The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  “Moonlight, this is Baum,” Benni spat, abandoning all covert caution. “You have an emergency. There are unfriendlies in your area—I repeat, unfriendlies in your area. Acknowledge.”

  There was no danger now that the ships would back away from each other. It was far too late for that, and Martina certainly knew it too.

  “Moonlight,” Benni began again. Then he shouted, “Ach, Scheisse!” and threw the microphone to the floor as the shadow of the Dakota enveloped the helicopter not twenty meters below, and then the white wasp was gone. Behind them.

  “Set it down!” Baum shouted to the pilot.

  “Where?” the South African twisted his head from left to right. “In the water? We don’t even have a hundred meters of straight beach.”

  “Damn you!” Benni pounded a fist on the doorframe in exasperation.

  “Over there!” Eckstein pointed to the left, where just past the line of low bluffs the plain of sand and brush looked reasonably flat.

  The pilot looked left, made his decision, then banked hard to the right. Baum began to curse him again as he was slammed against the doorframe. But the pilot was merely setting himself up for an approach, swinging out briefly over the water.

  “I’m coming around,” he warned as he stamped the rudder pedals and hauled on the yoke. The engines howled as they dragged the big airplane into a skidding left turn, and Benni struggled to hang on.

  “Go strap in,” Eckstein shouted to Baum.

  “Strap in your bloody self,” the pilot yelled, for Eytan was now being smeared into the right corner of the cockpit by the force of the wild turn.

  Benni hesitated as the line of rocky bluffs grew large across the windshield, but there would be only seconds of straight and level flying, so he staggered quickly back into the cabin, fell onto the port bench, and fumbled for the crash belt. As soon as the catches clicked, he twisted around toward the window, catching a glimpse of the chopper as its rotor kicked out an expanding circle of sea foam and its skids dipped into the shallow waves licking at the beach.

  He was thrown back as the Dakota banked hard to the left once again, then straightened out, and he heard the engine roar drop suddenly to a rumble of low power rasps.

  “Crank that hard!” he heard the pilot yell to Eckstein. And then they were floating, settling gracefully, the nose lifting and the floor tilting as scrubs of sand thorns reached up to the windows and the sky was snatched up and away like a magician’s cape.

  There really was nowhere to land the airplane properly. The sandy plateau was scarred with deep drifts and nubby seaside vegetation. The wind was still hard from the southeast, and the pilot was using every muscle he had to keep the right wing down.

  With his bowels in his throat, Benni welcomed the crash, for otherwise they would roll to a stop far away and too late. The big tires dumped into a trough, the right wing came up and was immediately butted by the wind, so it kept on rising while the tail lifted, the propellers bit into the sand, and huge waves of yellow grit pinwheeled over the wings as the nose tilted over and punched into the ground.

  Benni pulled himself up onto his left elbow. He unstrapped his crash belt, fell to his knees, and immediately began sliding along the floor toward the cockpit. He threw his hands out for the doorframe.

  Servos were whining crazily. The windshields had spidered from impact compression and there was the reek of spilling aero gas. Eckstein was slumped against the control panel, his arms hanging down and his head turned to the left. A gash on his forehead was already expressing a thin stream of blood that ran past his nose and over his upper lip.

  The pilot was bracing himself against the panel with one hand as he fumbled to unstrap himself. He twisted around and saw Baum in the doorway.

  “I’ll get him out,” he mumbled as he returned to his efforts. Baum seemed to be frozen there. “He’ll be all right!” the pilot yelled, clearly furious at having destroyed his beloved aircraft. “Just go!”

  Benni turned and propelled himself away from the cockpit. He stumbled against the port cabin wall, for the plane was pitched up at a crazy angle, and he used the vertical ribs to pull himself along until he found the emergency window exit. He reached up, grabbed a cross-spar, lifted his legs, and kicked into the Plexiglas with all his weight and muscle. The window and the exit panel exploded out of the fuselage, and his momentum thrust him through the narrow rectangle, where the flesh of his upper arms was rent right through his sweater by the sharp metal.

  He felt no pain as his feet collapsed under him, his knees banged onto the wing, and he squinted hard in the sudden burst of daylight. Then he began to slide forward and managed to flop onto his back and twist in toward the fuselage, narrowly avoiding impaling himself on one jagged blade of the curled-back propeller.

  He fell into a pile of sand just forward of the wing. The cockpit door popped open, and he saw the heels of the pilot’s boots. He did not wait. He struggled to his feet and began to run.

  A strange and terrible silence enveloped him as he found his bearings and sprinted toward the sea. No roaring engines, no gunfire, no unnatural disturbance of the morning calm but the pounding of his boots in the sand, the ragged wheeze of his own breath, and the soft hammer of metal against bone as his holstered pistol flopped against his pelvis. The wind was at his back, and it curled the tips of salt grass in the dunes, stole the sounds of the sea from him. His panic mounted, for he could not hear the helicopter’s rotor, nor would he hear the launch of the missile, or its impact, until it struck its mark and whispered back to him with a dull boom.

  His fists were striking at the air and his thighs were on fire as he neared the edge of the bluff, and for the first time ever he thought that his heart might finally explode, for he could feel it swelling inside his aching chest, the sweat dribbling over his face and into the neck of the sweater that strangled him.

  He reached the edge of the cliff, and the helicopter came into view, the size of a horizontal thumb, vibrating there at the edge of the water. And beyond it, in a perfect flat trajectory, the two vessels were touching prows in an Eskimo kiss on the dazzling blue horizon. He never took his eyes from the white machine, not even as he leapt into the air and smacked his spine onto the steep face of the bluff, jamming his heels into the sand as he slid and watched Martina’s small figure wrestling the Minnow from the open door of the Bell into the surf. Something jagged tore across his back as he struck bottom and was up again, nearly sobbing through his gaping mouth, dragging the pistol from the holster as he pounded across the flat sand.

  She was up to her hips in the water, gently turning the missile on its floating skirt, her distant figure still so small, too small, and Benni breathed like a man in the throes of a nightmare where he could run forever and remain in place, unable to flee from or catch the monster that was himself. The helicopter lifted away, ruffling Martina’s hair and drenching her in spray, and she ignored it as she bent to the Minnow and extended a cable, as if she were starting a lawn mower. Yet Benni knew it was the launch trigger. He could not remember if a round was chambered in his High-Power, and he pulled it out, cocked the slide, and raised it as he ran. And he tried to yell, yet nothing emerged but a feeble grunt of air.

  She sensed him then. She straightened up and slowly turned her head. Her right hand was on her hip, and she briefly regarded his clumsy athletics with the disdain of a gazelle for a rhinoceros. Then she turned back to the Minnow and leaned to its sight.

  He began to fire, and his yell came to him, though it contained no human word. The pistol bucked at the end of his arm, the explosions sledgehammering his head as he ran through the smoke, and still her narrow back would not flinch. He fired again, and she stood up stiffly, her head arching to search the sky. He fired again, and she twisted and lay down in the water.

  He walked now, but his finger could not be ordered to desist, and it kept on pulling until Martina’s hand floated away from her trigger and Benni’s slide locked itself back, refusing to continue its compli
city.

  The echo of his last shot breathed away over the sea. Benni dropped the pistol, took one more step, and crumpled to his knees.

  Then he collapsed onto the cold sand as the fringe of a wave crept up to him and tiptoed around his body.

  Epilogue: Jerusalem

  The Athenian edifice of King Solomon’s Temple has long since vanished from the high plateau of ancient rock, a summit upon which Abraham once raised his blade to sacrifice his son, his hand stayed by an angel stunned to witness the power of human fundamentalist fervor. Now the Moslem shrine of the Mosque of Omar squats on toppled slabs of the dead king’s pride, its golden dome the city’s centerpiece, its circular floor a moat of murmurs where pious men touch their foreheads into the dust of Maccabean bones.

  There is little left of Solomon’s glory, just one small section of the temple’s western retaining wall, albeit spectacular in itself, a high and wide brickwork of huge slabs of granite. And it is to this shuttered gateway to the biblical past that Jews are drawn from every continent, bowing their heads in prayer, caressing the rocks with trembling fingers, whispering their wishes into seemingly indifferent geology.

  Yet perhaps there is a clue here to the legendary prowess of the Israeli intelligence services, a hint of traditions inherited by Jewish agents. For, spurred by tribal custom, men and women silently approach the Western Wall, clutching scraps of folded paper scrawled with prayers in countless tongues. The cracks in the towering stones bristle with these messages, for this is the Lord’s mailbox, his chosen people’s dead drop. It is a portal to heaven through which slip prayers For His Eyes Only, in private codes he alone can decipher.

  The early winter morning was a cold one, though not bitterly so, for patches of the sun chased shadows of cloud across the flat pink slabs of the wall’s great forecourt. The wide-open floor, bordered by the structures of the Old City, was fairly empty now, for the celebratory crowds had not held the field for long. Captain Dan Sarel was finally home, but he was in no condition to be lofted on gleeful shoulders, and without his presence the parties dispersed in reluctant solemnity. It was a quiet morning, leaving only the fervently religious and the recently bereaved.

  At the farthest corner of the courtyard, beside the wide stone staircase that leads up to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, a quartet of tired travelers had gathered. This inner corps, their heads bent toward each other like physicians at a loss, was watched discreetly by an outer ring, a few nonmembers standing well back, hunched politely in the chill.

  Didi Lerner, Amir Lapkin, and Rick Nabbe were not present. They had already reentered their lives: Didi to salvage his law boards, Amir to trim neglected hedges, and Nabbe to the pistol ranges in Frankfurt. Jerry Binder’s flight was just touching down at JFK, while Sadeen and Schneller lay in adjoining beds in the military wing of Tel Hashomer Hospital, arguing over a game of rummy. Shaul Nimrodi was going to spend the day spoiling his three daughters before heading back to Mauritania. And Horse, of course, was where he should have been, at SpecOps headquarters in the Russian Compound, cleaning out Benni Baum’s office.

  Perhaps of all those in the small group, Art Roselli should have appeared the most relaxed and triumphant. After all, he had returned his elderly kidnap victim safely to her rest home in New York, no worse for wear. The two surviving members of Martina Klump’s cell were being arraigned in a District of Columbia federal court. And the Minnow was presently being loaded aboard a U.S. Navy cargo plane at Ben-Gurion Airport. But Roselli’s tired eyes displayed no pleasure, for although he, too, was going home, he would also be accompanying a friend.

  He bent to Ruth and kissed her softly on the cheek, then took her hand and held it as she looked up at him. The wind lifted her hair and dappled her face with a deceptive glow. He cleared his throat.

  “I’m going to get him a commendation,” Arthur said. “The one he should have had for Desert One.” Then he lowered his gaze from Ruth’s glistening eyes and murmured, “I know that means nothing to you now.”

  She opened her arms and came to him, hugging his waist, her head against the parka over his wide chest as she tried to smother his guilt.

  The Falcon had actually lifted off the road near Taghit, despite some bullet punctures in the fuselage, and they had enough fuel to make it as far as Tlemcen. But seeing O’Donovan’s condition, Nimrodi decided to set down at Bechar and had begun radioing for an ambulance and a trauma team almost immediately they were airborne.

  O’Donovan had regained consciousness for a moment. He lay on the floor of the jet, his head cradled in Ruth’s arms. It was as if he had been reviewing his life through each labored breath and found the balance of it meaningless, for he opened his eyes, looked up at her, and whispered, “But you were something. . . .”

  They almost lost him at Béchar, but a skilled French surgeon saved his life, though not his spine. The AP wires were carrying a story of an American tourist wounded and paralyzed by Algerian fundamentalists, which was more or less the truth.

  Ruth spoke into Arthur’s chest. “But it will mean something to him,” she said. Then she backed away, polishing her cheeks with the backs of her fists. She swept a lock of hair behind one ear as she tried to smile. Arthur stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets and summoned a casual expression that failed to touch his eyes.

  “So you’re going back to the Rotten Apple?”

  “Have to finish my degree,” said Ruth. “And Michael will need me, at least for a while.”

  Roselli turned to Benni Baum.

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t push her to stay, Baum.” Then he saw Benni’s frown and warned, “You know what happens when you push kids.”

  Benni shrugged. “They go in the opposite direction.”

  Roselli nodded. “Parental Law of Physics.” He stuck out a hand, which Benni took and gripped for a long time, saying everything with his fingers, until he finally released it.

  “Arthur?” Baum searched for an exit from his emotions. “Did you hear anything about the Falcon pilots?”

  “The Red Crescent picked them up in the dunes near Igli. They almost didn’t make it. The pilot had the copilot over his shoulders, the older one carrying the younger one.”

  Benni grinned. “Isn’t that how it always is?”

  “Chantareesh. Bullshit,” said Eckstein as he punched Baum lightly in the shoulder.

  “You’re wounded,” Benni warned, pointing at the fresh sutures in Eytan’s forehead. “But I’ll still take you to the mat.”

  “Children,” Ruth scoffed, and she and Eckstein exchanged full glances.

  A large blue Mercury with diplomatic plates had rolled through the security gates at the southern end of the forecourt. Arthur saw it and sighed as he shook Eckstein’s hand.

  “Until whenever,” he said.

  “Not too soon,” said Benni, for their reunions were becoming heart-straining events.

  “L’hitraot, chevrey. See you again, comrades,” said Arthur, and Ruth took his elbow and walked him to his car.

  Eckstein reached up and plucked absently at his ponytail.

  “When are you going to cut that wretched thing off?” Benni chastised.

  “When Anthony Hearthstone comes out of the bush.”

  “At the rate you work, it’ll be down to your waist.”

  But Eckstein did not hear him. He was squinting off past Roselli’s car, where a young raven-haired woman was crossing the stones quickly, a small child grasping her hand. The little boy suddenly hopped in the air, tore his hand from his mother, and began to run, his blond bangs flying as his wispy cries reached them.

  “Abba! Abba!”

  And Eckstein was flying toward him, his leather jacket flapping as they collided, and Eytan swung the laughing child around and around in a blur of small sneakers and quick kisses to his laughing face.

  A cloud of smoke drifted around Benni’s head, and he turned to find the towering figure of Itzik Ben-Zion. The general was back in uniform, snuggled in a rakish
fur-collared officer’s jacket, his boots and insignia polished. He had come from a congratulatory breakfast at the Prime Minister’s residence, and the warmth of accolades seemed to have returned his youthful posture. Yet he had not just arrived. He had waited in the shadows until the group dispersed, uncomfortable with their apparent intimacy.

  “Why did you call me, Baum?”

  Benni had signaled Itzik’s digital display beeper with “Meet me at the Wall. B. B.” Just as with Vietnam veterans in Washington, such a summons could mean only one location in Jerusalem.

  “I wanted to introduce you to Arthur Roselli,” said Benni. “Without him, you might just be shark bait now.”

  Itzik followed Baum’s eyes to the receding car. He was a man of curious double standards, happy to bathe in glory, while pretending outwardly to disdain it. And never thanking others for performing their duties.

  “I’ll ask the Washington embassy to throw him a party.”

  Benni opened his mouth to retort, then shut it partially and murmured, “Nice idea.”

  “It’s confirmed, by the way,” said Itzik as he continued to stare through his cigarette smoke. “The exchange was an Iranian setup. A diversion, while they took possession of a warhead.” He dropped the cigarette and ground it under a boot.

  Benni looked down. They had discussed this fresh intelligence while sailing back to Haifa aboard the missile boat. The Moroccans had, of course, quietly blessed the exchange taking place in their waters off Cap Ras Tarf. And they had also allowed the naval commandos to come in and pick up Baum, Eckstein, and their pilot, in exchange for the rumpled yet recoverable Dakota. The signals from Jerusalem had begun to reach Ben-Zion while they were still at sea, but Benni had pushed the disheartening news away. Until now. He closed his eyes.

  “I am praying it was one of the Blackstones,” he whispered.