The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  “The range is still too great,” said Nabbe, the realities having temporarily squelched his enthusiasm.

  “We will fly nap of the earth to the border.” Nimrodi’s deep voice wafted over his shoulders, for he was still facing away, sipping from a glass of café au lait. “Then we will run for altitude, make a wide arc into their territory, exit, and the plane will cross back before the Algerians can scramble.” He actually had a modification of this plan forming in his mind, but he thought Baum was not mentally prepared for it yet.

  “Baba,” said Lapkin, “you’re making me believe an airplane actually exists.”

  “There will be an airplane,” said Nimrodi with a dismissive wave.

  “And parachutes?” Didi asked doubtfully.

  “Yes. It will be preferable to use parachutes,” the small colonel said without irony. Someone emitted a shaky laugh.

  “That’s my project,” said Eckstein. “And you’ll use rip cords, Didi.” He wagged a finger at Lerner. “No throw-outs.”

  Didi smiled back at him. The trend for experienced free-fallers was to dispense with rip cord deployment and open their main canopies by throwing a small pilot chute into the slipstream, which in turn dragged the rest of the assembly into a more graceful blossom. The pilot chutes were packed into long pockets on the lower right side of the backpack containers. Once, when he and Lerner were jumping together, Eckstein had reached for his pilot and found it bunched and locked in the pocket. Didi, seeing Eytan’s struggle, had tracked into him, latched onto his harness, and used all his might to haul the stubborn rag from its hole. The two men had deployed their chutes at less than five hundred meters altitude. Breathless, they had walked straight from the drop zone, finished off a six-pack of Maccabee, and never mentioned it again.

  “So what about other gear?” Lapkin posed.

  “Yeah,” said Binder. “Like weapons.”

  “Working on it, my friend,” said Nimrodi. His “work” apparently consisted of squinting past the tip of his cigarette into the cloud of an idea.

  “Somebody make a list,” Schneller suggested.

  Horse produced a small writing pad, the orange-bound spiral notebook issued to IDF officers. Benni frowned at this breach of security, but then, Horse was not really a field man.

  “Penlights,” said Didi. “Electrical tape, black. Lots of it.”

  “Goggles,” said Lapkin. “Blousing bands for sleeves and cuffs.”

  “Knives,” said Schneller.

  “Helmets?” Sadeen asked.

  “No,” said Eckstein. “Just the balaclavas you brought. Right?”

  The men nodded. Binder rolled his eyes.

  “Altimeters,” Nabbe blurted. Then he clucked his tongue, realizing they would be impossible to find here.

  “Me and Lapkin have ours,” said Didi. “We won’t need more, mate.” With a HAHO jump, the men could simply agree on a count from exit to opening, then just pull and form up on the leader. If they could find him at night.

  “Compasses,” said O’Donovan. “We should all have one.”

  Horse scribbled furiously.

  “Water.” Lapkin began to count off on his fingers. “Some kind of energy rations, climbing rope, waterproofed matches, serious first aid.” He avoided looking directly at Baum. “Hey, who’s done medic’s course besides me?”

  Nabbe, Schneller, and Sadeen raised fingers.

  “A surgeon’s nightmare,” Lapkin commented.

  “A stretcher,” said Benni. “In case we have to carry someone out.” He tried to swipe the image of Ruth’s body bouncing on rough canvas from his mind.

  “Which brings us to the extraction problem,” Didi offered.

  “Let’s forget it for now,” Eckstein said. He did not want to stifle the momentum with harsher realities.

  “Okay,” Didi agreed. “But we should have a stretcher.”

  “Tent poles!” Horse suddenly blurted, then blushed at having spoken. But he finished the thought quietly. “You could buy a tent, then make a collapsible.”

  “Very good,” said Benni as he touched the analyst’s shoulder. “List it. And we will need packs too, to bring the gear down and carry it.”

  “Magazine pouches, or some sort of load-bearing gear,” said Schneller, looking over at Nimrodi. “Assuming we’ll have ammunition.”

  “You will carry them in jacket pockets, my friend,” said Nimrodi curtly. “There will be no combat webbing. I am not a magician.”

  “We’ll jump them in the packs, with the weapons,” said Lapkin. “Then we’ll break them out.”

  The safety-conscious Israelis were used to parachuting with their weapons swaddled in a canvas bag, so that no shroud lines could snag on the metallic protrusions. Unless, of course, intelligence predicted a “hot” drop zone, in which case the assault rifles would be slung and strapped down to the body. Americans always tended to jump “cowboy style.”

  “My weapon’ll be locked and cocked and taped to my fuckin’ hand,” said Binder.

  “What about commo gear?” Didi suggested.

  “Better dig up a Radio Shack in this berg,” said Binder. “Pick up some walkie-talkies. With earpieces.”

  “Note Spider’s name next to that item,” Benni said to Horse.

  “Any chance of night vision?” Sadeen asked hopefully, though there was little hope of securing a pair of the expensive electronic goggles.

  Benni pointed to one of his own eyes. “Only what you were born with, I am afraid.”

  “You’re afraid,” Nabbe said. “I am already pissing in my trousers.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Eckstein. “Let’s move on to the assault gear.”

  “Distractors would be nice,” said O’Donovan. “Flash bangs.” He was referring to a type of nonlethal hand grenade that would temporarily stun with its noise and blinding light.

  “I’ll do something,” Sadeen promised.

  “No frags, though,” Schneller warned. “Not with hostages.”

  Sadeen nodded at him.

  “How ’bout illumination?” Lapkin suggested. If the assault area was pitch black, it would be difficult to distinguish terrorists from captives. Under such circumstances, the assault group usually used tube-launched parachute flares.

  “Flares?” Sadeen frowned. “I cannot promise.”

  “Emergency roadside stuff?” Didi suggested. “Better than bloody nothing.”

  “Good,” said Benni.

  “Let’s work up a model,” O’Donovan recommended. It was standard for special operations troops to construct detailed miniatures of the mission target.

  “We will.” Benni patted the small pile of photographs. “But tomorrow. We need to divide up responsibilities now, set transportation.”

  Horse reached out cautiously and slipped one of the photographs onto his lap. Then he opened the viewer case, extended the legs, and hunched over the lenses.

  “You are forgetting something,” Shaul Nimrodi suggested to no one in particular. He was watching two Moroccans exit the men’s room, but they were hurrying to get back to the game, so he did not order the planning hushed.

  “What is it?” Benni asked.

  “The opposition,” said the small colonel. “Who are they? Her men. What is their experience?”

  Benni had wanted to postpone discussing this until some of the technical details were worked out. When you painted the enemy in flesh and blood, the mood of a planning session shifted. Young soldiers preferred to know nothing of the enemy’s humanity, while experienced operators wanted every detail. But all of them grew somber when the heightened images reminded them that some, on both sides, would lose their lives at the moment of human collision.

  Yet the subject had been raised, and all eyes were on him.

  “Martina Klump leads a small group of freelancers,” he said as he lit up another cigarette and blew out a cloud of acrid smoke. “They are not amateurs.”

  Eckstein continued Benni’s brief. “They are an offshoot of Hizbollah,�
�� he said. “Trained and blooded in Lebanon. They have certainly seen action in the security zone.” He meant the Israeli-controlled strip of southern Lebanon where IDF troops frequently clashed with the fundamentalists.

  “They might have pulled off the consular bombing in Manhattan,” O’Donovan added. “But we know for sure that they ambushed the missile convoy in Maryland, blew up the lead vehicle, and killed most of the Marines.”

  Lapkin and Sadeen raised their eyebrows, while Schneller murmured, “Schweine,” in his native tongue.

  “So they’re not going to bloody break and run,” Didi declared quietly.

  “No,” said Benni.

  “Do they claim credit after ops?” Lapkin asked. “Call themselves something?”

  “They didn’t this time,” said O’Donovan.

  “They call themselves Yadd Allah,” Benni said.

  Nimrodi turned to him. He took the cigarette holder from between his teeth. “Yadd Allah?”

  Baum closed his eyes and nodded once.

  “Somebody translate,” Binder demanded.

  “It means Hand of God,” said Eckstein. Then he looked down the table at Rick Nabbe, who was smiling rather foolishly. “Something funny about that, Rick?”

  Nabbe did not answer immediately. His eyes were fixed on Didi Lerner, who seemed to know what the Belgian was going to say next. Nabbe scratched his nose thoughtfully.

  “I once had a jump instructor who said that all parachutists are madmen. One life is not enough for them, so they are constantly trying to end it and begin again.” Didi blushed, but Nabbe went on. “He said that parachuting is like committing suicide and being saved by the hand of God.”

  Didi took a swig from his Pepsi. “I believe I said the nylon hand of God,” he corrected.

  “Yes,” Nabbe conceded. “I believe you did, mon ami.”

  No one else spoke for a moment, as the men glanced inwardly at their own motivations, the psychoses that drove them through their lives, forcing them to commit acts that were reckless, or heroic, depending on one’s viewpoint. The brief spell was broken by the mass scraping of chair legs from the floor below. The game was over.

  Horse had finished examining the aerial photographs. Now he placed them facedown on the table and frowned deeply as he fiddled with the viewer. Benni was intimately attuned to the analyst’s moods.

  “Speak up, Horse,” he ordered. “That is why you are here.”

  Chernikovsky was not called Benni Baum’s Nightmare for nothing. It was his job to inform a team of how they might fail, not compliment them on their valor. There were no A’s for effort in SpecOps.

  “It will not work,” he whispered.

  “Say it out.” Benni waved a hand toward the other men, even as a constriction gripped his chest.

  “It will not work like this,” Horse said in a fuller voice. “Klump’s shelters are under the ground, set up in an open bowl of hard sand. Some air vents show, and a few sentries perhaps. But nothing else.”

  The men listened carefully; no one interrupted him. They seemed to be holding their breath.

  “You cannot simply assault the position,” Horse went on. “Even if you get close and silent-kill the sentries, you do not know in which shelter Klump has the girl.” He could not bring himself to use Ruth’s name. “Even if you can find the doors and blow them, there will not be enough time. These are not like exposed rooms, where you have windows and such options. They are buried trailers, most probably linked to form a tunnel.” He looked around at the attentive faces, himself a lecturer doomed to a career of depressing speeches. “It will be like trench warfare, where you are funneled and the defenders have all the advantage.” He paused for a moment and picked up someone else’s coffee glass, the liquid trembling as he sipped it. “The hostage is probably guarded by an armed escort. And that man most certainly has his orders.”

  Silence settled over the contingent like mist in a graveyard, the recent adrenaline of plotting now pooling like a depressant in their bellies.

  “Well, rain on my fucking parade,” Jerry Binder whispered, but his tone held no malice for Horse. In fact, it was tinted with respect for a fellow professional.

  “And so?” Benni rubbed both of his eyes with one hand. “Your conclusion, Horse?”

  Horse sat up straighter in his chair. “The hostage must be aboveground when you assault,” he said with conviction. “For some reason, Klump must bring her up.” He turned to Baum. “I think, boss, that you must find a way to get her to do this. To make her want to do it.”

  Shaul Nimrodi slowly pulled out a chair and sat down next to Benni. He seemed no longer concerned that an intruder might eavesdrop. He was devoid of ideas and only praying that Baum’s mind was still sharp, as sharp as it had once been in Beirut, in Suez, in the forbidden city of Petra, when they were young fools and their reflexes were as quick as viper strikes.

  “Is there a way, my friend?” Nimrodi whispered.

  Benni sat back and closed his eyes, folding his arms across his chest. He dismissed the throb at his temples, dissolved the image of Maya weeping over a fresh grave in Jerusalem. Martina had to bring Ruth aboveground. She had to want to do it, and the move could not be spontaneous. It had to be timed, planned. Such an act would occur only in response to an arrangement. An agreement. A deal.

  “There might be a way,” he murmured.

  He could feel the shift in telepathies, hear the men’s bodies angle toward him. He opened his eyes, to find his volunteers staring at him with the hunger of children who desperately want to please a parent. Benni placed his palms on the edge of the table.

  “God knows I love my daughter,” he said. “And God willing, Martina Ursula Klump loves her mother.”

  Chapter 18: New York City

  By sundown, the interior of the black Jeep Cherokee had grown as cold as an Eskimo tribal tomb in the Alaskan tundra.

  The vehicle’s engine had been inactive for hours, the heating fans as still as the rusted props of a sunken scow, and it seemed probable that the battery’s acid had been turned to the consistency of a snow cone. The comforting hiss of the jeep’s AM/FM was strictly forbidden, so the plumes of exhaled breath rose to the roof and hung there in a silence broken only by the occasional muted crackle from a concealed transceiver. Although it was not yet 7:00 P.M., the winter darkness was as pitch as midnight, and the two members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force stared blankly from their alabaster faces, their bodies as stiff as the carp carcasses under glass at the corner fish market.

  FBI Special Agent Jill Greene reclined against the tilted back of the passenger seat, a position she chose because otherwise her six-foot frame offered too much of a silhouette. Her blond hair was tucked beneath a down ski hat with ear flaps, which she referred to as her “Elmer Fudd,” and the thick roll of a brown turtleneck was stretched over her sharp jaw. She would have opted for long johns, but if she had to run, it would be like sprinting in a diving suit. The rest of her was encased in a maroon ski coverall, and a nylon belly pouch held her ID and her Smith & Wesson automatic. She thought that she had never suffered a chill so deep, so numbingly painful, and she wanted to scream and slap her frozen body with her gloved hands. Yet her only movement was the curling of her toes inside her blue Nikes, for she was not about to reveal a single twitch of discomfort to her partner.

  New York Police Department detective John de Vizio was not quite so proud. He sat hunched in the driver’s seat, wearing a green down parka, over a heavy ragg sweater, over his Kevlar vest (which he used only in the winter months now), over a navy cotton turtleneck. He had also stuffed his middle-aged body into a black, bib-type ski overall and wrapped his lower half in a tartan wool blanket. He knew that Greene disapproved of the coverlet, because it would inhibit quick action, just as she would have sneered at his electric socks had she known about them. But he didn’t really give a damn about what she thought. She was barely half his age; he had twenty years’ experience on her and had waited out a thousand more sits
than her few measly “surveillances”—as her snotty Feebie buddies called this kind of torture. He slapped his thighs, rolled to the left and right like a decked tuna, groaned, and looked over at her. She was sitting there like the goddamned Sphinx.

  “Tell me you don’t feel this, Greene,” de Vizio snapped. “Tell me.”

  “I feel it, John.”

  “Yeah,” the detective snorted. “You feel it.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “This isn’t cold. It’s the dark fucking side of the moon.”

  Greene smiled. She did not express herself the way John did, keeping the foul language of her sorority days out of her lexicon now. She was going places in the Bureau, and a woman did not climb by emulating the crudities of male coworkers. But she enjoyed hearing his creative cursing, the way she imagined a reformed prostitute might nostalgically watch porno tapes.

  De Vizio turned to her again.

  “How do you do it, Greene?”

  “Do what, John?”

  “You haven’t moved in a friggin’ hour.”

  “Woman,” she said simply, keeping her eyes focused down the street on the doorway to number 167 East Eighty-ninth. “Superior being. Extra layer of fat.”

  “Oh, please,” de Vizio sneered. “Extra layer my ass.”

  “Yes,” Greene agreed. “Yours does have an extra layer.” That was about as far as she would descend into his world of bitter banter.

  De Vizio broke off the contest and peered through the breath-fogged windshield. An elderly couple was approaching the entrance to the Edelweiss. He wiped a small circle of the glass with his glove, picked up the Olympus 35 mm, and propped the 300 mm lens on the steering wheel. He had 3200 ASA lab film in the camera.

  “Don’t bother,” said Greene. “They can barely walk.”

  “If I don’t, you’ll probably turn me in,” de Vizio mumbled. His hands were trembling, but he managed to get the shot. He dropped the camera on the seat. “Seven hours of friggin’ nothing.”

  “It only has to happen once, John,” Greene reminded him in the tone of an Academy instructor. “Then it’s all worth it. Just one of her cell gets careless and crosses our path. The right man, at his wrong time.”