Binder fidgeted as he scanned every dune on the eastern horizon. He regretted having wounded Martina’s survivor, wishing he had killed him outright. He did not like loose ends, though he had trussed the man, gagged him, and dumped him in the passage to Klump’s underground lair. He and Eckstein had wanted to go down into the trailers to load up on “intelligence materials,” but Baum would not allow it. He himself had taught Martina to booby-trap such attractive prizes.
Benni took his arm from Ruth’s shoulders and jogged to the Dakota, with Eckstein close behind. Nimrodi jumped down from the cargo door, and he did not need to ask if Ruth was all right. Anything else would have shown instantly on Baum’s face. They began to shout at each other over the rumbling engines.
“Nu?” Nimrodi looked up at Baum. “Are you waiting for an invitation from the Prime Minister?” His black onyx holder was jammed between his teeth, but he could not light his cigarette in the prop blast.
“She got away,” Baum shouted.
“Who?”
“The woman,” Eckstein yelled. “In a chopper. Probably with the missile.”
Nimrodi looked at his watch. “We can try a radio relay to Ben-Zion, maybe through one of the Moroccan airports. Though I’ve been declaring emergencies all over the sky and have certainly used up all my favors.”
“And even if we could,” Benni said.
“He would have to postpone the exchange,” Eytan finished.
Nimrodi looked at them, then up at the airplane. “Do you think you could catch up?”
“Maybe,” Eckstein said. “She was in a Bell 212.” The cruising speed of a loaded Bell was 161 mph. The empty Dakota could do 204.
Nimrodi sighed, although no one heard it. “What about the jet?”
“It looks all right,” said Benni. “But what do I know? It will have to be towed out to the road, and there isn’t time.”
Nimrodi suddenly turned, leapt up to the cargo door, and wriggled inside. After a moment he came back and jumped down again, followed by the copilot, and then Horse, who glanced around wildly as if he had just been dropped into a panther cage. Baba placed his hands up on Benni’s and Eytan’s shoulders, pulling them close.
“Like this, then,” he yelled. “You two take the Dakota. I will get everyone else into the jet. Like civilians; no weapons, no equipment. Just passports.” He paused. “You did not find the charter pilots?”
Benni and Eytan shook their heads.
“We will fire up the emergency frequency and declare ourselves the stranded victims of a hijacking,” Nimrodi continued. “Will your friend be monitoring?”
“I’m sure Arthur has been sleeping at Warrenton.” Benni meant the CIA’s communications facility in Virginia.
“Good. If we can get it off the ground, we will just hop to Bechar, sit on the runway, and scream for the American consul. And if not, we’ll drag it out onto the road here, lock ourselves in it, and broadcast to every airport in the Mediterranean.”
Benni and Eytan looked at each other. Nimrodi shook them hard. “Do not worry,” he shouted. “No one will dare touch us!”
Benni looked down at the road. The High-Power, still unfired in anger, gleamed from the holster strapped to his belt. He hiked up his trousers.
“Okay,” he shouted. “I’ll go get Ruth.”
Eckstein caught his elbow. “No, Benni.” He held Baum’s eyes with his own. “She’ll be safer here, with Nimrodi.”
Benni opened his mouth to object, but Nimrodi placed a hand on his chest.
“Yes.” Baba smiled. “Everyone is safer with me.”
It was true. An entire parachute brigade would swear to it.
The small colonel released Baum, grabbed Horse by the sleeve, and ran off with him as the copilot trotted behind them.
Benni hesitated. He could not leave without speaking to her, and he stared longingly past the wingtip of the airplane. Then he saw her in the halo of the pickup’s headlights, standing anxiously with Nimrodi as he spoke to her, touching her sleeve, and she sprang away, running toward her father.
The Dakota pilot clanged the jump warning bell like an impatient trolley driver. Eytan pulled at Benni, who turned to find his partner bending, with his fingers intertwined. Benni reached up for the doorframe, stepped into Eytan’s stirrup, and struggled inside. He pulled Eytan up after him, then pushed him aside as he lay in the doorway, his arms reaching down as Ruth ran up in her bare feet.
“Abba!” she shouted.
He reached out and took her face in his hands. “Ruti, go with Nimrodi.”
“Abba!” she cried again. The streams were flowing freely over her cheeks, and she reached up to press his hands against her, as if she might seal them there with her tears. She began to walk as the Dakota revved and started its roll.
“I will see you in Jerusalem,” he yelled as he clasped her harder. “I swear it!”
“But Abba,” she choked, “you always lie.”
“Not this time.” He tried to smile at her as his heart pounded against the steel floor. “Not this time,” he shouted.
She could not keep up, and she backed away, arms still outstretched as the roaring engines lifted her matted hair.
And then she vanished into the darkness.
Chapter 25: Cap Ras Tarf
Benni Baum’s stamina tried to desert him over the wide Plateau du Rekkam, and although his shoulders were jammed between the narrow doorframes of the Dakota’s cockpit, his head began to nod, his fingers went limp, and he would have pitched backward but for Eckstein, who reached back from the copilot’s seat and grabbed him by the belt buckle. He snapped awake, not altogether surprised that his body finally sought refuge, for his child was out of mortal danger and it begged him to shut down. He would have liked to comply, but as Itzik Ben-Zion had pointed out, he was much like Mary Shelley’s eternal experimenter, and the deadly creature of his own concoctions was still very much at large.
He squinted through his stinging eyes at the dark tables of rock and patches of trees, that seemed to rush the cockpit and then dissolve below in a blur, and he wondered how the pilot could possibly maintain the reflexes to fly so low after such a grueling night. Yet he certainly appreciated the man’s efforts, which were not the showy aerobatics of an old airman. Benni had told the pilot that they were engaged in a mortal air race for the finish line at Cap Ras Tarf. As the Dakota’s speed efficiency was greatest where the props could bite the thickest air, that was why they now seemed on the verge of shredding treetops.
In the absence of caffeine, Benni lit up a cigarette, which trembled in his fingers, for every muscle in his body was twitching on overdrive. Eckstein looked up at him longingly, sighed, and succumbed at last, sticking out a hand. Benni could have refused, helped Eytan maintain his nicotine celibacy, but he handed him the butt. It was wholly a personal choice. Like suicide.
The approaching strip of northeastern Morocco began to glow now with a dull pink burnish beneath a quickly paling sky, and Benni tried very hard not to glance at his watch. But the clock face just above the pilot’s knee intercepted him. He had often looked up into the bright-blue sky of midday to find the strange appearance of the lunar crescent. Just like that unsettling phenomenon, the morning sun was about to shine on Moonlight.
We could just make it, he thought, though the idea that they might also arrive to find a smoldering catastrophe at sea made him want to scream, “Come on!” like a teenager stuck behind an old man driving a jalopy. Still, they were very lucky that their flight had so far been unopposed. They had monitored only one alert, at the Algerian air base at Beni-Abbès just as they crossed safely back into Morocco. Thereafter, the towers at Boudnib, Taza, and just now El Aleb had called out challenges to them. Eckstein had answered casually in French, using Nimrodi’s call sign as Ahmed Tabri and referring them back to the base commander at Menara. No one had ordered them to set down, though that was small comfort as Benni fretted over Nimrodi’s ability to safely shepherd his people from the mouths of the wolv
es. The images of O’Donovan’s wounds and his daughter witnessing his pain caused him to grind his teeth, his previous jealousy over their affair bathed in the glare of his conscience, like a pervert caught by a policeman’s flashlight.
He looked down at Eckstein, who seemed to be trying to will the Mediterranean to appear on the horizon. His partner was filthy, his fingers black with paraffin burns, his face still streaked with brown shoe polish, and his blond hair caked with dust like that of a reserve tank commander. Hunched forward in the old leather seat of the Dakota and wearing the bulky headphones, he looked like a mercenary running drugs for a cartel. Baum was grateful that there was no mirror in which to face his own visage.
“Do you think they made it out, Eytan?” Benni asked above the engine roar.
“No,” Eytan replied without turning his head. “Not yet. I’d be amazed if the Algerians just let them fly away.”
“Thank you for your honesty,” Baum groaned.
“But, Benni, even if they are all taken in, do you think Algiers will fuck with them while Roselli is raising an international ruckus?”
“No.”
“Then let’s shut up and concentrate on Martina.”
Benni grunted as he reached up and rubbed his face. The hand, already stained with Schneller’s blood, came away smeared in brown grease. He wiped it on his oatmeal sweater, which had been sloppily dyed black.
Concentrate on Martina, yes, that was the exercise now. To focus on her madness, her sociopathic cruelty, her near execution of Ruth. To suppress the nagging suspicion that she had certainly been able to kill his daughter, yet had made the conscious choice to abstain. Ignore the fantasy that Martina’s taking of Ruth was the vengeance of a spurned lover, and place it in one of those other categories he used to justify the ruthless acts of his profession. This was not the time to pan for Martina’s qualities of mercy. She had shot Michael O’Donovan point-blank. But then, she had not shot Benni, although that should have been her first choice. And it was not her lack of reflexes that had kept her from pulling the trigger on Ruth.
No matter. For in truth, Benni did not really expect ever to see Martina again. Yes, she had taken off in a helicopter whose United Nations camouflage was clearly designed to stay the trigger finger of anyone who might shoot it down. And he had little doubt that the Minnow was aboard the Bell. But unless Martina had crossed that threshold where a desire for self-destruction devoured reason, she would assume that her intended target had gone to full alert. She would grudgingly choose escape. She would choose life.
They would arrive in a cold sweat to Cap Ras Tarf, while she would never appear. He found himself wishing that for her. And he was secretly ashamed.
There had been no sign of the helicopter since their flight from Algeria, though that was evidence of nothing, really. She would not have crossed back into Moroccan territory, for her refuge was in the skies of a country rife with Islamic fanaticism. If she did intend to carry out her mission, she would fly due north through Algeria and cross back into Morocco only at the final stage, along the coast at Saida. Her necessity to detour was the only hope they had of intercepting her, given her substantial head start.
Eckstein suddenly raised his left arm and pointed forward. Benni squinted through the windshield, yet he saw nothing to warrant his attention. They had just passed over the last large forest of cedars and pines at the foot of the Rif Mountains, then the highway that links Melilla to Tangier had flashed underneath, its predawn truckers probably rubbing their eyes after witnessing this aeronautical ghost roar overhead. Before them lay a valley of wheat and corn, then the last dry ridges of the eastern tail of the Rif.
“Do you see it?” Eytan excitedly called out to Benni.
“What?” He craned his head. “What?”
“There’s Dar-Kebdani,” the pilot said, pointing to a casbah nestled in the ridge folds. “It’s nine hundred meters there, so we have to get over it anyway.” And he gently pulled the yoke toward his chest.
The Dakota began to climb, and Benni finally realized why his partner’s enthusiasm had revived.
The tops of the ridges dropped away. Beyond them an endless blanket of wispy fog curled to the horizon, and as he watched, the morning sun melted it, and there was the hard blue face of the Mediterranean Sea.
Martina saw the sea as well, yet from her vantage point on the right-hand assault bench of the Bell 212, it was much closer, only meters away, the soft curls of its dawn swells rushing past the windows. To her left, the long strip of winter beach was empty, for it was too early for even the hearty old Moroccans who raced each morning to the cold surf in the belief that the exercise prolonged their lives. In the cockpit, her mercenary Sudanese pilot delicately twisted the collective, and past the white globe of his helmet the coastal bluffs curved away to the north. She could see a small phallic structure poking up from a cliffside at the end of the peninsula, and she came off the end of the bench and stuck her head into the cockpit for a better look. Beyond the bluffs, perhaps one kilometer out to sea, the flat gray silhouettes of small vessels were slowly clustering. She reached out and knocked on the pilot’s helmet.
“Set down in the surf just beyond the lighthouse,” she ordered.
The helmet dipped twice.
She climbed back into the assault compartment and hauled on the right door latch, pulling the heavy sliding panel halfway back as the cold wind rushed into the cabin. Then she put her right foot on the bench, which was a double affair so that troops could sit back-to-back facing both doors, and swung her left leg over the spine as if mounting a small pony.
She straddled the piping for a moment, leaning forward, gripping it with her hands. Closing her eyes, she breathed in the scents of brine and fishes that washed over her face as the wind fluttered her coverall and lifted her tousled hair. Almost dreamily, she reached down to her left to touch the nose cone of Der Fliegende Fisch, where it rested on the floor in its flotation skirt. The optical sight had been stripped of its protective plastic, the trigger and tracking toggle banded to the launch casing for her convenience. Nabil had run checks on all the circuitry and inspected the warhead. The device was armed. A flip of the safety, and it would be ready to leap into its maiden flight.
Martina had not even entertained the notion of retreat. She did not see that option as the better part of valor. She had had plenty of time during the night flight to plan a means of escape, to forswear this final act, yet she had not done so. Instead, she reflected silently on the loss of her men, mourning for their devotion snatched from her. Her mother had been used as a pawn, while surely remaining unharmed. But Martina’s family had gone to its grave.
Alone within her private silence, unbreached by the vibrating flight, she had realized that her enthusiasm to use the missile had not really waned, for the lust had never really been there. It was an apolitical act, pushed along by the very personal motives only occasionally glimpsed by her for their hard truths. Her will, her furies, her brief loves and rages, all were festering wounds unsoothed by her cries for something she could never have. As the helicopter flew and she knew that each kilometer brought her closer to her own end, her life had not raced before her eyes. She had carefully summoned it, dredged up every year, each rare joy, and the larger balances of sorrow.
And although there were a thousand images of cruelty, hardships, and violence from which to choose, only one picture refused to fade. It was the vision of Benni Baum throwing his body over his daughter’s, hiding her, protecting her, smothering her with his love. It was the stark realization that not since her fifth birthday had there been, nor would there ever be, someone who would do that for her.
She opened her eyes and looked down at her right leg. The thigh pocket of the coverall was half open, the butt of the P-38 protruding from the zipper. She lifted her father’s pistol out and looked at it, touching the barrel lightly with one finger. Then, as the lighthouse flashed by the windows and the Bell began to slow and settle, she lofted the pistol throu
gh the open door, where it twisted like a boomerang and did not return.
The Dakota banked hard to the left at Pointe Afraou, and Benni scrabbled for the cockpit doorframe as his spine jammed into the steel. They had come down off the ridges like a hotdog skier, twisting through the wadis as the pilot dove to pick up speed. Then a flat strip of brush-strewn plateau appeared and almost instantly dropped away into a blink of beach, and they were out over the water. The pilot skidded around the turn like a drunk and came back on line, where the low waves foamed against the shoreline. The thatched roofs of a small seaside resort poked up briefly from the dunes and rushed past the left wing, and within seconds Eckstein was clutching at the cockpit dash and shouting.
“There!” He stabbed his finger madly. “There!”
The sun was high enough now to dazzle the sea with sparklers of white light, and just beyond the point of Cap Ras Tarf a small flotilla of vessels—two larger ones almost prow-to-prow and smaller shapes buzzing about like water flies—was haloed in the glow.
“Get on the emergency frequency,” Baum snapped at the pilot.
“And call bloody who?” the Dakota driver asked as he tried to squeeze more power from the throttles.
“The air force’ll have a 707 in the air,” said Eckstein. “They’ll be monitoring the international tethers.”
“Eytan!” Benni gripped Eckstein’s shoulder so hard that the major winced and looked up at him. Then he quickly snapped his head forward again when he saw the shock in Baum’s eyes.
The finger of a lighthouse was quickly growing into a stone forearm, and just beyond that, the spinning rotors of a white helicopter flashed up streamers of sunlight as the craft settled into the surf.
“For God’s sake, man!” Benni yelled, and the pilot fumbled with the radio transmitter and tossed a hand microphone into Eckstein’s lap.
“Moonlight, Moonlight, this is Bavaria calling. Over.” Eytan nearly shouted into the mike, hoping that one of the AMAN officers aboard the communications jet would recognize his old departmental code name. He had barely released the button when Benni snatched the mike from his hand.
The Nylon Hand of God Page 60