Part III
Chapter 21
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Walking up to the wreck, Callahan thought it looked like an old Soviet T-54 main battle tank, but now, after several years under the desert sun, the original dark green paint had given way to a lizard-like patchwork of rusty tans and grays, the main turret punctured in at least two places by, he assumed, an Israeli tank that had scored a hard kill then moved swiftly on to the next encounter.
You had lived on this battlefield by keeping your wits about you, or you died - and quickly, too. But wasn't it the same on any field of combat, Callahan thought. Nothing had changed since Roman legions walked these plains, and as long as humans chose conflict over coexistence nothing would change
But right now he was looking for cover because he could hear several helicopters - and they would be flying a standard search grid, looking for him - headed up the valley in his direction. He found what he needed by crawling under the shattered bulk of the tank's main hull, and he waited for the first helicopter to show itself.
It didn't take long.
The Huey flew over the tank once, then circled before setting down twenty meters away.
And as the rotors spun down his round-faced instructor stepped out of the Huey and walked right up to Callahan...
"Could you possibly have found a more obvious place to hide, Inspector Callahan?" Colonel 'Benni' Goodman cried. "Really! Have you not listened to one thing we've tried to cram inside that nonsensically thick skull of yours!"
Harry pulled himself out of hiding, brushing sand and gravel off his uniform as he stood, but then he jumped back when the colonel pulled out a holstered Beretta and fired three rounds into the sand by his feet.
"Let alone, Inspector Callahan, that in this heat every cobra within a hundred miles will try to find shade this complete!"
Callahan looked down at the still-writhing snake and shuddered.
"Well, I guess it wasn't a total loss, Callahan. You evaded for fifty-five hours; not bad for your second time out."
Callahan stood motionless long after the colonel had turned and started back to the Huey.
"Well, come on, Inspector! Or do you want to walk all the way back to camp!"
'Camp' was an odd assortment of tents clustered between a few dozen palms that rimmed a small spring-fed watering hole not far from the Dead Sea. The desert here was warm during the day and positively freezing at night, and after two nights of sleeping in the rough Callahan was whipped. He wanted a shower and a steak - in no particular order - then about twenty-four hours of serious rack time...
But no...that was not to be.
He was the first picked-up, but an hour later Al Bressler arrived - looking dejected, at least until he found he'd beaten Callahan...
Then Bullitt arrived - looking worn-out - and put-out.
That left the Bennetts - Sam and Stacy. She was doing pretty good, too, considering she was dead. Or supposed to be, anyway. After the Israelis found the FBI had been penetrated the decision had been made to get her off the streets, and Jim Parish had been recruited to complete the deception. Still, not even the Israelis considered the scale of the attack that took out Chip Bennett.
Stacy had some serious training under her belt from the FBI Academy in Quantico, but Sam had been a Marine in the second world war, so it was still even money who might be toughest between them.
"So?" Frank asked the group as he settled in with a bottle of cold water. "Who's gonna last the longest?"
Turned out everyone assumed Sam would come in well before his sister, because - of course - he was much older and therefore had to be in worse shape.
Stacy Bennett came in on the next Huey.
And the Israelis had yet to find Sam, and now Colonel Goodman was growing a little concerned.
"Suppose he fell into a ravine?" the colonel's aide said.
"Or maybe a cobra found him?" Callahan added, still coming to terms with how close he'd come to another fatal encounter with the snakes out here.
They heard another helicopter approaching, but this one was coming from the coast, so they gathered near the pad and waited for it to arrive.
But no, two new instructors jumped out before the heavy transport helicopter thudded away back to the northwest.
Six hours later - a little after midnight - Sam stepped out of another Huey and joined the team in their mess tent for a quick de-brief, then everyone filed out and found their way to a tent for some sleep; not an hour later the sound of grenades and machine-gun fire filled the air, and the team bolted from their tents - running low to the ground to prepared trenches - only to be told the drill was over.
Callahan grumbled as he crawled back into his sleeping bag, wondering what the hell had happened to the comfortable little world he'd left behind in Switzerland...
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Saul Rosenthal watched British troops loading German prisoners onto transport lorries, yet he was surprised by his lack of emotion as he watched the scene unfold.
"What a fucking waste," was about all he could think to say as he looked back over the last ten years. A simpleton, really, a raving Austrian lunatic had appealed to the very worst in human nature, a deeply embedded populist anti-semitism combined with a sense of Aryan superiority, and with this divisive hate as his weapon of choice Hitler had turned an industrious, democratic society in on itself, and he had taken Europe down the same rabbit hole with him. Not even twenty years after the end of the last war. Like a pendulum swinging back and forth between ever-widening extremes, Hitler had exposed the raw edges of humanity's desire for self-immolation to light; he watered and fed these impulses until the became undeniable. And unstoppable - at least within the confines of Europe.
Rosenthal had watched as Hitler's brand of divisiveness spread from the Tirol to Bavaria, from greater Germany to France and Italy. Hitler's brand of hate wasn't unique, either; it had laid dormant in Europe for ages, the virulence breaking out every fifty years or so, and it would break out again. Hitler had tapped into this same awesome power of hatred just as the next populist leader would - wherever that might be - and humanity would be dragged kicking and screaming down into the warrens once again.
"Maybe Avi is correct," Saul said to the wind as the last German troops were transported from Denmark. "Maybe Palestine is the answer. Perhaps the world will simply leave us alone."
But Avi was the traitor that had leaked the scientist's departure information to the Gestapo, and all in an effort to arrange his marriage to Imogen.
And he had vowed to kill his brother, hadn't he?
But how? How do you kill your own flesh and blood without becoming the very evil you hope to destroy?
Then he was hit by the thought: How could the liberal democrats of the Weimar Republic have killed Hitler - without becoming the very thing they wanted to destroy?
But was the equation ever really so simple? Probably not.
If left as things stood now, he thought, humanity was doomed to cycle between altruistic periods of intellectual expansion and regressive interludes of irrational mysticism. Yet, if a strict balance was maintained between the two cycles, human development might be stymied; the only way forward would be to keep the irrational mysticism 'within' - somehow - under control.
So...how could he keep Avi under control?
'Avi wants Imogen most of all, correct?' Saul said to himself. 'That means he wants the future only she can provide. And that means he wants to take her to Palestine.'
He found himself walking along the waterfront - several British-flagged cargo ships off-loading medical supplies. The shipping area was only now coming alive after several nights of bombing and resistance activity, and it felt good to see the city coming back to life. Seamen from all over the British Commonwealth were crawling around the wharves but in amongst this vibrant throng he saw a new, very different queue forming quayside...of refugees, if the look of the tattered scarecrows waiting there meant anything at all, and taken as a whole this looked like a very malnourished group...
'But...what if I deny Avi the future he craves? Would that be punishment enough for his many betrayals?'
He looked at the ships as he walked along the water's edge, the rough contours of a plan taking shape as he looked at the destitute gathered in the shadows of a broken world. 'I've got to keep her away from Avi, whatever I do. Somehow, I've got to break this new cycle he seems intent on starting...'
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After another day in the desert, Callahan was exhausted and his body felt sore all over, but so too did they all - though the oldest among them, Sam Bennett, still seemed the most 'on the ball' - both physically and emotionally. Harry knew Sam was carrying the heaviest burden of those in their little group - the death of his son - yet as far as Chip's murder was concerned Sam's sister Stacy seemed to have been the most adversely affected. The 'attack' had been uncovered only hours before it happened, and the advance word was a sniper was going to try to take out Stacy. The bomb in Frank's Porsche had taken everyone, including the Israelis, by surprise; now Sam was intent on revenge and his fury burned with a ferocity that really troubled Stacy.
Yet after talking with Stacy Harry learned that what bothered her most of was much simpler, and yet far more deadly. Someone in the Bureau had 'burned' her, had been providing the Bay Area Vigilante Group with detailed reports of her whereabouts - details that had been known only to a very small group of people - and she knew once this person was uncovered they would surely be killed. The problem - for Stacy, anyway - was that every person on that list was a friend. The solution - as she now understood it - involved getting her close enough to the traitor to take part in his death. and as she told Callahan what she knew so far he began to see the dimensions of the problem. No matter how this turned out, if she took out an agent there was no way she could go back to work for the Bureau. Extrajudicial killings were not tolerated within law enforcement for all the obvious legal and moral reasons, and by 'going off the reservation' like this would make her a real pariah.
They were gathering now, after shooting practice out in the desert, in the tent that they'd been using for classroom training, and sure enough after they settled into their seats Colonel 'Benny' Goodman came in - carrying several file folders that he put on a folding table well away from the tent's floppy entry flap. Callahan watched carefully while the old Israeli as he set out materials; he knew Goodman well enough by now to see that something was troubling him - and Callahan found that vaguely unsettling.
"Good evening," Goodman said as he pulled up a chair and faced the group.
"What's wrong, Benny?" Sam Bennett asked, for clearly everyone had picked-up on the old man's sour expression and agitated movements.
Goodman steepled his hands on his lap and nodded. "How many of you know Captain Jerome McKay?"
"Pencil Dick?" Callahan and Frank Bullitt said together, causing everyone - but Goodman, who looked confused - to laugh a little.
"Pencil Dick?" Goodman asked.
Sam Bennett cleared his throat, trying to hide his grin behind a deepening scowl: "McKay is," Sam began, "an officious, pompous little know-it-all, Benny. He earned the name by being more concerned with budgets than with officer safety."
"But...Pencil Dick?" Goodman repeated, and Frank held up his fist with only his little finger extended, and this he wagged bag-and-forth a few times. "Ah," Goodman said then, his understanding now apparent.
"What about him," Harry asked.
Goodman took a deep breath then dove in: "Well, it seems your Captain McKay is the leader of the network in California."
Callahan burst out laughing. "McKay? Are you fucking serious? He couldn't lead a blind man to a goddamn urinal!"
Goodman fed a tape into the hulking reel-to-reel deck on the table and pushed play; scratchy audio filled the tent and Harry could hear cars in the background, as well as sounds you might hear in a busy restaurant, like the recording had been made somewhere like a sidewalk café...
'What do we have on him?' one voice could be heard asking.
