The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

By now, Mossad teams in Europe would be climbing into tractor trailers registered to cover corporations. On a relayed signal from Itzik to his Mossad counterpart in Tel Aviv, they would deliver the tons of agreed-upon spare parts to anonymous Farsi-speaking drivers. It was the first half of the deal, upon which the primary portion relied, but to Itzik it seemed too simple, too insignificant a demand. It troubled him in instinctive ways, like his occasional produce purchases in Machaneh Yehuda, when he would successfully bargain down a fruit seller, only to discover that the grapes were sour.

  Sure, for months now his commander had ordered all AMAN field personnel to focus their intelligence gathering on Moonlight; report all rumors, search for the loopholes, find the catch. Yet there was no hint of an ambush, no smell of deception. The Mossad, with its much wider area of global operations, had likewise refocused many of its efforts, trying to uncover the dangers in what appeared to be a straight deal. Always reluctant to commit themselves fully to a position, the civilians had also given a green light.

  And yet the nagging suspicion that the entire intelligence community was being led astray refused to free his mind. Moonlight would be a coup, but he worried that the gala event might be only a sideshow. He had been bred to think this way, for he had matured into the service on the heels of the Yom Kippur War, when a brilliant series of Arab deceptions had nearly resulted in cataclysm.

  Martina Klump’s role simply did not fit the play, her actions being an anomaly to the proceedings. Vengeance alone was not sufficient motive in which to frame her quest, for if she succeeded, the destruction would impact both enemy and ally. Perhaps it could all be attributed to simple synchronicity.

  Itzik was not paid to entertain coincidence. And yet . . .

  He looked at his watch. In one more hour, he would have to signal a “Go,” and the flotilla would cross the point of no return.

  He sighed, and as he watched the indigo ghosts scudding across the horizon, he answered the captain’s question.

  “I am the commander of AMAN’s Special Operations, Ami,” he said. “I know too much. And I never know enough.”

  Chapter 20: Skorpion

  The impact of Martina Klump’s palm against Ruth’s cheek cracked like a lion tamer’s bullwhip, echoing off the bulkheads of the small bedchamber and followed by a stunning ring in her left ear and a dull explosion in her brain. The power of the blow was further enhanced by its undeflected symmetry, for it had arrived completely unexpected, beginning with a hand resting casually on Martina’s hip and ending as her arm suddenly arced through the air like a baseball bat.

  In the instant following the slap, Ruth realized that there had been a warning. It was the way Martina opened the door and strode into the compartment, the sheen in her eyes and her labored breath. Her body seemed to contain a great pressure, and as Ruth rose slowly from the bed, Martina appeared to be gazing past her at something that colored her face and lifted her upper lip.

  And suddenly Ruth was careening through space, her skull bouncing into the hard corner where the walls intersected. Her hair flew up into a spray of wild tangles, and she slid down onto the pillow, her legs splayed like those of a child playing jacks. Her cheek burned as if scalded by an iron, and she tasted a coppery froth of blood where her flesh had been slammed against her teeth. Yet her tears were not emotional, only smacked from their ducts, and she chose not to wipe them as she raised her trembling hand, cleared the hair from her face, and tucked it behind an ear.

  “Dein verdammter Vater! Your accursed father!” Martina yelled as she paced at the foot of the narrow bed, pivoting in jerky twists of her body, her hands clutching at the air as if she were choking a ghost. She was wearing a black flight coverall stained with patches of oil and grit, and a pair of leather tanker’s boots with ankle straps and cross-buckles clunked on the floor of the camper. The aluminum door to the sleeping compartment had remained open, and Martina must have sensed Youssef’s concerned stare from up forward of the kitchenette, for she suddenly spun and kicked it closed. Normally the walls of the recreational vehicle would have reverberated with such a blow, but as it was buried belowground, only a heavy thud resulted, followed by the whisper of trickling sand.

  Ruth flinched with this second venting of Martina’s rage. Up until this moment, the woman had appeared to be unflappable, her cool demeanor under pressure almost admirable. In their brief encounters, she was civil if unsympathetic, her expression at times approaching a smile—a sign, Ruth assumed, of the woman’s superior position in whatever gambit she was playing. The effect of Martina’s confidence had been to drain Ruth’s hope, dragging her through alternating hours of panic and despair.

  But this was different. Something Ruth’s father had done or said, or failed to do, had opened a fissure in the woman’s armor, causing a regressive tantrum. For the first time since her abduction, Ruth felt empowered by Martina’s unexpected violence.

  She watched carefully as Martina suddenly stopped moving, facing a tall mirror on the door of the camper’s closet. She reached up with both hands and briskly rubbed her short blond hair, ruffling it into a spiky plume. Then all at once she was tearing open the closet door, yanking out the black mourning dress of Ruth’s recent travels. She looked at it, then flipped the hanger away and tried to tear the dress in half, but the cloth would not give. “Scheisse!” she screamed, and then she had a black, short-bladed knife in her hand, and she slashed the fabric into strips. She hurled the ragged heap into a corner, cursing like a sister who had decided that this Cinderella would not be going to the ball.

  Ruth adjusted her position, moving her back against the rear wall of the trailer, setting her bare feet on the rough navy blanket. They had thrown her a pair of gray sweatpants and one of those dark-blue commando sweaters with elbow and shoulder patches, for there was no heat in the RV and the nights were very cold. They had taken her shoes.

  She licked at the corner of her mouth, tasting the warm blood, then gently explored the gash inside her cheek with the tip of her tongue. She pressed her hands into the blanket, gathering a fold in her fingers. Martina was still holding the knife. Until this moment, Ruth had not thought herself capable of overpowering the woman. But if that blade came any closer, she would launch herself at Klump, crash her to the floor, and pummel her until they dragged her off the bloody body. The idea of it set her heart pounding at the cotton of her bra, and a cold rivulet of sweat snaked from her right armpit.

  Yet Martina seemed to have forgotten that there was another presence in the compartment. She did not look at Ruth, who had become no more to her now than a flower vase smashed in a fit of frustration. She turned her back to the low bed and slowly sat on its corner, gripping the knife and pounding the hilt on her knee. Her back shuddered as she mumbled in German.

  “Mutti, I am so sorry.”

  Ruth held her breath as she tried to overhear the whispered demons escaping Martina’s mouth, tried to imagine why she should now invoke her mother.

  “The devil take him and burn him in hell if he harms you.” Her voice was like a child’s whine, a thin plea choked with liquid. “I will save you, Mutti, I swear it. I will save you and still destroy their filthy bargain, and the only thing left for them to trade will be blood and bones.”

  The left side of Ruth’s face throbbed, and a lump was rising under her hair where her head had struck the wall, but she pushed through the pain and tried to focus her concentration. The endless hours inside the cold metal cavern had exhausted her, dulled her, yet she realized that here was an opportunity. A small window had opened through which she might glimpse the truth of her circumstances, and she had to grasp the clues quickly.

  What was the “filthy bargain” of which Martina muttered? What kind of “trade” would Martina’s enemies hold dear, while she swore to turn the objects of barter into pulverized meat?

  For most of Ruth’s short imprisonment, she had been allowed to see nothing outside her chamber. Only once had she been taken out into the freezing desert n
ight for an “exercise” walk around the compound, yet passing through Martina’s sunken warren was enough to confirm that some sort of major operation was afoot, and her abduction only a side issue.

  There were three long trailers buried in the sand, of the type used to pamper film stars on location shoots. As a former army intelligence officer, Ruth had visited hundreds of concealed observation posts, bunkers, and communications facilities, for the Israelis also had a penchant for digging. One such OP on the Egyptian border was so undetectable that she had walked unaware across its roof, while her escort from the engineering corps grinned proudly. The air exchange vents were concealed in tufts of prickly scrub, the head of a periscope inside a fiberglass cactus. It was easy for her to imagine how Martina’s lair had been constructed.

  A large semicircular trough had been dug into the sand, into which the RVs had been driven onto wooden planks. Duct tape and plastic sheeting had been used to seal the wheel wells, engine compartments, and roof-mounted air conditioners. You could not run the engines with their intakes obstructed, so electrical cables had been laid to the vehicles’ external hookups, leading from a gas generator that hummed day and night. The pop-up emergency ceiling exits had been removed and vertical aluminum vent pipes inserted, capped with conical “hats” wrapped in earth-tone burlap. The trailers had been backed in catty corner, so that the open driver’s door of each vehicle nearly met the tailgate exit of the next, the connections effected with sections of two-meter-wide flexible PVC water carriers, also sealed with plastic and tape.

  When the sand was hoed back over the trailers, their roofs rested two meters below the desert surface.

  The entrance ramp that led to the first vehicle was covered with a camouflage net and branches of scrub. This was the “action” trailer. The fold-down dining table just behind the driving station was being used as a plotting surface, but most of the other amenities, including the kitchen appliances, had been removed to make room for communications gear, equipment, and ammunition lockers. The walls were pegged with steel bolts supporting AK-47s, Hungarian AKMs, MP-5 machine pistols, and two RPGs. Martina’s men sat on twist-up piano stools, monitoring radio traffic through headphones, cleaning grit from their weapons, or reading Al Watan Al Arabi. The cabin lights sometimes flickered as the gas generator choked on a bit of dust, the yellow glow reflecting off the high windshield and side windows, revealing the umber sand packed up against the glass. The pressed earth was lined with black crevasses and small rocks, a pattern suggesting a giant reptile hugging the camper to its belly.

  The second vehicle was the living quarters for Martina’s men. The ripe smell of chilled bacteria leaked from the humming refrigerator, and the scent of burned zahtar rose from the stovetop. The men had minimal access to water, and the dried sweat common to all soldiers’ bunkers topped off the aromas. Every available horizontal space was covered with a well-used sleeping bag, including two fold-down ship bunks bolted to the wall where the kitchen table had stood.

  The last trailer was clearly Martina’s private quarters. She had not warmed the space with personal touches. There were no photographs, printed quilts, or tea cozies. However, the small dining table held a collection of maps, aircraft technical manuals, a copy of the German weapons magazine Visier, a pistol-cleaning kit, and a box of Tampax. She had given up her bedroom in the rear for use as Ruth’s cell, after first stripping it of every item that might be used innovatively by a prisoner. A heavy dead bolt had been added to the bedroom door.

  Nowhere in the complex had an emergency escape tunnel been constructed. Martina expected her men to fight and die with her where they stood.

  During Ruth’s brief passages through this submerged trailer park, she did not glimpse assault diagrams, catch the men preparing dastardly disguises, or overhear the proper names of Israeli or European cities popping through their Arabic. Rather, it was the atmosphere that convinced her of a countdown, the silences of men anticipating action, settling private accounts. It was the same pre-mission intensity she had witnessed often, always as an observer, guilty in her safety. That emotion was certainly not present now, but she could still smell an operation on the brink of its launching.

  Whatever Martina was planning, she clearly thought that holding Ruth would assure noninterference. This in turn meant that somehow Ruth’s father, and therefore AMAN, could foil her operation. The conclusion had to be that Martina’s target was an Israeli one, perhaps the “trade” of her incoherent mumblings. Yet here Ruth’s reasoning ground to a halt. There were not enough pieces. As always, her father’s lust for secrecy had left her in the dark.

  “Oh, Papa.” Martina was whispering now, rocking slightly as if trying to control an abdominal pain. “Please forgive me, Papa. I should never have let her leave home. I exposed her, I know it—it was so stupid.” She called herself Trottel, a retarded idiot. She roughly smeared the end of her nose with the back of her fist. “But I will get her back, I swear to you.”

  Ruth stayed still as an ice statuette, which was how she had come to feel, given the winter desert days, hardly discernible from the nights. The gloom of her metal cavern did not change with the course of the sun. Her watch had been taken, and her only point of time reference was the top of the air vent. A section of chain-link fence covered the ceiling hatch, but through it she could see the undercap of the conical hat, and as the sun moved, the light inside the tube faded to a shadowless black. She shivered constantly and her nose ran, and now the bruising of her face triggered a further flood. Without warning, she sneezed.

  Martina leapt up from the bed as if reacting to a gunshot. She spun on Ruth, regarding her as though the young woman had just crawled in through a window.

  “You think he is going to save you, don’t you?” she said, her voice still heavy with her moments of remorse. “You think he is going to come in here and whisk you away.” She snorted once through her nose. “Or maybe that stupid policeman, yes?”

  Ruth just watched her, focusing on her eyes even as the blade flashed with Martina’s gesticulations. Early on she had found the opportunity to ask about Michael’s fate, when Youssef allowed her to use the small toilet between her chamber and the kitchenette. He refused to respond, and she failed to read the truth in his eyes, yet now Martina’s slip revealed the wonderful reality. Michael had survived. He was out there somewhere, maybe together with her father. Forces were gathering on her behalf, oh, yes.

  “Perhaps he will,” Martina speculated, her body easing into a more casual posture as she regained some composure. “Your father is a very resourceful man.” She looked up at the ceiling as she tapped the knife blade on a fingernail. “Isn’t he?”

  It was time for Ruth to answer. She had to speak, or lose the power she had gained by refusing to cry out with Martina’s blow. “Yes, he is,” she warned.

  Martina nodded as she inspected the dirty crevices of the trailer, frowning like an interior decorator in a shelter for the homeless. “Ah, that’s nice to hear,” she said. “A daughter’s pride.”

  Ruth knew enough about the woman’s early loss of her own father to be wary of every step in this emotional minefield. However, she had no idea that once, when Martina was barely out of her teens, she had looked to Benjamin Baum as a substitute for that lost paternal care.

  “A father’s love is also very powerful,” she suggested carefully.

  Martina dropped her pale eyes to Ruth’s face. “Really?” she asked as if, having lost that gift, she could not imagine it.

  “I think parental love is the most powerful of all,” Ruth said, realizing with a twinge that she might not live to adore a child of her own.

  “And you think your father loves you?”

  “Yes.” It was a selfish love, but was there really any other kind?

  Martina’s expression did not change, though she lowered her gaze to Ruth’s mouth. The two women were separated only by the length of the bed.

  “Your lip is swelling,” she said.

  Ruth rai
sed her hand to touch the bruise, then stopped halfway and returned her palm to the blanket.

  “You could use some ice,” Martina suggested.

  “That would be good. Thank you.”

  “We have no ice here,” Martina said flatly. She waved a hand through the air. “I do not allow it. The freezers function, but I forbid such luxuries. Men are like children. Give them a treat and they immediately go slack and lazy, expecting toys and presents and affection.”

  Ruth said nothing. She had a fleeting image of Martina as a mother, a shiver of pity for any child of hers.

  “He loves no one,” Martina said. She looked down at her hands and, discovering oily grit beneath her fingernails, began to clean them with the point of the blade. “Your father. He is not capable of it.”

  Ruth stepped blithely into the trap, a scoff of arrogance. “Oh? You know him so well?”

  “I know him much better than you do, my dear!” Martina yelled without warning as she thrust the blade forward, causing Ruth to bang her head back against the wall. “Much better!”

  “You must be very perceptive, then,” Ruth responded quickly, trying to assuage Klump before she erupted again. Her calf muscles bulged as she prepared to parry a lunge.

  “Perceptive?” Martina sneered. “Perceptive? You think I am some kind of deluded clairvoyant? I know him from experience, years of it. He is not a man. Or yes, he is, with everything that implies. A lizard, hiding beneath a rock. A liar, a betrayer, a deceiver by trade!” She stopped yelling and slowly straightened up. Then she shook her head and laughed once as she turned and gently closed the closet door. “You don’t know, do you?” she whispered in genuine empathy.

  “It is true that my father is some of those things,” Ruth offered, although Martina’s vehemence confused her, warning of some strange connection that she could not imagine. “He is an intelligence officer. Spies are not princes.”

  Martina’s fingers were set to the glass of the mirror where she had pushed it home. She stood there looking at her own face, and then she began to laugh, throwing her head back and giving full vent to it.