The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  “You’re right, Jack. This is bullshit.” Special Agent Charles Gold, Buchanan’s tall black deputy, had been leaning against the wall behind his boss’s chair. He unfolded his tweed-jacketed arms and threw them up. “Let’s skip this and take it to the NSC.” He pointed at Baum. “Drag his attaché over to the White House and get some action. We don’t have time.”

  Spurred by his deputy, Buchanan spun from the window. “Do you understand what is happening here, Baum?”

  “I do.”

  “A secret prototype has been stolen, Colonel. Men have been killed.” Buchanan was bending at the waist, an effort to prevent himself from approaching the bed. “The hijackers were led by a woman. You know that woman.”

  “I understand the event,” Benni tried to assuage. “And the consequences.”

  “No you don’t, mister,” said another NIS agent, who was pacing out a small track near the closed door of the room. Unlike Baylor, he was dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, and regimental tie. Peter Cole was Baylor’s commander, and with his short black hair, quarterback features, and Oklahoma drawl, he could have stood in for a country-and-western star. “No you don’t. Or you just don’t give a damn because they weren’t your people.”

  Benni reached for the bed controls and raised the upper portion of his body. “I apologize if I gave you the impression that I don’t care,” he said. “That is not the case.”

  “Well, it damn well seems like the case,” Gold pouted.

  “Gentlemen, do not read my mind,” Benni warned. “You will get it wrong. I want this woman as much as you do.”

  “Then spell it out!” Buchanan nearly yelled.

  “You know as much as I do,” Benni dissembled again, feeling an encroaching sense of guilt. “As much as the Germans do, or Interpol. It’s all in your own files, I am sure.”

  “But what’s her objective?” The third FBI official in the room was Hal Novak, who served as the Bureau’s counterintelligence liaison to the Pentagon. He sat on the other bed of the room’s pair, his back to the Israeli, his voice controlled and level despite his anger. “What’s she planning to do with it?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Benni snapped, finally beginning to resent the implications. He was being treated like a multiple bank robber who had stashed his take in a secret hideaway, yet he suddenly realized an opportunity to elicit some information for his own needs. “Are you telling me, gentlemen,” he asked quietly and with genuine concern, “that this prototype is functional? That it can be armed and fired by just any ambitious thief?”

  There was no immediate response from anyone in the room, though Benni quickly scanned their faces for a hint of confirmation. In the far corner, to the left of the wide wooden door, was a stainless-steel sink, above which a mounted shelf held tongue depressors and a box of surgical gloves. A man who had not been introduced by name leaned against the trough, apparently taking little interest in the “debriefing” as he toyed with one of the hand condoms, snapping its elastic fingers like party balloons. Very large, he wore a dark-blue turtleneck beneath a brown Australian outback raincoat, and his slightly graying thick black hair was pulled back from his wide face into a ponytail. Benni assumed this man to be a representative of a special operations team that might be tasked with recovering the navy’s missile, perhaps an officer from SEAL Team Seven. By the looks of him, the life of one Israeli girl would not even appear on his score card of obstacles.

  One other man sat closer to Baum, on the edge of the empty bed to his left. He was small and bald, and even though he was nattily dressed, he reminded Benni of Horse, who was no doubt fretting terribly now in Jerusalem. Dr. Werner Carswell was director of the Minnow Project at the Naval Surface Weapons Center at Indian Head. He carried a large soft briefcase swollen with papers, as if somewhere therein might lie the recipe for the rescue of his kidnapped child. As he held his thick glasses and nervously flipped the frames open and shut, he looked up at Peter Cole for a signal. He received a cautionary nod.

  “Well, Colonel”—Carswell sighed reluctantly—“let’s just say that the Minnow was designed for simplicity. Of operation, that is. It’s actually an extremely sophisticated concept, combining some of the TOW features, such as goniometer tracking of a modulated IR lamp on the projectile, which signals changes to the fin surfaces as the operator locks on optically. But then, you also have some features from the Hellfire RB-17, the whole dual mode thing, you know, antiradiation slash infrared seeker, which is auto backup if the operator can’t remain stable. And there’s the unitary antiship warhead, naturally.”

  Benni blinked at the little man, a gesture that brought a small smile to Denny Baylor’s lips and a flush to Dr. Carswell’s face as he realized that his enthusiasm had carried him too far.

  “Nice work, Doc,” said Peter Cole as he rolled his eyes. “But I think the colonel was looking for a plain old yes or no.”

  “Of course.” Carswell cleared his throat. “Well, all of that is packaged to be very user friendly. I wouldn’t call it a cinch for the simple infantryman, but it would be for the simple SEAL.”

  The big ponytailed man in the corner emitted a pained grunt, which confirmed Benni’s assessment of his Military Occupational Specialty.

  “So you are saying, Doctor,” Benni coached, “that our terrorists could easily figure out how the Minnow works, and use it?”

  “Well,” said Carswell, “your Israeli troops use our own Dragon. If you issued one to an untrained man, could he use it?”

  “The firing instructions are printed on the launcher,” said Baum.

  “Same concept.” Carswell shrugged.

  “The instructions are printed on the damn thing?” Buchanan asked incredulously.

  “A prototype is designed to test all aspects of the concept, sir,” said Carswell in defense.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Charles Gold whispered.

  For a moment, Benni thought that the men were turning inward, focusing on their own lax security. But Hal Novak, whose job it was to seek out security breaches in the defense establishment, addressed the room.

  “People, odds are she already knows how to use it,” he said darkly. “Already knows everything about it. No smart woman buys a diamond without first looking at it through a jeweler’s loupe.” Novak rose from the bed and turned to face Baum. He was wearing a brown corduroy three-piece suit, complete with a vest-pocket watch. His thick gray hair and mustache filled out the image of a “hanging judge” from a rough East Coast city. His counterintelligence post demanded patience, suspicion, and brainpower. “I think, Colonel, that Martina Ursula Klump had inside information. She knew what she wanted, and when and where to shop for it.”

  “I agree,” said Baum. “So you should probably begin looking immediately at your Weapons Center personnel.”

  “I’m looking at you,” said Novak, not bothering to conceal his intent.

  “Then your vision is blurred.” Benni raised his voice as he rolled onto his left side and returned Novak’s attempt to stare him down.

  Outside in the hospital hallway, a soft double bell rang out a code call for a Stat team. To Benni, it sounded like the signal for a boxing round as the Americans commenced a verbal assault.

  “Why did you come over here, Baum?” Buchanan demanded.

  “You know why, Mr. Buchanan. To investigate the consular bombing.”

  “Did you know Klump was involved?” Charles Gold jumped in.

  “I am still not convinced that she was,” said Benni. “The bombing and the hijacking may be purely coincidental.” He no longer believed that, yet he could not reason out a logical connection between the two events. Why would Martina tip her hand so clumsily?

  “Yeah, right,” Denny Baylor snorted. The lump in his cheek was revealed to be tobacco, as he spit a short brown stream into a paper cup.

  “I think you knew she was here, Colonel,” Hal Novak accused. “And you knew what she was up to.”

  “I’ll second that,” said Peter Col
e.

  “Gott im Himmel,” Baum grunted as he pulled his left hand from beneath the blanket and folded his arms across his chest. By now the paper ball was a clammy wad of pulp, and he felt free to knead it in anger. “So you all really think that an Israeli officer, an allied officer, would come here with full knowledge of an impending attempt to steal a secret American weapon and not share that with the Defense Department? Does that make sense?”

  “Hey, you guys got your own agenda,” said Baylor simply, as if Baum were the head of a Mafia family, a different moral culture.

  “And when you had Beirut in eighty-three,” Hal Novak added, “two hundred and fifty Marines bought it, while your people probably had a heads-up call on every major terror action going down.”

  “And we warned you twenty fucking times!” Benni finally bellowed, feeling like he was now defending the honor of his nation rather than his own familial interests. “If you place your men in a war zone, forbid them to chamber ammunition, and they are blown up by an unopposed maniac driving a truck bomb . . . search your own damned souls!”

  “Hear, hear,” the large SEAL grunted from his corner, obviously harboring similar opinions regarding ridiculous rules of engagement.

  “But for the sake of argument, Baum,” Jack Buchanan broke in, “let’s say you did know that this Klump was after the Minnow.”

  Benni blew out a long breath, dredging up his last reserves of patience as he laced his fingers over his stomach. “Mr. Buchanan,” he said slowly, “you have no argument. For the simple fact is, I had no idea that your Minnow even existed until you so generously revealed it to me right here in this room.”

  Buchanan held Baum’s gaze, while the other men glanced at each other, wondering who was going to catch hell for that little security breach.

  Baum had spoken the truth. He’d had no foreknowledge of the Minnow, nor of Martina’s intention to steal it, though now he certainly suspected her intentions for its use. He did not, of course, reveal his depth of knowledge of her background, details of the Tango file that might soon mean all the difference. At any rate, the fact that Otto Klump had been a scientist who conceived of such weapons long before technology allowed their fruition was irrelevant. And the idea that Martina would covet such an irony, as the icing on her cake, was beyond fantasy.

  “But I agree with Mr. Novak,” Benni pressed on. “She did have knowledge of the weapon. And all of us, as intelligence officers, can draw the conclusions. Either you have an enemy agent inside your military, perhaps even a paid informant who revealed this information to Klump, or you yourselves have already presold the Minnow to some other customers. Perhaps a third world nation? Perhaps an Arab nation?”

  As it happened, both of those suppositions were accurate, although only Dr. Carswell and Peter Cole could confirm the last part of Baum’s theory. Cole chose to bluster.

  “That is pure bull, mister,” he growled as he placed his fists on his hips.

  “Really?” Benni wondered. “For an investigator who should be thinking exactly along those lines, I think you protest too much.”

  “And I think you’re just trying to draw off the heat,” Cole spat.

  “With finesse, Baum.” Buchanan shook his head. “With finesse.”

  Once more Benni found his calm. Yet as he looked squarely at the men, he suffered profound disappointment, the hurt of a mistrusted yet essentially loyal friend.

  “Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “heat means nothing to me. I am trying to work with you, but the atmosphere here has brought me to the sad conclusion that a call to my embassy’s attorney might be in order.”

  The men watched him, some of them thinking now that this had not been managed well. They had followed Jack Buchanan’s lead, echoing his allegations like a wolf pack. No one had thought to play the cliché role of “good cop,” and they now were faced with a defiant prey who would not be brought to ground. The nameless SEAL team officer had already decided that under other circumstances, he would enlist this Baum’s aid in setting up joint exercises with the Israeli naval commandos. Peter Cole, on the other hand, did not know a hard case when he saw one, nor when to change tactics.

  “You want to talk lawyers, Colonel?” he challenged. “We’ve got a great one over at Justice. Digenova barely whetted his appetite on Pollard.”

  Cole’s allusion to the American intelligence analyst who had been convicted of spying for Israel brought the sting of bile to Benni’s throat. Benni turned to him with a battery of daggers in his eyes.

  “I will consider your remark as a formal breach of diplomatic protocol, sir,” he said. “And given the presence of American deep-cover agents on our soil, whom we have politely allowed to play with their toys, I will advise the Prime Minister that they are now fair game.”

  Benni was bluffing, for low-priority counterintelligence was the purview of Uri Badash and the GSS. But he caught Hal Novak’s momentary blanch and could only wonder what it meant. In fact, Novak was screaming Stop! inside his head, for he had recently discovered that the Defense Department’s supersecret espionage wing, the Intelligence Support Activity, had two deep-cover agents actually serving in elite units of the Israel Defense Forces.

  There was a knock on the door, and Peter Cole stepped away as it was pushed open. Benni could see the arm of a uniformed Marine guard, but his heart sank as a nurse stepped shyly into the room. She looked at no one as she walked through a silence thick as sour pudding, placed an electronic thermometer in his mouth, and waited for the readout.

  His dismay deflated him as he lay back on the pillow. Where the hell is Arthur? He pleaded silently, wondering why Roselli had not arrived to help him counter Buchanan’s attack. The CIA agent had left the hospital the previous evening, indicating only that he had some ideas about Benni’s next course of action. Yet now Baum found himself trapped in a room with these men who obviously viewed him as a convenient scapegoat, and he wondered if his spontaneous tactics of the previous morning had been poorly chosen. . . .

  His reaction to Martina’s phone call had been genuine, and Aaron Davis’s sickening news of Ruth’s kidnapping had buckled his knees, causing him to slump to the floor of Avraham Yaron’s office as a wave of nausea spun from his bowels and up into his head. Yet even as Yaron yelled once again for the embassy physician, Benni was able to calculate. He could not reveal the truth to any of his own comrades, not even to a blood brother such as Avraham. And nothing short of hospitalization would assuage Itzik Ben-Zion’s impatience for his return.

  He managed to give Yaron the contact number for Roselli at Langley, and within minutes a navy ambulance was speeding north on Connecticut Avenue, transporting him to the Bethesda facility.

  Baum’s state of shock was not feigned. The ambulance paramedics confirmed it by his blood pressure, and as he breathed heavily through a plastic oxygen mask, his wild thoughts were dulled by the inclusion of a sedative via an IV. He vaguely recalled the turn into the rolling grounds of the hospital, a glimpse of the sand-colored Bethesda tower as they swept by, the muttered curses of the driver when he saw that the emergency entrance was blocked by deliveries of the more gravely injured.

  The ambulance swung to the NNMC’s main entrance, halting before a massive glass facade that reflected that day’s unusual winter sun, and Baum squinted painfully as they rolled his gurney from the wagon. The images and sounds blew by: the thump of rotor blades, Art Roselli’s face bending over his own, Avraham Yaron’s worried expression joining the American’s, the hiss of hydraulic doors, and the barking of orders. A huge American flag hung from a balcony above the wide lobby, curious civilians stood from their armchairs to watch the drama, a square blue pennant showed the hospital’s motto: “Caring Is What We Do Best.”

  He passed the better part of the day on the third “deck,” in the Coronary Critical Care Unit, strapped to a high bed inside a glass-fronted cubicle. Testing revealed no threatening fibrillation or telltale muscle damage, and Benni sent Avraham packing off to send a messag
e to Itzik Ben-Zion and then to host his congressmen, while Roselli stayed on.

  At last, when the navy doctors had raised his status to stable, Benni was allowed to confer quietly with Arthur, who showed little surprise as his old friend relayed a string-of facts that might have seemed hallucinatory had they come from anyone else. Roselli had spent a life exposed to contorted plots, and he had developed quite a tolerance, yet finally his emotions caused a squint of empathic rage to hood his dark eyes.

  It was Arthur’s idea to contact Eytan Eckstein, his suggestion to utilize Langley’s transmission capabilities. Benni gave over the frequency and contact time, and Arthur hurried away to meet the 4:00 P.M. deadline, for Addis Ababa was eight hours ahead. Before he left, he promised to return at the first opportunity, pending some arrangements he thought it wise to prepare.

  “In the meantime,” he warned, “be ready for the jackals. They will come.”

  As he left the CCU, he spoke to a doctor and arranged for Benni to be moved to a room on the other side of Three West. He noted the room number and that of its private telephone, then showed his identification to a chief petty officer. He sternly emphasized that the Israeli patient should be moved only to that designated room and that the posting of a Marine guard might be wise.

  In the late afternoon, Benni was transferred to his new quarters. He was mildly sedated, unaware that Jack Buchanan and Charles Gold had already shuttled down from New York, their fervent requests to question him denied till morning by a strict “No Visitors” order from the navy doctors. Following a dinner that remained untouched by Baum, Roselli called once to check the line, assure Benni that the “telegram” had been sent, and state cryptically that he was “shaking the trees.”

  Later, as the night rolled in with a blanket of winter clouds, Benni found the strength to hobble from his bed. Holding his IV bag aloft with one hand, he rummaged through his valise, which had been delivered by one of Nadav’s GSS men, and extracted a legal pad and his copy of A Farewell to Arms.

  It took him a long time to devise his message to Eckstein and to properly encrypt. His concentration flagged repeatedly, and when at last he reversed the process, and it came out right, he was drained of strength and hollow of spiritual sustenance.