The Devil's Shepherd Read online

  The Devil's Shepherd

  Steven Hartov

  Also by Steven Hartov

  The Heat of Ramadan

  The Nylon Hand of God

  In the Company of Heroes

  The Night Stalkers

  Afghanistan on the Bounce

  “Twilight Zone” written by George Kooyman copyright © Snamyook/TBM International CV/Sony/ATV Music Publishing is reprinted with kind permission.

  “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel copyright © Impulsive Music 1977. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  THE DEVIL’S SHEPHERD. Copyright © 2000 by Steven Hartov.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or part in any form. For information, address Writers House LLC at 21 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10010.

  Print ISBN 978-0-7867-5402-1

  eISBN 978-0-7867-5403-8

  Cover design by Michael Scowden

  Distributed by Argo Navis Author Services

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue Eritrea, April 26, 1993

  Part I: Volunteers

  1. Tel Aviv April 28

  2. Tel Aviv April 28

  3. Bosnia-Herzegovina April 30

  4. Sarajevo April 30

  5. North Africa May 2

  6. Addis Ababa May 2

  Part II: Mercenaries

  7. Durba May 3

  8. Amhara May 3

  9. Bahir Dar May 4

  10. Bahir Dar May 5

  11. Jerusalem May 6

  12. Gojam May 6

  Part III: Saviors

  13. Vienna May 7

  14. Kunzula May 8

  15. Guba May 9

  16. Tel Nof, Israel May 9

  17. Abu-Mendi May 9

  18. Jerusalem May 10

  19. Almahel May 10

  20. Tel Aviv May 10

  21. The Sudan May 10

  For my sons

  Oren and Jesse

  May the road rise to meet you,

  May the wind be always at your backs,

  May the sun shine warm upon your faces,

  The rains fall soft upon your fields and,

  Until we meet again,

  May the Lord hold you in the palm of His Hand.

  Acknowledgments

  The writing of a novel is a long and arduous journey. This one would not have seen completion but for the unconditional love and support of my sister and brother-in-law, Susan and Paul Berman. Along the way, many others also helped carry the load, offered their wisdom, surrendered secret knowledge, endured me with patience, and even risked their own safety. I am grateful to you all: Lt. Col. (L.O.F.) Michael D. Epstein, Albert Zuckerman, my mother and father, Claire Wachtel, Lt. Col. (res.) Shaul Dori, Samuel M. Katz, Arye Rubel, Milton Schonberger, Richard S. “Buddha” Meyers, David Bale, Fred Pierce, Mike Marcus, Lt. Col. Charles J. F. McHugh, Shlomo Baum, Yaakov “K,” Alon and Yael Shafran, Evelyn Musher, Klaudia Berkow, James Dator, Maja Nicolic, Dr. Hermann Heller, Otto Haan, Nicholas Burns, Bernard E. Gross II, Special Agent Gary F. Truchot, Rami Hatan, Nigus Fisseha, Mulualem Anemut, Muluget Yegezaw, Tinneke Dirckx, Avi Nesher, Mizuki Ogawa, Rick Washburn, Roger Berger, Christina Denzinger, Lee Malecki, Sgt. 1st Class Jerry Ginder, Bernie Hasenbein, Andrew Norman, Howard Goldberg, Joseph Vernon, Donald Maas, Ryder Washburn, Lia Yang, and David Hansberry.

  This manuscript has been reviewed by the IDF Military Censor, which is a requirement with which I must comply, given my background.

  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.

  Help I’m steppin’ into the Twilight Zone.

  This place is a madhouse, feels like being cloned.

  My beacon’s been moved under moon and star,

  Where am I to go now that I’ve gone too far?

  Soon you will come to know . . .

  When the bullet hits the bone.

  —Golden Earring,

  “Twilight Zone”

  Prologue

  Eritrea, April 26, 1993

  MAJOR EYTAN ECKSTEIN prayed that the bullets would kill him before he heard the gunfire.

  Such was the way of ballistics, especially across open water, and he wrestled the urge to look back from the prow of his black Zodiac assault boat at the fading strip of midnight beach. Even at this range of half a kilometer, the heavy 7.62 mm round of a Dragunov sniper rifle could leap out faster than the speed of sound and sever his dreams, long before its sonic report reached his dying ears. If he was lucky, he would feel virtually nothing at all.

  “Zeh beseder. It’s all right,” he silently persuaded himself in Hebrew. “Ahf echad lo echieh l’tamid. Nobody lives forever.”

  He paddled on, first the right side, then the left, watching his aluminum oar blade slice a flat sea shimmering with the pearls of an evil moon. The blazing orb should not have been up there at all; it was supposed to be obscured by clouds, and he cursed the army meteorologists and tried to think. Of nothing. Not of home, not of his wife, not of his son. There is no future. There is only now. Like the moments before a parachute jump, thoughts were your nemeses, instincts your only allies. Fantasy brought fear, fear broke concentration, and a flagging brain would react a split second too late, and then . . .

  Just row, he ordered that other Eckstein, the cold professional one, while the hair at the nape of his neck stood straight up and stiff as the arms at a neo-Nazi rally.

  The major had not always cringed at the possibility of being shot. As a young paratrooper, then an officer, and finally a senior operator with the Special Operations division of AMAN—Israel’s military intelligence branch—he had swaggered into gunfire with the idiocy of ignorance, as do most young men whose flesh has not yet been scarred by spinning slugs of lead and brass. But later on, he had been wounded. Badly. His knee still ached from it, his memory held a vintage taste of that vicious flashback. He knew what it would feel like and he tried not to show that he trembled with the knowledge.

  Just row.

  Ahead, the gray unlit hulk of an Israeli Navy Aliyah class missile boat bobbed clumsily in the undulating swells, engines silent, its form growing larger, but slowly, so slowly. Eckstein fought another urge, to go prone now and paddle like a madman. But his wards were huddled just behind him in the rubber Zodiac, watching their shepherd very carefully. He could feel their eyes on his back, and so he knelt, spine erect.

  First the right side, then the left. Just slice the Red Sea, part the waters, think about Moses . . . He grimaced slightly, chastising himself for his biblical comparisons as his muscles strained with the oar. I suspect we might be having some delusions of grandeur here, Major.

  There were eleven falashas in Eckstein’s “stretch” Zodiac Hurricane and eight more boats behind him, carrying a few remnants of the Ethiopian Jews who had been airlifted to Israel during Operation Solomon back in ’91. Solomon had been a public relations triumph for Jerusalem, over 14,000 black Jews spirited to the Promised Land in less than forty-eight hours. Ethiopia’s then-dictator, Mengistu Haile-Mariam, had happily snatched a thirty-five-million-dollar bribe from the Israeli government in exchange for turning a blind eye to the rescue, and promptly fled his war-torn country for Zaire.

  But tonight, with the first general Ethiopian elections set for dawn and the province of Eritrea on the verge of independence
, various and sundry rebel bands were pillaging the countryside, getting in their last licks. There was no one left in power to pay off, so Eckstein’s mission Operation Jeremiah, was barely Solomon’s pauper cousin and strictly a covert operation.

  The falashas gripped the gunwales of the rubber boat; silent, polite, mostly women and children, a couple of “old men” of fifty. A grandfather wearing an incongruous Sinatra fedora slipped a silver-plated Old Testament from his worn tweed coat and began to bob over the pages. The refugees were surely frightened, and possibly ashamed, for Eckstein had had to strip the women of their bright white shama shawls and their tin jewelry, and the handsome mothers in their burlap smocks clutched their children to their breasts, shy eyes lowered, waiting, watching.

  Yet they trusted Eytan Eckstein, whom they knew only as “Anthony Hearthstone.” They had listened to him when he came to their secret villages in Gondar, along with that burly bear of a man called “Schmidt,” who was in fact Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Baum, Eckstein’s superior and SpecOps Chief of Operations. The two strangers had to say no more than, “It is your turn. Come with us to Israel,” and the joyous tribal leftovers of Beta Israel abandoned their meager belongings to join a month-long trek by foot, wagon, truck, and finally here, to the sea.

  The danger, besides the sun, starvation, and disease, was from Amin Mobote and his Oromo Liberation Front. The Oromo rebel leader was furiously jealous of the Eritrean independence bid and determined to upset the elections by any means possible. Ambushing and killing over one hundred falashas and their Israeli rescuers would do nicely. And so, as the ragtag convoy grew, following their Israeli pied pipers from Asmara to Akordat to Keren, through the searing wadis and the frosted mountains to Nakfa and Karora, and finally to the beaches of Ras Kasar, the OLF had probed. Like hyenas after wildebeest they had fallen on the weak, the slow, and the sickly who strayed.

  Eckstein, Baum, and three support men from Queens Commando—the AMAN cover name of their SpecOps unit—had strict orders not to engage. But the rebels were growing dangerously bold, so on the last night before the final dash to the sea the Israelis had laid their own ambush. Igniting a seemingly frivolous campfire, they had drawn in the OLF probe, fired a brace of deadly Claymore mines, then herded their flock into poultry trucks and sprinted the last twenty-eight kilometers to the beachhead . . .

  Eckstein broke his own rules of engagement now and began to think, making hollow promises to himself.

  No more after this. No more. It’s your last field mission, Eytan. Onward and upward to a desk in Jerusalem. It’s enough. You’ve proved you’re not your father. He ran from the Nazis, you ran straight at the enemy. Over and over and over. You can stop now . . .

  He was aging, hurtling toward forty. It was not physically apparent, for his blondish ponytail was misleading, his physique boyish, and the sun of these continents had tightened and camouflaged the tired flesh around his pale blue eyes. But inside, his memories overflowed. Inside, he was sixty-five.

  First the right side, then the left.

  A pool of phosphorescent algae glowed green around the blade of his oar, and the missile boat beckoned. He could see a naval crewman gripping the handles of a fifty-caliber machine gun on the beachside gunwale. He could see the amber combat bulbs glowing from inside the bridge.

  He glanced down between his knees at an olive canvas parachute bag. “Anthony Hearthstone” was zipped up in there: his frayed jeans and chambray shirt, his forged British passport, his “pocket litter,” his press credentials from Stern, his cameras. Now Major Eytan Eckstein had emerged once more, clad in black fatigue pants and canvas Palladium commando shoes soaked through from the wading. He was shirtless except for a cordura assault vest, magazines of nine-millimeter ammunition, a Browning Hi-Power pistol, a smoke grenade, and a field dressing. On the beach a naval commando had handed him a small packet from General Itzik Ben-Zion, commander of AMAN SpecOps. It contained Eckstein’s genuine dog tags, military ID, and prisoner of war card. He was a soldier again, in theory no longer summarily executable as a spy, but to Mobote’s rebels it would make no difference. A warm African breeze full of brine prickled the hair on his arms. He was cold.

  He suppressed the thoughts of gunfire and glanced over his left shoulder. Just behind him, Bayush Addisu sat cross-legged on the hard rubber flooring. Like all the refugees, she wore a water skier’s life vest painted black, and she stroked her four-year-old son as he slumbered in her arms with the womb-like rocking. She opened her mouth and the accursed moonlight flashed from her smile. Eckstein felt the muscles twitch his lips as he grimaced in return. At the rear of the Zodiac two naval commandos from Flotilla 13 crouched at the flanks of the silent Evinrude 40 engine, rowing steadily outboard with their young muscles. They wore no diving gear, only black wetsuit tops and fatigue trousers, their mini-Uzis clipped to the new high-tech chest harnesses that Eckstein had never seen before.

  The rest of the Zodiacs curved behind to the south in a long arc, much too visible under the betraying night of star clusters and the earth’s bald-faced satellite. Benni Baum was back there somewhere, bringing up the rear in the last boat, and Eckstein wished they had reversed their positions. He felt like a lazy farm boy allowing his aging father to plow the fields on a blazing August afternoon. Baum was supposed to be out of it already. Baum was supposed to be retired, at home in Abu Tor, cursing his boredom and tending his garden. But he was a stubborn old bull and he had stayed on to help with Jeremiah, and in the field he was still the boss, by experience and by rank.

  “You’ll take the first boat,” Baum had said when they broke through the brush and came upon the beach and the naval commandos suddenly rose from the water like someone’s aquatic nightmare.

  “Up your ass, Benni,” said Eckstein.

  “That’s an order,” Baum growled.

  “I see your point.”

  While the two officers and their three SpecOps men separated the falashas into small groups, the naval commandos secured the beachhead, then called in the Zodiacs from the missile boat. The rowing-in seemed to take forever, but the outboards could not be fired up, for if Mobote’s men were still tracking the flock the roar of marine engines would bring them on like a wolf pack.

  Still, it had gone fairly smoothly, even though the falashas had backed away like frightened sheep at the sight of the strange rubber alligators, having never seen anything like them. And now they were all away, nearly to the missile boat, perhaps twenty minutes from making full throttle for the distant Gulf of Aqaba. Eckstein willed his neck muscles to soften as he watched the dot of Benni’s distant boat bumping over the shallow shore swells and the beachhead team of commandos backing up with staggered discipline into the water, sweeping the beach with their gun barrels. They carried light weapons of choice, Colt Commandos or mini-Uzis, their flippers linked to their combat webbing. They were going to swim to the missile boat, a feat of which Eckstein found himself jealously annoyed.

  He turned back toward the gray mass of the sleek hull out ahead. It was larger now, like a bobbing fifth of whiskey, and he could see rope ladders dangling from the gunwales. Just a few more paddle strokes, maybe a hundred, he reckoned. First the right side, then the left, and he remembered Baum’s whisper in the dark, just before Eckstein pushed his laden Zodiac from the beach into the curling surf.

  “This is all so unnecessary.” The colonel had gestured at the tensed commandos crouching on one knee, weapons poised, hissing into commo gear. Eckstein looked at Benni, while the beefy bald man shrugged and pointed. “We could have just stood on that dune with a white flag and a suitcase full of cash. Mobote would’ve probably joined us for a bonfire and a kumsitz, sent us all off with a kiss.”

  Eckstein had just grunted, then pushed off for the sea. But now he smiled.

  Simple bribery. Not a bad idea, come to think of it. Benni Baum was many things, including a genius tactician and practical cynic, and in the field even his jokes were often the fruits of operational lifesavers.
Well, next time, Eckstein decided, then remembered that he had just sworn off field operations forever.

  His ears pricked up like a dog’s as something plucked at the water not two meters from the Zodiac’s prow, and just as the flash from the beach registered on his retina and the choked report of the rifle reached him, the truth thundered in his head.

  This is the next time!

  The rest of it happened all at once. From the hillocks of brushy dune just above the slim beach a line of star-shaped flashes burst the night open, throwing Jeremiah’s boats into horrific silhouette, their occupants frozen like teenagers caught skinny-dipping as the cannonade of Kalashnikovs rolled across the water. From somewhere behind, one of Eckstein’s men yelled “Ta’tan’kak!” in Amharic, and the heads of the falashas bowed to the floors of their Zodiacs like Moslems at midnight prayer as quick lines of green tracers crisscrossed overhead and hissed into the swells.

  Eckstein’s heart muscle froze for a millisecond, then he caught a breath and turned to yell orders at his boat crew. But the commandos were instinctive and well-trained animals and all the Zodiac pairs reacted simultaneously. The men facing the beach unclipped their mini-Uzis, came to their knees, and opened up with controlled bursts of spaced red tracers back at the hillocks, ineffective as their nine-millimeters were at such a range. The starboard men kicked the Evinrude blades into the water and hauled on the starters, and in the shallows of the beach itself the withdrawal team quickly abandoned their retreat, went prone in the surf, and hammered back at the hillocks on full auto.