The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  She could see other figures now, shadows moving purposefully across the sand bowl. From behind her, some men grunted as if hefting a weight, then passed by in front carrying a long box on their shoulders. Martina stopped them.

  “Take it to the hole, put it in the aircraft, and remove Iyad for burial. Then seal the doors. I want to keep the dust off it and check the circuitry tonight.”

  The men hurried with their burden. They did not follow the path of the jet, but shuffled in a different direction altogether. There was another aircraft? Then Ruth realized that Martina had not used that word. She had said Hubschrauber.

  “Willkommen.”

  Ruth winced, snapping her head back to the voice. Martina stood before her at a detached distance. It was too dark to read her expression, but her short blond cut seemed to glow around her skull. She still wore her funeral dress, yet despite the bitter wind she did not hunch or embrace herself. Her arms hung down, loose and relaxed. In her right hand she held a pistol as casually as a hair dryer.

  “Your quarters are being readied,” Martina said.

  Quarters? Ruth glanced around. She saw nothing that resembled a building, a barracks, or even a tent.

  “You were an unexpected guest,” Martina added by way of explanation.

  For some reason, Ruth snatched a crumb of comfort from the remark. The woman’s operation was clearly not improvisational, but at least her abduction had not been part of the planning. Then the hope quickly diminished. What difference did that make here and now?

  She found her voice.

  “Can I ask where we are?”

  “You may ask,” said Martina, though she clearly felt no obligation to answer. She turned and looked off in the direction of the towed Falcon, and Ruth followed her gaze.

  Five shadows were approaching across Martina’s “parade ground.” The two figures in the middle appeared to be stumbling along, their hands clasped strangely before them, while three other men seemed to be supporting them. The wind carried the muffled sounds of American voices raised in anger, and as the men neared, Ruth could see the white shirts of the pilots beneath their open flight jackets. Their hands were bound at the wrists. They were clearly not part of Martina’s crew.

  “You and your humps have crossed the fucking line, lady!” Joe Dawson spat as he lunged forward and was checked by an octopus of arms.

  “I see that you are much braver on the ground than in the air, Mr. Dawson,” Martina said. There was a smile in her voice, and Ruth looked at her.

  “Fuck you,” Chip Bergh spat.

  Martina laughed. “As you say in your vernacular, you should be so lucky.” She switched to German. “Riyad, take them for a long walk east. At least five kilometers.”

  Ruth’s head twitched back toward the men. Martina’s goons were holding the black bodies of machine pistols. For a moment, she had thought she would be sharing her predicament with the pilots, finding comfort in numbers. Yet her eyes widened as the Americans were spun around. They were being led off to execution, and Ruth’s character burst through her own survival instincts.

  “No!” she shouted, then yelped as Youssef s hand dug straight down to her bone.

  Dawson spun his head around, but he was pushed and fell to his knees. Riyad pulled him up, and the death squad progressed away toward the dunes as the wind stole the sounds of tramping feet and violent curses.

  Ruth had partially slumped with the pain in her arm, but now she drove up and to the right, yanking free for an instant. Martina’s hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of the front of her dress, pulling their faces close with amazing strength.

  “Don’t kill them,” Ruth pleaded. “You don’t have to. Why do you have to? Don’t!”

  She lost her voice as Martina turned and hauled her, walking briskly across the sand. Ruth tripped over her own feet but was kept aloft by the momentum.

  “They won’t be killed,” Martina said.

  “Don’t!” Ruth begged again, Martina’s claim not having registered. “Please don’t. They might have families, children. You can’t—”

  “I said they won’t be killed!” Martina stopped short and jutted her face toward Ruth’s, causing Youssef to nearly topple them all over from behind. “They are going to be set free.”

  She held her posture until Ruth’s body relaxed. The girl was sniffling, and as she hung her head, Martina found herself impressed by her foolish courage. In the face of the pilots’ deaths, she had forgotten the proximity of her own.

  Martina reached down and took Ruth’s hand. Then she led her at a brisk march toward the northwest corner of the sand bowl.

  Ruth’s strength was gone. Her emotion had drained her reserves to a parched, numbed well. She walked, feeling Martina’s grip and the big hands on her back. She saw the ground suddenly fall away into a shallow ramp, then they were going down into a dark trench, the meager light all but gone now as they passed beneath a net stretched over the passageway.

  Maybe the pilots were not going to be executed. Maybe they would be set free. But here in this winter desert, it would mean practically the same thing.

  “They’ll freeze to death,” Ruth murmured in a final, feeble protest.

  The sounds of rusty hinges reached her ears, and just ahead, a gray square of subdued light appeared in the subterranean pitch. Martina pulled her toward the chamber, the smile in her voice once more.

  “I only need one bargaining chip, my dear,” she said.

  Chapter 16: Casablanca

  In the course of his middle-aged life, Hans-Dieter Schmidt had successfully negotiated a thousand passport controls.

  As the director of marketing of a Munich-based pharmaceutical concern, Schmidt’s pursuit of foreign customers had kept him abroad for much of the past twenty-five years, and now the crossing of a border should have evoked no more excitement than a stroll to the local post office. In countless lines of weary, foot-shuffling passengers, he had acquired a posture and an expression of passive disinterest. Whether in Larnaca or London, Sofia or Saigon, a democratic enclave or a hotbed of tyranny, he had learned to ignore the petty arrogance of customs apparatchiks and the steely glares of jackbooted border guards. He projected the impression of a rumpled, nonsubversive visitor and had rarely been detained for even a cursory inquiry.

  So this morning’s arrival at Casablanca’s Mohammed V airport should have educed no more adrenaline than the train ride from Salzburg to Vienna, yet Schmidt knew that it was the most important crossing of his life, and he wondered if his hammering heart might give him away.

  From the arrival ramp of Royal Air Maroc’s Flight 205 to the escalators descending to the customs hall, the endless corridor was populated by pairs of khaki clad border police, smoothing their mustaches as they scrutinized each face. At the foot of the escalators, where ragged queues extended back from the control desks, the gargantuan gold obelisk jutting down from the vaulted ceiling looked very much like a guillotine. And although Schmidt carried no contraband of any kind, beyond the visa clerks a final X-ray scan of incoming hand luggage was being conducted, causing beadlets of sweat to break out on his brow.

  Perhaps it was vague recollections of a childhood at Dachau that rekindled the sensation of fate at the mercy of oppressors, as he searched for the correct answers to questions that might be posed. He reread the front page of France-Soir, growing ever angrier at the bureaucrat who languidly compared photos to faces, checking information on a nationally linked computer. And then he found his bubbling indignation had been totally unwarranted, as he was passed through with the whack of a visa stamper and a cursory “Bienvenu.”

  Breathing like a liberated convict, Schmidt recovered his valise from a carousel, went out into the main concourse and straight to the currency exchange window. He armed himself with five hundred dirhams, strolled to the information desk at the hub of the mall, and thumbed through brochures of the Maghreb until the American finally emerged from customs, shouldering his way through a throng of locals. The tall blon
d man was easy to spot, as North Africa was still suffering a paucity of tourism as a result of the Gulf War, and most everyone else was wearing a jallabiya.

  Schmidt followed him out the glass entrance doors into a welcome North African sun. The American waved off the teenagers who offered to carry his Tourister, and the German did the same, until they found themselves side by side before a line of Mercedes taxis.

  The American spoke. “Want to share?”

  “Why not?” said Schmidt.

  They got into a battered cream sedan, the driver assumed their objective to be the heart of Casablanca, and he was off. The chunky German turned to the lanky American.

  “Ahh, the Middle East warms my bones,” said Benni Baum.

  “Compared to New York, it leaves me cold,” said Mike O’Donovan.

  Benni nodded. “L’hôtel Sheraton, s’il vous plaît,” he said to the driver, and the rest of the ride was as devoid of conversation as the bedroom of a couple on the verge of divorce.

  Benni’s appearance on Moroccan soil was not in itself a high-risk venture. Of all the Arab states, Morocco was regarded by the Israelis as the least confrontational, its monarchy paying lip service to Arab unity, its newspapers supporting the Palestine National Congress with desultory editorials. In the mivtzaim (operations) room of AMAN’s SpecOps headquarters, a large map of the earth covered one wall, with countries considered high risk for Israeli operatives shaded in varying hues of red. Morocco was a very pale pink.

  Israel and Morocco had maintained a covert link for many years. GSS teams had trained King Hassan’s close protection details, Israeli advisers from the World Bank had been seconded to Rabat’s Ministry of Economics, and even Yitzhak Rabin had made a secret pilgrimage to Hassan’s palace, disguised in a “Beatle” wig and black-rimmed glasses that were still the butt of jokes in the Mossad’s “costume” department.

  When AMAN Special Operations teams began their indoctrinations in street-craft, they cut their teeth in Israeli cities, then moved on to European capitals. Those men and women who showed promise in tracking, shaking watchers, and proper handling of dead drops then graduated to low-risk “unfriendly” cities, such as Casablanca and Tunis. If you could not handle yourself in Tangier, then you were certainly not going to Damascus. These relatively harmless practice sessions did not mean, of course, that the Moroccan Sûreté Nationale would look kindly on Israeli operators launching an unauthorized mission from their sovereign territory. For the sake of the world stage, if such an endeavor was discovered, it would have to be punished by incarceration. The unlucky participants would surely be repatriated, but only after an acceptable term in a malodorous Moroccan prison.

  When Eytan Eckstein had served a two-year stint as head of SpecOps Training, he enlisted Benni’s aid to run three teams through their paces in Casablanca. The two men had headquartered at the Sheraton, and although today they had made no arrangement to meet there, the colonel knew his major’s mind. . . .

  As for Michael O’Donovan, the U.S. Special Forces was essentially a combat recon and indigenous liaison outfit, and he had not been extensively trained in intelligence tradecraft. However, in his ten years on the streets of New York City he had accumulated more “hunting” experience than most field agents acquire in a like period of intermittent assignments. He had some German and French, and although he did not know exactly what Baum and Roselli had in mind for North Africa, he was determined to participate.

  His sense of duty to the NYPD had been replaced by a horrible crush of responsibility, a hunger to save the woman who had seen so quickly into his soul. Their lightning union of minds and bodies had given him hope that there might be someone meant for him, and although fully aware that the relationship might fail even a brief test of time, he mourned as if Ruth had been struck down by a hit-and-run driver, then snatched away, still breathing. He had let her be taken, she was out there somewhere, and he would not rest until he saw her again.

  At first Baum resisted his inclusion in the mission, but O’Donovan made it very clear that he would not be left behind. The detective threatened to dog him across the entire globe, and if that did not work, he would go over to Jack Buchanan, blow Benni’s scenario, and join the cumbersome government effort that would surely result.

  “Well . . .” Baum relented at last. “I suppose an angry New York cop might be useful.”

  Art Roselli quickly supplied O’Donovan with a new passport and backstop material in the name of Michael Connolly, a corporate attorney from New York specializing in mergers of pharmaceutical ventures. He also provided a letter from a New York surgeon prohibiting O’Donovan’s participation in all police activities for thirty days, which was delivered to his lieutenant. She promptly called his apartment, but spoke only to his answering machine. He had not gone home again from Washington. . . .

  The face of Casablanca had not changed very much since Baum’s last visit, its skin the same alabaster of grand Moresque civic structures and white Franco-Mediterranean facades. A few more unsightly moles of modern business towers had sprouted from its folds, the arms of its French-style boulevards reached farther out toward Azemmour and Rabat, and the date palms of the medians had flourished untrimmed. But the city was still like an immortal, matronly ship captain’s widow, slowly spreading its girth in its perch by the sea, smelling of sun-broiled fishnets, chugged diesel, and the salt of a damp breeze.

  Although most of the Maghreb still bowed to conservative Moslem mores, Morocco, as the gateway to the Iberian Peninsula, seemed to have been granted dispensation by the Imams for the sake of commerce. Casablanca flourished in a schizophrenic flaunting of its license. The towering mosque of Hassan II was evidence of a billion-dollar devotion to monarch and Allah, while the kosher restaurants of the city’s remaining Jews overflowed with patrons who no longer feared repression. Yes, there were still Moslem women here who wore the veil, but many sported the more fashionable, rainbow-colored jallabiyas, with no head coverings at all, and just as many strolled along in business suits and immodest skirts. In stark contrast to Tehran, there were no Religious Police here who might shoot a woman for wearing lipstick and eye shadow.

  Lisbon, Geneva, and Vienna had all seen service as neutral playing grounds for the secret struggles between fascist and democratic, communist and imperialist ideologues. Beirut had also taken a turn hosting the shadow warriors, but she had died in twenty years of civil war and foreign invasion, and even the most foolhardy mercenaries were still loath to do business there. But Casablanca’s gleaming 1930s architecture, the winding alleys of a mysterious Casbah, and her palm fronds waving to the spill of French and Arabic tunes remained as a backdrop to the cliché. The city was safe haven to diplomats and arms dealers, thieves and entrepreneurs, smugglers and spies.

  At the corner of Avenue des Forces Armées Royales and Rue Colbert, Baum and O’Donovan walked into the cavernous lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. It was already late in the morning, and businessmen were gathering in the open coffee-and-sandwich salon. The wide reservoir of a fountain splashed and bubbled, and the chatter of parrots in hanging cages mingled with the tunes of a recorded jazz ensemble, so that the high walls hummed like a combined dance café and Caribbean zoo.

  They strode to the reception desk at the far end of the lobby, a chest-high rectangle of polished stone, manned and womaned by blue-blazered Moroccans. Registration forms were filled out, Baum guaranteeing payment with a “Schmidt” gold Visa card, which was registered to a Frankfurt account. While O’Donovan watched the lobby traffic with a distracted frown, Benni tried not to look across to the gift shop on the far side. There was a postal box mounted on the wall, and a European man wearing an American A-2 flight jacket and black jeans was inserting postcards into the slot. His dark-blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

  The desk clerk handed Benni a pair of plastic room-access cards.

  “Seven-eighteen, Herr Schmidt,” said the clerk.

  “We are smokers,” Benni warned.

 
“So are most of our guests.” The clerk smiled broadly. “Morocco is still civilized.”

  “Merci beaucoup.”

  “Avec plaisir.”

  A young porter hefted their bags, but as the trio neared the elevators, Benni handed him twenty dirhams and said in French, “Thanks. We need the exercise.” The boy backed away, a palm placed over his chest.

  Eytan Eckstein followed into the elevator, but he moved straight to the back of the mirrored cubicle, and he and Benni did not make eye contact. O’Donovan glanced at the third man’s reflection, the sunburned expressionless face, eyes hidden behind pilot-style sunglasses. He knew that Baum was anxious to meet a fellow AMAN officer here, but this man could not be the major of record. He looked more like a German terrorist or, at best, a Swedish rock-and-roll drummer.

  Benni and O’Donovan exited onto the seventh floor, and when they reached 718, Benni stopped to insert the plastic key as O’Donovan turned his head and stiffened.

  The third man was coming on quickly. O’Donovan twisted back to Benni and flicked his eyes in warning. But Baum just casually said, “I hope this one is better than that dump in Tangier,” opened the door, took the American’s elbow, and roughly pushed him into the room. The ponytailed man came in on his heels, Benni slammed the door with his foot, and he and the intruder embraced in a bear hug that expelled their air.

  Baum and Eckstein parted without a word. Benni walked straight to a television on a polished bureau and, without glancing at the accommodations, said, “Ahh, place looks very decent.” He turned on the TV, found the European music channel, and Peter Gabriel’s “Sledge Hammer” rang off the walls.

  “Beds look comfortable too. Don’t you think, Michael?” Benni coached, and when O’Donovan just stared at him dumbly, he made a flapping gesture with his hand, as if he were working a sock puppet.

  “Yeah,” said the detective, at last picking up his cue. “Real nice.”