The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

What she did feel was an oncoming eruption of rage, for the truck just sat there like an abandoned ship, no sign of life, only the rumble of its old engine. The arrogance! Did Baum think she would wait there forever like some stood-up schoolgirl?

  “Let me see her!” she called louder, in English now.

  Nothing.

  “All right,” she whispered through clenched teeth. She stepped closer to Ruth and stuck her hand through the mat of her hair, gripping the warm throat where the girl’s pulse pounded. “What were you saying about a father’s love?” she growled as she pushed down with a violent wrench of her fingers.

  Ruth fell to her hands and knees. She began to sob as Martina cocked the P-38 and placed the barrel against her skull.

  Schneller’s first shot missed Martina completely. But considering that he had just crested the eastern dune, flopped onto his belly, and aimed for less than two seconds, the impact to Youssef’s left jaw was really quite amazing. The huge man jerked and slumped to the ground just before the report of the 7.62 mm cartridge echoed through the bowl, and then everything else came down like an avalanche of fire and thunder.

  Close-quarter combat is nothing like its cinematic depiction, in which an editor carefully assembles points of view so that an audience can follow along. A gunfight, especially at night, is much more like a road accident on the autobahn, a ten-car pileup whose drivers snatch up bits of images and sounds through their terror, items burned into the memory like random cuttings from a jerky old news-reel. Some of it you recall forever, especially those stark tableaux frozen by explosions and muzzle flashes. But mostly it is a private, claustrophobic experience, in which your hearing is quickly deadened by your own gunfire, your nostrils and lungs fill with burning gases, the screams are unrecognizable as your own, and you are locked inside your own private little box of violence.

  Benni charged. He had sprinted even harder toward the berm as the bowl beyond filled with the lights of the truck, and as he scrambled up the embankment, his eyes breached the top and he was faced with the horrific vision of his daughter going to her knees. He never slowed. He instinctively yelled, “Kadima!” as both a rally to his men and the blatant offering of himself as the better target. His boots slammed down onto the flat bowl and a terrible cry emerged from him, for he heard Schneller’s shot and thought it was Martina’s pistol. But then Ruth was scrambling toward him, and he thundered toward her, arms and legs flying like a stampeding bison, and he saw nothing else at all.

  Eckstein was very close to his left flank, O’Donovan and Binder just twenty meters to the right, and despite Benni’s motivation, O’Donovan’s was equal, and his young legs longer.

  Martina had her choice of targets, though merely a millisecond in which to make it. Rounds from the left were kicking up near her feet, but the weapons of the charging shadows before her had not yet flashed, because the girl was between them, crawling in the sand. Yet they would begin firing over her form in the next second. The calm of the changing game came upon her as she realized that she had been duped. All right. A point for you, my ex-beloved.

  One figure emerged first into the light. A woolen cap flew from his head, and she recognized the blond policeman from New York. How romantic. How pathetically galant. Shoot the girl? Or leave her with an endless nightmare?

  She squatted quickly and held the P-38 out between her knees. This is not a snowy rooftop game of hide-and-seek. And you only get one warning.

  She shot O’Donovan twice in the chest, and his momentum carried him flat onto his face, his legs in the air, a wave of sand pluming over his shoulders.

  Benni dove, his arms in front and his back arched hard as the white blisters of Kalashnikov muzzles opened up directly before him. He landed on top of Ruth, his chest slammed her backside down, and she grunted out a great moan. He grabbed for her bare feet, banging one ankle with his pistol as he folded them roughly under his arms, jammed his thighs together over her head, and tried to bury her like a tortoise protecting its soft-shelled newborn.

  Martina leapt behind Mussa, who was standing to her left, erect as a figurehead on the bowsprit of a sailing ship. He was absolutely expressionless, wondering only who would inherit his role as Martina’s protector, for there were no more Hawatmeh brothers, and he raised his MP-5 to his shoulder. From their two opposing angles, Binder and Eckstein swung to him and fired in bucking double taps until he arched beyond their muzzle flashes, then they both went prone and continued firing as Martina bear-hugged the body that slammed backward into her chest, fell with it, and spooned up against Mussa in death as she had refused to do when he lived.

  With Schneller’s first shot, Sadeen had stamped the accelerator of the Renault, swung the wheel to the right, skidded in reverse, and hit the brakes. His headlights swept across the ragged line of Martina’s men. Peripherally, he saw Baum dash across the bowl, with Eckstein a close second, but his attention was fused to the closer group of HOGs, who, apparently offended by his breach of night etiquette, opened up on him with everything they had. He vaulted for the right-hand door and scrambled out onto the ground as the windows exploded above him and the Renault bucked like a police van being pummeled by a crowd of rioters.

  Although Didi and Amir had reached the encampment before anyone else, they had the farthest to go now in order to close the range. They had crouched in the black shadow beneath the wings of the Falcon. Yet when Sadeen’s truck appeared, they were momentarily confused and went instantly to their bellies. The growing whine of the distant chopper turbine made it possible for Lapkin to put his mustache to Lerner’s ear.

  “Looks like Sadeen went for the Schneller option.”

  Didi nodded, then glanced up at the jet’s fuselage, wagged a warning finger at Amir, and pointed out toward the eastern rim of the bowl. Lapkin understood: no firing till we are clear of the airplane. It was the only available taxi in sight, and they did not want to use it as cover.

  Schneller’s first shot launched them from their cover, and now the gunfire was a squall as they sprinted from their corner of the bowl, trying to get clear of Binder, who lay between them and the scurrying shadows against the northern dune wall. The lights of the truck exploded, and they kept on, then zigzagged wildly as a pistol spat at them out of the sudden blackness. . . .

  Salim and Yaccub had backed up behind the two standing vents of the trailers. Eckstein, functionally deafened now, was holding them there with his CAR, shifting quickly from left to right and getting off quick doubles. Every fourth round trailed a neon pipe of red light, some of them sparking off rocks and careening up into the night, and from somewhere behind the riddled truck Sadeen’s CAR joined in, echoing Eckstein’s weapon like an admiring younger brother. The two HOGs dueled back with their AKs, firing less disciplined bursts through the heavier Kalashnikov throats, until Schneller killed each of them with a single shot from the Parker-Hale. His Pecar was not a night scope, but the men illuminated themselves nicely with the bursts from their own weapons.

  Nabil, Martina’s explosives technician, had chosen to hunker down behind the fallen vent of Ruth’s trailer, next to a quivering radio operator called Idri. They each had Makarov pistols but had not fired a shot, choosing instead to scrape troughs for themselves with their wriggling bodies. Yet they were lying on the roof of the trailer, whose shallow surface of remaining sand offered no further cover, and the aluminum vent pipe banged and rolled with every impacting round. When a red stream of tracer passed through the tube and struck the sand in front of Nabil’s face, he jumped up and ran.

  The dunes at the northern flank were ten meters high, but he was already halfway up the slope when, for some reason, he stopped and turned. The truck was beginning to burn, reminding him of the Marine Hum-Vee that had been destroyed by his briefcase bomb. In the flicker of its flaring gasoline he could see a man, who he did not know was Eckstein, lying on his stomach and reloading a short assault rifle as he yelled something. It was an easy shot, one final blow for Martina before he escaped, and he rais
ed the Makarov.

  Nabbe, who had been sniping with his High-Power alongside Schneller, was up on his knees, reloading, when he saw the distant silhouette on the dune slope. His palm was still slapping the magazine home when he arched the weapon around and up, released the slide, and got off three quick shots one-handed at an impossible night range of one hundred meters. The shadow rolled down the dune.

  At the northeastern corner of the bowl, a trough had been plowed through the dunes, leaving a high-walled, forbidding black tunnel. As the Renault’s headlights burst under impact, Martina rolled away from Mussa’s bloody corpse, sprang up, and ran for the tunnel’s mouth, firing spaced single shots at the two shadows charging her from the direction of the covered jet.

  She disappeared into the passageway, but Muhammed and Riyad were not quite so quick. They trailed her by only five meters, sprinting in long hurdlers’ strides. Didi dropped to one knee, Amir stamped to a stop in strange baby steps just to his left, and they led the figures with the mini Uzi and the High-Power for two full seconds before releasing a flurry of single shots. Muhammed and Riyad sprawled.

  The firing stopped, all forty-six seconds of it, the echoes of the last shots fading away like heavy, stuttering nostril sighs. The immolated Renault bathed the bowl in eerie campfire flickers, and the stench of burning rubber and powder gases drifted along with the pale haze of gun smoke.

  Binder rose cautiously to his feet. He removed a magazine from his CAR and looked at its lips. Two tracers lay in the metal folds. He grunted, pocketed the magazine, and jammed another into the weapon, thumbing the bolt latch. He looked to the right, where Didi and Amir had flattened themselves up against the right frame of the tunnel mouth after checking two strewn bodies for signs of threat. He looked to the left, where O’Donovan lay still on his chest, his right hand stretched out to the side, palm turned up. The wind ruffled his hair. His weapon was plowed into the sand, the stock sticking partially upright. There was a ragged tear in the back of his ruck.

  Eckstein jogged across in front of Binder, waving up at Schneller and Nabbe, urging them off their dune to intercept the woman. A small man, Martina’s surviving radio operator, got up shakily from behind the fallen aluminum air vent. He was not wearing his kaffiyeh. He raised his hands and placed them behind his neck.

  Binder walked to him, drawing the kochmer from its sheath as he did so. Idri, who had never seen a Berber so large and ferocious looking, lost control of his bladder and sank to his knees, babbling prayers of mercy. Binder stopped just before the lowered head. He sheathed the blade, walked around the kneeling man, stopped again, and fired a round into his right calf muscle.

  “That oughta hold you, motherfucker,” he said as he walked away from the scream.

  Benni rolled off Ruth. She gasped as if she had been drowning again, but when she tried to rise, he pushed her flat as he scanned his surroundings. “Not yet, Ruti,” he panted.

  Sadeen limped up to him, silhouetted in the flames of the burning vehicle.

  “Your moped grew,” said Benni.

  “It got excited.” Sadeen smiled weakly.

  “Watch her,” Baum ordered, and he trotted away.

  Didi and Amir were hugging the right frame of the tunnel mouth, Eckstein on the left. Binder was squatting next to Eckstein, opening his ruck.

  “Amir,” Benni called quietly as he ran up. “Go see to Michael.” He said it flatly, fearing that Amir’s ministrations would be unrewarded gestures. Lapkin sprinted away.

  “Anyone go in besides her?” Eckstein asked across to Didi. He thought he was whispering, but he was nearly shouting.

  “Not that I saw, mate.”

  “But who knows what scumbag lurks?” Binder posed the question as he rose with two of Sadeen’s flash-bangs in his hands. He frowned at them, reversed the primitive caps, unfurled the tails, and sighed. “Give my balls for an M-26,” he said as he hurled the grenades, putting football spins on them, one right after the other, up and over into the roofless trough.

  The devices had the effect of stunning Binder, for he did not believe they would actually detonate. But they did, with high-pitched hollow bangs and a blast of yellow light that bounced off the trough walls like camera strobes. Eytan and Didi charged in, firing.

  No one was in the passageway. Martina was gone, sprinting in the direction of the whining turbine and a pickup truck parked halfway between her camp and another wide hole, which, until only an hour before, had been covered by a pegged-down net.

  Schneller had scrambled down the far slope of his dune, which was very steep, and he lost track of Nabbe when the Belgian tripped and went head over heels like a clumsy skier. The tall German hit flat sand, ran around a plowed-up embankment, and nearly toppled into the woman.

  He skidded to a stop and quickly brought the long rifle to bear, yet he hesitated for a moment. She was loping along through the dark and hardly broke stride as she turned toward him, first shot him a look of empathy for his inferior reflexes, then shot him with the P-38. The 9 mm round punched through the wooden stock of the Parker-Hale and into his right side, knocking him flat back like a snow angel.

  She picked up her pace and ran past the truck. Jaweed and Ali, the blond and the redhead who had butt-stroked Del Ray and shot Humason on the road through Ironsides, were crouched in the back of the pickup behind the wooden sign that said FOLLOW ME. As Martina flew by and the distant figures emerged cautiously from the tunnel, they opened up on full auto with their AKs.

  The heavy Russian rounds split off chunks of plowed-up rock and geysers of sand as Eckstein and Didi dove to their bellies and rolled up against the sides of the trough. Some of the projectiles were green tracer, and they whip-cracked in the dark air overhead. Binder was trying to crawl forward to them on his elbows, and Eytan waved him off violently. Ruth was safe. This was no time to die. He held his CAR away from his body and got off a meaningless, blind burst.

  “Where’s the fucking air cover?” Binder yelled amid the cacophony of ricochets and Eckstein’s short-barreled explosions. Eckstein thought he heard Didi laugh.

  Rick Nabbe was not amused. He poked his head around a low sand nipple and saw Schneller lying on his back, then winced as a pair of white barrel bursts leapt out from the dark hulk of a truck just a stone’s throw away.

  He wriggled out of his rucksack, quickly checked his magazine, jammed it back into the High-Power, slithered backwards, and began to run. He swung out to the right, his head bent low, dodging clumps of sagebrush, the incongruous black ring of a discarded tire. The whine of the turbine was shifting even higher now, and it seemed that weak bolts of lightning were bouncing up from a wide hole up ahead, but he cared only for the AK barrels that hammered away to his left.

  He went to his stomach, crawled over a low dune, and found himself nose-to-grille with the pickup. Then he rolled to his feet, duck-walked along the driver’s side, and stopped with his back against the cab, taking a deep breath as the brass casings from one of the guns streamed out over his head.

  He stood up, gripping the pistol two-handed. Terribly unsporting, he thought, then shot both men twice between their shoulder blades.

  He spun his head when he heard the rotors biting hard into the air, then opened his mouth as the tail of a snow-white Bell 212 helicopter rose from the ground not fifty meters away. The main rotor appeared, and the aircraft floated straight up, then tilted, filling his eyes and mouth with grit as he threw up an arm to protect his face.

  He staggered forward, squinting into the roiling haze as the Bell turned on its axis, mocking him with the bold black letters of the UN stenciled arrogantly on its flank.

  He raised the pistol and squeezed the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber as the chopper roared off into the night.

  At 0212, Nimrodi brought the Dakota in on the Ben Zireg-Taghit road. He had told Baum that he was going to do it, circling over the Moroccan side of the border and then coming back in for them, no matter what happened. Benni had vigorously objected
, insisting that if they survived the action, they would improvise a way out: find a vehicle, march overland to the border, dig up one of Klump’s trailers, and drive it.

  “Oh, yes, my friend,” Nimrodi had scoffed. “You and your wounded will be fresh as daisies and ready for automotive excavations, while the entire Front Islamique du Salut closes in on you!”

  For once Benni was grateful for equality of ranks, for he could not overlord a fellow lieutenant colonel.

  The men did not really need their guznik landing beacons, for Nabbe had parked the pickup truck on the shoulder beside the cutoff to Martina’s smoldering camp, and he flashed the headlights and then left the high beams on. But they had laid out the flaming soup cans anyway, as a signal to Nimrodi that it was they who awaited him and no others, for they had no radio contact with the plane.

  The black silhouette of the Dakota was a comforting sight, but no one jumped up to run to it this time. Its tires screeched on the cracked road well to the north, sending up sprays of pebbles that hammered a racket on the wing bottoms, and then it crept slowly toward them like a wary raven.

  They lay off the eastern shoulder in a shallow depression, spread out in a full circle, weapons outboard. Some of them chewed bits of chocolate bars. O’Donovan lay on his back on the assembled stretcher, his ragged chest wounds patched to the best of Lapkin’s abilities. He was covered now by Binder’s field jacket, his breaths shallow and bubbling, his pale forehead beaded with sweat. Ruth sat close to him, her ruined fingers trembling gently through his hair. Her shoulders shook despite the warm shroud of both Benni’s and Eytan’s anoraks.

  Sadeen’s chest had gone completely stiff now, and he had to lie on his back, where he tried to will his body into using only his right lung. He rested his head on Schneller’s thigh. The big German’s wound was not life-threatening, Martina’s round having passed through a “love handle.” He held one of Benni’s field dressings over the entrance hole, while a gauze pad soaked up blood from his back, and he and Sadeen kept each other going by arguing over whose injuries were worse.