do with Eytan’s family? He shuddered, yet the years in intelligence work had taught him not to indulge in speculative panic. And why a relay from the United States? What was Baum doing there? He should have been up to his ass in Moonlight—the recovery of Captain Dan Sarel—of which Eckstein was supposed to know nothing at all. And finally, why was their old ally Arthur Roselli making the contact on Baum’s behalf? Eytan might have assumed that Baum was somehow incapacitated, except that “the bald man” now waited impatiently by a telephone. Perhaps Roselli had made the contact because only he had access to the proper transmission gear?
Eckstein stopped excavating his mind and squinted at the dial of his Breitling. He had a full twelve hours in which to select a secure contact station. It was standard procedure to allow a man in the field half a day to answer a contact, for his mahfil—his control—could never know the full situation on the ground. If the English message had included the code word “pomegranate”—a translation from the Hebrew slang for hand grenade—then Eytan would have signaled his team members, destroyed his gear, and headed for a predetermined extraction route from Africa. But no such alarm had been sounded.
He had planned to sleep until dawn and then begin the long drive to Addis Ababa, but after a quick calculation, he decided to drum up a meal and depart at once. By noon he could be in Bahir Dar, at the southern tip of Lake Tana. Even if every telephone line in the province was down, the digital link at Dar’s airport would be functioning.
He packed up his camera gear, filled his ruck with three days’ worth of underwear and socks, made certain to include some very relevant reading material, and left the pension. . . .
He drove briskly now along the lower ridges near Addis Zemen, his boots kicking up small swirls of dust from the clutch and gas pedals, the gearshift chafing his palm under a sticky glue of grit and sweat. He focused on the winding highway, glancing at the vast geographic phenomena that fated the Ethiopians to a life of challenge. To the east, the wide forestlands that briefly flourished after September rains were slimmed and browner now from a constant diet of sun, the fields of yellow flowers gone. To the west, the surface of Lake Tana was flat and bright as polished steel. A flock of pink flamingos touched their black beaks to the water’s edge, the reflections of their spindly legs giving them the odd double forms of alien mosquitoes.
On the long slope rising toward the road, a shepherd boy led two burros laden with dry bundles of firewood branches. Waiting for him on the shoulder was an adult couple, the man wearing the bleached shawl of a shamma, the white skirts of the woman’s k’ami shaded by a straw umbrella.
As Eytan passed, he knew that the parents smiled down at their son, for the boy’s bright face reflected their pride as he struggled upward with his prizes. A pang of longing struck his heart, for while he tried to focus once more on the road, he saw the black curls of Simona’s hair framing her blue eyes, and the wide dimples of his son’s cheeks beneath a tousled mop of blond hair so much like Eytan’s own. Oren was well into his fourth year now, and Eytan was grateful that most of his recent assignments had not taken him far from Jerusalem, nor for extended periods of time. His feelings for his wife had always been remarkably intense, even during times of conflict. But until the arrival of Oren, Eytan had never imagined a devotion so powerful, a love that could not be tempered in the least by his own dark moods, his son’s occasional bouts of inherited recalcitrance, or thousands of kilometers’ distance and weeks without contact.
Too often he pictured Simona, alone in their bed in Talpiot Mizrach, the Jerusalem moonlight striping her body. An image replayed itself daily, of Oren scampering happily off to gan with his Mickey Mouse backpack bouncing on his bony shoulders. And Eytan knew that while Simona provided the fatherless apartment with comfort and joy, inevitably she would find their little boy staring at the black-and-white photograph of Eytan on the coffee table in the salon, asking in his sweet, reedy voice: “Matai abba yavoh habayta? When is Daddy coming home?”
Yet all soldiers, if they intended to survive the profession, had
to be able to strike such emotional encroachments from their minds. If you could no longer accomplish that, then it was time to retire. The frequency with which Eckstein found thoughts of his family nearly filling his eyes had begun to cause recalculations of his future. In two more years he would have put in a full twenty in the Israel Defense Forces, when many officers took their pensions and with the relative youth of four decades set off upon second lives and careers. In addition, dangerous fieldwork was voluntary, and you could simply request extraction from such challenges and “fly a desk,” as Benni Baum sneeringly described office combat. But Eckstein was excruciatingly self-aware, and he knew that the same blood that had once driven him to volunteer for the paratroops, and then again for Queens Commando in Special Operations, would always run in his veins. He would have to leave the army altogether, or he would constantly be sticking his ever aging neck out.
Another factor that weighed on him was that Benni Baum was himself about to retire. And in truth, their segregation from each other had changed the game so much that Eytan’s enthusiasm had waned. He had not lost belief in his missions, but his ability to execute a task without his “better half” was being sorely tested. It seemed to him that he and Baum had been fated to function as a single entity, and although neither man had yet found the courage to voice that conviction to the other, Eytan would bet all his accumulated field bonuses that Baum felt the same.
Benni Baum would never admit that he needed the input of another specific comrade, yet his rantings to Personnel as he repeatedly assembled identical rosters of teams, with Eytan always as his second, were evidence enough. Eckstein and Baum were two halves of a single brain that simply functioned in low gear during their separations. The relationship was more than the father-and-son meld of successful family businesses. It was really too close to be sensible, and now the distance was too damned far, and that was why Eytan raced along the highway toward Bahir Dar.
After another half hour of speed that was drawing off his last reserves of concentration, he sighed with relief and slowed to a more reasonable cruise. He was approaching the outskirts of Ethiopia’s most rapidly expanding city, and he could see the spiderwebs of utility lines that crisscrossed over the low buildings, the textile factory that was attracting country laborers tired of their battles with the land. He glanced at his watch, satisfied that he still had plenty of time. Yet one could not yet rely on the fortitude of the telephone system, and he would seek out the very first instrument. If that failed, he would continue on to the airport in hopes of more regularly maintained technology.
A small gasoline station appeared on the lake side of the road, and Eckstein decided to give it a try. He spotted a telephone line running from the roof of the station’s single-story pink pastel building to a nearby pole. In addition, a white plastic sign hung over the open doorway, the bright-red Amharic letters advertising a roadside café. He could water his “horse,” feed his grumbling stomach, and hopefully put his disquiet to rest.
Parking the jeep well away from the pair of old pumps, he turned off the engine and swung his legs out over the oil-stained earth. He sat for a minute, expressionless, rubbing the long pink scars that curled around his right knee. It had been over five years since a burst of Skorpion-68 rounds had nearly crippled him on the highway between Munich and the München-Riem airport, and he was fully recovered now, even holding his own in a couple of spontaneous soccer matches with the locals. Still, any prolonged position brought the cramping back to the joint. He stood up and suppressed a grunt, removed his Yankees cap, wiped his slick forehead with the front of his sweatshirt, and reset the hat. Then he reached into the jeep for his camera bag and rucksack and walked into the building.
Emerging from the harsh light of noon into the gentle gloom of the café, Eckstein was momentarily blinded. He could hear the low hum of an electric fan, and above that the bubbling notes of a washint, the long wooden flute played by shepherds to calm their flocks of oxen. The relative cool of the space brought instant relief. He pulled off his Ray•Bans, leaving them to dangle at the ends of a black cord.
There were only four wooden tables, a pair to the right and left, attended by folding metal chairs of rusty tubing. A peeling color poster of the great Blue Nile falls was glued to one wall next to an ironwork window, through which sharp shafts of light threw prison-cell stripes over the concrete floor. Against the rear wall, a small wooden counter rose to bar height, and a young boy’s head and shoulders poked above the scuffed top. He had a crop of nubby hair covering his dark scalp, wore a bright-blue cotton shirt thick with dried sweat, and was concentrating on the gnarled flute. Glancing up at Eckstein and smiling through his eyes, he finished his lick with the discipline of a prodigy practicing for a recital.
Eckstein approached the counter. There was no cash register, only a wooden drawer divided for denominations. A small caged fan turned slowly at one end of the bar, and there was no telephone in plain sight, though that did not immediately alarm him.
“Hullo, mate,” said Eckstein brightly. He already had a fair grasp of Amharic, as that was the predominant dialect of the Ethiopian Jews. However, other citizens shared a score of tribal tongues, so in most urban areas the lingua franca was a pidgin version of English.
“Helloo, meester.” The boy grinned. “You need petrol?”
“Something to eat first, I think.”
“You like wat?” The indigenous stew was a spicy mix of lentils, peas, and beans, with an occasional egg thrown in and a few chunks of mystery meat if you were lucky. Actually, Eckstein longed for a plate of hummus and a cold bottle of Maccabee, yet that was only a fantasy here.
“Sounds lovely,” he said, and the boy placed the long washint on the counter and skipped through an archway into the “kitchen,” which looked to be no more than a burlap tent at the rear of the building.
Eckstein walked to the nearest table and set his rucksack and camera bag on the floor. He returned to the counter and called into the back room.
“My friend.”
The boy emerged, wiping his hands on a cotton rag. “Yes, meester?”
“Got a telephone, by any chance?”
The boy reached beneath the counter and set an ancient European model before Eckstein with as much pride as if he had produced the golden crown of Solomon himself.
“Fabulous,” said Eckstein, although the existence of the old phone proved nothing yet. Ethiopians often displayed appliances, whether or not they actually worked. He fished into his shorts pocket and came up with a wad of mixed Ethiopian and American dollars. The boy waved a hand at him.
“You pay after,” he said.
“I’m calling collect,” said Eckstein, which was standard procedure, as the number and charges would appear only on the recipient party’s bill. “But I still want to pay for the use.”
The boy frowned at him and shook his head.
“The other side is paying,” Eckstein tried to explain as he pointed off toward some distant shore. “But I want to pay you too.” Actually, he just did not want to be interrupted during the conversation. He fanned the wad of bills like a blackjack dealer and said, “Go ahead, pick a card.”
The boy’s eyes widened at the peacock tail of currencies. He looked up at Eckstein, who grinned at him and nodded. The boy snatched an American twenty from the deck, and when the foreigner did not move to take it back, he laughed a happy warble and scampered into the kitchen.
Eckstein removed his small notebook and a mechanical pencil from his pocket and placed them on the counter. He picked up the handset and swept the zero around the rotary dial. When the operator in Bahir Dar came on, he stated his wishes and read off the number, then waited for nearly a full minute as he pictured her searching for a free line on an old plug switchboard. He heard her Amharic-accented English in the foreground, the inquiries of an American operator in the background, and then a discomfiting silence as an agreement to accept the call was negotiated.
“Hello?” Benni Baum’s voice
was unmistakable, even with the crackles of multiple relays.
“I thought I told you never to call me here,” Eytan quipped in English as relief swept over him.
There was silence from the other end.
“Boss?” Eytan’s brow furrowed as, not knowing whether Benni might be using cover, he fell back on this general verbal address.
“Hello, Tony.” Benni’s tired voice sighed. “Thanks for getting back.”
“What’s up?” Eytan asked.
“Well, things are very interesting.”
Eytan did not reply for a moment. After so many years together, the two men had developed a private working code in addition to the encryptions supplied by the office. A situation described as interesting was dangerous, dreadful, and horribly screwed up. An event delineated as boring would have indicated the standard difficulties of their profession. This was clearly an emergency, and the muscles of Eckstein’s shoulders tightened.
“Well, that’s good,” Eytan said in a flat, unenthusiastic tone. “Life should always be interesting,” he added, meaning quite the opposite.
“Hunh,” Benni grunted. His timbre was so depressive that Eytan’s alarm multiplied.
“Where are you, by the by?” Eytan asked.
“In a hospital.”
“Oh? Who’s the patient.”
“I am.”
Eytan said nothing, hearing his own breath, trying to suppress his forebodings.
“It’s all right,” said Benni. “I’ll be getting out tomorrow.”
“What was the problem?”
“Never mind that, Tony,” Benni said impatiently. “I have some changes in the price lists for the medical supplies. Do you have the catalogue?”
Eytan stared at the telephone cradle, dimly aware that the Ethiopian boy now carried a steaming bowl of wat from the kitchen to his table. Benni was reverting to code. Whatever was going on, it was serious enough that Baum wanted to relay it encrypted, and he did not feel that the transmission was secure. There were, of course, no “medical supplies” involved. The reference to changes on a price list simply meant that Eckstein was to take down a series of numbers. The “catalogue” was the code key in his rucksack.
The Nylon Hand of God Page 31