The Nylon Hand of God Read online

  The Nylon Hand of God

  Steven Hartov

  Copyright © 1996 by Steven Hartov

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system. For information, address Writers House LLC at 21 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10010.

  eISBN: 978-0-7867-5401-4

  Print ISBN: 978-0-7867-5400-7

  Cover design by Michael Scowden

  Distributed by Argo Navis Author Services

  Contents

  Also by Steven Hartov

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue New York, Late November 1992

  Part One: HOGs

  Chapter 1: Jerusalem

  Chapter 2: New York

  Chapter 3: New York

  Chapter 4: Columbia University

  Chapter 5: The East River

  Chapter 6: The USS Intrepid

  Chapter 7: New York Police Department

  Chapter 8: Yorkville

  Chapter 9: The Lexington Avenue Grill

  Chapter 10: The Grill

  Chapter 11: Brooklyn

  Chapter 12: Washington, D.C.

  Part Two: Nylon

  Chapter 13: Ethiopia

  Chapter 14: Bethesda, Maryland

  Chapter 15: The North African Coast

  Chapter 16: Casablanca

  Chapter 17: Casablanca

  Chapter 18: New York City

  Chapter 19: The Mediterranean

  Chapter 20: Skorpion

  Chapter 21: Marrakesh

  Chapter 22: The North Atlantic

  Chapter 23: Amanouz

  Chapter 24: Skorpion

  Chapter 25: Cap Ras Tarf

  Epilogue: Jerusalem

  Also by Steven Hartov

  The Heat of Ramadan

  The Devil’s Shepherd

  In the Company of Heroes

  The Night Stalkers

  Afghanistan on the Bounce

  FOR AL ZUCKERMAN

  My agent behind the lines

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Shaul Dori; Ory Slonim, Special Consultant to the Prime Minister; Brigadier General Yigal Presler, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Anti-Terror Warfare; Colonel (res.) Ranan Gissin; Sergeant Major Didi Lehman; Yaakov “K”; Fred Pierce; Dr. Donald Drouin; Detective Tim Connelly, NYPD; “Arthur”; Erster Polizeihauptkommissar Bernd Pokojewski; Eric Sabbe, EKHK G. Haiber-Bundeskriminalamt; Dr. David Th. Schiller; Sergeant First Class Jerry Ginder; Major Robert Oles; “Mustaffa”; Claire Wachtel; and of course, the real Ruth.

  This work was reviewed by the IDF Military Censor.

  The Hartov espionage trilogy is comprised of The Heat of Ramadan, The Nylon Hand of God, and The Devil’s Shepherd. This new release reflects the original hardcover manuscript, unedited and unabridged. For the many loyal fans who’ve inquired about the fates of Eytan Eckstein and Benni Baum, their adventures will continue in an upcoming book. For more information, please visit the author’s site: www.stevenhartov.com.

  Have pity upon me,

  Have pity upon me, O ye my friends;

  For the Hand of God hath touched me.

  Job 19:21

  Prologue

  New York, Late November 1992

  Moshiko Ben-Czecho knew that his death was imminent, but he refused to surrender to his shameful sensation of fear.

  There was no visible threat in evidence, he had no reason to be afraid, and he was determined to lock the rising paranoia in that corner of his mind reserved for fantasy, premonition, and weakness. He would slam the door of his subconscious on that paralyzing viper, so that no one might see it, smell it, hear its insistent hiss. He would simply ignore it, as if it did not exist at all.

  Yet it was there. Like the faint scent of electric air, when there is thunder in the wind. Like the sound of bird wings in the dark, when the careful steps of something large and powerful break no twig in the undergrowth.

  Moshiko understood—for his training was thorough—that this essence of fear was a physiological response to some sort of environmental stimulus. His brain was bypassing its own logic, alerting his body to its possible destruction.

  Already his adrenal glands were injecting his muscles with a significant boost in power. Heart rate was up, increasing oxygen flow to his extremities. His pupils were dilating to take in more light, auditory canals expanding to absorb faint sounds, and olfactories stretching to snare the smallest particles of a predator’s breath from the atmosphere. And even as his blood raced through his limbs, the arteries were also constricting, so that the slash of a blade or the plowing of a bullet would not result in a fatal gush from his wounds.

  His body had required only a few milliseconds to prepare, and now the secondary phase was engaged. The decisive phase.

  Fight or flee.

  But Moshiko Ben-Czecho, because he was a security officer at the Israeli Consulate General, did not have the luxury of choice. He could not flee. And inasmuch as the dread sweeping over him like a malarial chill did not stem from any discernible danger, he was determined to outwit his instincts.

  Today, Moshiko decided, he had absolutely no reason to be fearful. It was a day like any other, the late-autumn morning a mirror of a hundred others that had gone before. No consular routines had been broken, no alarms had sounded in the hallways, no diplomatic crises had encroached upon the denouement of a long workweek sliding toward the Sabbath. Yes, his vocation made him the potential target of gunfire or sabotage, but much like a professional test pilot, he, together with his fellow members of the General Security Services, lived with that danger, while for the most part ignoring it.

  The Consulate General and Permanent Mission to the United Nations occupied five floors of an unexceptional skyscraper on Second Avenue in Manhattan. It resembled a typical Israeli government office, transported to the West intact. The interior walls were of thickened concrete slabbed over with plaster, the floors of cracked linoleum tiles that looked like leftovers from a warehouse fire sale. The heavy wooden desks were scuffed and scabbed by thousands of dripping tea mugs and careless cigarettes, and hardly any chair in the place had its twin.

  The finger-soiled walls, which displayed few attempts at decor except some aging black-and-whites of elder statesmen and laboring kibbutzniks, were freely utilized like the Wanted boards of U.S. post offices. Stuck up every which way were notices from one department to another. Personnel advised secretaries that their overtime was getting out of hand. Security reminded diplomats that their movements should be properly logged. Information warned everybody that all contacts with journalists had to be cleared by them.

  As dictated by realpolitik, the consulate was also a secure facility, the hard-shelled outpost of a country at war, deep within the architecture of a stalwart ally. It was a maze of secret passageways and escape routes, with video cameras poking their snouts from every corner and X-ray machines scanning incoming mail for explosives. There were more pistols in desk drawers than in the mansion of a Colombian drug lord.

  It was a schizophrenic entity, an island of love and paranoia that warmly welcomed its friends, while patting them down in search of armed enemies. Moshiko’s job involved the latter, somewhat distasteful, necessity.

  He was enduring the last ten minutes of his shift on the fourteenth floor of the building. This was the first level of the consulate, the entrance through which Israelis trudged to renew their passports, foreigners appeared to submit visa applications, and the parents of young Israeli-American men came to beg that their sons be excused from m
ilitary service (the embarrassed boys usually hung back, looking at their shoes). The general public was restricted to this area, for above were nestled the diplomatic enclaves, the secure communications centers, and the quiet caves of Mossad officers, with their smiles as thin as their economic covers.

  Moshiko’s post was the first line of defense, for no visitors, whether bicycle messengers or White House presidential advisers, simply wafted into the consulate. The double doors of a passenger lift opened onto a large antechamber cum security screening room, an oblong space bordered by plastic chairs, overflowing ashtrays, cheaply framed propaganda posters from the Ministry of Tourism, and an Israeli flag drooping from a pole. Across the rectangle of worn blue carpet, the facing wall was dominated by a double-thick steel door held fast by an electromagnetic lock, and a large picture window of bulletproof plexiglass.

  The window was a new addition to the facility, the outcome of a nasty little skirmish between the Foreign Office and the GSS, known by its Hebrew acronym, Shabak. Up until recently, all visitors had suffered the equivalent of bowing before Oz, as they were viewed by cameras and queried by intercom, an indignity that the GSS insisted was an effective psychological deterrent. But the diplomats successfully argued that although the country was still technically at war with twenty Arab states and terrorist factions, her face abroad should not be one of a panicky prison warden. The peace process was taking center stage in the world’s media, and consulates, though they might indeed be small fortresses, should not appear to be so.

  To a man, the New York GSS officers hated the “aquarium.” And as one of the members of the team, Moshiko had to endure his share of shifts, when he would sit behind the glass feeling like a lonely bank teller guarding Fort Knox. He did not have much faith in the impregnable qualities of the window. In Lebanon, he had seen what a simple rocket-propelled grenade could do to an armored personnel carrier.

  On the Israeli side of the Perspex, he perched behind a counter in a small, dimly lit room. A row of video monitors showed him images from other parts of the facility. A microphone poked up from the countertop, so he could speak to visitors in the waiting chamber, and a red telephone sat beside a “panic button.” To the best of his knowledge, no Shabaknik had ever pressed it, for it would be like ringing the scramble klaxon at an air force fighter base.

  Below the frame of the wide window, a shallow steel drawer was set into the concrete and could be pushed to the outside for deposits of passports or identity papers. Beneath that, a row of photographs was propped in the shadows. The grainy shots were of active anti-Israeli terrorists. Not the political masters such as George Habash or Ahmed Jabril, but the men who had proved their mettle in actual hijackings, bombings, or shootings. Moshiko glanced at them often, seeing them not so much as the enemy as the antimatter to his own existence.

  In a waistband holster clipped to his belt he wore a Beretta .22 caliber automatic. The weapon’s stopping power was questionable, but within the confines of the consulate you did not want your rounds passing right through a terrorist and killing some unfortunate New Yorker who had come to volunteer for banana-picking duty on a kibbutz. Besides, in keeping with Israel Defense Forces tradition, you were not expected to hunker down and outmarksman an attacker to death. You were expected to charge.

  There was a running joke among the Shabakniks about designing a bullet that would kill terrorists, wound diplomats, and bounce off anyone else. Not that these young men viewed their endeavors as a game, but as with any dangerous activity, some self-deceptive levity was necessary, even as they remained alert as hunted gazelles during every second of their shifts. The routine was exhausting, yet if you faltered, that could well be the moment that you, and those you had sworn to protect, would die.

  In the year that Moshiko had worked at the consulate, hardly anything of substance had occurred. One explosive device had been mailed to the consul general and immediately detected and defused. One overwrought fan of Louis Farrakhan had stepped from the elevator waving a plastic pistol, which he had wisely dropped before being nearly executed by Moshiko and two of his comrades. It was hardly a chain of mishaps that boded ill for the immediate future, so Moshiko did not understand why he was breathing as if he had just run the obstacle course at Wingate.

  Perhaps it was the very lack of action that had him spooked. He had had that feeling before, lying in ambush near Marj Ayoun, just before his tour was over and he was about to go home. Yes, that was it, a foolish superstition, like that of a businessman who had flown too many times without a mishap, an unsubstantiated sense that the odds were shifting.

  He sat in the armless swivel chair, looking down at his hands where they rested on the countertop. The building heat was adequate, yet his fingertips fluttered and his left knee bounced above his tapping heel. There was a small annoying tic in the corner of his right eye, and his pulse throbbed some kind of message in his ear.

  “Zeh lo ritsini.” He assured himself that the affliction was not serious. “Atah stahm mishtagaya. You’re just losing your mind.”

  Determined to outwit his forebodings, he embraced a false calm, harking back to the teaching of his hand-to-hand instructors. The body was not a temple; it was a slave to be mastered. He began to breathe diaphragmatically, hissing the long breaths in and out, slowing his heart rate. He drew his fingertips together and commanded them to a stillness, as he did each week on the pistol range in Nassau County.

  “Hey, Maharaja Yogi. Try to stay awake for your last ten minutes.”

  Moshiko nearly bucked from his chair, but he managed to quickly feign composure. He looked up to see the image of his boss reflected in the window. Hanan Bar-El, a short, muscular forty-year-old given to dark shirts and flowery ties, stood framed behind him in the open doorway of the booth.

  “I was practicing Krav-Maga,” said Moshiko as he set his hands into the first position of Contact-Combat.

  “Well, don’t punch anything expensive,” Bar-El warned playfully. As GSS chief of security for New York, he was not prone to smiles. But Moshiko was one of his favorites. “And let those poor misguided Russians in. See you Monday.”

  Moshiko waved over his shoulder as Bar-El closed the door.

  He looked out through the window at the five visitors in the waiting chamber. Four of them were a family of Russians, the young parents fussing over a pair of toddlers whose winter clothing made them look like small stuffed bears. These days most Russian Jews sought the golden promise of America, yet here was a family who had made it to Manhattan but longed for Jerusalem. A former refugee himself, Moshiko was still touched by such naive idealism.

  “Mr. Penkovsky?” He keyed the microphone and spoke in English. “Please come in.” He touched a button beneath the counter, the magnetic lock buzzed, and the Russians rushed through the door with a bounce that made him feel momentarily like a gatekeeper at Disney World.

  The remaining visitor in the chamber was a girl, who looked to be less than twenty. She was wearing bright-yellow boots and a blue wool ski cap. As Moshiko watched, she pulled off the hat, shook out a stunning stream of red hair, and smiled up at him. He waved back briefly.

  So where was this mortal danger?

  It did not exist.

  He looked at his watch.

  Six minutes to go.

  As his apprehension slowly faded, Moshiko allowed his mind to engage in a forbidden pastime. It began to wander, as he reflected with a blend of melancholy and hope on the not too distant future. Soon his life as a Shabaknik would end, yet something with more promise would begin. . . .

  Moshiko had long ago come to the realization that he was not going to have an illustrious career in the Israeli intelligence community. He had been born in Czechoslovakia as Moshe Kubis, the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother, which according to biblical tenets made him a member of the Tribe. At the age of seventeen he had emigrated to Israel and Hebraicized his family name to complement his new life.

  When Moshiko (a nickname for the Old
Testament name Moses) had completed his compulsory three years of army service in the Golani infantry brigade, he applied for duties with the Special Operations wing of AMAN—Israel’s Military Intelligence branch. Almost immediately it appeared that his East Bloc background would thwart him, yet by a stroke of luck, one of his vetters was a Major Benjamin Baum, who as a child of the Holocaust was partial to renegade refugees.

  “Kubis?” Baum’s brows had arched as he perused Moshiko’s dossier. “As in Jan Kubis?”

  “My great-uncle,” Moshiko had muttered, bracing himself to be thrown out on his ear.

  “My boy.” Baum was stunned, for in addition to being a brilliant AMAN officer, he was also an amateur historian of the war years. Jan Kubis was a Czechoslovak hero. It was Sergeant Jan Kubis who had been parachuted by the British OSS into the Czech forests on a winter night in 1941, the point man of a secret mission called Anthropoid. And it was also Kubis who had managed to mortally wound SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Butcher of Prague, before being killed himself in a shootout with the Gestapo.

  Baum quickly found a position for Moshiko with the physical-security detachment of Special Operations, as well as a place at the Sabbath table in Baum’s Jerusalem home. However, the regulations of an intelligence service at war could not be completely circumvented, and when it became clear that Moshiko’s security clearance would restrict him from the adventures to which he had aspired, the major helped him transfer to Shabak.