Covenant

32

Breathe.

Ethan sucked in a mouthful of dusty air, trying to overcome what felt like steel bands encasing his lungs. The flustered beat of his heart reverberated through his chest like war drums, his frayed nerves scraping the lining of his stomach like a convict’s nails against the stone walls of a cell.

He could see nothing through the coarse sack that was bound with rough cord around his neck, crushing his thorax and filling his nostrils with stale air. His arms were bound behind his back with rope that scoured the skin from his wrists and his knees ground painfully on an uneven floor of bare, rocky earth. He knelt with his head between his knees, kept breathing, and tried to refrain from weeping.

Fear wasn’t an emotion that Ethan enjoyed checking out, but it scalded now like acid through his veins. Vertigo from his loss of spatial awareness caused his blackened world to gyrate and pitch around him, further fueling his asphyxia. He had been incarcerated by men who would cheerfully kill him with neither hubris nor regret. And so, in all likelihood, was Rachel. The steel bands around his chest tightened at the thought.

The men who had captured them had wasted no time. His shouts for calm and for Rachel’s safety went unheeded, his body lifted by uncaring hands and shoved without ceremony into the back of a car before being driven through Gaza’s streets.

His journey had ended with his body being carried from the car and through a doorway. The muted noise of Gaza outside had been brutally shut off with the slamming of a door, and then the cords around his wrists had been mercifully loosened. Any relief he may have felt was swept away as he was forced to clamber blindly down a ladder. He had sensed the closeness of the walls around him, tasted the odors of damp and dust, and felt the warm, heavy air clinging to his skin. He had known then without a doubt that his Palestinian captors were taking him to the only place where they could keep him from any Israeli rescue attempt.

Underground.

Ethan had long known of the network of tunnels that perforated the ancient soil beneath Gaza. The tunnels of Rafah were well known to most, the subject of Israel’s wrath on many occasions as Palestinians used them to smuggle contraband from across the border with Egypt. This covert industry might have been left unchecked by Israel were it not for the parallel operations of insurgents bringing weapons and explosives into the Strip. But Gaza City itself was also a warren of interconnecting tunnels used to move men, goods, and equipment beyond the omnipresent eyes of Mossad, Shin Bet, and the Israeli Defense Force.

Ethan’s captors had prodded, shoved, and jostled him for what he estimated was perhaps fifty meters, the heat oppressive and the closeness of the earthen walls amplified by Ethan’s blindness until it felt as though the entire world were collapsing in around him. They had then led him to a cavity in the floor where he sensed rather than saw a heavy wooden trapdoor being lifted before he was wedged into the tiny space. The last thing he felt was a boot slammed into his back to jam him down firmly into the hole and then the door shut just above his head.

Breathe.

Ethan focused, and some of the crushing anxiety eased as he forced images of Rachel and Joanna from his mind. He could only guess at how long he had been incarcerated. One, maybe two hours? Christ, he was losing it already. A real man would have controlled himself, maybe even slept a little to conserve energy, but Ethan was barely able to sleep at home in his own apartment with the door double-locked and a gun under his mattress, so the chances of his catching some shut-eye while in the grasp of suicidal militants in Gaza seemed mighty fucking remote. He was buzzing now on nervous energy, the kind that powered the muscles but ultimately drained the mind, poisoning it with paranoia, fear, and hallucinations.

The oppressive heat closed in around him in the darkness. It was joined by a chorus of voices reminding him that he had sallied valiantly forth to free one lost soul and had succeeded only in incarcerating two more. Moron. An image of his father appeared unbidden in his mind.

“You should have learned by now, Ethan,” the great Harry Warner had said, wagging a thick finger at him, pale eyes glowering above the twisted bayonets of his broad gray mustache. “What the hell did you think you’d achieve resigning your commission and gallivanting around the globe with a damned camera? Why didn’t you get a proper job like everyone else? You wouldn’t have ended up in this goddamn mess!”

He should have stayed in Chicago and not gotten involved. Doug Jarvis had a lot to answer for. Yet despite everything, somewhere within his tortured soul there remained a spirit that had not yet been extinguished, like a pale candle flame flickering alone in an immense darkness. Maybe he had a bit more of his father’s indomitable gumption than he had realized. If you’ve got nothing, you’ve everything to gain. He could deal with this.

A brief burst of Arabic punctured the silence. Damn. The pale flame gusted out.

More voices from somewhere above — muffled, distant. A new and nauseating flush of panic churned within him. Having yearned to be freed, he now feared that they had come for him with murder in their minds. The gumption vanished. A deep thud startled him as heavy wood banged against the roof of his skull, and then he felt a sudden updraft of hot air being sucked from his prison as the trapdoor was yanked open. Rough hands grabbed him and hauled him from the hole. Ethan tried to stand but his legs would not respond and he sprawled awkwardly as unseen hands dragged him across the rough, uneven ground.

“Get up!”

Ethan struggled to his knees and somehow managed to command one of his tingling feet to shift beneath him. He staggered upright, swaying as stars of light sparkled in the darkness before his eyes.

“This way!”

A hand shoved him and he stumbled blindly forward, banging off the walls of the tunnel and dislodging chunks of earth and dust with his shoulders. He heard whispered exchanges from behind him and guessed that two men were following.

The air became slightly cooler, and the tone of the hushed voices changed as he emerged into what felt like a larger space. A hand grabbed his shoulder, turning him around and shoving him downward. Ethan slammed into a wooden chair that almost toppled backward beneath him. Before he could react he felt himself being bound again, this time to the chair itself, and for a brief moment he was almost comfortable as his weary body settled onto the chair.

A long silence ensued and he braced himself for any sudden impact. Something wrenched at the hood over his face and a harsh white light burst into his eyes. He blinked away from it, squinting and struggling to focus on his surroundings.

The room was surprisingly large, about five meters square and braced at the corners and the center by old but sturdy wooden pillars. The earthen ceiling was restrained by a simple latticework of timber beams, from which dangled a single unshielded lightbulb that illuminated the room with an unnatural glow. A handful of scattered crates and boxes lined the walls of the room, and in one corner two AK-47 rifles leaned against a large four-gallon water canister.

“Welcome.”

Ethan squinted up and to his right to see a pair of dark eyes observing him. A thick scarf covered the rest of the man’s face. He looked about twenty-five years old, his hair thick and black, coarse stubble peeking above the scarf. Ethan looked into those eyes and did not like what he saw there.

“Who are you?” he asked, already knowing the answer but eager to establish some sort of dialogue with his captors. Keep them talking, always keep them talking.

The dark eyes narrowed cruelly. “Are you that stupid?”

Ethan managed to hold the Palestinian’s gaze with a thin veneer of bravado.

“You don’t look like one of the good guys.”

The man leaned close to him. “You parachuted into Gaza from an Israeli airplane at night. You don’t look like one of the good guys either.”

“Where is Rachel?”

The features creased into a smile that conveyed no hint of warmth or comfort. “She remains well.”

“Let me see her.”

The man straightened, glancing at his companion before whirling and plunging his fist deep into Ethan’s stomach. A surge of air blasted from Ethan’s lungs as his eyes almost burst from their sockets. Ethan gagged as he bolted forward over the blow, trying not to vomit as he strained to suck air back into his lungs.

“You may not,” his captor said simply, above the blood rushing in Ethan’s ears. “Who sent you here and why?”

Ethan sucked in another lungful of air, waves of nausea flushing and tingling like needles on his skin.

“Nobody sent us,” he gasped. “We were forced out of our airplane over Gaza.”

The Palestinian strolled across the room and grabbed a small chipped mug, dipping it into the open water canister and sipping from it as he returned to stand before Ethan.

“The airplane continued into Israeli airspace,” he said quietly. “It was not damaged so there was no reason to escape from it. I will ask you one more time. If you do not answer me properly, I will make you very sorry that you ever encountered me. Who sent you and why?”

Ethan shook his head, slowly gaining control of his breathing.

“Nobody sent us. We’re not Israeli. I’m American; so is Rachel. We were forced to jump from the airplane by an organization trying to stop us from reaching Jerusalem.”

The Palestinian looked across at his companion, who remained impassive, standing with his arms folded and regarding Ethan from behind a scarf that scarcely veiled a thick beard.

“That, my friend, would seem highly unlikely, would it not?” Ethan’s interrogator leaned close to him, the smell of tobacco thick on his breath. “If I were sitting where you are and you were questioning me, would you believe what you have just said?”

Ethan looked at the man and performed a rapid mental calculation.

“I’d wait and see what evidence turned up,” he said.

A cruel smile creased the man’s features. “Yes, so would I.”

He raised a hand and clicked his fingers. Instantly, the bearded man grabbed something from inside one of the nearby crates. Ethan recognized his rucksack. The Palestinian reached inside and produced Ethan’s camera, handing it to his companion.

The Palestinian held it to Ethan’s face.

“This, my friend, is my evidence.”

Ethan saw the screen change as the Palestinian cycled through the camera’s menu and selected a video. He felt a deep chill as he saw the film of Ayeem being beaten by the MACE guards out in the Negev Desert, his Bedouin companions held at gunpoint nearby.