The devils shepherd, p.27
The Devil's Shepherd, page 27
Eckstein had, of course, walked much farther than this. As a paratroop officer he had led platoons of men for ninety grueling kilometers, tortures lasting over twenty-four hours from the armor base at Julis to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He could no longer count the stretcher drills he had suffered as a noncom, the fully loaded combat marches through Sinai as a recruit. Yet with each of these events, traditional factors guaranteed success. There was the peer pressure, for a man could not fail his comrades and demand to be carried. And then there was the momentum, for such forced marches were conducted at a brisk rate just short of a jog.
But tonight, in Africa, Eckstein wondered if he would make it. There were no peers to spur his machismo, and speed was out of the question, because his comrades were children.
The departure from Krumlov’s orphanage had been relatively uneventful. While Dominique had carefully divided the children into two groups of equal physical strength, the men had quickly buried Max and Bernd. And then by the light of the burning vehicles, Baum and Eckstein had spead their map and chosen route distances, times, and a hopeful rendezvous. The main battery of the satcom was dying and the spare had taken a bullet, but they managed to make one final coordinate contact and then it was finished and they were off before first light.
Eckstein, Dominique, and Debay had thirty-two children in tow, and at first the way was easy, all of it downhill toward Wonbera. The children’s wanting bellies were full of waht, rice, and weak tea, quickly prepared by their nurse, and with the change of venue and a new adventure they were energized and gleeful, nearly skipping ahead of the dour adults into the cool valleys before dawn. By a mad stroke of luck, a farmer driving a tractor and towing a long flatbed of hay had stopped to offer the strange troupe a lift, and all through the day they had ridden along the banks of the Blue Nile to the foot of the mountains that rose to Guba. But there the farmer reached his home, and with dusk the trek began in earnest.
Now they had been at it for over six hours, all of it uphill, the joy of hope stillborn and sucked out of them. Eckstein was at the point, bent forward and pressing down on his own knees to force each painful thrust upward. He had fashioned a backpack from a burlap sack, with leg holes at the bottom and slits at the top through which he had thrust his shoulders. Inside was the sleeping form of Dvora Yohanni, a seven-year old girl who could not have weighed forty pounds, her sandaled feet bouncing beside his waist and her forehead thumping against his upper spine. To counter her weight, his own rucksack was hung before his chest. By day he had completely covered his head in a fallen rebel’s kaffiyeh, and Bernd’s Uzi and ammunition remained in the pack. Now the scarf was wrapped around his throat and the Uzi slung from his neck, and he rested one fist on the cool steel while with his other hand he gripped Adi’s fingers and pulled the boy along beside him.
Just behind Eckstein, Dominique also carried a sickly child in a makeshift ruck, and Eckstein was amazed that the French girl had not faltered or complained even once. Below, the remaining children fell away in a ragged line, with Debay bringing up the rear, striding along with his MAT-49 in one hand and the largest child of the pack riding him piggyback. The Belgian had joined this group on Krumlov’s orders, reluctantly leaving his master’s side, but he was silent and powerful, a human pack mule, and with each kilometer he would quickly switch to another child until all of them had been able to rest against his muscled torso and ride his strength.
But still, it was not the kind of progress that would spell success. There was no rhythm to it and often the children faltered, swaying and coughing, sometimes sitting down without warning, and Eckstein would be forced to stop and wait until the line formed again and they went on. It was demoralizing, the sort of forced march that happened after a battle, when the objective was only to move the wounded quickly enough to ensure their survival. Yet here there would be no extraction force waiting, no field hospital, no flight of helicopters ready to pluck them all back to safety. There was only the mountains and the hours, and perhaps a rendezvous with Benni, if they were very lucky, on another day.
The night was wide and thick and cool, and Eckstein moved in a swirling froth of steam emanating from his own skin as the broiling moisture of his body evaporated from his pores. It was as if he was atop the peaks of a planetary world, the black mountains arching into a sky full of stars so bright that the dwarf bushes and sharp rocks cast hard shadows onto the paths plowed by goats and wind. With each new crest, he stopped to take azimuth readings with his compass, then adjusted his trajectory and carried on. He tried not to look back into the bowl of valleys behind, for he already knew that they were followed, but he could not make quicker progress and watching the rebels close the distance would do nothing but raise his anxiety. Early on, Debay had jogged to his side, touched his elbow, and thrown a thumb over his shoulder. Eckstein had come up with Max’s night scope, swept the foot of the mountains, and found the glint of gun steel in the distance. Checking again every hour had revealed their pursuers maintaining the range, like coyotes stalking a wounded buck. It was unnerving, but not terribly threatening—for now. When Eckstein chose to rest for the night, which would have to be soon, he would discover the enemy’s true intentions.
“I am tired, Eytan.”
Adi’s whisper startled Eckstein, for with treks like these he often slipped into a semi-meditative state that removed him from the physical realities of his body. Also, none of the children had spoken for hours. In the daylight they had been encouraged to sing and laugh and Dominique had told them stories to burn away the kilometers. But with nightfall Eckstein and Debay had to be stern and force their silence. Night combat discipline was a difficult concept for Ethiopian children, or any children not Israeli. But the exhaustion had finally hit home and they no longer made noise, except to whimper occasionally like tired puppies.
“Ishee,” Eytan whispered in return, using the common Amharic expression of reassurance. “We will stop soon.” He felt Adi tug at his hand and he looked down to find the boy’s eyes wide with a question.
“Are you not tired?” Adi wondered.
“Yes. I am.”
“You carry so much things. And Dvora Yohanni. You are very strong.”
“I am not so strong. But I am very stubborn.”
“Stub-born?” Adi tried to pronounce the word.
“Ahiya. Donkey,” Eytan said.
Adi nodded and fell silent again, while Eytan squinted up ahead to a peak at the far side of a razorback ridge. On the eastern side of the summit three small structures stood out as pale blocks against the starstudded blackness. Eckstein did not need to take another azimuth reading. He knew that this was his objective for the night, a cluster of shepherd’s shelters that had been built long ago as a signal relay site for the armies of Melanik.
“Eytan?” Adi whispered again.
“Yes?”
“Can you tell me about Jerusalem?”
It was strange, for the small buildings on the side of the peak had also made Eckstein think briefly of his home. Perhaps Adi had seen pictures of the city in a book, or been told stories about Israel’s capital by the Israelis who had come before and failed to rescue him from his purgatory. For a moment he could see the circles of stone edifices that ringed the Judean hills, and he could smell the sweet perfume of pine mixed with desert dust.
“There is no other city like it,” Eytan whispered. “It is like one giant stone castle on the top of a mountain, and the mountain is very green and soft. The sky is almost always blue, and when the sun sets at the end of the day the whole city glows pink and gold and silver. At night, the towers of the castle touch the moon and the stars.” Eytan’s words gushed forward without plan or thought, and he realized his own homesickness and how he suppressed it.
“Is God always there, Eytan?” Adi asked. “In Jersusalem?”
“God is always there,” Eytan replied. And the Devil, too, he added silently, thinking of the insane religious fanatics stoning cars on Shabbat, the clashes of rioting Palestinians and the border police on the Temple Mount, the gunfights between terrorists and citizens in the promenade on Ben Yehuda. Yes, Jerusalem was a wondrous and gorgeous city, full of angels and demons.
“And will I be a faranji there too?” Adi asked.
The word meant “foreigner,” and it was clear that Adi had never in his young life felt at home, as if he truly belonged to any place or anyone. His only dream was to live in a land where an unnamed cloak of comfort would welcome him with maternal arms. No one he knew had ever returned from Israel to tell him the truth, that the falashas, once rescued from their hell in Africa and spirited to the promised land, still faced incredible hardships at the bottom of the Israeli food and immigrant chain. They were black, undereducated, warm, naive, and kind, and they found themselves struggling upward through a sea of cynical Middle Eastern spartans.
But Eckstein was not about to shatter Adi’s hope with harsh reality, nor sully his dream with the truth. There was no point to it, for he was unconvinced that any of them would make it as far as the Eritrean border, let alone to the shores of Tel Aviv.
“You will be a king, Adi,” he said. “Like Solomon.” And he could hear rather than see the boy smile . . .
The trio of stone huts sat on a small cut in the mountainside, forming a triangle on the shallow plateau. It was a perfect defensive resting place, for the only approach was frontal, as the sides of the peak were nearly vertical walls of sharp granite and slipperly shale. The thatched roofs of the structures had been worn away by wind and weather, offering peeks at the stars through wide and broken slats of twigs and straw. There were no windows, only crude doorless openings, and the front of the lower hut had been somehow blown out as if by a satchel charge, leaving a half-moon, gaping mouth. Together with the two huts above on the grade, this left the impression of a crudely sculpted face on the isle of Tiki, with the upper huts forming high wide eyes and the lower an endless scream.
Eckstein squatted a few meters down the slope before the first hut, his elbows resting on his knees, Max’s night scope in his hands. The wind was swift and cool at this height, and although it made hearing the warning rustle of an assault impossible, he was satisfied that whoever was in pursuit had chosen to rest in kind. They were out there on another peak, perhaps two kilometers back, and they had arrogantly lit a campfire and warmed themselves and cooked by it. It was after 2:00 A.M., and Eckstein had held the first watch and was secure that he and Debay could maintain the vigil in shifts. They all would live another night, at least.
Most of the children had been bedded down in the western hut above, after a meal of brown flour and beans mixed with the tepid water from Debay’s jerry can. Dominique had asked for water to wash herself, and although Debay had balked at using the precious liquid for anything but sustenance, Eckstein had reminded him that they would have to find more of it tomorrow anyway or be finished. He filled a canteen for her and she went off, taking Adi with her to the eastern hut to rest.
He reached down now for the cap of the jerry can and watched the stars flicker in the water there as he sipped. Then he unbuttoned his shirt, took it off, and poured a palmful of water into his hand and smeared it over his face and arched his head back and shivered as it sluiced off his chin and onto his chest. He remembered how once as a paratroop recruit on a fifty-kilometer forced march, he had opened his canteen and poured half of it onto his head, an infraction for which his sergeant had made him haul a full jerry can around on his back for a week. But there was no one to admonish him here for sins of the field, and he raised the cap in a toast to the spirits of all hardened noncoms and finished off the water in a gulp.
He waited another minute while the wind dried his skin and took his own smell away from him, and then he pulled the shirt back on, its fabric stiff with salt and sweat but no longer damp. He pocketed the night scope, picked up Bernd’s Uzi, and walked back up to the first hut and Debay.
The Belgian was not sleeping. Eckstein found him sitting in a corner of the stone hut, the MAT-49 submachine gun across his lap, his legs splayed. There was not enough ammunition for the MAG light machine gun to make it worth hauling, so he had left it behind. Starlight filtered through the torn roof, striping a pile of five empty cans of Tala beer, which were apparently as important to Debay’s kit as bullets. The mercenary sipped from his sixth can as he watched Eckstein for a moment, decided the Israeli was not a threat tonight, and looked up through the slats of thatch into the night sky, squinting.
“I am going to hell, Hearthstone,” he said.
Eytan thought the Belgian meant a lack of structured exercise and too much alcohol intake.
“Cut down on the beer,” he suggested as he helped himself to an unopened can and slid down another wall, sighing as he popped the tab. The Tala was warm as urine, but it was liquid.
Debay snorted. “This?” He frowned at his own can and crushed it, the aluminum crackling under his calloused fingers. “Merde. I could drink a hundred of them and still fuck like a teenager.”
“I’m sure you could.” Eckstein sipped, thinking of how poor a beer drinker he was himself. A couple of Maccabees and he was usually ready for a nap.
Debay tossed the can aside and lifted the submachine gun from his thighs. Eckstein instinctively stiffened, his fingers twitching toward the Uzi near his knee, but the Belgian removed the MAT magazine and began to field-strip the weapon by rote. His eyes were bloodshot, but they focused through the blasted gap of the front wall and down into the valleys, flicking with a vigilance of their own as his hands continued their work, unattached to his vision.
“No. I mean to hell,” he said. “Fire and . . . how do you say?”
“Brimstone.”
“Oua.” The Belgian version of Oui.
Debay pulled a camouflage-patterned handkerchief from his jacket pocket, snapped it open, and spread it on the dirt floor, laying the MAT receiver and bolt down.
“Do you believe in hell, Hearthstone?”
“Do I?”
“All of you. Les Juifs.”
Eckstein came up with his Rothmanns and offered one to Debay, who looked at the box and grunted. Eckstein lit up.
“Well, not really.” He shrugged. “Not in hellfire and damnation and all of that. The Old Testament says we’ll be rewarded or punished here on earth. Nothing specific about an afterlife.”
Debay nodded, coming up with a small screwdriver and a strip of flannel gun cloth. He wrapped the tip of the tool and began to preen each crevice of the weapon receiver.
“I killed a priest,” he said.
Eckstein stopped in mid-drag, lowering his cigarette, holding the burning end above his lap. So that was it. That was the cancer eating at the man’s soul. Yes, it was true that he’d been gut-shot; Eckstein had seen the puckered scars around his belly when he dug Niki’s grave shirtless. And he had also seen the Belgian peeling off stomach tablets from a roll and popping them like candy. But apparently they were not a part of his medical kit to soothe a damaged intestine. Somewhere inside he was a religious man, and his sin ulcerated him.
“It was in Angola,” said Debay. “Ten years ago. I worked for those South African bastards.”
He was not a simple racist. He hated everyone impartially, and he usually focused on the blacks to justify what he had done.
“They said he was a terrorist. But he was not. He gave them food and water, when they came to him, when they were wounded by us, or running. We were very angry. You know, you hunt and hunt, weeks in the fucking bush. Then you finally bring down an animal and some fou finds it before you finish it, patches it up, sets it free. You know?”
Eckstein said nothing. Debay stripped the ammunition from the magazine and began polishing each round.
“I volunteered to do it. The father had a little parish, a small white house. Stucco, I think you call it. He drove an old black Renault. It was très difficile to get to it. They protected him always. But I was good. Three hours crawling to the house, putting the charge under the car. Ignition wired. Simple.”
Eckstein flicked his hand and suppressed a grunt as the ash burned his fingers. Debay seemed not to notice.
“We watched, from the bush. Binoculars. It was the next morning. I was happy when he came out. Then, a woman came too, a noir, with a child. They all got into the car.”
Debay did not describe the rest. He just nodded over and over as he cleaned an already spotless weapon.
“So,” he finally said as he snapped the MAT back together, the bolt echoing in the hut as it rang home. “Do you believe in hell?”
Eckstein shook his head. “No.”
Debay grunted, as if to say, “What do you know about it?”
Eckstein had killed too, but not that way, and no bystanders, thank God. Mistakes? Oh, yes. But women and children? Not yet. Not ever.
Yes, he thought. There is a hell, my friend. I’ve been to it and you live in it. And if there is a place like that after death, where you smolder inside the inferno of your own guilt for a thousand years . . . You’re going there, God help you.
Debay got up and slung his MAT.
“Well, maybe you Jews are right.” One corner of his mouth turned up. “The Chosen People. Maybe God tells you the truth, and lies to the rest of us.” He stepped into the gaping mouth of the hut, then stopped and spoke without turning. “I will take the watch until dawn. You can go to sleep. I do not sleep.”
He walked off to be with himself, alone. And Eckstein was, for the moment, very grateful to be the man he was, wanting as that might be.
