38

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHERN LEBANON

When he woke up again, Marcus had no idea how much time had gone by.

Still engulfed by darkness, he strained to hear what was going in the outside world. There were no explosions. No fighter jets roaring through the skies. He certainly was not hearing gunfire or battle tanks. He didn’t think there was any way the Israelis had stopped engaging the enemy. The only thing he could surmise was that he had been moved farther north, deeper into Lebanon. But where?

He heard no sounds of people—no voices, no boots, no radios or vehicles. But the longer he listened, he did begin to hear the sound of an occasional bird or two—gulls, in fact—and, however faintly, a low, dull roar. Could those be waves? Had the Egyptian and his men moved him to the coast? And if so, which one?

If he and the others had already been transported to Iran, then they would most likely have been taken to the capital, Tehran, a good 120 kilometers from the coast of the Caspian Sea and 650 kilometers from the shores of the Persian Gulf. Which meant it was unlikely they were in Iran.

Far more likely, they were still in Lebanon. Which meant they were somewhere along the Mediterranean coast. Tyre was one of the country’s largest coastal cities and the closest to the Israeli border. But Marcus had not heard any traffic sounds. Perhaps they were in the suburbs. Or at a Hezbollah camp of some kind. Then again, thought Marcus, the Israelis would probably be bombing the heck out of known Hezbollah facilities. Which brought him back to his original question. Where exactly was he? And why?

Feeling around in the blackness as best he could, Marcus realized he was sitting on a wooden chair. His hands were shackled behind him. His feet were shackled as well. Yet he also realized that he was no longer stripped down to his boxers. He had no shoes or socks on, but he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It was hot. Immensely hot. His clothes were soaked with sweat. He stank. As did the room he was in. But the fact that he was clothed strengthened his conclusion that he had been moved.

That, however, raised a new question. Had they all been moved? Or just him? It was risky to move them at all. The vehicles could be spotted by drones or satellites. Then again, it did not make sense to keep them too close to the Israeli border. If al-Masri was smart, he would have moved Kailea to one location, Yigal to a second, and Marcus to a third. Why keep them all in one location? Why make it easier for the Israelis or the Americans to find them and rescue them?

Marcus’s stomach growled. His mouth was dry. He flexed his fingers and rolled his neck, all of which felt stiff, and tried to get a sense of how long he had been in captivity. He remembered blacking out from the electrocutions. Then, he suspected, he’d been drugged again to get him clothed and transported without any prospect of him waking up and trying to resist. Was it still the same day? Or had several passed?

He wondered how Kailea was holding up. He wasn’t really worried about her betraying her country or giving up secrets. He did worry about what these bastards were capable of doing to her whether she talked or not. And then there was Yigal. He was a good kid, but there was no question he was the weak link in the chain. If he talked, they were all going to die. And he was the most likely of the three of them to talk. He had no SERE training. He had no idea how to survive, evade, resist, or escape. His best chance—his only chance, really—was sticking to the story that he was an American. If al-Masri discovered Yigal was actually an Israeli, he would probably release his picture to mess with the Israeli government and people, like waving a trophy in front of the masses. Social media in Israel would light up. People—some, anyway—would recognize Yigal as the nephew of the prime minister. And if that got out, it was game over.

Marcus knew he had to escape from his chains. There was no point coming up with a game plan to get them all away from this place—wherever they were—and on to Tyre, and onto the fishing charter, if he could remember the name of the company or its owner, unless he could break free.

In the pitch-blackness, he began feeling around again, trying to determine exactly how he was secured. He discovered that his hands were not simply wrapped tightly in metal chains. At some point, they had also put metal handcuffs on him. That was smart. For even if he could slip out of one restraint—all but impossible under these conditions—he would still have to slip out of the other. And then there were his feet. Before, back in the auto repair shop, his ankles had merely been wrapped in chains, which had been bolted to the floor. Now, he realized, they had put him in manacles, which, best he could tell, were also locked down to the floor.

The floor. It was not concrete. It was metal. Not wearing socks, he could feel not just warm metal below him, but rust. That was interesting. And unexpected. It meant he wasn’t being held in a prison cell, where the floor would likely be concrete. Nor was he being held in a mosque or a school of some kind, where the floors would more likely be wood or tile or even carpet. But metal? Rust? Marcus could only come up with one scenario for this. They were holding him in a shipping container, and an old one at that. Given their proximity to the Med, that made sense. But what did that mean? Were they going to transport him back to Iran on a container ship? Were they already at a port? He still did not hear any movement nearby. No trucks. No forklifts. Or cranes. Or horns.

Then a thought came to Marcus that should have occurred to him before. Why had Colonel Amin al-Masri given him his name? And why hadn’t he kept his face covered? It was not to build trust. That was never going to happen, and al-Masri knew it. Why then? Marcus pondered the question from every angle. In the end, however, he could only come up with one reason. Al-Masri intended to extract as much information as possible out of Marcus and then kill him. Most likely he would keep Kailea and Yigal and leverage them to broker the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners or to loot the American and Israeli governments for hundreds of millions of dollars. Marcus could not actually think of a time when the Israeli government had paid a cash ransom for any of its people, but then again, the nephew of the prime minister had never been taken hostage before.

But Marcus? He was a dead man. Why else would an experienced Hezbollah commander allow a hostage to see his face and hear his name unless he knew that hostage was never going to live long enough to make use of the information?