Special Prayer for Your Boy

When Lynn Archer woke up, she was sure it was the same sound as the night before. It had sliced into her sleep like glass. Only this time, it was much more insistent.

She lay under the thick blanket the village woman told her was woven from a Dorcas gazelle’s pelt and listened to the sounds of the night.

While the 193 Squadron Atalef had flown her twenty-two miles south of Beersheba two days ago, she’d thought to herself what the heck it was just another desert. When night came, the sounds of the night came with it. They sounded nothing like Arizona.

She thought about Dylan in Tucson. How many words was her fourteen-year-old son able to speak in a string without losing his voice?

The low raspy whistling broke her reverie.

She was comfortably stretched out with her left hand resting easy near the cold grip of the M18 pistol.

The village was more than three miles to the northeast. Below the mouth of the cave yawned the makhtesh, almost half as large as the southern Dead Sea basin two hundred miles further northeast.

She tried to gauge the distance of the sound from her bivvy. The imperturbable silence of the desert did not pose any acoustic barriers except the barren hills to the west and the weird-looking sabkhah lying near the northern side of the boulders that led up to the small cluster of caves above the inky dark of the makhtesh.

The whistling grew softer until it faded. What woke her up had been shrill and much closer.

It was going past 1:30 a.m. by her watch. She flipped the blanket aside and pulled on a parka. A waxing crescent had hung earlier in the desert sky but now she gazed at the cloudless dark mirror above the barren expanse. The only thing that looked like Arizona was the stars.

The gun was up in a flash, pointing at the shadows that swayed at the jagged edge of the makhtesh. Only the sea squill erupting from the softer rock. White flames in the darkness, some long enough to stoop like giant claws.

Lynn turned to read the gouged and fractured shapes falling away to the plain. The flashlight snicked, shook the defaced boulders out of their black trance. No one there.

She fished out her satellite communication device and typed:

DEVICE HOST POSSIBLY DETECTED FULL STOP INDICATION OF PRESENCE AURAL FULL STOP DISTANCE FROM AGENT UNKNOWN COMMA ERROR DISTINCTION FROM NATURAL SURROUNDINGS POSSIBLE FULL STOP INVESTIGATION UNDERWAY FULL STOP

The man who’d met her at Beersheba had placed before her a device no bigger than half the size of the thumbnail of a ten-year-old. It was easy to mistake it for a quartz stone.

“You know what this is?” he’d said with an accent that sounded Arabic to her.

“It looks like some kind of tracking device.” She’d begun to pick it up when he made a warning sound in his throat and lifted a hand to stop her.

“I would not advise it.” He’d looked at her for a minute, his hand still in veto. “Watch this,” he said as he brought out a pair of pincers from the desk and motioned to the other man in the room. He vanished through the door and quickly returned with a large rat in a cage.

“Never saw a golden rat,” Lynn had said.

“It’s a spiny mouse,” he said, picking up the quartz-like device with the pincers to gently touch it to the back of the rodent in the cage.

As Lynn watched, the device moved from between the pincers and settled into the fur. All at once, two tiny tendrils shot out of it and it sank into the fur. She frowned and the demonstrator motioned at her with the pincers and then rubbed them on the fur where the device had been. “See it?” he said.

Lynn leaned for a closer look. The mouse showed no sign of feeling anything. It hadn’t so much as flicked its tail. “Gone,” the man said.

“Gone?” She looked at him.

The man nodded and the other man opened the cage. The mouse twitched its whiskers and stepped out. They all waited until the mouse moved to the edge of the desk, flung itself to the floor and scampered through the door of the room in the largest safe house she’d seen.

Then the man behind the desk had retrieved a receiver and asked her to step over to his side. On the screen of the receiver she saw the glowing dot move zigzag as it tried to figure the way out of the corridors she’d followed the other man down to reach this room.

“We’re looking at the movements of the mouse and we can go on doing so for a radius of six hundred miles,” he told her.

She whistled. “Some range.”

He went on: “And anyone who picks up the mouse within that range or outside of it will only feel the fur. No device.”

She waited. He said, “Because no one can reach under the skin of the mouse, can they? No one can reach into the bloodstream of the animal.”

“You mean to tell me that thing you put on its fur, dug its way into the body of the rat?”

“Mouse.”

“Yes, spiny rat. I mean, mouse.”

“That’s right.”

“And I’m supposed to find these devices where they may be lodged inside the flesh of a bunch of mice running around wild in the desert?”

“Miss Lynn, please sit down,” the man said. “The model you saw is the one created after Islamabad and Washington ran a successful heist in Aktau four months after the Ukrainian war.”

“Where’s that?” Lynn lowered into a chair and watched the receiver screen on the desk.

“In Kazakhstan, on the Caspian Sea.”

“Your demonstration impressed me,” she said.

“The real Blood Transponder,” the man continued, “as they informally call it came into play when the Russians used it on the battlefield against NATO troops near Ukraine’s Romanian border.”

“Yes, I read the detailed report on that massacre.” The dot on the screen was glowing in a spot past the maze of corridors outside the room.

“Five thousand men, Miss Lynn, suddenly turning on their own commanding officers. An outstanding marketing strategy, nevertheless. Finally, there is an answer to what it was that the other side did to achieve such a feat. Perhaps it was the most brutal military tactic in history. The little device I showed to you is the first link in the chain. You are the next link.”

“There will be answers when we get our hands on that Estonian runner.”

“They have already caught up with him. He is quite the lobbyist. The shipment was thwarted, and he has no clue of who was behind the…jam-up. Your people have no reason to doubt the agency’s credentials anymore. Even sources inside the Russian ministry are ready to vouch for it.”

“How’s it looking on the ground here?”

“Well, since Langley let us know about your past work, I must say things are already under control on the ground here.” The man grinned. “You have been part of the desert terrain before, and you have impressive experience.”

“There are fifteen of these Blood Transponders out there stashed behind a rock,” Lynn said. “During the briefing back home about the peculiar rock formations in the Negev, I became curious as to why we needed to get the lost ones back. We still have the rest of the shipment. And your men already took care of the Palestinian group that tried to use them.”

The man complemented: “So, why not pay more and make up for the remaining supply?”

Lynn refrained from nodding.

“The village you are going to cross to get to your location has had an outbreak.”

Lynn waited, but the man waited too, gazing straight at her. “What kind of outbreak?”

“A family of five caught some kind of virus in Nevek Kadesh. They had a coughing fit and in less than forty-eight hours, only a child in the family survived. A boy of thirteen. But only long enough to be brought here and examined.” The man turned off the receiver and stowed it inside the desk.

“New Omicron strain?”

“Not at all, Miss Lynn.” The man paused to clear his throat. “All the devices that entered the NATO soldiers’ bodies in the last days of the Ukraine War were extracted within seventy-two hours. Well before it, actually. Bug them remotely, make them dance on a string, access gene information at the same time, and de-bug remotely. It took less than fifteen hours to achieve the historical feat once the BTs were lodged inside the living bodies. It was imperative after the massacre that the BTs be removed. Once the host is dead, it gets more difficult to control the device and there can be…unnecessary consequences.”

“Why didn’t anyone in the department talk about this before?”

“We understood…well, we are still trying to understand, what kind of changes the host may experience if the device is left inside for too long. Everyone involved is certain the picture will be much clearer once you retrieve the lost BTs.”

“What about the child you mentioned from that village family? Did you find the device inside his body?”

“We have reason to believe the BT disintegrated in the bloodstream.” The man got up and slowly began to pace the room.

Lynn Archer let the silence in the room make her think. Something didn’t seem to be working in the puzzle set out before her. The pieces her own command provided her a week prior to meeting the collaboration center in Beersheba had had nothing to say about possible infections. Her briefs and reports had centered on the successful real-time testing of a highly advanced and covert version of a transponder designed for intelligence gathering and manipulation. The manipulation part was incredulous. Perhaps, distressingly so. But it was a miracle of operational and strategic intelligences. Mouths high up in National Security were betting heavy on possibly spearheading the greatest break from the norm in traditional intelligence classification.

“If this device came into contact with a living body, without external monitoring, would it penetrate the person or the animal anyway?”

The man broke his pace and tapped his chin. “We should take all precautions possible. That’s why I stopped you from touching it with your bare hands.”

“If the family in Kadesh died because of penetration and the consequent delay in extraction then…”

“Either someone guided the devices into the people,” the man supplied.

“Or,” Lynn added, “the device can enter without prompt. Either way, it means there are less than fifteen of these little guys waiting for me to find them out.”

She stood at the bottom of the distorted rocks, a wonkily anthologized stairway leading down from the ridge above. A lanky acacia grew beside her, its top clinging to the side of the ridge wall, lapping the rugged stone in doleful susurration. Others had fitfully tried to set roots close around but it was the sole survivor among those gaunt trunks.

There were not too many hiding places in front of her. Whoever made the whistling sound could not have been inside any of the caves up on the ridge. She had the deepest cave to herself anyway and there were three others. What she heard in her sleep must have risen from the mouth of her cave. There had been no footsteps afterwards, unless someone was moving around barefoot. But even then the tiny stone-shaped camera installed above the mouth of the cave had not picked up any human presence.

None of the animals found in this region of the Negev whistled, according to the material exposed to her.

She strolled alongside the ridge, training the flashlight up to the cliff behind the caves. It wasn’t possible for an untrained climber to approach from that side. The humongous stones behind the caves may have deep cracks between them, falling down a hundred meters, but they eventually ended in a treacherous escarp plunging into the gaping belly of the makhtesh.

A thousand yards away to her right, the sabkhah was a miniature Stonehenge. She turned off the light and walked toward the glinting laths of gypsum poking out of the shiny chest of the salt flat.

Some more than fifteen feet high, the pillars of salt crowded together in some places, as if silently consulting each other over the stranger entering their midst.

Lynn smiled in the dark, as her hand clutched a thin object inside her parka. She pointed it toward the base of one listing white finger and pressed on the UV beam. The rundown calcite pieces became peppered with tiny stars. The beam played from one broken shingle over to the next, stippling them with brilliance.

Dylan had been delighted when she got him the glass box full of fluorescent minerals last year. He’d been at the center for bone marrow transplant. She had especially ordered a UV light source to be fitted within the box with a switch attached underneath the glass.

Then she’d found a crafter who specialized in customizing mineral rocks. The activators inside the stones could be set in a desired pattern. When she had turned out the light of the hospital room and asked her son to flip the switch, the glowing streaks in the stones read: Dylan.

She pressed the beam off as something moved several feet ahead, near a place where the pillars stood further apart. The sound of metallic scraping on hardened calcium sulfate. Like claws.

The salt flat was a hundred yards wide and about twice as long.

She moved in, arms stretched out in front, the M18 sweeping left and right in slow, measured arcs.

Was Ruma’s son out here playing hide and seek?

The woman at the village of Nevek Kadesh had sat with her and talked after Lynn thanked her for the specially woven blanket. “Please get back my son,” the translator told Lynn.

“Did you know the family that fell ill?” she had asked. Ruma nodded. “There have been more like them,” the translator said.

“Do you have children?” Ruma had asked her and she had told her about Dylan’s condition. “I will pray a special prayer for your boy,” she had told Lynn.

Just before Lynn was about to leave, Ruma had caught her arm. The translator was outside the mourning family’s house, waiting for Lynn. “Avishai find box. In desert. Before he go. He tell me.”

Lynn narrowed her eyes and listened. The wind was much quieter now.

“Avishai,” she called. “Is that you?”

There was a thud in the distance behind her. She turned and saw a shadow standing beside the tall acacia. No more than four feet in height. And then the raspy whistling lanced the stillness of the desert.

The shadow broke into a run and covered half the distance from the ridge to the salt flat before Lynn had let off a few slender breaths. She braced herself for an attack. It was a boy alright, and boys didn’t run that fast.

“Avishai?” Lynn said. “Is something wrong? You’ve been out playing too long.” The pistol did not waver in her hand.

“Eeeeh-maa…”

The long-drawn call was filled with longing and terror. A cold shiver shook her skin under the parka. She guessed the meaning of the word from the second syllable.

“I’ll take you back to Ruma, Avishai,” she called back to the boy.

She thought she heard a whine rising from the boy. The suspicion turned to certainty when it turned into the same whistle, piercing the air and her senses. She clamped a hand on one ear, struggling to hold the gun straight.

Another sound crashed in as a powerful light beam shot down from the ridge and fixed the boy in the tip of its circle.

She was about to shoot in the direction of the ridge when a man’s voice said — “Agent Archer”— through a bullhorn — “We have you covered.”

Lynn hadn’t expected this. “Don’t shoot the boy,” she shouted.

The voice from the ridge: “What did you say?” Pause. “Just hold on, we’re going to get the host.”

A soldier in Israeli uniform bounded down the boulders and began to move toward the boy.

The boy looked back, caught in the powerful light, then back at Lynn. “Eeh-mah?” he inquired. The approaching man said something in Hebrew as he closed the gap between the boy and him.

Lynn stopped pointing her weapon and waved with both hands. “Don’t run, Avishai. Don’t run. It’s alright. Ruma’s waiting.”

The soldier was standing beside the boy now, putting an arm on the small shivering shoulder. The next minute something happened that made Lynn wish she hadn’t accepted this mission. The soldier’s body staggered around blind, a thick jet of blood lashing out of the place where the head had been. Lynn didn’t have to look far to spot the missing part. Grown abnormally large, the boy’s jaws comfortably clenched the head. The light beam from the ridge died followed by indiscriminate shouting.

Just when Ruma had tried to tell her something about disfigured bodies turning up outside the village, the translator had swung his head around the door and informed her of the waiting Jeep.

Lynn didn’t need the light beam to see that the boy lifted his chin and spat the head. It sailed through the air several feet away. Then the boy turned and ran toward Lynn, going down on all fours this time.

The last words Lynn Archer heard in her head were “…special prayer for your boy,” as her gun’s slider went into overdrive.