The man handed him a soft briefcase with a shoulder strap, which appeared to be empty. “Be careful,” the wizard said. “There’s a hundred thousand dollars in the lining. Go home.” Now thoroughly confused, Horse boarded his regular bus to Gilo, but before entering his apartment house, he was beckoned over to a car, in which sat two of the gorillas from “Peaches,” the SpecOps internal security detail.
“Go upstairs and pack,” said the beefy driver. “Three days’ worth, climate like Jerusalem. Take your time. Ten minutes.”
Even though Horse himself was by now a captain, he tended to snap to orders like a recruit. The two men sped him to Ben-Gurion Airport, a nauseating careen during which they handed him a travel packet containing his cover passport, which was Hungarian, appropriate support papers, a ticket for the short El Al hop to Cairo, and another on Egyptair to Casablanca. They made him repeat his contact instructions three times, but no one ever mentioned Baum, and by the time Horse was entering Moroccan airspace, he was paranoiacally convinced that Itzik had made him a sacrificial cash courier. He was going to deliver a payoff and might never come back.
When he walked into the Café de France, high on adrenaline and shivering from the wind, he nearly fainted when he saw Eckstein’s face smiling over the balcony rail. Now he sat at the table, reunited with his “family,” safe and secure, though certainly in harm’s way. He studied the Lonely Planet guide to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
At Benni Baum’s left elbow, a small, dark-haired man screwed a cigarette into a black holder, bit the onyx between his teeth, and lit up with an electronic lighter. Lieutenant Colonel Shaul Nimrodi, former OC of the IDF parachute school at Tel Nof, was one of those rare diminutive men who never felt the need to over-compensate for his size. The youngest of twelve children born to an Iraqi rabbi and rebbitzen who had walked to Jerusalem from Baghdad, Nimrodi had discovered early on that his flashing smile could quickly disarm opponents while his quick brain moved in for the kill. He had served as an airborne officer for twenty-five years, and given the thousands of recruits who had followed him out the jump doors of every transport aircraft in the IDF inventory, he was something of a national celebrity. In Israeli airports, restaurants, and movie theaters, he was still warmly accosted by paunchy reservists who clapped him on his small, muscular back and thanked him for quelling the most fearful moments of their lives.
Nimrodi’s humor under pressure was legendary, yet the respect he commanded was also due to his insistence on rigid discipline and the stunning rage he could summon whenever unprofessional laxity appeared. He had been known to keep an entire company at attention for three hours under an August sun for neglecting the instructions of a rigger.
In the course of his career, there was not a single major Israeli airborne operation in which he had not played a crucial role. From the Golan in ’67 to Suez in ’73, from Entebbe in ’76 to Beirut in ’82, Nimrodi was summoned when history could not wait for loadmasters to consult their technical manuals. The chief of staff would task the chief paratroop and infantry officer, who in turn would task Nimrodi, no matter who else stood in the chain of command.
“We have to put the 202nd regular battalion on the ground at Sidon tomorrow at 0700,” the CPIO would say.
Nimrodi would jut his cigarette Roosevelt style, squinting up through the halo of smoke, tap one set of fingers with his thumb, and come up with a calculation.
“We’ll need six C-130s, each with one support APC, six G-111 cargo chutes per vehicle, drop the M-113s from the ramps at six hundred meters altitude, then bring the troops into a landing on the strip, line astern. We’ll put in Pathfinders and Para Recon first from two C-47s for LZ marking and security, but no parachute drop for the main force. It’ll give us more room for ammo and heavy MGs and mortars, maybe an additional two thousand kilos per bird. Estimate thirty minutes tops for the main-force delivery.”
“Can you do that by tomorrow?” the CPIO would ask doubtfully.
Nimrodi would simply grin, and the long crevasses that spidered down from his eyes to his jaw were always the signal that caused his superiors to reply with a beaming “Kadimah! Forward!”
Nimrodi had finally retired with his pension, and at the relatively young age of forty-six he had no plans for a second career. He had fully intended to spend the next ten years with his wife and three daughters, touring the world, playing backgammon at the beach, dabbling in the stock market, and then he would see about a modest business venture. But his telephone never seemed to stop ringing, and officers in uniform and civilian clothes kept appearing at his door in Nes Ziona. Men like Benni Baum, with whom he had worked on a number of tricky insertions and extractions, would not allow him to lapse into comfortable sloth. At the present time he was working as a consultant for Akorda, a transport corporation owned in proxy by AMAN, which was contracted to the government of Mauritania. He was a free agent now, taking orders only from his own conscience, and Eckstein’s telephone call had resulted in a quick hop over to Casablanca to see if he could help out an old comrade in arms.
Nimrodi looked over at Benni and raised his right wrist, showing Baum his watch.
“Just another five minutes, Baba,” said Benni in English. Nimrodi was traveling under a false Iraqi passport supplied to him by AMAN in 1991, when the entire parachute brigade was preparing for a drop into the western Iraqi desert, a mission that never materialized. The document stated his identity as Ahmed Tabri, but the Arabic nickname for “Papa” had stuck with him since an operation in the Jordan Valley in 1968, during which he had worn a kaffiyeh and led a recon team of Arabic-speaking commandos.
Nimrodi smiled at Baum, shrugged, and sipped from a steaming glass of black coffee. “I am in no hurry, my friend,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice. When he spoke English, his accent sounded curiously French, and since it emanated from a face that was angular and large-featured, he was often compared to the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. “But you will want to begin this soon.”
“Yes,” Benni agreed. He looked down the row of tables, where the men were bending their heads together, quietly recalling other missions and adventures. “We can manage as is, but the last man is bringing the real time product.”
“Knowledge is power,” Nimrodi agreed. “We will wait.”
Michael O’Donovan was not seated with the rest of the contingent. Although more intimately linked to this venture than any of them, he felt the outsider and was in no mood to exchange pleasantries with seven strangers. He stood off to one side of the balcony, between tables on which empty chairs had been upturned like the corpses of poisoned roaches. He sipped a beer, smoked, and stared blankly down at the crowd of soccer fans.
“It wasn’t a malfunction. It was a panic cutaway.” The man to Nimrodi’s left, David “Didi” Lerner, was expounding on a parachuting incident with one of his former army comrades. Lerner was a wide, muscular Israeli of Australian birth. He was prematurely bald, but his youthful face suggested that maybe he shaved his head for “style.” Lerner was still a reserve sergeant major with Sayeret Matkal, the ultrasecret General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, which was technically in the AMAN order of battle but reported directly to the chief of staff. One of Israel’s top experts in high-altitude parachuting, he now ran a marginally successful free-fall club called ParaGo. The business teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, because Lerner was much more interested in jumping than in marketing his services for Independence Day demonstrations. With a wife and child to support, Didi had decided to go for a law degree, though he had little faith in his ability to pilot a desk for long without getting kotzim ba’tachat—thorns in the ass.
“That’s what I thought too,” said Amir Lapkin. “He was hardly out of the plane when he cut it away. He didn’t even let the main fully deploy, so everyone thought it was collapsed.”
Lapkin was also half “Anglo-Saxon,” as the Israelis refer to those citizens whose native language is English. Born in Toronto, he had been brought to Israel as a child. Lapkin’s d
ark features and a long mustache that drooped to his jowls gave him the look of a Mexican bandit. He had served as an officer in Lerner’s Matkal team, but as with all such units, rank meant nothing to their relationship. He was a gardener in civilian life, but he spent a lot of time packing chutes for ParaGo and maintaining his national marksman status at the Olympic pistol range in Herzaliya. He had a rumbling voice and a dry wit made sharper by his unsmiling, deadpan delivery.
Two more men sat across the table from Lerner and Lapkin. Although they were also Israelis, their Nordic features and clipped conversation in Hochdeutsch suggested descendants of Gestapo officers rather than Holocaust survivors. Ari Schneller was tall, nearly white-blond, and German born. He had served in the IDF parachute recon force of the Thirty-fifth Brigade, and on three previous occasions he had been attached to Benni Baum to work briefly as a “hard man” for operations in Germany. After mustering out of the service, he had relocated to Vienna and started a security firm, supplying technical services and armed escorts, trained by himself, to the heads of Viennese banks. Disarmed by his classically Aryan looks, Schneller’s older clients sometimes took him into their confidence and reflected on the “good old days.” He relished these incidents, giving the old Fascists plenty of rope, then pointedly announcing to their stunned gapes that he happened to be not only a Jew but an Israeli commando as well. Eckstein’s call had offered a welcome respite from the Austrian social and climatic chill.
Schneller argued with Rick Nabbe over the merits of the Glock 9, a plastic pistol whose grip Nabbe insisted was designed only for Texans. Nabbe’s military background was similar to Schneller’s, for he had also served in Sayeret Tzanchanim. He was Belgian born, medium height and wide, wore his brown hair in a Julius Caesar cut, and sported steel-rimmed spectacles with wraparound earpieces. He was equally quick of humor and reflexes, and was known to defuse operational dangers by impersonating Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau.
He had not worked directly for Baum but had occasionally been summoned by AMAN when SpecOps was planning operations on French soil. When French engineering industries were irresponsibly supplying Saddam Hussein with nuclear processing components, Baum had recommended Nabbe to the Mossad. He was most proud of having blown up a factory warehouse containing Baghdad-bound centrifuge components in Lyons.
Nabbe had taken a two-year contract as a close-protection expert in Frankfurt. He was sometimes called upon by Germany’s GSG-9 to instruct the antiterror commandos in combat quick-draw, but mostly he was sick and tired of being treated like a butler by touring rock-and-roll stars. Eckstein’s cryptic telephone suggestion that this project would overshadow Nabbe’s adventure in Lyons had sent him packing to the airport.
The last member of this eclectic group of tourists was a compact, wire-haired kibbutznik known only as Sadeen. The word in Hebrew means “bedsheet,” and the farmer from Galilee had acquired the nickname early in his army days, when he carried a white sheet in his combat ruck and always mummified himself before crawling into his sleeping bag. Sadeen was the youngest of the volunteers, having just turned thirty, but no small-unit mission could proceed without experienced hands such as his.
An immigrant from Uruguay, he had volunteered for service as a member of Chabalah Mootznachat, the airborne demolition section of the regular paratroops. He was quickly recognized as a natural genius with all manner of explosive materials, breezed through noncom and officers’ school, and was sent to the Technion University in Haifa by the army. He was a captain in the reserves now, still frequently called up and attached to units being inserted deep into Lebanon. Demolition material was never foolproof; it could deteriorate or be lost in an airdrop; it could fail, but Sadeen never would. It was said that he could wander empty-handed into a sheep farm and come out with a burlap bag full of nitro cellulose.
He was not antisocial, yet he sat alone now near Eckstein at the far end of the tables, tinkering as always. He had emptied a glass salt shaker onto a napkin and was examining the inside of the metal screw cap.
All of these men, including Nimrodi, still easily scored Aleph-Aleph—double A—on the live-fire course at Mitkan Adam, the IDF’s antiterror training facility. Among them, if they happened to shower together, one could have counted a total of nine bullet scars. For when they drew their weapons, whether on the slopes of Lebanon or in the back alleys of Europe, inevitably the opposition drew theirs as well.
Didi Lerner suddenly laughed. He threw his head back and barked, “Royt, mate,” in his raspy Australian as he slapped the table. Amir Lapkin, who had obviously triggered this response, just twirled the end of his mustache and regarded Lerner curiously.
Eckstein turned his head from the balcony and glanced at his “recruits.” These men were the real thing: not comic book heroes but the reluctant warriors who were Israel’s most successful crop. They had proved themselves—not for glory or medals but for their cause, their comrades, their families, all entities that constituted that thing called country. They were half deaf from years of gunfire, but could still quick-march a hundred kilometers, and their combined hours of combat training were uncountable. Yet none of these factors was the decisive point that had made Eckstein reach out to them. You could train a man for years, but until he had actually been under fire, you knew nothing about him. Each of them had faced the devil, entered his darkened doorway at midnight, chased him through a cloud of flash and smoke, wrestled with his body close.
They were not violent men by nature, and Eckstein doubted if more than two of them had ever been in a fistfight. But in a firefight, they would stand up and charge.
Benni caught Eckstein’s attention and lifted his eyebrows in impatient concern. Eytan raised a finger to signal one more minute, then turned his attention back to the café’s entrance. Then he smiled, reached out to his right, and snapped his fingers. Mike O’Donovan heard the fleshy click and walked over in response to Eckstein’s wave.
“Are you feeling the odd man out, Michael?” Eckstein asked.
There was no point in denying the obvious. “First day at a new school,” said the detective.
“You should get to know the men.” Eckstein took O’Donovan’s can of Imperial and swigged from it as if to demonstrate intimacy.
“I will,” said the American as he glanced briefly at the seated contingent. “So who are we waiting for?”
“Roselli’s courier. He will make it easier for you. I think you know him.”
“Who is he?”
“That man.” Eckstein jutted his chin toward the entrance.
O’Donovan placed his hands on the balcony rail and hunched to see better. His eyes widened as he stared at the entranceway.
Detective Jerry Binder was standing just inside the doorway. He was wearing a white German alpine parka splotched with intermittent leaf designs, shouldering a black Eastern Mountain Sports ruck, and looking around as if he had stumbled into the wrong dimension.
“Holy shit.” O’Donovan whispered.
“Is he an asset?” Eckstein asked.
“Like two men,” the American said, with barely concealed joy.
“Can you whistle?”
O’Donovan looked at Eckstein. Then he understood, stuck two fingers in his mouth, and issued a short, piercing blast.
Binder snapped his head up, brushed off an approaching waiter, and headed for the stairs.
O’Donovan’s expression of stunned pleasure was still stuck to his face when he greeted the burly cop at the summit. He reached out his hand, and Binder crushed it briefly, but the big man was embarrassed by emotions and he pushed past as the younger detective followed.
“Jerry!” O’Donovan exclaimed in a sharp whisper. “How the fuck?”
“You think you’re the only ex-SFer on Langley’s roster?” Binder growled as Baum rose to greet him. “I was in Sphinx when you were still pissing in diapers.”
“But how did Roselli know . . . ?”
“Fuckers never let you go,” said Binder, although h
e was clearly proud to have been called upon once more. “Your Company buddy wanted a bag boy and somebody to watch your ass. Click click, clack clack.” He mimed punching a computer keyboard. “Fed you in, came up with me.”
“I don’t believe you,” O’Donovan scoffed. “You went down to Virginia and busted somebody’s door.”
“Fuck you, then,” said Binder as he shook Baum’s hand.
“A pleasure, once again,” said Benni. “Though not a surprise.”
“Same here,” said Binder. “And we’re calling you . . . ?”
“Schmidt.”
“Yawohl.” Binder smiled and clicked his heels. “And I’m Alice in Wonderland.”
“How did you get away?” O’Donovan pressed, meaning from Midtown North.
“Vacation time.”
“The lieutenant must be duly pissed.”
“Brace yourself. She’ll probably ship us out to the Bronx.”
O’Donovan laughed, something he had not done since Ruth’s abduction. Binder’s appearance had instantly reset his equilibrium, as if he had been stumbling lost in a dark forest and suddenly come upon his own twin, holding a flashlight and a map.
Binder opened his ruck and removed a large padded envelope, which he handed to Baum. Then he pulled out an empty chair and sat down between Shaul Nimrodi and Didi Lerner. Nimrodi turned to him and grinned around his onyx holder.
“Call me Baba,” said Nimrodi.
“Call me Binder.”
“A nickname would be better.”
“Spider, then.”
Nimrodi looked the American over, taking in his stiff black hair, large jaw, and the pectorals pushing at his parka. He was anything but delicate and arachnoid.
“Do you wear a tattoo?” Nimrodi asked.
Binder’s eyes narrowed. “A tarantula. On my left hip.”
“Yes.” Nimrodi nodded. “It was just a guess,” he assured the detective. “You are very large.”
The Nylon Hand of God Page 41
