53

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTHERN LEBANON

The moment the broadcast ended, the prisoners were taken back to the freezer.

Kailea and Yigal were dragged, as they were barely able to stand. Marcus, on the other hand, was forced to walk on his own, the barrel of a Kalashnikov pressing into the small of his back. What surprised and somewhat confused him was that neither he nor his colleagues were blindfolded. The Hezbollah fighters were masked, as they had always been. Marcus had never once seen any of their faces, only the Egyptian’s. Even now, al-Masri remained unmasked, eyeing them warily while standing in a doorway on the other side of the courtyard, somewhat aloof from his cheering and enthusiastic men.

Though Marcus had no idea why he had not been blindfolded, he had used every moment to absorb as much information as he could. For starters, the sun was setting. From the shadows, he guessed it was maybe seven or seven thirty. And given that al-Masri and his men were all wearing the same filthy uniforms they’d had on earlier and clearly had not taken showers, Marcus concluded that it was still the same day. From the palm trees surrounding the courtyard and the camouflage netting he noticed overhead, he decided they were still in Lebanon. The sounds of the gulls and the salt breezes meant they were near the coast. He could neither see nor hear any fighter jets or military activity of any kind, which suggested they had been moved well north of the Israeli border. But where?

From the courtyard, they were taken through what appeared to have once been a dormitory on the eastern side of the compound, through a dining hall filled with old wooden tables and chairs scattered across a floor covered with broken glass, and finally into a filthy and long-unused industrial kitchen. The freezer was located in the back. Marcus noticed two tall wooden stools—likely the perches of two of the three fighters who had just returned them to the freezer.

Once inside, they were again chained to the remains of the compressor unit. This time, the lights inside the freezer were shut off, and the door was slammed behind them. Marcus had noticed a padlock on the outside handle as they were being brought from the courtyard, and sure enough, he heard it being snapped back in place and double-checked to make certain it was truly secure. The three of them, however, were not sitting in pitch-darkness. Some light from the kitchen was seeping through the grid of the two exhaust fans.

For a long while, though all three of them were awake, no one spoke. They now knew there were at least two guards right outside the door, possibly three, and none of them wanted to risk drawing their attention or their ire.

Marcus used the time to chew on several things that were bothering him. The first was the fact that while he had recognized the voice of Sheikh Ja’far ibn al-Hussaini, he had not understood a word of what the man was saying. It had obviously electrified al-Masri’s men. And Marcus had heard the Sheikh read the names of the three captives. But that was it. There were clues in that speech. There had to be. And it galled him not to know what they were.

There was something. Why were they being held in facilities that clearly had not been used in years? Why hadn’t al-Masri taken them straight to Beirut? Why hadn’t they been handed over to Sheikh al-Hussaini and the Hezbollah leadership? Why hadn’t they been paraded before the cameras to accompany what had to be the Sheikh’s victory speech? Marcus was grateful they had not. The moment his face was seen on TV, it would not take long for Iranian and Hezbollah intelligence to figure out whom they had. So Marcus could only conclude that at this point they still did not know who he was. Or Yigal, for that matter.

But how much longer could that last? Would they not soon be heading for Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport? Would they not be loaded onto a plane bound for Tehran? Once there, he was a dead man.

In the silence, Marcus turned the questions over in his head again and again. Something was not adding up. Even if they were not being taken to Beirut, why hadn’t al-Masri taken them to a legit Hezbollah base? Bringing them here, to facilities abandoned so long ago, made no sense.

And yet there was a reason, Marcus knew. There had to be. Al-Masri was evil, but he was not an idiot. He had just pulled off a daring border raid. He had taken three prisoners alive. He and his boss were utterly humiliating Washington and Jerusalem by telling the world they had captured three Americans—U.S. federal agents, no less—from Israeli soil. His men were well trained and highly disciplined. He was clearly a shrewd and skilled tactician. That meant he had a plan. So what was it? Marcus understood why al-Masri was hiding from the Israelis. But why did it seem like he was hiding from his fellow Hezbollah commanders as well?