The devils shepherd, p.9
The Devil's Shepherd, page 9
“Sorry. Just asking.” Pissing off the nashak was an unhealthy habit for a soldier.
If Lahst’s ingenious little device was discovered and confiscated, that would be bad enough. But such a breach in Croatia, especially during wartime, could easily result in being thrown into a cell and forgotten about for a year or so. There were six customs clerks milling about a long examination table, two of them gleefully rifling the camera bags of an agitated American journalist. Eckstein sauntered toward the doorway marked NOTHING TO DECLARE, his heart beating quickly and his ears pricked for a shout of “Prestati!”
But no one stopped him.
Inside the main terminal building all of the airline and rental car counters were dark for the dearth of tourism, and in a country rife with war nerves the trapped air was laced with cigarette smoke. He changed some dollars for kuna and moved quickly though a pair of filthy glass doors and out onto the sidewalk, where he saw Benni Baum and turned away from him as the colonel hauled himself onto a half-empty bus headed for the city center.
Eckstein waited until the bus pulled away, then hailed a battered cab. As he folded himself into the small taxi, he spotted Francie Koln emerging from the terminal into the gray light of a sodden dusk. Her auburn hair was coal-black now, a thick brown scarf wrapped around her throat. Francie’s gaze fell upon him for an instant, then panned away as if he were no more than the invisible ghost of a fresh corpse. It chilled him.
An absurd profession, he decided as his car rumbled off. Where your best friends ignore you in public, as if you once seduced them into a drunken orgy they’d prefer to forget . . .
The entire team had to hole up in Zagreb overnight now, which, on the precipice of such a mission, was akin to having your car break down on a highway while your wife gave birth in a hospital just a hundred kilometers down the road. But Baum and Eckstein could not proceed until receiving a final briefing and go-ahead signal from a field agent who had been working in Sarajevo.
He was called “Johann,” but only Benni Baum knew his true identity. The elderly German Jew had worked in Berlin for the British S.O.E. throughout World War II, then emigrated to Palestine and continued his profession in service to the fledgling Haganah, forerunner of the IDF. Johann was a jolly raconteur of this particular period, during which he had turned against his former employers and caused great mischief to the British C.I.D. in pre-state Israel.
He had officially retired from the Israeli Army in the late 1960s, but moved back to Europe at the behest of AMAN, fulfilling the odd essential task for which a dapper Continental was most suited. He regarded Benni Baum as his own private “control,” and just two months before, the colonel had rendezvoused with his old friend in Munich.
“We want you to go into Sarajevo,” Baum had muttered as the pair of aging spies strolled through the freezing Stachus.
“Warum? I thought you liked me.”
“I do.” Baum grinned. “But you know how it is. Once you can’t get it up anymore, you’re expendable.”
“By that calculation, half the general staff should be shot.”
The two men laughed for a while, then Baum returned to business.
“We’ve intercepted some Iranian commo traffic. They’re smuggling arms to the Muslims in Sarajevo.”
“Well, the poor bastards deserve the help . . .”
“Yes, but you know Tehran. They never give without getting. The whole purpose is to recruit a fresh crop of fanatics. The militia will hone their skills in Bosnia and wind up on our northern doorstep when it’s all over. We need to keep an eye on this.”
“All right. I’ll go. But it will cost you.”
“Good. I’ll tell Ben-Zion.”
“Scheisse. With him running the show, I’ll be lucky to get cab fare.”
So Johann had gone into Sarajevo undercover as a relief worker, and he had already gleaned hard intelligence on Jerusalem’s theory. Just three days ago he had also received a burst transmission from Benni Baum in Jerusalem, instructing him to monitor Niki Hašek’s daily movements, then make his way to Zagreb and report.
Inside the city, Serge, Gerard, and Francie had all been prebooked into separate hotels by Mack Marcus. Eckstein and Baum would not be able to locate them at this stage, which adhered to the precept of “What I don’t know, can’t hurt you.” If Horse’s fears proved out and the major and colonel were ambushed here, they would fail to appear for the next leg of the mission and the survivors would withdraw to home.
Such events had occurred more than once in the history of Israeli Intelligence, hence the markers below some names at the memorial denoting “Chah-ser Ba’shetach”—missing in the field.
The two officers checked into the International Hotel on Miramarska, but at separate times, into separate rooms, on different floors. At 6:00 P.M., Eckstein took the banging old steel elevator to the third floor landing, where he quickly buried a Ziploc bag containing his pipe and “filters” in the sand of a dying corn plant. It was better to risk their unearthing there than have them discovered during a room toss. On the wall behind the plant he found a small chalk mark, the numeral 7. He erased it with his thumb and returned to his room.
At seven o’clock the Croatian night was black and brittle with a windless chill. Eckstein left the hotel, bundled up in long johns, jeans, a speckled wool sweater, and his motorcycle jacket. His riding gloves were double-padded over the knuckles—if need be, he could punch straight into facial bones without worrying about nursing a broken finger.
A meet with an agent on a night like this in a foreign city was the stuff that caused ulcers and early retirement. Even if the contact was a veteran you’d known for half your life, nothing was certain until you walked away alive. It was always possible that he had been caught and turned. It was more than likely he was being tracked. In Eckstein’s business, you reevaluated your friendships with each dawn.
Baum left the International just after Eckstein, wearing his worn leather car coat and Tyrolean hat, following his partner at a constant fifty meters. The streets were swollen with slush and the trams swished by like steel serpents as the two men clipped briskly along Miramarska toward the city center. They hurried beneath the rail bridge at Koturaska and into the clusters of high stone apartments. Zagreb, never well lit at any time, was barely aglow due to the energy-sapping war, its dark edifices reminding Eckstein of a graveyard for giants.
Eckstein’s pace began to warm him. He unzipped his jacket, but he did not look behind. It was Benni’s job to watch his back, and so far he had picked up no trackers, or his partner would have uttered two quick sneezes.
He broke onto the great square of Trg bana Jelačića, where crowds of young Croats swarmed between the slow-moving trams and settled like pigeons at the base of a great green horse statue, blowing clouds of tobacco smoke and lung steam into the night. He stopped and lit a cigarette, glancing at a circular newspaper kiosk at the south side of the square.
Johann appeared at precisely 19:30. He was physically much like Baum, except that he still had a full head of gray hair. He wore a jaunty feather in his Munchner hat, and he was leashed to his ever-present German shepherd, Tasha. Eckstein wondered how he schlepped the animal in and out of Sarajevo, not to mention how he kept the starving inhabitants from making a meal of her.
Johann walked to the kiosk, bought a newspaper, left a pack of Croatia Filters on the slate counter, and retreated.
Eckstein tossed his butt away, moved in, bought a copy of Erotika, and palmed Johann’s cigarettes.
This was the moment when, if the process was being observed, the opposition would pounce, hoping to snatch all parties involved in the “dead drop” as well as whatever was in the box. If such an action occurred, Benni Baum would immediately cry out in pain, drop to the ground, and feign a massive coronary, just enough distraction to give Eckstein and Johann time to bolt. But nothing untoward transpired, and Eckstein turned and followed Johann to the edge of a raucous crowd encircling an impromptu juggler.
“Excuse me.” Eckstein raised the cigarette box as he neared Johann’s back.
The sprightly gentleman turned, and Tasha spotted Eckstein and her ears pricked up.
“Bitte?” said Johann.
“Deine Zigaretten.” Eckstein switched to German.
“Ach, ja.” Johann looked at the Croatia Filters in Eckstein’s hand. “Thank you. But there were only two left. You can smoke them if you wish.”
Eckstein nodded and smiled. “Thanks,” he said as he lit up, and he glanced down at Johann’s dog. She was looking up at him and grinning, wagging her tail. She obviously recognized his scent, even though she had not seen him in over three years. “Tell her to bark,” he muttered. “She’s too friendly.”
“Bellst du mal, du blöde Hündin,” Johann ordered. Tasha barked twice.
The two men turned toward the crowd, and Eckstein edged a bit closer as he smoked.
“They’re good-looking, these young Croats,” he observed.
“Ja. The girls remind me of Munich in my younger days.”
“I’m originally from Munich myself.”
“Your contact instructions are in the box. Don’t smoke them.”
“I’m trying to quit. What about the Czech girl?”
“Except for a couple of flies, she’s clean.”
“I miss Munich sometimes. Especially Oktoberfest.”
It was okay, then. Niki Hašek had a pair of Russian babysitters, but they were probably just bored watchers assigned to keep her under surveillance. Had someone been laying a trap, there would have been a “box team” on her round the clock, and Johann would have said something like, “She’s a sweet girl, with a crowd of bees to prove it.”
“Lightly protected,” Eckstein murmured. “That’s good.”
“Lightly?” Johann almost laughed. “They’ve got her behind a wall of insane warfare. Only a confederacy of idiots would go in and get her.”
“Thanks.”
Johann took Eckstein’s elbow. “Have you seen the cavalry statue, young man? It’s magnificent.” He walked Eckstein toward the great horse sculpture, glancing aside to see if anyone moved along with them.
“It is quite something,” Eckstein agreed. They stopped walking, and Tasha started butting her nose into Eckstein’s leg. He gave up ignoring her and bent to ruffle her ears. Johann mimicked his posture and stroked Tasha’s fur.
“You may have some additional problems,” he said.
“Really?”
“Hizbollah trainees.”
Eckstein said nothing for a moment. Adding Iranian-backed fanatical terrorists to the equation was not news he had wanted to hear.
“They’ve been coming in by the busload,” Johann continued. “Two hundred at least, straight from the Bekaa. They’ll be shooting at everyone, just to improve their skills.”
“Lovely,” said Eckstein.
“They’re already roaming the streets, looking for blood. Yours and Benni’s would make a tasty cocktail.”
“She’s a fine animal.” Eckstein continued petting Tasha, but his enthusiasm for Sorcerer had just waned even further. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Be very careful.”
Eckstein nodded and straightened up from the dog.
“Well, thanks for the cigarettes.”
“Bitte.” Johann nodded.
The two men did not shake hands. Eckstein had an urge to grab Tasha’s ears and kiss her head before he left, but he resisted.
She whimpered as he walked away . . .
Flying in a military helicopter is somewhat like taking a torturous ride inside a giant blender. Unlike the civilian versions that offer waist-coated businessmen comfortable hops from major cities to bustling airports, army choppers have little soundproofing, scant padding, and certainly no pumped-in Beethoven to dull the engine whine. The steel benches bang and rattle, unfettered cargo buckles whip like yo-yo’s, and the unmuffled turbines make communication impossible except by shouting. Your entire body trembles from your heels to the top of your skull, as if you’re strapped to a vibrating bed in a cheap motel, and the only solace is that the trip is unlikely to last long. These machines are, after all, designed for assault, perhaps an hour of nauseating banks and turns, at the end of which you are likely to witness someone’s death.
Eckstein sat on the starboard bench of the white Bell 212, facing outward, as the steel slabs were bolted back to back. Francie Koln gripped the seat immediately to his right, wincing in rhythm as the bucking turbulence bruised her bottom. Serge and Gerard were on the port side, while Benni perched just behind the two pilots, wearing a headset and backseat driving. The pilots’ helmets were angled forward as they squinted into a pitch-black night.
“It’s like riding a roller coaster through a railway tunnel!” Francie shouted in English. None of the team members had uttered a word of Hebrew since leaving Israel’s borders.
“What?” Eckstein cupped an ear.
“I said, I hate you,” Francie mouthed through a pained grin.
“Ahhh.” Eckstein nodded.
Since no one could properly communicate, he took the time to finally decode Johann’s contact instruction and the details of Niki Hašek’s schedule. From behind the foil lining of the cigarette box, he unfolded a carefully scripted matrix of numbers. Then, he produced a notepad, pencil, and an old Penguin paperback edition of A Farewell to Arms, the key to a highly primitive yet secure book code used only by select members of Benni Baum’s “family.”
He began to decode, cursing as his pencil point jumped around like the needle on a seismograph. In truth, even to him this all seemed like an excess of logistical support for the extraction of a single hundred-pound girl from Sarajevo, yet the chopper was preferable to losing the entire team in a land where one wrong turn off the road to Mostar could have you executed by a gang of trigger-happy gunmen. Still, Ben-Zion had only agreed to the outrageous expense when Baum unkindly reminded him of a frightening mishap in the general’s own youth.
“I seem to remember,” said Benni, “that you once got lost and wound up in the Gaza Strip, driving a blue Volkswagen with Israeli plates.”
“All right,” Ben-Zion had huffed. “You can have the fucking helicopter.”
In the late morning, the team had linked up at Zagreb’s airport, posing as members of Médecins Sans Frontières and greeting each other with genuine warmth. They did not wear white lab coats or flaunt latex gloves, but some stethoscopes gleamed from the pockets of their ski parkas. They now all carried cordura gear bags affixed with the MSF decals, barely dry since their printing by Documentation.
A snow-white Dassault Falcon jet, its flanks emblazoned with red crosses, arrived from Marseilles and shortly the team was airborne for Split, a small city on the Adriatic coast. There they waited for dusk, their ears twitching to the echoes of distant artillery, until the sun slid behind the Italian peaks across the sea and the Bell 212 arrived.
Now it buzzed along the high shoreline cliffs and suddenly banked inward at Metkovic, its rushing white belly reflecting off the huge salt ponds of Adriatic water below, from which humped peaks rose like the dorsals of a dragon. The pilots flew nap-of-the-earth, tilting at the labyrinth of craggy hills and then barely missing them, causing Francie to slap her hand over her eyes.
Eckstein memorized Johann’s decoded message, destroyed it, unhooked his crash belt, and smeared his face up against the starboard Plexiglas. Near Zitonlislici, a triangle of dim landing lights appeared in an open field astride the frog-green waters of the Rama River, and he reached out, tapped the back of Benni’s head, and signaled “down.”
The chopper nosed over and dropped 100 meters, then hovered above the landing triangle just long enough for Eckstein to throw the door and haul in two young men dressed in olive coveralls and slinging gym bags. The pair were commandos from the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit—Sayeret Mat’kal—the cream of the IDF’s most secret and elite special forces. They had flown to Dubrovnik from Naples, picked up a car, Skorpion machine pistols, and ammunition from a local contact, then driven to the predetermined rendezvous point.
One of them, a bushy-bearded wrestler type, settled on his haunches at the rear of the chopper. The other, a white-blond sergeant who looked like a Soviet Spetznatz, squeezed himself onto the bench between Eckstein and Francie. He opened his gym bag, removed a pair of identical pocket pagers, and handed one to Eckstein. The major looked at the beeper, noting two small buttons below the readout screen—one green, one red.
“Green,” the Mat’kalnik yelled in Eckstein’s ear.
Eckstein pressed the button and the readout immediately glowed brightly, showing split numbers for latitude and longitude. The device was not a pager at all, but a miniature Global Position System, tracking its earthbound location via a network of American satellites.
“Red,” the sergeant yelled again.
Eckstein hit the second button, which had no effect on his own “pager,” but immediately activated the second device in the sergeant’s hand. The Mat’kalnik’s readout now glowed with the same numbers displayed on Eckstein’s device, and they shifted in unison as the helicopter’s position progressed. Now, wherever Eckstein went, his location could be transmitted to the commandos, who would track him on a detail map of Sarajevo.
The sergeant nodded, and both men switched off their “pagers.”
“Don’t call us unless you’re really in the shit,” the commando shouted.
Eckstein smiled and offered a thumbs-up.
When the chopper landed at Sarajevo, the Mat’kalniks would remain on board and perform a mock overhaul of the machine. They would only leave the aircraft if Eckstein signaled an emergency from inside the city. If they could not commandeer a vehicle, they would run to him over the three-kilometer stretch.
If Eckstein and his team did manage to make it back to the airport but were pursued, the Mat’kalniks would stay on the tarmac and fight it out with the pursuers while the chopper got away, then escape and evade from Bosnia-Herzegovina by whatever means possible. If they did not survive, they carried no identification of any kind to mark their corpses as Israeli. No one in Israel would ever hear of their heroism, and their families would be left to weep over small markers on Mt. Herzl. The commandos understood this. Such was the stuff of young volunteers in the special services . . .
