The wind died at a thousand meters. Completely. One minute it was driving all of them like an express train, the dunes below moving quickly between their boots, and the next minute they decelerated to only the speed of their chutes, their sliders flapping languidly above their heads.
There was nothing to be done about it. Didi knew that at least a stingy breeze survived, and he picked out a flat trough of ground between two high dunes, passed it at two hundred meters, and then gently turned back for it, twisting his head to see that his flock followed.
He knew that the men were stunned by the cold of the endless descent, sapped of the energy to control their landings properly. He gathered all his own strength, sped in hot, and flared half a meter above the ground, uncrossed his ankles, and stood up. The chute tried to billow, but he was already dropping his harness as he turned.
They came in with all the grace of crash dummies, someone racing past him to smash into a dune, others falling short and dropping out of sight. Baum flared too high and dropped straight down like a rock, but his instincts returned and he managed a parachute-landing fall in the sand. Eckstein made a good show of it on the left, plowing up a plume of sand with one foot as his canopy flapped like the wings of a dodo and he slid into a cloud of dust. Schneller’s rifle pitched him forward onto his face, as Didi winced. The others touched down in the darkness beyond his vision, except for Lapkin, who made a wild hook turn just above and then raced in to flare and stand up just meters to Didi’s right.
Astounded by their survival and ecstatic to be grounded again, the men struggled up and hobbled around on their frozen legs, pulling their chutes down, doffing their harnesses, bundling them up and kicking sand over them, until they were buried and briefly mourned.
Didi waved his penlights, and the men began to gather with their rucks and weapons. Baum limped forward first, rubbing his thigh but moving quickly.
“Do we have a count?” he whispered as he neared.
“Not yet,” Didi replied in kind. “Give it a minute.”
Schneller came out of the shadows, his ruck already slung, tearing the canvas from his rifle scope. Baum peered up at him. The German’s face had encountered a rock. His goggles were gone, and two streams of blood ran from the bridge of his nose down over his cheeks like a witch doctor’s tattoo.
“It’s all right.” He grinned at Benni. “It’s warm.”
Eckstein appeared carrying his ruck, his CAR-15 already slung from his neck and a magazine in the well.
Nabbe, who had overshot the DZ, came walking back, covered in sand from head to foot and picking cactus thorns from his backside. Binder and O’Donovan showed up together on the run.
The ground temperature was as balmy as an autumn eve in Vermont, but they were all still shivering from the torturous ride. Benni took over now.
“Get the thermals off,” he whispered. He saw the hesitation in Nabbe’s face. “Do it,” he ordered. “Then put your web belts on and finish one canteen per pair. We don’t want any sloshing.” No one balked. They were dehydrated from the adrenaline and the extreme cold. Benni switched his penlight off, and everyone followed suit. “Roll your caps up. Lose the goggles. Men with the walkie-talkies, stick the earpieces in and fix them with a Band-Aid. Set your weapons and magazines up.”
Benni bent to his own ruck, a signal that he was through for the moment. After six long minutes, O’Donovan and Eckstein were standing up, then moving to help the others.
“Mike and Eytan,” Baum whispered from the ground, where he was taping a walkie-talkie to his left ruck strap. “Go up to that high dune and get a fix.”
The two men jogged away with their weapons and compasses. They struggled up the promontory on the northern rim of the DZ, nearly crawling in the loose sand near the twenty-meter summit. Falling to their knees, they looked over the top.
Below them the dune sea sloped down and away into a wide gray bowl of undefined shadow. Beyond that to the northwest, the light of the stars picked out the lower ridges of a long range of mountains. A slim black line followed the curves of the foot—the Ben Zireg–Taghit road. Somewhere between their position and that road, Martina’s camp lay in the folds of the Sahara.
Eckstein flipped open his compass. O’Donovan pulled a small pair of rubber-coated binoculars from his pocket.
The American scanned to the northwest. He picked out a small cluster of buildings and some meager lights just beyond a huge mound of sand. The Grande Dune. And the village was the only evidence of humankind on the horizon.
He lowered his glasses and pointed. “That has to be Taghit,” he whispered. “But if we’re on our mark, it should be over there,” and he swung his arm due west.
“I know it,” Eckstein said.
O’Donovan looked at him. They scrambled backward and hurtled down the slope. . . .
The men were nearly ready. They were crouched around Baum like Boy Scouts at a campfire, listening to his admonitions as they tightened ruck straps and adjusted weapon slings.
“Okay,” said Baum. “Lock and load.”
The pings of bolts and charging handles sounded like a car crash in the night, but it had to be done.
Eckstein and O’Donovan appeared on the run. Benni looked up at them.
“We’re short by three kilometers,” Eckstein panted.
“Five from the target,” said O’Donovan.
Benni rose to his feet. He raised his wrist and peered at the luminous face of his watch.
Midnight.
Five kilometers.
Over dunes.
Without a word, he burst through the huddle and began to run north.
The men raced after him across the sand.
Chapter 24: Skorpion
Ruth was awakened by the sudden burst of silence.
For five days and nights, the engine of the gasoline generator had idled incessantly in the distance, at first the constant coughing of the cylinders grating on her terribly, compounding her inability to find comfort or rest. Then she had begun to accept the machine, grateful for the energy it supplied to the only light in her prison. And finally its hum pervaded her being, a pulse in the background assuring her that she was still alive, like the sound of her own breath.
She had not been able to sleep at all until after her “discussion” with Martina. Prior to that she had retreated to the bed for warmth only, the blanket over her head to shield her from the harsh electric light, and she accomplished nothing but a constant squirm, as her life did not flash before her eyes. It crawled.
Yet after the wounding of her face, the adrenaline surge of their encounter, and three hours of frantic searching, during which she failed to devise a single practical weapon or escape tool, she finally collapsed. She slept throughout that afternoon, her nostrils briefly alerting her to an open can of cold soup and three loaves of pita that were set inside the door. She crawled to the meal and finished it with the groggy indifference of necessity, then returned to her slumber.
She sat up with a gasp in the utter stillness, rubbing her eyes roughly as she feared for a terrible moment that they had poisoned her into blindness. The generator had died and with it the light. The chamber was almost completely black, except for a gray cone of starlight that reflected off the sand above, into her air vent, around the aluminum shaft, and down to the floor, where the shadows of the grating drew the soft lines of a cage.
She slid her back up against the wall and hugged the blanket over her chest. For a moment, the tomblike silence gave her hope, an ironic wish that she had been abandoned, that for some reason Martina and her HOGs had fled. But slowly other sounds began to come to her, echoing softly from beyond the door, from somewhere in the warren of trailers. Boot steps thudded dully back and forth. The voices of men called urgently to each other. Her ears were open and receptive as a hound’s now, and she discerned the ring of metallic slings, the dull clicks of catches and springs, palms slapping against pressed steel, and the heavy ramming of bolt carriers and breeches.
/> She had heard those things before. They were the sounds of death.
She threw off the covers and jumped up from the bed, the freezing floor stinging her bare feet as she thrust her hands into the darkness and found the door. She pressed her ear against it, but quickly turned and stared up at the air vent.
The engine was starting again. She waited, but the bulb did not come on. She stepped slowly into the cone of watery light and squinted up into the vent.
It was not the same sound as the generator. It was different, a heavy whine beginning slowly, then rising in pitch as if someone were squeezing it. She searched her memory for a match. It might have been the engines of the jet, but the thumping oscillation that accompanied it now denied that option.
Then she remembered. Martina had said Hubschrauber. Helicopter.
She waited for a moment, expecting to hear the whopping of the distant rotor blades blur into a roar, then recede as the machine lifted away. Yet nothing changed. The turbine continued to spin at a constant rhythm as if just warming up. Waiting.
Ruth began to pace in a tight semicircle inside the weak conus of light. Martina’s men preparing their weapons? A helicopter standing by? They were the signs of a coming battle, perhaps an assault on the prisoner exchange, or her removal to some other location.
Yet Martina still had to deal with Ruth’s father if she did not want him to harm her mother. Did she plan to go to him, dragging Ruth along to a rendezvous? Was he on the way here?
Ruth stopped suddenly and stared down at the skin of her legs, a shivering pale blue in the gloom of her cell, and her fingers spread wide like the claws of an alarmed cat as it hit her. Martina led a team of sacrificial fanatics. There was no fear in fundamentalists and no honor among terrorists. As soon as she had her mother safely at her side, she would turn them loose to kill Ruth, her father, and anyone else who was with him.
Michael.
“No!” she yelled involuntarily, and then quickly covered her mouth. She stuck her fingers into her matted hair and squeezed her eyes shut. As long as she stayed in this miserable hole, she was serving Martina’s interests. She was a pawn. She was bait. Her imprisonment shackled her father’s hands, making it impossible for him to secure the prisoner exchange. Her existence threatened that of some poor Israeli prisoner of war. And worse than that, every moment that she stayed here brought her own father closer to his end, and hers would surely follow.
Rubbing her arms, she suppressed the urge to scream like an ensnared wolverine. She had to try again. Ruth had no illusions about surviving in the desert night for very long, but if she could just get away, even for a short while, she could hurl Martina’s plans into turmoil.
She squinted at the door. She had spent an hour in the morning trying to pry off its frame, work its hinge pins out, which only resulted in curses and broken, bloody fingernails. But she had not tried to ram it.
She stepped up on the bed and bounded quickly to the rear wall, bending into a sprinter’s stance, ready to charge. Then she dropped her head, her hair hanging as she swallowed a wretched sigh. The door was heavy aluminum. It was not going to splinter like hollow wood. She might dent it superficially, but only after nearly breaking her shoulder.
She snapped her chin up, swept the hair from her face, and stared at the air vent again. A metal grate, like a section of chain-link fence, was sandwiched between the roof and the bottom of the wide tube. She had wanted to saw at the links, yet her quest for a tool, anything with a rough edge, had proved fruitless. But she had not pulled on it.
She jumped down off the bed, reached beneath the frame, and dragged it to the edge of the ray of light. Then she hopped up onto the foot of the mattress, turned, pushed the sleeves of the woolen sweater up over her elbows, crouched like a competition swimmer, and jumped.
The links rang as she hooked her fingers through them. A metal joint caught her flesh, and she bit down on her lip, but she held on. Her bare legs swinging above the floor, she looked up into the vent. The grate flexed as she swung, and she quickly switched her grip, bringing her hands closer together at its center. A trickle of blood ran down her right palm; she ignored it.
She began to swing now in earnest, feet apart, back and forth until she had a good arc going. Then she arched hard on the backswing, held her breath, sped forward, and grunted hard as she rolled her hip sockets and jammed her feet to the ceiling on both sides of the grate.
She froze there for a moment, stunned that she had managed it, stuck to the ceiling like a bat in a cave. Her legs were pressing outside her elbows, and she shifted her feet wider for better leverage. Then she pulled.
Nothing significant happened. The grate bent a bit, and she heard the whisper of loosened sand, but that was all. She let her head flop back while she breathed, her back muscles straining. She had pulled only with her arms.
“Your legs, you idiot,” she whispered, and she bent her head into her chest, focused every ounce of strength into her thighs, and willed herself to stand erect.
She came to her senses on the floor. She had plunged straight down onto her back, the air knocked from her lungs. She gasped in the first breath as she felt the pain at the back of her skull, then realized with a shock of joy that the grate was lying on her chest, her fingers still locked around the links.
The grate was, in fact, a piece of chain-link fence, a section cut just wider than the mouth of the vent. It had been placed over the ceiling hole, the aluminum vent tube on top of that, and strips of burlap laid around the joint before the earth was shoveled in. Ruth had completely bent the grate, pulling it through the ceiling. But its edges had levered the vent upward, leaving a gap the height of a head.
She pulled herself painfully to her elbows and looked up. At first only a light drizzle of sand hissed from the edges of the hole, bouncing onto her sweater like sprinkled sugar. And then it happened.
The roof of the trailer was buried beneath two meters of the Sahara, half a metric ton of sand, and it plunged for the opening, a sudden avalanche of liberated grit. It sprayed from the hole like a black torrent from a fire hose, and Ruth took a faceful of it before she slapped at it with her hands and rolled away.
She scrambled into a corner near the door, spitting ground rock from her mouth and shaking her head violently to dislodge it from her eyes and ears. It was in her throat, and she bent over and retched, the reflex bringing tears that she smeared away with her palms.
Even in the pitch dark of her cell she knew what was happening. The light was completely gone, but she could hear it well enough, a roar like a ton of grain gushing from a kibbutznik’s silo. It was not like an hourglass. It was like a river rushing through the open window of a submerged car.
She waited for two full minutes, crouched and utterly still, hoping that the current would run itself out. Then, for a split second, it slowed, and a brief stab of gray light revealed an enormous pile already nearing the ceiling. Then it all went black as it began anew.
Ruth was no longer cold; sweat ran freely down her ribs. Her pulse was bursting in her throat, and her breath was labored. She tried to tell herself that there was plenty of air, that soon it would stop. Just like with a submerged car, the fluid would reach a certain level and then pressurize itself, leaving a breathable bubble.
But no! this was not water, and the chamber was not sealed. It was open at the top, and the sand would keep coming until it entombed her. Or she stopped it. Or fought through it.
She closed her eyes and dived at the mound, scrambling up as the torrent pounded her face and hair, gasping as she tore at the peak with her cupped hands and the spray pummeled her, mocking her feeble efforts.
She should have allowed the pile to find its own form, to peak until it pierced the ceiling hole, for it would eventually have corked itself. But the panic was on her now and she slapped at the sand and pulled as she wept freely, the tears masking her face in streams of silt.
She backed out of the mound, gasping for air, her legs crumpling under her a
s she knelt in the cool pile that had already smothered the entire floor. She rose and waded through it to the door, pounding on it with both fists as she cried, then slumping against the aluminum, her trembling cheek pressed up to the metal.
“Abba,” she groaned. “Oh, Abba.”
She turned her back to the door and leaned there for a moment, catching her breath, her very last breath. She was going to die. Oh, yes. That was clear. That was what God had in mind for her. By either Martina’s hand or his own.
She preferred Martina’s hand.
She charged the mountain again. It was so huge now that she sank into it up to her hips. She fought her way up the slope and punched the cone away, cursing and screaming at it as she swept it to the side and it instantly grew again. She crawled up farther and bent her head as it assaulted her, snatching open the neck of her sweater and molesting the flesh of her chest with pummeling fists of broken rock, flooding over her hair and mashing it to her neck, while the exposed tips of her ears were bent down and the skin where they joined her skull started to tear. It pounded her with the power of a waterfall in hell, hammering at her burning biceps, vacuuming the last air from her lungs. And then her shoulders froze in spasmodic exhaustion, her flailing arms slowed, she could not pull her legs from the monster’s grip. And finally she collapsed, her forehead in the crook of her elbow.
The sand enshrouded her, like blizzard snow over a fallen deer.
It stopped. As quickly as it had begun. One final torrent, a following trickle, and then nothing. Not one grain. Silence.
Ruth tried to raise one arm. It came free and her fingers scratched the air. Her nose was completely closed off, but her mouth was open to a small hollow, her upper teeth embedded in the jagged powder. Her lungs burned with the pain of oxygen starvation. She tried to raise herself on one hand, but it just plunged in up to the elbow. Then she pulled it out once more, laid the whole arm flat, and rolled with everything she had.
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