The devils shepherd, p.19
The Devil's Shepherd, page 19
“Of course.” Feldheim ignored the tone of Mobote’s comment and continued perusing the map. “Krumlov has contacted the Israelis and offered up the falasha children, but he wants to go with them.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“There is a price on his head.” Feldheim turned from the map, one hand behind his back and his cigarette held between his other thumb and forefinger. “I am sure you know how that feels.”
Mobote folded his large arms. “But I would not flee from my home.”
“This is not his home. He is a traitor of some sort and has already quit his home, and to an educated European Africa is no more than a place to suffer a bad sunburn and endure mediocre beer . . . I hope I have not offended you.”
Mobote said nothing, but he was imagining Feldheim hung from a game warden’s fence and slit open from sternum to pubis like a poacher.
“Perhaps he thinks he will live as a hero in Israel,” Feldheim speculated. “If he brings these waifs out safely.”
“A true hero does not survive his struggles,” said Mobote.
“Really?” Feldheim tried to suppress his amusement. “Only the good die young? I believe that was a Billy Joel hit.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.” Feldeim waved his cigarette. “In any case, I offered to intercede with you on their behalf.”
“I do not understand.”
“I am afraid I made you the villain, Colonel. I told the Czech that you would allow me to deliver the supplies, and you would guarantee his and the orphans’ safe passage, in exchange for one million dollars from the Israeli government.”
It took a moment for Mobote to grasp the role he’d been given, but as he took it all in his face seemed to purple and he rose from his chair and clenched his fists.
“I would not do this!” he roared and the walls of the Quonset rattled and Feldheim backed up and slipped behind his desk. “I would not hold children for money!”
“You would not?” Feldheim asked with all the composure he could muster.
“Never!”
“Wirklich? Really?” Feldheim slurred in his native Viennese. “And what was that incident last month in Eritrea? You attacked the Israelis then without such righteousness . . .”
“It was not about them. It was to show that we also deserve a province and it was not for money!”
“So noble, Colonel? Tell me, how much is the liberation of the Oromo worth?”
“It is not a thing of money.” The muscles at Mobote’s neck bulged like a ship’s hawsers.
“How will you buy more guns, ammunition, medical supplies, communications?”
“We have these things.”
“You have nothing,” Feldheim snapped as he calculated his margin of safety for a verbal counterstrike. “You hide in the forests because you are nearly out of ammunition, and you must come to me and beg for food.” He took a beat, marching about as the humiliation hit home. “Can your people eat your political slogans? Do you think liberation is built on dreams? It requires power, and that means money, and who will give it to you? What country? What king? Who cares about the Oromo but you, Colonel? And who can supply you with the means to an end but me?”
Somewhat like a naive child who had been thrashed for his stupidity, Mobote stood there, slowly deflating. His eyes flashed at Feldheim, his nostrils puffing, but he moved to sit in the chair again and looked at his knees and slowly whispered as if convincing himself.
“We need more guns . . . ammunition . . . supplies.”
“Yes.” Feldheim nodded briskly. “And believe me, a million dollars is nothing to these Israelis. It does not even buy a single battle tank, and their money comes from the Americans at any rate. To them, it is an annoyance fee. To you, it could mean a country.”
Mobote was not yet able to look at Feldheim. When he finally spoke, his voice seemed to have dropped a full octave. “What is it you want me to do?”
Feldheim squared his shoulders and walked back to the map. “I want you to apply pressure.”
“Explain, Major,” Mobote said quietly. “In plain English, without hints.”
“Take your men to the Czech’s orphanage and lay siege. I will add some ammunition to your supply delivery. Let no one and nothing in or out until Krumlov sends a messenger and agrees to your terms.”
“My terms.”
“Yes, Colonel. They shall be your terms, your conditions,” said Feldheim. “The man with the power sets the rules of the game.” He mistakenly assumed that Mobote would miss the double entendre.
The African waited, but there was nothing more. “That is all?” he asked.
“For now.” Feldheim pushed the supply release form across his desk.
Mobote rose, took the form, wrapped the burnoose around his great bald head, and replaced his sunglasses. He picked up his dula, walked to the door, and turned.
“And if the siege does not work, Major Feldheim?”
“Then you will attack, Colonel Mobote.” The Austrian raised a clenched fist. “Attack.”
10
Bahir Dar
May 5
THE STEEL OF Eckstein’s pistol was cold as an icicle against the small of his back, but nestled there where he had tucked it into his jeans it gave some comfort as he stood alone in a black wadi southeast of Lake Tana. Like a cowboy of the American Old West, as an Israeli he had been raised to handle a gun, respect it, and use it cautiously, yet without hesitation if necessary. And hailing as he did from a “rough neighborhood,” he did not regard a weapon as a symbol of virility, nor an option to be disputed by vote-seeking lawmakers. It was simply an extension of his person, and without it, he felt rather like a fashionable woman without her purse.
He stared up into the night sky and shivered, despite the olive wool pullover and his New York Yankees baseball cap turned bill-backward and jammed onto his head. It was well past midnight and the African earth had long surrendered its warmth, but the tremble he felt was more empathic, for the man who would soon fall to him from 16,000 feet was about to experience a bone-chilling shock of altitude freeze much harsher than Eckstein’s mild discomfort.
He rubbed his arms briskly, then squinted at the luminescent dial of his black Breitling. It was five minutes to midnight, nearly forty-eight hours since he and Baum had first set foot in Krumlov’s orphanage, and he had spent most of that time on the wild roads of the Rift.
On the first morning he had nearly come to blows with Debay over possession of the Land Rover, but Baum had impressed upon Krumlov that Eckstein’s operational priorities were key, and by nature of the profession, private. So, as Debay grumbled and his trigger finger twitched, Eckstein had left them all behind and traveled to Bahir Dar.
His prearranged “mailbox” was a small roadside café on the outskirts of the lake, the young proprietor having served the photographer Anthony Hearthstone in his previous travels. In this instance, another stranger had first arrived from Addis some days ago and paid the boy well to keep safe a shallow wooden cigar box. The lid was glued shut, and when Eckstein arrived to recover it he was pleased to find it untampered with, its considerable weight assuring him that his Browning Hi-Power had indeed made safe passage from Jerusalem. He rewarded the smiling teenager behind the rickety counter with a further quintet of American presidents, then sat down at a dusty old table and slowly sipped a warm Pepsi until the boy left the café to service a battered Volkswagen at the gas pumps.
Eckstein produced a folding knife, pried the cigar box open, and slipped his pistol and spare magazine into his camera bag. He then placed Krumlov’s dubious mole photo into the box, carefully warmed the dried glue with a cigarette lighter until he was able to reseal the lid, and set the box back on the café counter. The same resident AMAN agent who had delivered the box would shortly return from Addis Ababa to recover it. He sat down again and began encoding a message to Horse at SpecOps headquarters.
Although the technical world of modern espionage is replete with impressive gadgets such as high-speed burst transmitters and satcom transponders, Eckstein and Baum harbored idiosyncratic tastes when it came to secret transmissions. Some of the most primitive methods were still the most secure, and unbeknownst to their superiors such as General Ben-Zion, they often resorted to a simple one-time pad or book code in the field.
Both Baum and Eckstein, as well as select members of their “family,” always carried identical dog-eared copies of the Penguin edition of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. When separated, they would communicate by encoding and decoding messages using the same page of the book. You wrote out your communication in English, located those same letters in a given passage, then devised a numbered matrix to indicate each letter by line and position. By prearrangement, they would also further encrypt through multiplication and indicate the page number with a prefix. However, when together in the field, it would have been a tradecraft sin for them both to carry a copy of the paperback, so Baum had left his in the nervous fingers of Horse in Jerusalem.
Eckstein rang up Horse from the counter boy’s old rotary telephone, reversing the charges. He greeted the jumpy Russian in English, then claimed that, as a harried photographer, he required that the “office” immediately overnight a packet of negatives to be worked on in the field. The list of negative numbers Eckstein recited was, of course, his encoded demand for immediate mission support.
“I . . . I don’t think we can do this so quickly,” Horse protested even as he decrypted with a calculator.
“Just give it to the boss,” Eckstein insisted, meaning Ben-Zion himself.
“I can’t. I mean, I will, but you know him, he won’t . . .”
“And don’t take no for an answer. Tell him if he wants me to bring home the Pulitzer, he has to send the film.”
“The Pulitzer?”
“Just do it. He’ll scream at you for a while, but you’ll live.”
“Scream? He might shoot me.”
Eckstein hung up on him. It was the only way to handle Horse’s insecurities, and this sort of unilateral demand from the field was the only way to secure Ben-Zion’s compliance. An actual discussion with the general would have resulted in all sorts of refusals and recriminations.
His message, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with film. And it was also the sort of thing that would require General Staff approval. But there still existed in the Israeli Army a time-honored tradition regarding men in the field—the soldier in harm’s way had the right to request any manner of logistical support, and get it.
Eckstein not only wanted the required medical supplies for the children, but a doctor as well. If they would be expected to survive any sort of overland trek to an extraction point, they would have to be examined, treated, and nourished. However, the luxury of waiting for a tropical disease specialist to arrive by normal methods did not exist. He would have to be selected from the ranks of the army, and arrive from the sky.
Although it was practice in the Israeli Army for robust field surgeons to accompany elite troops on the most dangerous missions, there were perhaps only five such men in the entire country who were not only parachute-qualified, but also able to execute a HALO—High-Altitude Low-Opening—drop. They had begun their military careers as volunteers to the top commando units, such as Sayeret Matkal, the Naval Commandos, or Paratroop Recon. With numerous secret and hair-raising missions under their belts, they mustered out and went through university and medical school.
Yet eventually, these men discovered that they were more at home in enemy territory than in the emergency ward of Hadassah Hospital, and they returned to these elite IDF units as career medical officers. It was common to find the names of such surgeons among the roster of those killed in action after a particularly bloody cross-border operation. The morning copy of Ma’ariv would display a black-bordered collage of young faces, and among them the more mature thirtysomething doctor gone to his grave as well.
Eckstein did not summon this sort of talent lightly. In the course of his career he had come to know all of the potential candidates, as the same men volunteered time and again for the most harrowing endeavors. He had specified the hour and exact coordinates for the drop, and although he did not know who would arrive from the black heaven like an armored Daedalus, he had no doubt that the man would be the best of the best.
Once more he scanned the flat bowl of the wadi, satisfied that he had chosen the best possible terrain for a blind drop zone. The area reminded him of the moonlike landscape of northern Sinai, with its large pools of hard-packed grit, pale gray beneath the starlight. The wadi was dotted with thistle bunches throwing prickly shadows like sea urchins, but any parachutist would rather suffer an ass full of thorns than a broken femur on slabs of granite. He squinted toward the rising hills and the few flickering lights of Bahir Dar, six kilometers to the northwest and 500 meters higher. Then, just to be sure, he removed his “pager” global positioning system from his pocket and once more double-checked the coordinates he had scouted before making contact with Jerusalem.
The green dot of his watch’s second hand swept past twelve, and Eckstein strode across the wadi, producing a Zippo lighter from his pocket. For a daylight parachutist, you marked the drop zone with colored panels and popped a smoke grenade as a wind indicator. At night, you had to indicate both wind and target area with a triangle of beacons. He had no mini-strobes as part of his kit, so he had relied on the traditional IDF markers utilized since the old days of the Haganah.
From the café in Bahir Dar, he had taken three empty lima bean cans, filled them with sand, fashioned three thick wicks from a torn burlap sack, and soaked each can throughout with petrol. Then, he had tested the wind and laid out these guznikim in an oblong triangle. Now he quick-marched from can to can, igniting the wicks, then took up a position off to one side.
He squinted up into the black sky, his ears pricking up like a German shepherd, though he knew that he would not hear the engines of the fat-bellied Arava special operations aircraft that should, at that very moment, be cutting its power more than four kilometers above. Now, with the beacons lit and the surgeon exiting the aircraft into the frozen night, he knew that this was the most vulnerable window of the operation. If the insertion had been compromised by some unknown factor, any opposition would be about to pounce. Still staring up at the sky, Eckstein slipped the Hi-Power from the small of his back, cocked the slide as quietly as he could, and held the pistol alongside his leg.
He imagined the doctor now, flat on his belly and hurtling through the blackness, glancing at his wrist altimeter as the needle spun the meters away, and he felt the raging wind flapping his jumpsuit and slapping his face, for he had done it himself too many times. He could do nothing to help the man now, so his thoughts turned to yesterday’s return to Krumlov’s orphanage, where Benni Baum had managed to procure him an old Renault jeep to replace Krumlov’s precious Land Rover. The jeep sat now nearby in the lee of the wadi, half-concealed by brush.
He had spent half the next day in the compound before setting out again for the return trip to the drop zone, a day in which Adi had taken his hand and proudly escorted him on a tour of the miserable enclave. Like many Ethiopian children, Adi had a firm grasp of English, peppered with Amharic expressions. Most of all, he spoke of Dominique, in tones of love and admiration, and Eckstein was surprised that the child was privy to her secrets.
“She is very old,” said Adi as he led Eckstein toward the camp’s “recreation area.” This was nothing more than a patch of ground shaded by an old army poncho on broom poles, beneath which some of the small girls were weaving colored straw into figures that looked like voodoo dolls. Their hands were so emaciated that Eckstein had to look away.
“She is?” Eckstein smiled, remembering how Oren’s concept of age also blurred with anyone beyond high school.
“Oh, yes.” Adi held up all of his fingers twice, then one hand and one extra finger. “How old is that?”
“Twenty-six.”
“You see? Very old.” Pairs of other children kept trying to join Adi and Eytan on their rounds, fascinated by the tall blond faranji, but Adi possessively shooed them away.
“Then I guess I’m really old,” said Eckstein.
“You? Yes, but I think you are like Dominique’s prince was.”
“Her prince?”
“She tells to me stories before I sleep. What are they called?”
“Fairytales?”
“Yes!” Adi nodded vigorously. “About castles and princesses.” He raised a finger like a wise old sage. “But I know they are sometimes about her.”
“You’re a smart boy, aren’t you, Adi?”
“I will go to school someday in Israel and I will be very smart.”
From Adi’s stories, Eckstein understood that Dominique had been in love with an older man in Paris. Many of the details were missing, but he gathered that she and her lover had been somehow unable to cement their relationship, and the beautiful young woman had entered a self-imposed nunnery of her own soul. The sad tale made him think now of his own life, and how we so often fashion our own tragedies, and of Simona and Oren, waiting there in Jerusalem for a husband and father who had also chosen repetitive exile, perhaps atoning for some kind of psychological sin of which he was barely aware.
He shook it off now as he distinctly heard the distant snap and rushing billow of a parachute exploding from its container. It was less than a thousand meters above and to the northwest, and he squinted there, although he expected to see nothing yet. The canopy would be the blue-black nylon of the XL-Cloud design, and the surgeon’s jump coverall would be equally dark. He waited, then thought he saw the glinting steel of a harness D-ring passing above as the parachutist swept over the landing triangle and turned back into the wind. And all at once he was there, like a small bat dangling from the risers, and the form grew larger and came sweeping in from the northwest, jump boots crossed at the ankles and black gloves working the nylon riser toggles. The goggled face loomed from the night and Eckstein instinctively stepped back as he heard the man whisper a curse and come speeding across the moonscape just a meter above the ground.
