The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  Schneller looked up from his work when something caught his eye through the slats of the balcony. It was Benni Baum’s bald head bobbing through the park as the colonel and Eckstein crossed onto Avenue el Mouahidine.

  “Eekon l’mizdar hamefaked,” Schneller murmured in Hebrew. “Prepare for the commander’s inspection.”

  “Watch your language,” Lapkin warned in English.

  There was a soft rap on the room door, and Lapkin went in off the balcony.

  “Password?” He smiled behind the closed door.

  “Canada is just a suburb of Detroit,” came Eckstein’s voice.

  “Fuck you.” Lapkin chuckled as he turned the lock.

  Eckstein came on through. He saw that the men were working out on the balcony, yet the sensation that events were too quickly swallowing them all caused him to stop for a moment and examine the room. The salmon-colored wall plaster was peeling, showing white patches like the sunburned skin of a Scandinavian. A single bare lightbulb hung from a wire, and the two small beds were steel military types, their white sheets scarred by ironing burns, gray woolen blankets rolled at the feet. There were no pictures or posters of any kind.

  He knew that every man on this team had encamped in such places before: flophouses, barracks, bunkers, bombed-out buildings in foreign lands. Like himself, they had lain on lumps and stared at ceilings not their own, seeking elusive sleep as they wondered if this would be the final bedroom of their lives. He had brought these men to this, and that stone of responsibility caused him to swear, once again, that he would quit this game and never ask another man to volunteer.

  Lapkin seemed to read Eckstein’s mind, for he patted the major’s shoulder and said, “Hey. At least it isn’t mud.”

  They went out onto the balcony.

  “Should I stand at attention?” Ari Schneller looked up from his growing pile of packages.

  “Thirty push-ups,” said Eckstein as he bent to examine one of the cleaning kits. “Looks good, gentlemen.”

  “A season at Sanur,” said Lapkin, referring to the paratroopers’ training base, where recruits were taught anal-retentive attention to their gear.

  Eckstein stood. “We were just at the Gallia.” This was another small hotel in the “budget” area of the medina. “Didi’s almost finished with the stretcher. Made it out of a two-man tent.”

  “Born to sew,” Lapkin commented. Lerner’s rigging skills were such that he could have made a wedding gown from a cargo chute.

  “And Horse is making mud pies,” Eckstein added.

  “Entschuldigung? Pardon?” Schneller often lapsed into the mother tongue with Eckstein.

  “The assault model,” said Eckstein. “You should see him. I’m sure he has toy trains at home.”

  Lapkin smiled at the image of Horse laying tracks in his Jerusalem flat.

  There was not very much for Eckstein to do here. As team leaders, he and Benni had to flit between the assigned safe locations, checking progress and coordinating activities. Yet these men did not really need baby-sitting. He made to leave. “You two need anything?”

  “Weapons,” Schneller and Lapkin said simultaneously, then looked up at each other and laughed.

  “Slingshots all right?” Eckstein deadpanned.

  “Just the ingredients will do,” said Lapkin. “Wishbones, condoms, and marbles.”

  “Maybe by tomorrow night.” Eckstein smiled at them. “See you at eighteen hundred.”

  Benni and Eytan walked along Avenue el Mouahidine, occasionally sidestepping as one of a cloud of moped riders would peel off, run right up on the sidewalk, and plug his rattling machine into a rack of scooters. Although the two men were clearly Europeans, none of the young locals tried to attach himself to them, for they moved too purposefully, eyes unattracted by the exotic surroundings. So often in the past they had diffused the dangers of operations with blustery jokes or false bickering, yet today they moved in silent sobriety, minds focused on a problem the likes of which no sadistic IDF scenario planner could ever concoct. They summoned every tactic developed through experience, yet in the end, both knew, the outcome would be in the hands of luck and fate.

  “She’ll be all right,” Eytan said quietly as they reached the large traffic circle at the corner of Bab Agnou.

  Benni did not respond.

  “And if not,” Eytan continued, “we will go with her.”

  Benni stopped walking, forcing his young partner to do the same, and he looked up into Eckstein’s face. Could it be that Eytan was saying what Baum himself had not yet confessed? That if Ruth died, her father would not go home alive, and Eckstein understood that and would join him in a ritual self-sacrifice? No, that could not be. Eckstein had his own wife and son. He could not possibly hold Ruth’s life so dear, no matter his brotherly love for her. Yet he had seen Eytan commit acts of suicidal heroics, wondering if a therapist might someday discover Eckstein lived in a world of hidden emotional pain and only survived this life because the opportunity to leave it properly had not yet presented itself. No. He simply meant they would save Ruth, or die trying. That was normal. That was acceptable.

  Eckstein pointed to the green awnings of the Café Glacier la Victoire. “I’ll be in there, overcaffeinating,” he said as he walked away.

  Benni crossed the circle to the Grand Hotel Tazi. Compared to the rest of the team’s pensions, the Tazi was deserving of its title. The rooms were relatively large, the necessity for a good work space having been Sadeen’s only request.

  Sadeen cracked open the door to his second-floor room. Whenever possible, operators on foreign soil never occupied higher floors. If your operation was blown, you had to be able to drop to the street.

  “Hola, Padre.” The sapper smiled as Benni slipped through. The room faced northwest, and the afternoon sunlight was diced by a wrought-iron window guard. Sadeen’s yellow T-shirt was stuck to his back, he wore tan gym shorts above his bare feet, and his curly brown hair was matted by soiled finger combing. He dropped to his knees on the tile floor and continued working.

  The place looked like an anarchist’s laboratory. The twin beds had been pushed aside, exposing a strip of open floor, along which Sadeen had laid out the components for his “flash-bangs.” There were long rows of various-width containers—soda cans, sink cleansers, vegetable tins, deodorant dispensers—some of them already bisected or drilled, their discarded contents forming an unimaginable brew in a plastic garbage can. Three soup bowls held different types of wood screws next to boxes of cornstarch, a tub of roofing tar, spools of electrical tape, three bags of children’s marbles, rolls of toilet paper, a dozen rubber balls, pliers, scissors, and a carpet knife. Benni looked over to one of the beds, upon which lay two black jallabiyas and a large plastic bag full of fireworks. The pyrotechnics were sold openly in the Djemaa el Fna, but the two boxes of Winchester twelve-gauge Express surprised him.

  “Where did you get the shotgun shells?” Benni asked.

  “Mustaffa,” Sadeen answered as he sliced a rubber ball in half. “The Berbers are bird hunters, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did Eckstein find that kid so fast?” Sadeen was clearly pleased with his “guide.”

  “Eytan has been here before,” said Benni. In fact, Eckstein maintained a link with the mountain tribesman by sending him the odd gift, as he did with all his local assets in foreign lands. The Berber guides were constantly being shaken down by plainclothes Marrakesh police, and Eytan had once sprung Mustaffa from jail with a hefty bribe.

  “Guess so,” said Sadeen. “You mention Mr. Anthony, and the kid’s eyes light up.”

  “How are you going to use them?” Benni turned one of the red shells in his fingers.

  “Well, first I was going to go electric, with a battery, impact switch, and some sort of filament or flashbulb as igniter.” Sadeen chattered rapidly, enthused about his improvisations. “But that is too risky, so I decided to keep it simple.” He held up half an empty cleanser container. He had
worked a hole in the aluminum bottom cap and forced just the brass primer case of a shotgun shell through. “Impact detonator, mix of powder from the shotgun shells and the fireworks, then a head of cornstarch for a nice air burst.”

  Benni frowned. “They will detonate when they hit? Just like that?” He was versed enough to know that the primer would need a robust striker.

  “Of course not,” Sadeen scoffed. He slipped half a soup can over the cleanser tube, a snug fit. A screw had been twisted into the can bottom, and he picked up half a rubber ball and held it over the end. “Striker pin, just like on a parachute flare, but with an aerodynamic nose.” The standard infantry flare was a long aluminum tube with a primer on one end. You simply reversed the end cap with its hidden striker, slipped it over the primer, and slammed the tube down onto your knee to fire it. “I will glue marbles around the primer for weight and put kite tails on the back ends for stability.” He gestured at the black jallabiyas.

  “Of course,” Benni murmured. He had a vision of them all hurling canisters that would then just lie there like bouquets at a leper colony wedding.

  “He is going to kill us all, mon colonel!” Rick Nabbe’s voice echoed from the bathroom. Benni stepped carefully across the floor and stuck his head into the cubicle. Nabbe was sitting on the toilet, making waterproof match containers from plastic film canisters, gluing matchbook flints to the insides of the caps. He looked up at Benni and grinned. “I prefer to die with dignity.”

  Benni backed out of the bathroom and shut the door. Nabbe’s matches and Sadeen’s powder were better kept segregated.

  “So? What about the truck?” Benni asked Sadeen reluctantly.

  “That piece of brilliance is being worked on as we speak.” The engineer smiled as he sliced open a shotgun shell. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No.”

  Benni sighed. He started for the door, and then his insecurity got the best of him. “Sadeen? Are these things going to work?”

  The engineer looked up at him and batted his eyelids like an offended debutante. “Amigo,” he said, “if I had but two more days I would give you LAW rockets and claymores.”

  Benni nodded and went out. . . .

  At the Hotel al Charaf, Eckstein was admitted into the lair of Binder and O’Donovan. He waved a hand through air thick with paint fumes, but the stench would pique no one’s curiosity, as the al Charaf lay just beside the busy petrol station.

  Ten camel-hide backpacks hung like smoked hams from a white clothesline stretched between the window grates, their skins spray-painted black. The floor was covered with the pages of a daily Arabic newspaper, upon which nine kochmers, the ritual Berber knives, were also laid out for painting. Binder sat on the edge of one of the beds, staring at the knives with regret. He was a blade aficionado, and the kochmers were quite beautiful, with curved, silver-plated scabbards, camel-bone hilts, and silver belt rings.

  Binder stood up. He was wearing a garrison belt with canteens and had linked one of the knives to the eyelets over his left hip. The big detective turned like a clumsy fashion model.

  “Check it out, baby,” he said. “Spider of Arabia.”

  “Very nice,” said Eckstein, squinting at the polished silver. “They’ll see you coming from three kilometers.”

  “I’m gonna paint them,” Binder whined defensively. “It’s a fucking shame is all.” He drew the blade cross-handed and showed it to Eckstein. The point was good, but the steel edge was so flat you could barely have sliced watermelon with it. “You’d have to go right to the heart or throat with this thing. Won’t cut for shit.”

  “Then why didn’t you buy kitchen knives?”

  Binder looked embarrassed. “ ’Cause these are scary,” he said as he slid the blade home again.

  “Ahh, the psychological edge.”

  “Fuckin’ A.” Binder picked up a can of spray paint, then bent over the newspaper and stroked across the knives with a long black plume. “Sacrilege,” he sighed.

  Mike O’Donovan came out of the bathroom. He was wearing his white dress shirt, which had been laundered in Casablanca, a pair of khaki chinos, and brown laced shoes, just purchased. His hair was washed and combed, and he had touched up his bruises.

  “Better move, huh?” he said to Eckstein.

  The Israeli looked at his watch. “Yes. Your flight is at 1530.”

  “Terrific,” Binder complained. “He goes flying while yours truly does all the homework.” He gestured at two large shopping bags printed with the green crosses and crescents of a pharmacy.

  “Benni will help you,” said Eckstein as he moved with O’Donovan to the door.

  “Send him up,” said Binder.

  A few minutes later, Baum came into the room and locked the door.

  “Skipper.” Binder greeted him as he continued to dull the scabbards.

  “Spider,” Baum replied. He picked up the shopping bags and dumped their contents on the empty bed. Then he sat down and sorted through the piles of gauze rolls, white tape, square bandages, surgical scissors, anti-infection cream, and Vaseline tubes. He laid out ten Ziploc bags and taped a Band-Aid to each for easy identification as a first-aid kit.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  Binder shrugged. “Go ahead.” The spray can rattled as he shook it again. “I’m already sucking gas.”

  Then Benni thought better of lighting up in the aerosol haze, so he plugged an unlit Rothman into his mouth. He cut a coil of rubber tubing into equal lengths for tourniquets, then fashioned quick-tying field dressings from pads and strips of gauze. The whine of mopeds and the friendly shouts in Arabic drifted up from the street, and he tried very hard not to envision the kinds of wounds upon which his no longer sterile concoctions might soon lie. He had once seen a woman shot, and he closed his eyes as he remembered the ragged puncture blaspheming her smooth flesh.

  Picking up a rubber rain poncho, he began cutting out squares for sucking chest wounds. . . .

  The ride to the Marrakesh airport at Menara was only a few kilometers over the fine wide road to Asni, yet as Eckstein and O’Donovan sat in the back of the Mercedes cab, they both wished they could further shorten the trip with distracting chatter. But all the hollow bits of small talk had been swept away by their cerebral storms.

  Eckstein had made a reservation for O’Donovan with a French pilot who flew sightseeing tours over the area. If Nimrodi succeeded in bringing in a transport plane, it would first land at Menara. But the Marrakesh facility was controlled by the Royal Moroccan Air Force, and you could not have nine combat-clad parachutists traipsing across the tarmac to board a strange jump plane. The craft would have to land, refuel, lift off again, and almost immediately declare an emergency. Then it would briefly set down again somewhere close by, load the men at that rendezvous point, radio the tower that only a warning light had malfunctioned, and be on its way over the Atlas range.

  It was O’Donovan’s idea to enlist the aid of a local pilot, for they could not just trot over to the tower and ask for the coordinates of potential emergency landing sites. When he heard that the pilot was French, he insisted that he be the one to go up for the survey. Eckstein pondered the American’s strange demand as the two men rode in silence, their windows open and their heads turned outboard to the passing palms. O’Donovan smoked, while Eckstein wished that he could.

  “What makes you think you’ll have rapport with this pilot?” Eckstein asked. Then he glanced at the back of the cabdriver’s head, a signal to keep the conversation cryptic.

  “I don’t,” said O’Donovan. “The French hate us. We saved their asses too many times.”

  “And that’s a plus?”

  “He’ll react to a challenge from me. It’s a knee-jerk ego thing. I’ll just have to mention Normandy, and he’ll probably buzz the tower.”

  “I hope that’s not what you have in mind.”

  O’Donovan did not answer. He was watching a fat tourist trying to
mount a camel in an olive grove. The animal spit at its driver, who was thrashing its forehead with a switch.

  Eckstein breathed in the mixed scents of desert dust and prickly pear cactus, spices that brought sense memories of home. His thoughts turned to the many hostage-taking incidents that had ended with Israeli commando raids. More often than not, one or more of the hostages died in these attempts, but the decision to raid rather than negotiate was still lauded by politicians and public. In this case, there would be no political capital. Ruth’s life was the only reward.

  “I’ve known her since she was a child,” he murmured as he stared at nothing and the breeze chilled his neck.

  “She’s not a child anymore,” O’Donovan said after a moment. Then he realized his response was defensive, an inappropriate suitor encroaching on a close-knit family. His voice dropped to a near whisper. “What was she like?”

  “Much the same.” Over the years, Eckstein had met some of Ruth’s few boyfriends and lovers. She was selective, and he realized that he would probably never meet the Michael O’Donovan to whom she had been attracted, for those aspects of the American’s character were certainly suppressed now and might be burned away forever in the coming firefight. “Smart, headstrong, direct,” he added. “Warm, when you’re worthy of it. Her beauty has only grown.”

  “Then she hasn’t changed,” O’Donovan said. He turned to the Israeli, and for a moment he had the urge to grip the man’s hand, to give and gather strength from it. Instead, he tossed his cigarette from the window and laced his fingers together over his knee. “I just hope this will all be worth the effort,” he sighed, meaning that Ruth would still be alive when they got there.