The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  She lay on her back, her nose just inches from the ceiling hole, and she opened her mouth and took in great gasps of the cool air swirling in through the vent. She coughed in agony, and a mist of grit sprayed out over her swollen tongue.

  She slowly lifted her hands to the lip of the hatch, aware as she gripped it that her fingers were caked with blood and earth. She pulled with her trembling arms and sat up into the opening, her hair streaming sand, like some mythical she-monster rising from a lava pool, and she was inside the vent.

  She squinted up dizzily at the conical cap. If she could just get her feet out and up onto the edge of the hatch, she could probably straighten herself and push the cover off. She sat for a moment, quieting her heart, gathering strength.

  Then she realized that the vent tube was sitting flush to the roof. She reached and pushed the aluminum. The entire thing toppled away from her and clanged, leaving her to stare dumbly into its fallen mouth.

  She came to her senses. She was out. She had to move. Right now. She put her palms to the roof and pushed to free her legs. But the effort was unnecessary, as she suddenly felt her hair clamped in a hand, and she screamed as she was lifted free in one mighty pull.

  She staggered backward, but a large palm held her spine erect. She squinted into a darkness absolute, yet gradually she discerned the shapes of human forms.

  She was surrounded by Martina’s HOGs. Their silhouettes showed the bulky shapes of combat webbing strapped to their bodies, black kaffiyehs on their heads, and weapons in their hands. Their smiles offered the only available light.

  Martina stepped in front of her face.

  “Welcome to the party,” she said. “I was just coming to get you.”

  Sadeen had broken three of his ribs.

  It was foolish and unnecessary and he could have avoided it, but almost immediately after his big XL Cloud deployed successfully, he had fallen prey to superstitions such as rarely distracted his engineer’s brain. The dark-blue canopy fluttered above him, and the Dakota’s engines faded quickly into the limitless ink, and he was alone. It was so dark and so cold that he felt like an astronaut expelled from a space shuttle, and he reached down from the toggles and pulled the woolen chin of his balaclava over his mouth.

  Didi had scavenged a triangular altimeter pillow from one of the other rigs and mounted it on Sadeen’s chest strap, taping a lensatic compass to it with ripstop. The sapper looked down at the luminous face and made a slow right turn until he was heading at 343 degrees north-northwest.

  Amazingly, the moped was still there, laid across his legs like a giant half loaf of pita. Its weight and the force exerted by his forward glide pressed it against his ruck, forcing the pack between his legs so that they were splayed like a wishbone, the CAR-15 chafing his pelvis. Now was the time to reach down and quickly cut through the taut loops that held the bike to his harness, letting it fall to the end of the climbing rope so he could glide comfortably. But he had the vivid premonition that if he did so, he would lose the contraption. Or, if it remained with him, he would not be able to control his landing and it might smash against a rock. All for nothing. Why screw up a good thing? he asked himself.

  A rushing layer of gray cloud moved below him, and he could not yet discern ground features, yet he was unconcerned. Didi had told him to just maintain his heading. By the time he crossed the area of Klump’s camp, he would be able to clearly see Taghit and the road to Ben Zireg. Given his early exit, he would merely have to land in the flats on the east side of the road, set up the bike, and drive south.

  Lapkin had given him his altimeter. At three thousand meters, his lungs ached and his body felt like a lump of frozen fish carcass. The shadowed ripples of dunes began to show themselves below, and as he descended, his speed became apparent as they moved more quickly past his splayed boots. Then the temperature rose perceptibly, almost like the thermocline as a diver rises into warmer waters, and he wriggled to free his frozen blood.

  At one thousand meters, he was quite sure that he passed over Klump’s camp and grateful that Didi had split his slider, for the small square sail above his head would otherwise have been flapping up a racket in this wind. The black line of the road was very clear now, and he turned due north to avoid crossing it.

  The dunes no longer looked so soft and creamy as he neared them. They all leaned with the prevailing Sahara winds, but their crests were blown into jagged tufts like the eyebrows of old Russian men, and the black steel wool of prickly brush poked up from denuded troughs. As he began to speed toward the ground, he wished that he had released the moped, and while regretting that lack of decision, he forgot to turn back into the wind for his landing.

  He flared instinctively at his usual altitude, which was also a mistake, for the added weight of his gear muddled the response of the chute and he came in impossibly fast. The moped smacked into a rill of sand and his body flipped over it, his face braking the forward roll as his forehead impacted with the ground. He actually heard the crack of bone from inside his body as it rippled up from his left side into his head.

  He could not move, for he was still roped tightly to the bike, his legs splayed in the air and his chest arched into the sand. He felt the chute billowing out in front, jerking at his harness, and the pain came in a nauseating wave.

  He was afraid to raise his left arm and puncture a lung, so he slowly drew it into his body, burrowed his right hand under his neck and across, felt for the hook knife, and tore it from his left palm. Then he began to cut at every line and web strap he could find.

  It took a full five minutes until he was finally standing, bathed in a chill, slimy sweat, the pain in his left side clawing at him with every breath. The chute had snagged on a large clump of black sage, and he just watched it undulate like a beached jellyfish, knowing that he should bury it. The Autobecane lay on its side upon the open slab of shredded carpet. He tore off his hood and his goggles, which had left a deepening bruise around his eyes, like a raccoon’s mask, and staggered out of the ruck.

  He looked at his watch. It was 0026, nearly half-past midnight. From somewhere deep inside he found anger and summoned it, for it was the only drug he had to fight the agony. He freed his weapon, shortened the sling, draped it over his neck, and got a magazine into it. Then he tried very hard not to yell as he bent down and righted the moped.

  He straightened out the handlebars, cursing them for doing this damage to him, and he did not bother to try to rig the dual headlights, not yet, as he slung his ruck over the brake handle and began to push.

  He was in a slight depression, whose edges rose enough that he could see nothing beyond. He stopped and leaned the Autobecane against his thigh as he panicked momentarily, dug into his pocket, found the compass, discovered that he was headed almost due west, and continued. The tires sank into the sand, and he had to lift the handlebars to make progress, a strain that caused him to breathe even harder, which pressed the soft tissue of his left lung against a very sharp splinter of rib.

  He was panting, nearly swooning, when he crested the bowl, but the panorama gave him a thrill of renewal. The mountain range was very close, its starlit ridges running north and south, rising away from him into blackness. The empty road lay there, not even a hundred meters down a shallow slope of hard-packed sand.

  With a grunt, he pushed the moped forward, and much to his relief it rolled well now, the tires hardly sinking in this stretch of slope that had recently seen a brief winter shower. Halfway down the grade, it picked up so much speed that he decided to mount it, trying hard to keep his chest erect as he did so, biting his lip as he flipped the ignition switch and engaged the clutch.

  Nothing happened. The thing did not even turn over. Not a single cough.

  He stuck out his heels and skidded to a stop, reaching down to pump the primer as he exhaled as much air as possible. Then he pushed off again, gathered speed, bounced over the shoulder, and managed to hold it as he turned south on the macadam, released the clutch again, twisted
the throttle.

  Nothing.

  It was finished. There was no way he could pedal it into ignition.

  He cursed in a stream of Spanish hisses as he braked and stopped in the middle of the road. He looked at his watch. In twenty minutes, the entire mission would depend on the appearance of two headlights he would fail to deliver. Schneller was right. It was a ridiculous idea. His own Technion University egotistical idiocy had doomed them all.

  Then he noticed something in the road. It was his own shadow, the silhouette of his CAR, the curls of his hair, growing sharper, stretching out before him.

  He jumped off the moped and threw it to the road, kicking the tire so it spun as he moved into the dead center of the macadam, knelt there, laid his weapon down, and smothered it with his body, spread-eagled and in genuine, undramatized pain. He heard the vehicle approach, felt the glare of its lights, then the steady throb through the road as it stopped. A door creaked. A pair of soft-soled shoes whispered up to him. He did not budge until the hand touched his shoulder, and then he rolled and sat up like a corpse in a horror film, grabbing the sleeve of a stunned Algerian driver as he set the barrel of the CAR into the base of the man’s throat.

  Sadeen knew that the lingua franca here was French. But he did not have French. All he had was a smile.

  “Buenas noches, amigo,” he said.

  To an infantryman, sand and snow are much the same, a nightmare of impediment to any reasonable progress. You may be in quite a hurry, even commence your march with a self-deceptive sprint, yet before too long the fingers that grip your boots will set your legs on fire and turn your muscles into quivering blubber. On a snow-cursed landscape, there is a slight advantage, because exertion raises your body temperature so that, as long as you move, freezing to death is a delayed danger. But in the desert, your only solace becomes the hope that you will soon either faint or be killed in action.

  Benni and his men no longer ran. They slogged. Their numbing glide of not an hour before had become a pleasant memory, their reluctance to shed their thermal underwear a joke. Their fatigues were stained with black amoebas of sweat, their gloveless fingers slippery on trigger grips; their polish-smeared faces shone like oil slicks in a third world seaport, and their breaths streamed behind their heads like the contrails of meandering jets. Each of them had done this before, many times. Yet that did not stop them from wishing they were naked now, barefoot, wearing their gear above loincloths like Amazonian spearmen.

  The desert sky was crowded with stars, and the purple-gray dunes and troughs were well defined, though maddeningly featureless in their repetitiousness. But the men were not in danger of wandering off course, for with their compasses they were on the mark. In addition to that, and of no comfort in the least, the heavy whine of an aircraft turbine reached out to them like a siren’s summons from the target’s vector.

  But they were still well short, and Benni knew it. Eckstein was keeping count. Every soldier knows the measure of his stride, and Eckstein’s was sixty full paces to every hundred meters. Yet in this sucking Sahara they were stumbling in baby steps, and it seemed ages between his raising of fingers to mark each kilometer.

  They had split off into pairs now, maintaining contact via panted whispers into their walkie-talkies. That was as planned, but their original concept to encircle Klump’s camp from the western, southern, and eastern flanks had to be abandoned. They were approaching from the southeast, and there wasn’t time.

  Benni had ordered Schneller and Nabbe into a classic Israeli infantry “banana.” They would swing out to the right, climb the eastern flank of Martina’s “bowl,” and set up like a light machine gun team, their marksmanship with the sniper rifle and the High-Power hopefully compensating for the lack of a MAG. Didi and Amir would use the shadows of the camouflaged jet to infiltrate close into the southeastern quadrant, while O’Donovan and Binder mounted the berm fifty meters farther west along the southern boundary. Baum and Eckstein would approach directly opposite the semicircle of sunken trailers.

  If there were antipersonnel mines, the first detonation would prove it. If Klump had enough manpower to lay out ambushes, a gunshot would be evidence enough. Either way, they no longer had the luxury of probing, and the agreed-upon response was simply to charge.

  Benni fell to his hands and knees near the top of a dune. He was exhausted beyond imagination, yes, but a heavy smoker who could still play a full intramural soccer match was not about to be taken out of the World Cup of his life. He had dropped as a result of instinct, and his right elbow poked into the sand as he kept his High-Power out of it. Eckstein came up and knelt to his left, the sweat from beneath his rolled balaclava running off the end of his ponytail, onto his ruck.

  They both squinted forward, over perhaps another quarter-kilometer of dunes, beyond which lay a straight ridge that appeared to have been formed by some sort of plow. Between that and the next row of dune crests lay a horizontal oval of black, like the surface of a large pond of oil into which they could not see. The distant horizon was feathered with the dark ridges of receding mountains and the peak of Jbel Es-Seba.

  Eckstein, panting like a dehydrated retriever, nudged Benni and pointed to the right. At the southeastern curve of the dark bowl, just beyond a dune shaped like a rump, the tip of a steel tail gleamed in spite of its camouflage net. The two men looked at each other. Their heart rates rose even higher.

  Baum was reaching to key the mike button of his walkie-talkie, when he and Eckstein both snapped their heads to the left. The southern berm of the camp stretched away into the western darkness, but its narrow tail there was suddenly aglow with the bouncing reflections of an approaching vehicle.

  “Sadeen,” Eytan whispered, and to Benni it sounded like a Talmudic blessing. Then he looked at the remaining tract of desert, and it became a cabalic curse. He jabbed the mike button.

  “Kahn Nylon,” he began in Hebrew, then quickly remembered O’Donovan. “This is Nylon. Five is here. Move!”

  “Two here.” O’Donovan’s voice crackled in Benni’s wet earpiece. “We’re hauling.”

  “Three,” Didi whispered.

  “Four,” said Nabbe. “Do not try it without us!”

  Eckstein jumped up and grabbed Baum’s antenna, but he was barely able to jam the whipping shaft down into Benni’s walkie-talkie as his burly mentor disappeared from his hands like a fleeing ghost.

  Sadeen’s new acquisition was a white Renault half-van, its cab like the front of a small sedan, with a bulky box in the back that had the Algerian postal PTT stamped on its sides. He wished now that the driver had been a woman, preferably an elderly one, for he could have sat her beside him and possibly bought Benni another minute or so. But he was grateful enough for what Providence had provided and only hoped that he had made the proper left turn. He was not worried that the driver whom he had frightened off into the dunes would summon the police. The fellow would be hiking until dawn before he saw another soul.

  The wide, flat wadi looked right, its surface spaded over for vehicles, the rising side berms resembling those of Horse’s model. He drove with his right hand and worked the strange dashboard shift with it also, for he could not raise his left arm at all now. He tasted the metallic film of blood in his mouth, and he coughed as little as possible. The driver’s strange white tagelmoust covered everything but his eyes and reminded him of Afghan mujahideen. His CAR lay across his lap, the barrel pointed at the left door.

  He had assumed that Klump would have posted men along the passageway to meet him and was surprised that no one appeared. But then, she was waiting for Baum and her mother, and she knew that the colonel would give her nothing until he saw his daughter.

  Every rut in the road was a blade in his left chest. He did not believe that he would die from this injury, though God knew he might shortly sustain more serious wounds. He could not have cared less. He was on time, and in just a few more meters he would have done his bit.

  The passageway suddenly opened into
a wide mouth, the right-hand berm stretching on while the left curved away. He took his foot off the accelerator and braked, then put the clutch in and set the gear in reverse, just holding. In the distance, the yellow beams of his headlights picked out the hulk of the netted jet. To his left, figures retreated from his offending light like shy vampires.

  He did not move, except to very slowly slip his right hand around the trigger grip of the CAR, thumbing the safety to full auto. It suddenly struck him that Baum and company might be still out there, wandering around the Sahara, and the idea that he had crashed this party alone nearly made him laugh.

  Then he saw the girl, and nothing was funny anymore.

  She was standing at the edge of the pool of his beams. Her legs were bare, she wore some kind of a sweater, and she looked as if they had keelhauled her through a pool of quicksand. Her head hung down and her long hair was encrusted with strips of plastery grit, but still he could see the shine of her eyes. He began to breathe heavily. It was the Latin fury rising in him, and he no longer felt his ribs at all.

  Where are you, Benni? he growled inside his head.

  A voice called out from the darkness. A woman’s voice, but it was not Benni’s daughter, and it was not in a language he understood.

  “Wo bist du, Baum?” the voice demanded.

  Now, Benni, Sadeen breathed. Now!

  Another figure entered the light just behind Benni’s daughter. Short blond hair and a hand that crawled over the girl’s shoulder and gripped it.

  For God’s sake, Benni!

  Martina was blinded by the headlights, but her handicap did not frighten her. She was protected by a human shield as unassailable as titanium. Mussa stood to her left, Youssef to her right, and the rest of her men crouched in blackness to all points of the compass.