As Tyrell walked out of the hospital, Claretta Neville was waiting for him, her defiance and vigor very much back in evidence.
“You give me something t’ave faith in, Detective,” she said, pointing a finger at him as he passed. “You give me somethin’ to believe in and find out what they did to m’boy.”
JABALIYA
GAZA STRIP
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