BADLANDS

November 27, 2016

Western Negev, Israel.

A branch brushed against Tom Keeler’s left temple and he ducked his head an inch to the right, protecting his eye. Yasmin was beside him, both of them prone in the thicket. The branch had been pushed by her shifting position. She made brief eye contact, like saying sorry. Keeler turned his head to the view of the desert plain down below.

Which was the precise moment that the sun dipped below the horizon, flaring as the last sliver disappeared over the Sinai mountains to the west, on the other side of the border with Egypt. A blue halo rose, flared, and was gone. Keeler blinked twice, the second time slowly, waiting for the retinal traces to die down. When he opened his eyes, a lone hyena had appeared on the hill just in front of them. The beast was upwind of the thicket, unaware of being observed, descending a few yards before tracing the ridge line, snout down and scanning for death.

The hyena hadn’t caught their scent, but was certainly interested in something out there, doing a grid search of the rocky desert outcrop. Keeler watched it work, one of the perfect animals that let others do the killing for them, arriving once the hunter was exhausted, driving the pure predators from their prey and appropriating the rewards.

Keeler glanced at Yasmin, catching her eye again. They both knew what the hyena meant, the truth that its presence revealed about the situation below. She handed him the Nikon binoculars she kept in her Subaru.

Their position was high above a desert flat. About a kilometer to the southwest, two human figures lay as still as lifeless dolls on a desert track a few yards from a white four-wheel-drive vehicle. The wind was coming from that direction. Keeler couldn’t smell a corpse from a kilometer away, but a hyena sure can. The fact that the hyena wasn’t already closing in on the dead suggested that the animal was deterred by something over there.

Keeler’s concern was the possible existence of living human beings, with their smells of tobacco, coffee, oil, urine and sweat. Not much else would deter a hyena from scavenging the kill, but maybe it was the vehicle, the fact that its engine was still ticking or something.

Yasmin had her phone up. She spoke Hebrew in a low voice. A couple of sentences in a cold military jargon. She ended the call and turned to Keeler.

“I told them to hold off a minute.”

Them being the Israel Defense Forces Karakal battalion, Yasmin’s unit. She and Keeler had been in the area hiking. They’d heard the gunshots and had moved to higher ground. Keeler had stopped her from rushing immediately to the dead, preferring to observe for a while first. The truth was, they didn’t know what they were looking at. It could be a politically motivated attack, or the result of a dispute between traffickers. Ambushing first responders was an old tactic.

The hyena was still sniffing around, maybe curious at some small trace of scent. Keeler got the binoculars up again and scanned across the area around the bodies. Sweeping to the right, slowly sweeping back again. Going for depth and letting the landscape lead him along the contours of the desert.

Maybe the scavenging animal had sensed a wounded person, alive but tucked into the brush nearby. The hyena was gone when he lowered the binoculars.

Keeler said, “Let’s hike down and around and set up on a likely exfiltration route. We’ll get into position and you’ll call it in. Get your people to make a ruckus. If there are perpetrators hiding in there, they’ll move away from a real force. We’ll be in place to catch them when they think they’re safely out.”

Yasmin said, “Presuming you are correct. How are you going to know which direction they’ll take?” She raked her hair back, doing complicated things with a rubber band.

Keeler had examined the terrain. The border was on the other side of the dirt track below, maybe half a kilometer west. A few kilometers north was an Israeli town.

He said, “They’ll move to the south-west.” He pointed. “There.”

“Hmm.” She made a clicking sound, tongue against the roof of her mouth.

Six days earlier, Yasmin had been the sector commander in this area. She’d only just finished her army service in the Karakal battalion, a mixed gender combat unit responsible for the border zone. They’d met in a hospital room, where Keeler had been recovering from wounds sustained in the Syrian badlands. He’d been in the fight with Yasmin’s sister Ruth, who was still hospitalized.

Yasmin had pulled Keeler out of the hospital, taken him south to the desert on a tour of her favorite spots. They’d been camping two kilometers away when she got the call. The current sector commander had been her deputy six days earlier and old habits die hard. The nearest combat unit was still fifteen or twenty minutes out. Keeler and Yasmin were the first responders.

Their position was south of the Gaza Strip, in a barren desert border zone where the state of Israel met Egypt. Keeler could make out foothills of the Sinai mountains to the southeast, the horizon already a craggy line of razor-sharp rock formations in red and purple. He liked this country, a place where things mattered, where every day routines seemed fragile, so obviously in need of protection.

Yasmin spoke into her phone. To Keeler, the Hebrew language was both soft and harsh. She was using a lot more areas of the throat than he was used to hearing, but then again, there were interesting things going on with the vowels, like two of them in a row without a consonant.

She said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

They crawled backwards out of the brush. Below the crest they both rolled onto their backs, looking at the desert sky, a beautiful purple now in the crepuscular moment.

Yasmin said, “Oh man, I love it here.” She had a broad grin on her face, glowing with happiness. It filled Keeler with hope.

He fingered the bolt on the M4 in his hands. rolled back up into a crouch and started moving down, hearing Yasmin follow. They reached the floor of a dry riverbed, a wadi in local terms, and moved south. Five minutes later, Yasmin caught up with him. She was 23 years old. Tall and dark and dressed in jeans and some kind of hippy shirt. Carrying another M4 short barrel rifle and holding it like a pro. That was Yasmin. His appreciation of her only increased the more time went by, and showed no sign of peaking.

Ten minutes later, they mounted a hill, crawling to the top and getting belly down. Keeler had the binoculars. He couldn’t see the bodies from there, but he got oriented.

He nudged her and chin pointed to the west. She followed his lead, and they moved quietly for another fifteen minutes. The descent was through another wadi, the rocky walls striated horizontally in multiple shades of pink, orange, and red. He figured this would be the best route if you were a perpetrator wanting to stay out of sight and move south.

Keeler led them up the dry riverbed until he found a cluster of boulders screening a shallow cave in the rocky wall. They could stay there and wait. The unspoken assumption was that they were looking for Bedouin traffickers who had infiltrated from Egypt.

Yasmin called it in on her phone. Speaking rapid Hebrew in hushed tones.

Keeler said, “Tell them to make a dramatic entrance.”

She nodded to him, a tight smile on her face. “They’re going to bring the noise.”

It was getting darker. The whites of her eyes flashed at him, excited at the prospect of contact.

He got quiet and let his breathing settle down to low, like a cat relaxing for the hunt. Bedouin were capable of disappearing into the desert. You’d never find them if they knew you were present. Yasmin was only a couple of feet away, sitting with him in the rocky sand, back against the cave wall. They were physically aware of each other. It had been only six days, but those six days had been very intimate, right from the start.

It took fifteen minutes for the heavy bass line of two military helicopters to become apparent. He felt the vibrating tones come up from the stone and sand and rock, and making its way to the small bones in his inner ear. It was like listening to complicated music, like weird jazz or something. Keeler was an aficionado, understanding and interpreting the melody.

It sounded like the choppers had come in low, zipping through desert valleys, rising up fast and synchronized for maximum effect. Keeler pictured the pilots, flight helmets on, heads up displays crawling with data feeds, scanning with thermal imaging gear, and other, less well-known sensors.

There would be an Apache attack chopper in the lead, a Black Hawk troop carrier behind it.

He pictured men in the back of the Black Hawk, ready to go, clutching advanced firearms. Keeler corrected himself. There would be men and women in the back of the chopper because this particular unit was Karakal, currently around 70% female.

No sound of small arms fire from below, and no sound of the helicopters opening up with big guns. Just the thumping beat of rotors and the attendant military engine whine coming through in stereo. Yasmin shifted slightly, and Keeler read into it. She was anticipating the opposition coming down the wadi.

Not half wrong. Five minutes later she dug her fingernails into his knee. She already had the binoculars up, scanning to the north.

Yasmin spoke softly. “Two hundred meters, three males.”