Good and Dead (An Avner Ehrlich Thriller Book 2) Read online

  As the plane rose above Tel Nof airbase I saw ‘Eichmann,’ the training tower of the paratroopers’ school, standing tall and solitary like a monument to the four slipped discs in my lower back. We bungeed down that Eichmann long before anyone knew that bungee cords were a thing.

  On the other side of the plane were some kids from the Navy, some of them apparently technicians, from the way they checked every couple of minutes to see that their electronic equipment was still secure. They were on their way to the no-longer-secret naval base in Dahlak, which – according to Be’er’s idiotic slip at that conference – is where our navy’s second-strike subs are docked and equipped, in preparation for a retaliation that will be launched at Tehran if Iran ever even thinks of a massive strike. A sort of nuclear “you can’t fire me, I quit.”

  The kids were in civilian clothes, of course. Among them was a tall, athletic officer from Flotilla 13, whom I found disturbingly reminiscent of Eran, especially from the side. I asked him for the time so I had an excuse to see his entire face, and he told me, smiling broadly, and asked me if the watch on my wrist was broken.

  “That’s what I’m checking,” I said, and thanked him.

  He looked nothing like Eran. Not at all, not even vaguely similar. I was horrified. Was I losing my image of Eran’s face? I can see with perfect clarity every millimeter of him as a baby; the lakes of his eyes and his golden hair, the soft fuzz on his chubby arms, but when I try to see his older face, the memory flickers, and soon disappears. I see him, I reach out to touch him, and he shimmers and fades into a black mass.

  “Wake up, y’all, Asmara in twenty. And you know what that means – we’re in fucking Africa!” announced the pilot.

  In a few minutes, the plane gently touched down in an abandoned field.

  “Thank you for flying with the 103 Squadron, our lovely flight attendant Rina will show you the exit,” the pilot said. Laughter rose from the cockpit as “Rina” came out – it was Sitvon, the flight engineer, who came to the back to open the hydraulic ladder. “Be strong, guys,” he said. “That’s all that matters. Be strong. Bah-bye, now.”

  The kids started packing their gear in preparation to move out. I waved them goodbye and got off the plane – Uzi, who came out here right after the murder, was supposed to pick me up, but so far I hadn’t heard from him. The minibus that came to pick up the soldiers pulled up next to me, and the officer who looked nothing like Eran offered me a lift to Dahlak. I thanked them and rode with them into town, where Uzi was to meet me.

  Asmara hadn’t changed much since I last was there, still looking more than anything like a sleepy little Italian town. Years of Italian rule have left their architectural mark, colorful and pleasant. There are very few vehicles, most of them 60 years old or more. Somewhat reminiscent of Havana, only without the good cigars or the girls rolling them. Any newer vehicle generally belongs to some baksheesh-laden government official or senior clerk, or to a foreigner. Asmara, like Vienna back in the day or Puerto Aguirre, was crawling with spies, intelligence agents, and guns for hire.

  The neighborhoods on the edge of town had drawn from the architectural legacy of Soweto, or Jabalia and Balata, giving me a vague sense of home. A mu’azzin sang the Shahada in a faraway mosque. As I was considering whether to light a cigar while I waited, the decisive rumble of a powerful diesel engine growled somewhere nearby. That would be Uzi, I thought, and indeed the white Land Cruiser I’d been expecting appeared a moment later, and pulled over next to me with a screech.

  But Uzi was not inside.

  Two very large men sat in the front of the vehicle. I began to feel somewhat concerned. The one who came out of the car looked like a cross between a gorilla and a rhinoceros, and stood about 6’5’’ tall. His glistening black arms were as large as my thighs, and his huge head was perched atop a thick, veiny neck. He wore a camouflage uniform, with the sleeves shortened to contain his enormous biceps. A red paratroopers’ beret lay on his shoulder.

  “Hey mister,” he said in English, “You want your friend?”

  Before I could reply, the other man came out of the car – thin and gangly, he seemed to have been put together from spare parts. He circled around to the back of the car and slammed his fist on the door. Someone inside made some muffled grunts; he sounded gagged, but I still recognized him easily.

  “Hah? Good? You want your friend alive, hah? You come with us,” said the lanky one, reaching for his belt – a move that was just as likely to result in a loaded gun as in some document ranging from a police license to a Red Cross ID. Documents around here, like life, were cheap and temporary. I began inching toward him, trying to somehow discern Uzi’s condition, as well as who these drecks were and what they wanted, who sent them, and most importantly – which one am I taking down first? The ill-fitting Transformer or the big brute? Here, at least, I had a clear answer. I had to cut down the behemoth first – three hundred and thirty pounds, not counting the heavy-looking Magnum on his hip. I started running away from them. This injected him with a dose of unfounded confidence, despite the fact that he couldn’t aim effectively while running. Also, the faster he went, the greater the force that’d act on him – mass times acceleration, so altogether quite a lot of force, especially when you add my own considerable mass into this poetic encounter.

  When his heavy breathing informed me that he’d reached his aerobic limit, I abruptly stopped and leapt up into a spin-kick – a classic yoko geri. The collision was truly inspiring.

  The crack his neck made as it broke left him lying on the ground, his head tilted into an odd angle. So much for that modeling career. I freed the Magnum from his hand and looked for the other guy, but he seemed to have vanished into thin air. I opened the trunk and freed a sweaty, pale Uzi from the zip ties and duct tape that bound him.

  He smiled, tried to walk around to the front of the car, and collapsed. I helped him settle into the passenger seat. After his breathing returned to normal, he tried instantly to tell me everything that happened.

  “Calm down,” I said. “Breathe. Help me load the beast into the car. Do you know somewhere we can stash him?”

  “Few kliks from here,” he panted. “There’s a lake.”

  “Excellent. Any crocodiles?”

  His eyes lit up. “Yeah, Nile crocodiles. The locals used to sacrifice virgins to them.”

  “Huh. Yeah, he looks like a virgin to me.”

  Uzi’s estimation was off – we drove at least thirty kilometers across lousy dirt roads before finally arriving. The sun was nearly gone by then, and a dim, ruddy light settled over the lake like a cloud. We carried the body down to the muddy bank and found a wallet with no ID and a decent tactical knife.

  We began pushing him down toward the water. No Nile crocodile arrived. Uzi slipped on the mud and let out a yelp as he slid down nearly all the way to the waterline, relaxing only when he came to a stop by grabbing onto the deceased’s huge arm.

  “Here,” I passed him the knife. “Cut him up a bit.”

  “What for?” he asked, but a second later understood and nodded, marking the dead man.

  “And don’t forget to take some DNA.”

  He handled it and then with a look of deep loathing shoved the corpse away. It slid lazily into the muddy waters.

  We got back in the jeep and drove to Senafe, the town closest to the Emba Soira station and the site of Gigi’s murder. On the way there, Uzi filled me in on the details of his abduction. He told me that his way from the embassy to the Italian restaurant where he was supposed to pick me up, the gangly Transformer crossed the road and fell under his front wheels.

  “I ran over to him and picked him up to take him to the hospital. When I tried to maneuver him into the passenger seat he took out a taser and knocked me out. After that I don’t remember anything until the moment he started pounding on the trunk lid.”

  “But who knew you were here
? And who’s got a motive to come after us?”

  Uzi shrugged.

  It was about 75 miles from Asmara to Senafe, including the 20 or so miles we’d driven to the northern rim of the lake. We were forced to drive the remaining distance at a speed ranging from 7 to 35 mph. We lowered the tire pressure to 10 PSI, so we could go slightly faster. The terrain grew blacker and rockier as we progressed.

  Uzi suddenly laughed, and asked me, “So what’s your impression of Buba?”

  “I like the big weirdo. He actually looks just like the leviathan that came after me, may the crocodiles eat his cock. Nice guy, Buba, but so far he hasn’t delivered much. What about you? You trust him?”

  “I trust the man who sent him.”

  “Bruno?”

  “Affirmative,” I said.

  Uzi nodded.

  “And what’s so funny about him?”

  “Hello, I am Buba. You want I fuck you in ass?” Uzi replied by way of impersonation. It was quite uncanny, but somehow I wasn’t in the mood to laugh.

  “You know that he walks around with our Jump Wings?” said Uzi.

  “As he should. He came over with a group from the Ethiopian army, and finished both our paratrooper and guerrilla warfare training.”

  “That explains it. But what’s he got to do with Bruno? Italians haven’t been around here since World War I.”

  “Nothing that official. Bruno’s the sort of man that makes connections and nurtures relationships and accumulates favors, and when he needs them, he cashes in. And all that aside…”

  “All that aside, you like the guy.”

  “Affirmative. So how long has the Buba been with you?”

  “Couple of days.”

  “Well, I hope he’ll have something to tell us by the time we get there.”

  As we drew closer, the roads improved somewhat, allowing me to increase our speed. When the first lights of Senafe came into view, the road took a sharp turn, without the usual “Dangerous curves” signs to precede it. The jeep slid into a drift, and when I somehow managed to jerk its ass back into the center of the road, I found that said road had been blocked by huge black pickup. I took a sharp left halfway into the roadside ditch and managed to overtake the pickup. The Land Cruiser took the beating without complaint.

  Uzi and I leaped out of the car, weapons drawn, and flanked the offending vehicle. The huge black pickup was dwarfed by the huge black leviathan leaning against it, grinning broadly and applauding us. But this leviathan was sporting a pair of Tel Nof Jump Wings.”

  “He does look just like him. Same eyes, same jawline. Jesus, you don’t suppose they’re brothers?”

  Buba came over and compressed me with a hug.

  “You, RP – you I like. No fuck in the ass,” he said in heavily accented Hebrew, and burst into a thundering laughter.

  “Thanks, Buba, I truly appreciate it,” I said. “listen, you wouldn’t happen to have a brother?”

  He signaled that he didn’t understand.

  “Brother?” I said in heavily accented English. “Do you have a brother?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” he replied, also in English. “Very young, six, maybe seven. Small, like my father – Me, I’m big, like my mother.”

  “Beautiful Buba, what do you have for me?”

  “Very sad, very sad. You follow me.”

  We got in our car and followed him. He pulled over next to a dilapidated three-story building, and told us that this was where Gigi used to stay whenever he came to inspect the station on the mountain. This last inspection was supposed to end with a vacation he’d planned to take with his wife Alina and their little girl Ofra. Buba mournfully pointed at the little parking space in the back, where the Suzuki Jimny they’d rented for their trip was still parked.

  Buba told us that three men were waiting for the family near the building’s front door: One of them tall and very thin, one nearly as big as Buba was, and another one, white, about 5’5’’ but with a muscular build. The little one, he said, wore a mask. They tasered Gigi and his family, tied them up with zip-ties and took them away.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked. He pointed at the uppermost right window. “The landlady was up there and saw the whole thing.”

  Before I could ask if we could talk to her, Buba said that she went missing after that and no one knew her whereabouts. If we ever found that lanky-ass Transformer, we’d probably find out what became of the landlady. The local police combed the site at length and found no DNA, or any forensics, for that matter – neither at the abduction site nor at the site of the murder. Buba was there while they conducted their investigation, and testified to the diligence and meticulousness of their search.

  “Okay. So much for Senafe. Is there any reason to go up the mountain?” I asked Uzi, who shook his head.

  “Waste of time. It’s either a several hour climb over about 2 miles of hard terrain, or order the chopper in from Asmara, and apart for some equipment and a glorious view all the way to Bab-el-Mandeb, there’s nothing up there.”

  After we left the crime scene we had a pretty good pizza at an inn owned by an Italian gentleman who looked like he’d been living there since World War I. He made us excellent coffee with his macchinetta, and we also bought a carton of the new Coca-Cola Coffee.

  At 4 am we collapsed into bed at the Sunshine Hotel in Asmara, but at 5:29 Buba already woke me up again, with a fragrant espresso and a huge smile.

  “I hope you’re not here to fuck me in ass,” I said drowsily, and noticed he’d left the door to my room ajar.

  “They found DNA.”

  I leapt out of bed. Uzi came into the room, rubbing his eyes.

  “What’s up?” he yawned.

  “Get dressed. We’re going down to the precinct.”

  22.

  The shift sergeant greeted Buba with a big hug. I barely noticed Buba’s hand slip a stack of bills into the sergeant’s pocket. He opened a cardboard folder and placed a photo on the table featuring a woman’s severed head, her hair dyed blond with purple stripes, telling us she was a hooker from town, well-known to the police, missing since Wednesday – about a day after the murder of Gigi and his family. Her arms and legs were bound by black zip-ties, and there were multiple signs of sexual abuse.

  “Sado-style,” said the sergeant, repeating the exceptional phrase several times, “Sado-style.”

  According to the sergeant, there was a 90% certainty that the knife that severed her head was the same one used on Gigi.

  “We managed to find some DNA, mostly from the rectum,” he said, his voice taking a dip on the last word.

  “This is for you,” he said, handing me an envelope with a copy of the lab report.

  “I’m afraid we found no match in our own database, nor in Interpol’s.”

  “That’s it?” asked Buba, clearly disappointed. “That’s what I –”

  The sergeant gave him a look that said you know me better than that, and handed me a memory card, while sticking another – the original, I assumed – into the slot on his laptop. “The Imperial Hotel, this is where the headless lady worked, and she was found up in room 269. We found the big man and the skinny guy in the security footage from the hotel bar, along with some European, white as snow, about 5’5’’.”

  The white guy was clearly aware of the camera, and sat at an angle that left his face hidden from it. The next clip he showed us was from the third floor hallway camera that the three of them passed on their way to room 269. This time the white guy was wearing a beanie that concealed his face. “The maid testified that they went into the room where the headless lady usually did business. She didn’t hear any screaming or anything unusual.”

  “And is that it?” asked Buba, still obviously disappointed.

  The sergeant clasped his hands in a gesture of conclusion. Buba also gave me the original
memory card having pulled it out of the slot, gave another little roll of bills to the smiling sergeant, and they parted like a pair of lovers.

  “Hang on,” I asked and stuck the card back in. “How about these two? You know them?”

  The sergeant shook his head. “Nothing in our files about them, or anywhere.”

  “Look for him,” Buba said, pointing at the skinny one, “And you shall receive.” He rubbed a thumb and a forefinger together in that tiny gesture that can move just about anything.

  The sergeant’s face lit up.

  “And this one? What about him?” he pointed at the behemoth.

  “He’s…” Uzi fumbled for words, and I said to the sergeant, “He’s already left Eritrea. Find the other guy, and you’ll be compensated for both of them.”

  We pushed up the meeting with Yossi, who headed the local Mossad branch. His best guess was that the white guy was Iranian, probably from the IRGC’s Unit 400. What we knew of his appearance also matched this unit’s doctrine - similarly to the Spetsnaz, they preferred their fighters small and well-muscled, a build that usually came with superior aerobic endurance. The other two had most likely been recruited from the Shiite Ansar Allah movement, funded by Iraq and employed for its benefit around this part of Africa. But if this was indeed revenge over the assassination of Mughniyeh, or over our daily activities in Iran, Syria and Iraq, or even over the head of the NSC’s insufferable boasting, why would they refrain from taking credit for the murders? Terrorism is pointless without the media coverage needed to exalt it and propagate public humiliation. Still, it was a breakthrough of sorts, and from there on the branch would be responsible for the search. To that end we teamed up Yossi and Buba, to both of their satisfaction, not before I put Yossi at ease regarding Buba’s trustworthiness, and asked Buba to be more selective with his propositions of ass-fucking.