The devils shepherd, p.28
The Devil's Shepherd, page 28
He slowly shook his head as he finished off the can of Tala, and his muscles ached and bunched in his calves as he stood up shakily. He picked up the Uzi and slung his ruck over his shoulder. There was no reason for him to move, for he could well have rested right where he was. Yet at the moment his greatest sense of discomfort came from the possibility that Debay might wake him. Not to change the guard, but to confess some other horrific sin of his past, and Eckstein wanted nothing more than to escape such realities, if only for a few hours . . .
Dominique lay on a coarse mattress of damp hay, alone in the eastern hut but for Adi, who was curled up in a darkened corner and sleeping soundly. She had covered him with one of the burlap bags used as a makeshift sling for carrying the smaller children, and then she had finally removed her sneakers and socks, wincing as the wool was torn from her blisters.
After some time in the cool night air, her feet no longer hurt and the muscles of her legs were calming, and she lay there in her jeans and the wrinkled white nurse’s blouse she had donned after washing as best she could. Her fingers were laced behind her head and she allowed her eyes to flutter, the stars above flickering between her lashes. She knew that they were all very close to death, for she had seen Eytan and Debay peering back into the valley during their trek, and she could tell by the way they glanced at each other as only troubled warriors do. Yet she was not afraid for herself, only for the children, and there was no choice but to leave it to these men.
Debay was nothing but a machine, a hating thing, useful now in the way a vicious dog might be welcome at the right time. Eckstein was something different, but also useful to her now, for in age and form and temperament he reminded her so much of her dead lover. She felt the warmth slide through her body, and as always before she slept, she thought of Étienne.
Dominique did not fear her body the way some nuns and nurses did who had not always been sisters of an order, and who remembered sexual pleasure the way alcoholics remember the sting of gin. Although she had sworn a loyalty of love to Étienne, she was not a nun and she had long ago decided that it would not do to suppress forever that which God deemed natural. She and Étienne had had a fiery and spontaneous sex life, full of wildness and gentleness, at times candlelight and wine, at times near violent frenzies in semi-public places. He was gone, but you did not flick your biology off like an oil burner switch.
However, to tempt herself and others as little as possible, she often wore an expression of blank disinterest, raising it like a motorcross caution flag at all hints of pleasures of the flesh. Her nearly lavender eyes, framed by uncombed long tangles of coarse black hair, went blank and unblinking, examining each potential seducer from a face that seemed of alabaster. Men often assumed with their pricked egos that she must be a lesbian, while women deduced that she was heterosexual and wounded, which was closer to the truth.
She took some pains with her costume, never wearing anything, since Étienne, that even hinted at her cleavage, nor any bra that would further flatter her young breasts. She knew that if a certain type of man, one physically like Étienne—strong and blond with a good smile—were able to glance down at her open chest, she might feel his lips again and want that memory too badly.
She had thrown every bathing suit away.
And so, from the neck down, she was colorless, wrinkled, and baggy. Yet in a special pouch, carried tucked in her military-style duffel, she kept one set of the lingerie she had shared with him, and whenever she felt sure and secure, locked at night behind a proper door or even a knotted tent flap, she would shed her uniform and dress in satin.
That was all gone now, in this cold night in this high place, but she lay quietly and remembered how she had pleasured herself, although never alone. Always with him, his image, her memory, feeling his arms, his chest, his hips, his warm lips upon her, their thrusting. She never used an object of any kind, for he was alive, warm and trembling, and he lived within her fingers and they served as every part of him that still reached out for her. And her fingers somehow detached themselves from her own arm, and they became his gentleness or his violent hunger, and she always came, for him. She would not stop until she arched, shuddered, and cried out his name in a whisper.
More than once, she wept afterward as she lay there breathing, or quickly folded the lingerie, hid it away, and donned a T-shirt and jeans and curled into sleep. But that was how she had kept herself for him. She had played both parts, and they had remained, in the dark, together.
Yet tonight, she would not find that refuge in this open place, and she realized with fear as sleep refused her that her struggle to keep the past alive might fail. If she survived, she might have to face the fact that she was changing. And if she changed, her purity for Étienne might fade. She began to hope that she would die, and as she felt the wetness come to her eyes, she suddenly started and sat up to find Eytan Eckstein standing in the open doorway of the hut.
“I am sorry.” His silhouette whispered in the dark. “I did not mean to wake you.”
Dominique quickly brushed her fingertips across her eyes. “It is all right,” she whispered in return. “I did not sleep.”
He stood for a moment, his ruck in one hand and the Uzi in the other, as if awaiting permission to cross the threshold of a lady’s chambers. His head turned and he jutted his chin at Adi’s fetal form.
“How is he?”
“Very fine,” said Dominique. “Very strong.”
“Yes.” Eytan shifted his feet. “I was going to sleep in the other hut, but the rest of them are a tangle of legs and arms.” He smiled slightly and shrugged, and Dominique crossed her legs and pointed at the hay.
“You may rest here.”
“Thank you.”
Eckstein gently laid the ruck and weapon near the entrance of the hut, then he found a place in the shadows and sat some distance from her. He looked out the doorway of the hut into the stark mountains and valleys below, and he thought about how throughout his life he had always sought the hard way, the highest height, the most forbidden alleyways, the battlefields farthest from help and home. The foolishness of youth had stayed with him for many years, and he had always survived without so much as a nod of thanks to fate and good fortune. But tonight he felt a tremor of loss, a conviction that at last he had bricked himself behind a wall from which there was no escape. What surrounded him now, this wind and this hut and this woman and this sleeping child, were his companions at the end of the road.
He drew up his knees and rested his elbows there, and he touched his hair and felt its length and the gathered ponytail that seemed so foolish now. His flesh and soul were exposed tonight, and no false documents or pocket litter or fashionable coif would suffice as cover.
“That hair must be uncomfortable to you,” Dominique whispered, still conscious of Adi’s sleep. She touched the black curls that fell from her head across her shoulders. “My own certainly is.”
“Yes,” said Eckstein. “I’m finished with it, but I don’t think I’ll find a barber here.”
Dominique leaned to one side and rummaged in her rucksack. She came up with a large plastic box emblazoned with a red cross, and from inside she extracted a pair of scissors that gleamed in the starlight as she snapped their jaws together.
“What is that story in your Bible?” she asked. “Samson and . . .”
“Delilah.” Eckstein looked at her and he smiled at her cocked head and the hint of mischief in her eyes. “She cut off Samson’s hair and took his strength. But I guess there’s no danger in that here, because I don’t have any left.”
Dominique came to her knees and walked on them to Eckstein, and she slipped behind his back and he did not move as he felt her close, her head perched above his, her fingers touching his ponytail, then gripping it.
“Are you certain?” she asked.
“Please,” he replied after a moment. “Cut away.”
He closed his eyes as he heard the blades closing on his hair, a sound like a surgeon’s shears slicing through tendons, and he strangely felt as if his past was being amputated by the fingers of a female spirit sent to release him from some unspoken burden. She reached out and held his severed tail before his eyes like a trophy, but he did not look at it.
“Don’t stop there,” he whispered.
“The rest is not very long.”
“It can be shorter.”
She used her small fingers as a comb and the clipping sound was a comfort, and he felt the matted tufts dropping onto his shirt back and shoulders. She was gentle and slow and careful, and somehow he knew that her aesthetic sense was fine enough, for certainly she had clipped the ends of sutures from the wounds of children who trusted her. After a while she stopped, and he opened his eyes and she was still behind him.
“I think you should remove your shirt,” she said.
Eckstein said nothing, but he certainly felt the thump of his heart and ignored it as he unbuttoned the stained khaki. He heard her opening her plastic canteen and then there was water in his hair and it dripped onto his shoulders and stung the chafing wounds there from his rucksack and weapons sling. And then her hands were working through his hair and brushing the soiled tufts from his back and he shivered.
She crawled around from behind and sat before him on her heels. She looked at the top of his head and moved some of the wet strands this way and that, and then she put her hands in her lap and nodded.
“It is very good,” she said and she smiled a bit. “I am immodest.”
“Thank you.” His voice was barely audible.
She looked at his head for a moment, her eyes lowered to his chest, then rose again to his face, and as her fingers drifted to his chin he felt as if she was looking at someone else. Her face blurred as she leaned toward him, and then her lips were brushing his and one of her hands gripped the back of his neck and all at once they were on their knees, pressing their faces to each other, their lips open and tongues entwined and their breaths coming quickly as they suddenly strove to suck in each other’s life.
She held his face so hard, her hands pressing against his ears, and she kissed his mouth and his cheeks and his eyes and his forehead, and then she flicked her fingers to her blouse and tried to unbutton the top button. He brushed her hand away as he helped her, quickly opening the shirt and pulling it from her shoulders, and in the darkness he could not see her body or her breasts but they both gasped as they gripped each other’s backs and pressed themselves together and crushed the cushion of her chest between them like a cherished pillow.
They stripped each other quickly and in silence, cognizant of Adi’s sleeping form, yet not really caring that he might wake to witness their frenzy, and their lips and tongues remained entwined until they fell together to the straw and found their fingers locked, their knuckles white with strength, their mouths tasting cool skin laced with brine. She pushed his head to her nipples and arched into his mouth as she reached down to grip him, and he wanted badly to descend and taste her, to bury his face in her, but she wrapped her legs around his waist and forced their bodies together, and as they joined they groaned into each other’s ears. Somehow, in their wanting for it to last, they rocked together for a long time, each holding back from fear of facing the other side of this abyss when it was over. And at last, as their bodies were heated and slick and their hands burrowed in each other’s hair, they came together in a frozen embrace of sorrow. Yet Eytan felt no guilt about Simona, for she was there. And Dominique did not betray Étienne, for she was with him.
They never spoke. But trembling, together and alone, they dressed again. And when they lay down, their breaths recaptured, they stayed immobile for a long while and stared at the stars. Side by side, their hands touched only once, a long firm grip, more like a farewell than anything else.
And when at last they slept, they did not embrace, but turned their backs close to one another for warmth, with no more romance than that of two sergeants seeking comfort in a winter tent . . .
16
Tel Nof, Israel
May 9
THE COMMANDER OF the Israel Defense Forces parachute school despised cigarette smoke, precisely because he had quit his two-pack-a-day habit just six months before, and there is no one more fanatic or rigid than a reformed addict. But the Israeli Army is an extremely difficult environment in which to refrain from tobacco, fried foods, or beautiful young women, and Colonel Zev Carmon was considering early retirement before the constant temptation to sin against his health and morals would do him in.
However, this evening he would have to endure, for an emergency briefing to salvage AMAN’s Operation Sorcerer was underway in his office. Clouds of cigarette smoke laced the foul atmosphere, bowls of greasy french fries sat on his long table, and General Itzik Ben-Zion’s secretary was a stunner. Carmon was tempted to don opaque sunglasses and a gas mask.
Given that special operations often involved aircraft, parachute drops, and fast helicopters, it was common for the Tel Nof commander to host the teams of officers sending men into harm’s way. This evening, Carmon’s long office, roughly the size of a freight car and up on the second floor of the base’s concrete HQ, was choked to the throat. Ben-Zion was there, along with his blue-jeaned minions, including that strange little brain they all called Horse. He had also brought along Mack Marcus, the crazy one-legged American who was constantly trying to board a C-130 for one more static line drop. The colonel in command of the Air Force Special Operations Squadron was there, the major in command of Zev’s own Samanim, or Pathfinder battalion, as well, and Lt. Colonel Shaul Nimrodi had been summoned from retirement because he was the best man ever from Anaf Ha’tasa—the Air Delivery Wing.
The commander of Sayeret Mat’kal was present in his usual guise—wrinkled fatigues with no rank or insignia of any kind, worn sandals on his feet, and a distinct odor of kibbutz cow dung. Uri Badash had shown up from Shabak, which made this operation a curious mix of soldiers, civilians, and spies, yet no one had thought to invite Mossad, which was fine with Zev, as it reduced the arrogance quotient somewhat. And of course they had all dragged along their own intelligence officers and personal attachés, which was annoyingly distracting because the latter were all young women selected for both beauty and brains. The phones were ringing off the wall, combat jets kept up window-rattling takeoffs from the adjacent air force base, and Field Security had locked the doors and taken up posts wearing their Ray-Bans and Brownings.
It was a fucking circus. Just another day in the Israeli Army.
“Hevreh, hevreh. Comrades, comrades. Please stop yelling.” Carmon raised his palms from his position at the head of his T-shaped desk and conference table. Although the session was taking place in his office, he was more or less a polite host rather than the commander of the operation. That role fell to Itzik Ben-Zion, who at present was leaning across the table and having a heated discussion with the commander of Air Force SpecOps. “The smoke’s killing me, I’ve got a splitting headache, and my best field surgeon’s in Ethiopa.” Zev did not yet know that the man of whom he spoke, Motti “Max” Rotbard, had been killed in action and already buried in the green hills of Africa.
Ben-Zion shot Carmon a look that could have curled a tire iron, but he did not pull rank on the paratroop colonel. He feared that Zev might remind him in public that they had been high school peers, and that the handsome, red-headed Carmon had often snatched Itzik’s girlfriends from under his nose.
Itzik took a breath and settled back down, but he continued to address the air force commander across the table, albeit in a more controlled tone.
“Look, Dani. I’m simply saying that you’ll have to have another C-130 ready to go in as soon as my people set up a landing zone.”
“Don’t nag me, Itzik.” The air force colonel jutted his chin aggressively. “The first unit’s not even halfway there yet.” He turned to his squadron intel officer. “Where are they now, Avner?”
An air force captain stood up and leaned over a long relief map that had been rolled down the length of the table and secured with full ashtrays. “Should be approaching latitude sixteen degrees, right here.” And he pointed to a spot over the Red Sea just north of the Eritrean coast.
“I wish I could have put just one man in there to mark the drop,” said the Pathfinder major as he shook his head and peeled an orange.
“My people don’t need a marked DZ,” the wrinkled Mat’kal commander scoffed. “They could spot a tampon string in a Moroccan brothel.” He glanced around the room and grinned. “Sorry, girls.”
Yudit looked up from her steno pad and rolled her eyes.
“Don’t be such an arrogant prick, Yossi,” Lt. Colonel Nimrodi chided the commando leader. He was a small, very muscular man who looked like the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he chain-smoked Marlboros from an onyx holder. “I seem to remember you trying to HALO into Iraq and nearly landing in fucking Afghanistan. Your heros will make the target, but only because we force them to use those pocket GPSs. And I’m not sure they have enough brains to operate them.”
The Mat’kal commander smirked and sarcastically saluted Nimrodi.
“And something else, Itzik,” said the air force commander as he wagged a warning finger at Ben-Zion. “Splitting the operation up like this is very risky. We can violate their air space once and get away with it, but when we send in the second aircraft—maybe tomorrow, maybe not for three days—what then? They’ll put a Strella right up our ass.”
“Oh, please,” Itzik grumbled. “The Eritreans don’t have any shoulder-fired missiles. They barely have bolt-action rifles.”
“Excuse me.” Mack Marcus raised a finger, instantly receiving a threatening glare from Ben-Zion. “You’re right, the Eritreans don’t have shit. But the rebels, especially Mobote’s people, have lots of scary toys.”
“Another country heard from?” Itzik snapped at the American-born officer. “You’re Planning and Logistics, Marcus, not field ordnance intel.”
