Lebanon Hostage Ch. 08

Wait, no. You idiot. If the soldiers discover you, they'll free you, you'll never have to worry again about whether or not the guards trust you.

Should I try to shout though the gag, through all the layers of tape? I doubt my muffled voice could be heard over the idling engine. A better idea—I can bang my head against the top of the compartment. The claustrophobic nature of our hiding place is suddenly a blessing in disguise. If Allan hears what I'm doing and does it with me, they have to hear us.

I'm frightened, this feels enormously risky. What if somehow the soldiers at the checkpoint don't hear us but our guards do? What if the soldiers hear us but assume that the noise is being produced by some fault in the engine? What if they hear us and become suspicious, but the guards floor it and make a successful getaway? In my head, Robert Berg is screaming uselessly for mercy...

Why run the risk if they're taking us to be released, anyway?

Unless, of course, they're not really releasing us, in which case this might be our only opportunity for rescue.

Dear God, what should I do? Tell me, give me a sign.

I'll do whatever Allan does. He's savvier than I am, he'll know better what the smart thing is to do. If he makes noise, I'll make noise.

We've advanced in line to the checkpoint. Under the throbbing of the engine, I can hear someone outside the truck speaking to the driver. I wait to hear what Allan will do. So far he's not making a sound. If he's planning to, it makes sense that he'd wait until a soldier comes around back to search the truck. Any moment now, we'll have to decide what to do...

We're driving forward. We've been waved through. They didn't search the truck.

I don't understand. What's the purpose of a checkpoint if you're not going to search the truck?

I'm enraged, I'm in despair. We missed our chance. No, we weren't even given a chance. What the fuck? What the fuck?

* * *

A few minutes beyond the checkpoint, we turn onto a different road and start to climb. We've done this before. They're taking us back to the basement prison in the mountains. I would much rather be going home, of course. But at least I know, now, when this nightmarish trip will end. In half an hour, maybe a bit more, we'll arrive, and they'll get me out of here. Half an hour. Please, God, help me endure that long.

The ride is hell. The jarring was bad enough on the city streets and highway; lumbering through the mountains is much worse. Bumps and potholes toss my head into the air. If wrapping a towel around my head was meant to provide cushioning, it's not enough to help. A large enough jolt can lift and drop my whole body, smashing my spine against the iron floor.

Occasionally, my head is propelled far enough into the air that my forehead hits the top of the box. A terrifying thought: If my nose gets hit, a nosebleed could smother me, or drown me. Or the unattached edge of tape in front of my nostrils might get smashed down, closing my air slit. I wrench my tape-wrapped neck side to side, as far as I can—barely an inch in either direction, but I'm hoping that the repeated motion will loosen the tape, allowing me to turn my face safely away from both the top of the box and the wall to my left... Shit, it's not working. The strain hurts my neck and makes it harder to breathe. I'm tiring myself out without accomplishing anything.

Breathing takes so much fucking work. Every breath is a conscious action. I have to think about it, I can't just breathe automatically. I have to work to pull enough air through my nostrils. I have to work to expand my chest under the tape.

The guards can't possibly know what this experience is like. They've never ridden inside this jolting coffin wrapped up like mummies. They don't realize how incredibly dangerous this is. Trust them? They don't have a fucking clue. I am in the hands of idiots. Mylife is in the hands of idiots. Dear God... hold me in your hands. Keep me safe. I am depending on you, I have nobody else.

Half an hour to the prison. I only have to survive half an hour. By now, it's probably down to more like twenty minutes. I can do this. I have to. I have no choice.

Try praying. The rosary. For once, the repetition will be useful. I'll have to focus to keep track of the number of repetitions, it will be a good distraction. Our Father in heaven... hallowed be your name... I try to establish a rhythm for the phrasing that will match my labored breathing. Hail Mary, full of grace... The Lord is with you...

Oh God, get me out of here.

Your kingdom come, your will be done... Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus... Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit...

Despite how chilly the air is, I'm roasting under all this tape, sweating like a pig...

I've done five decades, a whole rosary, minus the prayers at the beginning and the end, which I don't remember. We still haven't arrived. How long does it take to recite the rosary? Fifteen minutes? I'll start over. I don't have any other fucking thing to do...

I'm sorry, God, forgive the blasphemy; you know I didn't mean to be disrespectful. Please, help me.

Help Allan, too. Shit, I haven't even been thinking about him. I assume he's all right. Please let him be all right. This next rosary's for him, for his safety—

Fuck! That bump hurt! It was like being cracked on the back of the head with a two-by-four and punched in the kidneys. Jesus... A blow that hard couldn't actually knock the wind out of me, stop my breathing, could it? That would take a blow to the diaphragm, right? The stomach, not the back?

Save us from the time of trial... Deliver us from evil...

Holy Mary, Mother of God... Pray for us sinners...

As it was in the beginning... ever will be... world without end...

Unless I miscounted, that's another whole rosary complete.

No, I must have skipped a decade. I can't have been praying for thirty minutes, we would have arrived by now...

Any minute, we'll be there. Hang on, it's almost over.

Why are we still driving? I know I'm shit at estimating the passage of time. Still, I'm certain we should have reached the prison by now.

Oh God. We're not going to that prison. We're going somewhere else. I have no fucking idea where. Which means I have no fucking idea how long it will take.

I cannot do this. I cannot fucking do this anymore! You have got to take me out of here! PLEASE!

* * *

We keep driving through mountains. Every now and then we make a particularly wide, slow turn, leaving one road for another, it would seem. The altitude change pressurizes my ears. Bound, I have no way to ease the pressure; swallowing alone doesn't do the trick.

After what I'm convinced must be an hour, I feel I have reached the absolute limit of my endurance. My body aches—from the jolting, the constriction. I need to stretch, I need to bend, I need to move. My chest muscles are sore from the exertion of pushing out against the binding as I breathe. I want so desperately to inhale through my mouth, a full, deep, unrestricted breath. I am drenched in sweat, which remains trapped inside my plastic wrapping. When I itch, the best I can do is squirm to relieve it. I'm thirsty. My jaw is in constant discomfort; the way they've taped it up has left it in an unnatural position. If I push my chin forward and down, straining against all those layers of tape, I can open my mouth a tiny bit, loosening the gag and expanding my nasal passage, my airway. But the strain is too much to maintain for more than a few seconds at a time. I have to relax—but relaxing merely means dropping my jaw back into a different uncomfortable position.

I cannot endure a minute more of this. This trip has to endnow. They have to stop and pull us out and unwrap us.

I have reached my limit... Yet we have hours still to go. Four hours total, Allan will estimate at the end. Four hours as mummies, bouncing helplessly in a metal box under a truck bed.

At one point, the truck dips heavily to my left, so far that for a horrifying few moments I'm convinced the wheels have slipped off the road and we're about to topple down a mountainside. The dip sends Allan sliding heavily into me, squashing me against the side of the box. I'm being crushed, I can't breathe...

As soon as the truck rights itself, Allan wriggles and lurches away from me. Several seconds later, he collides into me again—except this time the blow strikes only my shoulder and the side of my head, and he pulls away again immediately. What the hell?

He does it again. He's hitting me deliberately. He's trying to communicate with me. He wants to know that I'm conscious, he wants me to respond. I deduce that his head and shoulders wouldn't have the leverage to swing back and forth so readily. That means he must be hitting me with his feet.

All this time, I've been envisioning that Allan and I are lying head to head... like lovers sleeping side by side. But no. The guards have inserted us into this box head to foot. Allan's head, instead of being next to mine, is at the far end of the box. That knowledge makes me feel more distanced from him. I feel more isolated, even more vulnerable than before.

Holding my breath, I bend what little I can at the waist in order to lift my legs. I swing them toward Allan, make contact. There, he'll know I'm all right. I lie flat again. That brief effort exhausted me, I have to go back to just breathing.

The drive through hell continues. I'm tired of praying, I need to do something else to distract myself, to make the time pass. In my head, I sing the soundtracks of musicals I grew up listening to from my mother's record collection.West Side Story.Fiddler on the Roof.The Sound of Music.

Still going. Where the hell are they taking us? Why are they taking us so far? I understood Lebanon to be a tiny country. Given how long we've been driving, is it possible they're transporting us into a different country?

We're descending now. I feel gravity pulling on my head, and I register the altitude change in my Eustachian tubes. I still can't unpop my ears, I've always had a hard time doing that. It's a trivial discomfort; nevertheless, it's one more maddening addition to the torture of this journey.

We're out of the mountains. Less jolting now, thank God. We rattle along down level roads, mostly straight, no more tight curving and winding. The new terrain allows us to pick up speed. Good—we'll get wherever we're going faster.

Not nearly as fast as I'd like. It turns out there's still something like an hour to go.

I'm soaking wet, clammy and chilly. At the same time, I'm parched—my body is desperate to replace the liquid it has exuded through my skin. I'm being pickled in that liquid, pickled in my own sweat. In addition to my thirst, my stomach resents having missed breakfast. The hunger, combined with the smell of diesel, is making me nauseous.

No! Think about something else, don't dwell on the nausea. If you throw up behind the gag, it will kill you.

As we drive on and on, I become sleepy. The work of breathing has wiped me out. Maybe I'd be able to doze off, now that the ride has become relatively smoother—but I don't dare try. I'm afraid that, on autopilot, my body won't know how much effort is required to keep me breathing. The yearning for sleep is a further agony, one more reason I need this trip to endnow already.

Maybe I'm sleepy because I'm being gradually asphyxiated by the exhaust.

Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad way to end this.

No. Please, God, I want to survive this. I want to be released, I want to go home to my family...

Despair and fear and exhaustion make me want to cry. I can't let myself do that, though, I'll suffocate. My breaths become shakier and longer, and more painful, until I'm able to get my emotions under control.

I can't focus on distractions anymore, my thoughts just ooze in random directions. My brain is being squeezed like a sponge. Is this what insanity feels like? I want to stop having any thoughts at all.

We turn onto another bumpy road—too level to be more mountains, but it's worse than the mountains, a dirt road, badly rutted. Oh God, the worst jolting yet. Please, let this be the last leg, let us be arriving... The truck feels like it's inching along. Come on, come on...

We brake. We turn in reverse. We brake again. The engine cuts off. The guards get out of the cab. At last. We've arrived. Thank you, Jesus! We've arrived.

They can't pull us out right away. They have to undo all those screws, one by one. Hurry... Hurry...

The cover's off. They pull Allan out first. I hate him for getting to go first, then immediately feel guilty. It's perfectly fair that I have to wait longer. They taped him up first, they should get him out first. Get to me quickly, though—before I lose my mind.

Something's wrong. The guards have remembered that there's something else they were supposed to do first. They slide Allan back into the box. You fucking morons, get your goddamn act together. One of the guards climbs onto the back of the truck, I hear him walking above me. Whatever he's doing up there, he's taking his sweet fucking time about it.

The guard in the truck jumps back onto the ground, and both guards walk away. Oh no you don't, don't you dare leave us in here... Within a few moments, they're back. They extract Allan again, carry him off. I hear the ripping of tape, but no sign of life from Allan. God, please let him be all right...

Finally I hear him, gasping and sobbing. "Motherfucking bastards!" The sound of ripping tape continues. "I'll do that," Allan says. "Get Jeremy out!" When they don't comply right away, he shouts hysterically, "The other man—get him out now, you sons of bitches!"

Theyhsst at him, but they do what he wants. They drag me out of the box by my feet, carry me a short distance, lay me down on the ground. Infuriatingly, when they cut the tape off, they start at my ankles instead of my head. As a blade slices its way up between my legs, the severed ends of tape spring away from each other, that's how tightly wrapped I was. It takes them longer to untape my groin, stomach, and chest: they have to make incisions and peel the tape off my clothes, a few strips at a time. When the binding on my chest is loosened, I take a long, loud, wheezing breath through my nose, relishing the sensation of my chest rising without restraint. Ouch—my chest muscles are too sore to want to stretch that far.

At long last, they free my head, slicing and peeling the tape until they can strip off the sweat-soaked towel. The towel was sweltering and did no good as a cushion, but I see now the advantage: they can unwrap my head more quickly, and I don't experience the pain of having tape pulled off my skin and hair and beard. I should be thankful, I suppose, for that small consideration. They leave my tape-wrapped blindfold on, but they remove the cloth gag tied over my mouth. Finally, finally, I can breathe freely again. I can breathe without having to think about it.

I'm lying on a blanket spread out on the ground. The guards roll me around at will as they finish stripping the tape off me. When they're done with me, they move back over to Allan, who's lying on an adjacent blanket. Despite what he told the guards, he hasn't been able to remove the tape from himself; they have to do it for him. No wonder, if his body's reacting like mine. All over my body, freed muscles are going into spasms. I shake uncontrollably for long minutes. I pray I haven't suffered permanent damage.

Gradually the spasms subside, leaving me limp and drained. I imagine that I can feel my sponge-squeezed brain slowly expanding back to its regular shape. Thank you, God, I keep thinking. Alternating with: Please—never again.

"Are you all right?" Allan asks me in a weak voice. The guards have laid us down with our heads next to each other this time. I feel far from all right, but I whimper, "Yes," so he won't worry. I trust that I'm going to be all right.

Once we've regained the use of our limbs, the guards give us each a bottle of water and show us where they've left a pee bottle close to our heads for us to share. Allan struggles onto his knees to use the pee bottle right away, although his bladder yields only a short trickle after a longish wait. I feel no need to pee. I have sweat all the water out of my body, I'm still wearing all that sweat in my clothes. What I need to do is drink. I gulp down so much water at a single pull that the guards take the bottle out of my hand for fear I'll make myself sick.

I don't feel the sun shining on us, so there must be a roof over our heads. But the floor beneath the blanket is dirt, and the air is fresh, and there's a breeze blowing in from beyond our feet. I hear sounds of a rural setting: birds chirping, windblown grass rustling. No sounds of people, except for an occasional truck passing by far away. I'm picturing us in an isolated barn surrounded by farm country. This can't be a new holding place. It feels temporary, an unloading point, not our final destination. But where is that...?

The truck we came in is very close by; I hear one of the guards jump up to sit on the truck bed. The other guard—only two accompanied us on this journey—is standing lookout a bit farther off, scuffing the dirt now and then with his foot. Tobacco smoke wafts toward us on the breeze. Allan asks for a cigarette, and the guard on the truck bed brings it to him. When the guard offers me a cigarette, I shake my head, still too drained to want to speak.

After giving us some more time to recover, a guard approaches us again. He has a bone to pick. He's not the fluid English speaker from the van, the one who told us to trust them. That man isn't here, the fucker. I don't think I've heard this new guard's voice before today.

The guard demands of Allan, "Why you talk bad to us?" He sounds pouty more than angry.

Allan's reply is measured but tight; he's holding himself back from exploding. "What you did to us was very bad. You cannot do that to people, it is dangerous."

"You are not hurt," the guard says in self-justification.

"Wewere hurt. All the time the truck was moving, it hurt us. We could have been hurt very badly. We could hardly breathe, we could have beenkilled."

The guard becomes more solicitous. "How are you now? Okay?" He nudges me, asks the same question. I nod.

Instead of answering the guard's question, Allan poses one of his own. There's a strain in his voice that makes me think he might be close to tears, although if so, he stays under control. "Are you really letting us go?"

"Soon." Patent evasion.

"Please. After what we just went through, can you please just give us a straight answer for once? Are we going home—yes or no? If we're not, just tell us, we just want to know."

The guard shushes Allan the way he might a fussing child. "Ss, ss, ss.No more talk. Is better you sleep now. You go soon. Not in truck—okay? No truck, no worry. Sleep well, then you go. All good."

He walks away. I am aware that in his attempt to pacify Allan, the guard did not make what would have been the most obvious move for him to make. He assured us vaguely that all will be "good." But he did not repeat the promise that we're going home.

"It's not real, is it," I say in a dull voice.

Allan doesn't answer right away. "I don't know." His voice is quiet but pained with frustration. "We might be going to Syria. We might be going to Baalbek."

I have no idea what either destination entails, I've never even heard of the second one. "Where do we want to go?"

"Syria."

I am able to sustain surprisingly little interest in this question. Right now, a different concern blocks my view of the future.