The Devil's Shepherd.

William Morrow and Co., 2000. First Edition. Trade Paperback. Very Good. GREAT BOOK! FIRST EDITION. MILD WEAR ON DUSTJACKET, LIGHTLY AGED, NO MARKS IN TEXT. From Publishers Weekly: Two battle-weary Israeli intelligence operatives--both on the verge of taking desk jobs--agree to tackle one last mission in this rousing, if overly sentimental, thriller about duty and dirty tricks in the desert. The two superagents, Eytan Eckstein and Benni Baum, accept the assignment to uncover the identity of a mole who has infiltrated Israel's nuclear missile defense system. The mission will force them to slip into Ethiopia to rescue a Czech defector, Jan Krumlov, who promises to divulge the name of the mole. Krumlov, however, has conditions: Eckstein and Baum must first extract his wife from Bosnia, then help him bring 50 Ethiopian Jewish children he's protecting back to Israel. Eckstein and Baum hold up their end of the bargain, but once in Ethiopia, they discover that Krumlov is a much more complicated man, with far more complicated motives, than first believed. He's also wanted dead or alive by a vicious band of Ethiopian rebels who don't care who else might get killed in their manhunt. Hartov, who himself worked in Israeli intelligence, infuses his story with enough realistic detail about espionage and the military to keep the intrigue high. For all its clever twists and high drama, however, the story suffers from bloat. At several points, it bogs down in schmaltzy dialogue and thickly applied subplots about the regrets of career soldiers and their domestic troubles. Eckstein and Baum, returnees from Hartov's previous novels The Heat of Ramadan and The Nylon Hand of God, are solid but predictable heroes. Far more absorbing are some of the story's secondary characters, who show the human side of the dark world of espionage. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. """"From Kirkus Reviews: Overweight, fiftyish Chief of Israeli Defense Forces Special Operations Benni Baum (The Nylon Hand of God, 1996) again teams up with intelligence agent Eytan Eckstein (The Heat of Ramadan, 1992). Author Hartov, himself a former Israeli intelligence agent, divides his time between New York and Jerusalem and knows firsthand the twisty byways and ambiguous alleys of which he writes. Here, Baum and Eckstein, having just returned from pursuit of Iranian bad guys through Algiers and Morocco in Nylon Hand, find themselves under direct orders to return to Africa to save from assassination Lt. Colonel Jan Krumlov of Czech counterintelligence who has defected to the Israelis in Addis Ababa and who knows the identity of the big mole is in Israels top-secret Rainbow group, part of Israels long-denied secret nuclear-weapons site six sub-basements underground in the Negev Desert. Krumlov must be secreted out of Africa. The story ends on a cliffhanger out of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Benni and Eytan doing a Robert Jordan against attacking rebels on an African hillside. Readers held in suspense throughout this galloping plot will end with their nails in their mouths, awaiting the next installment. -Copyright 2000, Kirkus Associates, LP.""""