Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller

by Stephen Leather

  ‘And now?’ Lupa said.

  ‘We give Scouse ten minutes to get back to the hotel and off the streets, and then we head for the exit ourselves. I’m hoping that a bit of front and a healthy wad of dollars will solve all problems.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’

  ‘Then we’ll have to improvise.’

  They waited another ten minutes and then Harper led them towards the gates. However, when he showed the guards the number on his arm, they ignored the bribe he produced and instead of letting them out, they escorted the three of them to the chief warden’s office.

  ‘We’re ready to leave now,’ Harper said. ‘Thank you for your hospitality. I just need my passport back and then I’ll be on my way.’ He showed him the number inked on his arm.

  Fernandez glanced at the ledger that one of his juniors pushed in front of him, then gave Harper a cold stare. ‘There must be some mistake, señor, the person with that number has already left San Pedro. So your number must be a forgery and therefore you are a prisoner trying to escape.’

  ‘But he was the prisoner, he just pretended to be me. Look at the picture in my passport, if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘He took his passport with him.’

  ‘Then look at me. You must remember me, I’ve been in your office a couple of times in the last few days.’

  The chief warden shrugged. ‘A lot of people pass through this office, señor, you cannot expect me to remember them all.’

  Harper spread his hands. ‘All right. How much money do you want?’

  ‘It is not a matter of money.’

  ‘It’s always a matter of money.’ He studied Fernandez for a few moments. ‘Shall we say $500 to make this problem go away?’

  The chief warden gave a crooked smile. ‘It is a very big problem.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Nothing less than a thousand dollars would solve it.’

  ‘Then a thousand dollars it is, but obviously I don’t have that kind of money on me, I’ll have to get it for you.’

  ‘You will need to send someone to do so, because you do not leave here without it.’

  ‘But if I don’t go out to get it, you won’t get your money.’

  ‘You have things the wrong way round, señor. If you don’t get me the money, you will never get out of here.’ Fernandez glanced at Lupa, running the tip of his tongue over his lips as he did so. ‘You can send the pretty señorita to get your money, but you stay here.’

  Harper calculated the odds. He was confident he could deal with the chief warden and the watching guard, but that still left up to ten other guards to deal with, most of them carrying pistols and two of them armed with rifles who were well out of his reach in the watchtowers. Those odds were too steep to even contemplate, so he gave a reluctant nod. ‘Okay, let Lupa out and she can bring the money here.’

  ‘One of my guards will accompany her.’

  ‘No he won’t. You have me and her brother as guarantees that she will return. I am not going to allow a guard to witness how and where she obtains the money.’

  The chief warden gave a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘As you please, but if she does not return, you can imagine the consequences.’

  ‘Trust me, she will return.’

  ‘It is precisely because I do not trust you, señor, that I am taking the precaution of keeping you and her brother here.’

  Harper took Lupa on one side and whispered in her ear, telling her where he’d hidden his money in his hotel room. There was close to ten thousand dollars under the mattress.

  Harper and Ricardo watched from the main prison yard as Lupa walked out through the main gates. He was pleased to note that as she crossed the square in front of the prison, she paused twice and glanced behind her to make sure she was not being followed, before moving on.

  She was gone for almost two hours and Harper was just beginning to feel a little anxious, worried less that she might have double-crossed him than that she might have been robbed by some opportunist thief. He heaved a sigh of relief as he saw her familiar slight figure picking her way through the crowds outside the prison and approaching the gates.

  She was held at the gates for some minutes, before being ushered into the prison and taken straight to the chief warden’s office. When Harper and Ricardo tried to follow her, they found their way barred by four guards, all with pistols drawn.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Harper said, out of the side of his mouth. ‘I’m sensing a double-cross.’

  ‘Not by Lupa?’

  ‘Of course not, by the chief warden.’

  She did not reappear until twenty minutes later and when she did she was ashen-faced, and being frog-marched by one of the guards. Flanked by two more of them, Fernandez lumbered down the steps behind her. He was scowling and there was the vivid red imprint of a hand on his cheek and four parallel scratches down his face.

  Screened by his guards, he came to a stop facing Harper. ‘Your girlfriend has stolen your money, señor. She came back here offering to have sex with me instead. When I refused, she attacked me. So there has been a change of circumstances; all of you will now be remaining here as prisoners. You will be charged with aiding and abetting the escape of a prisoner and attempted bribery, and will face trial in due course.’

  ‘He’s lying Lex,’ Lupa said. ‘He took the money, tried to rape me and is now trying to cover it up.’

  ‘I know that,’ Harper said, keeping his voice low. ‘But there’s nothing we can do about it now. We’re unarmed and there are too many guards protecting him. If we try anything, we risk being shut in the punishment block and that will make escape much harder. So we need to back down now, get back to the cell and then plan our next move.’

  Before they could do so, there was a sudden flurry of activity at the gates. One of the guards, who had strolled off in the direction of the poorer sections that contained the punishment block a few minutes earlier, came sprinting back, shouting to his comrades. The gates were immediately locked and barred, all the prisoners and visitors were instructed to remain motionless where they were and a head count was begun in every section of the jail.

  The count was done and then re-done, and there was much head-shaking as the numbers were tallied. From the guards’ conversations, overheard by Ricardo and Lupa, the total number of prisoners and visitors - dead and alive - appeared to tally exactly with the prison records, and yet one of the punishment cells now stood empty, but for the bodies of the two thugs who had been guarding it, and its former occupant had disappeared without trace. Harper, Lupa and Ricardo could have enlightened them about why that was, but although the other two exchanged worried looks, all remained silent. Harper maintained his normal cool outward air in front of them, but he was on maximum alert, watching for any hint of a threat to them, either from the guards or from Don Lorenzo. He must now have been aware that two of his men were dead, and would have been able to make a pretty shrewd guess about who was responsible.

  Eventually with much shrugging, head-shaking and gesticulating, the guards resumed their normal routines and the prisoners and visitors were left to carry on with their activities. Harper had been thinking furiously while they had been held for the head-count and he had formed a rough plan. ‘We need to be low-profile for the moment,’ he said, ‘but we have to find a way to bust out of here and quick. Even if Don Lorenzo doesn’t get us, that chief warden is not going to let me - or us - out of here for any amount in bribes. And if you were right about why Scouse was being held, Lupa, it may well already have occurred to Don Lorenzo that one sacrificial Inglés will do as well as another, and funnily enough, I’m not that keen on the idea of spending the rest of my time on earth concreted into the foundations of a hotel or an office block.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, but let’s get back to the cell first, we’re too vulnerable out here in the yard.’

  Harper waited until they were back in their cell, with the door locked, and then said, �
�Right, here’s my plan, but feel free to suggest any changes or improvements. This isn’t a dictatorship, we’re all at risk here and we all need to feel confident in the plan we choose.’

  He watched their faces fall as he outlined what he had in mind, but as they talked it through, it was clear that, with only minor modifications, they accepted that while it was risky and even desperate, it offered a better chance than anything else they could come up with.

  ‘So first off, we need some weapons,’ Harper said.

  ‘They’re banned and the guards will seize any they find.’

  ‘But in practice, as we’ve already seen, the guards very rarely venture into the sections and the police never do at all.’

  ‘Not even when murders happen,’ Lupa said with a shudder.

  ‘So while we can assume that the guards will confiscate any weapons like those Colts you found for us in Santa Cruz, if we or any visitors tried to bring them in, they can’t intercept any that we get made in here.’

  ‘But we can’t just start manufacturing weapons.’

  ‘Can’t we? I agree we can’t produce Kalashnikovs, Armalites or anything sophisticated, but we can make single-shot pistols easily enough. They’ll be muzzle-loaders like guns used to be way back in the day and we’ll have to fire them using a taper or a smouldering bit of rope to ignite the gunpowder, just like they used to have to do before flintlocks were invented, but since we’re a bit more sophisticated these days, a cigarette end would do the same job for us. To make the actual weapons we could probably just use some lengths of bamboo, but then we’d really have to try and hold them against a wall while we were firing them, which would be awkward, but if we didn’t, the back-blast would be potentially dangerous to us and it would also seriously compromise the power of the weapon. So we’ll be better using some metal piping and some basic metal parts that should be easy enough to get. Plumbers’ copper piping is too soft, it’ll bulge and split if you try to fire a round through it, but the sort of narrow-bore steel piping they use as conduit for electricity cables would do the job perfectly. There’s bound to be some kicking around here somewhere and the guys in the forge can make the other bits we’ll need, including the rounds we’ll fire.’

  ‘And what about Don Lorenzo while we’re doing all this?’ Lupa said. ‘He’s not going to sit back and politely wait while we do all this, now is he?

  ‘No and we’ll undoubtedly have to deal with him and his thugs before long, but I’m fairly confident that they’ll wait for darkness tonight before they come calling on us, so at least we do have a few hours to prepare. So let’s get to it.’

  With Lupa translating any technical terms, Harper talked to the blacksmith about what he wanted and after a few questions, some diagrams scratched in the dust on his table and the sight of yet more US dollars, he eventually nodded, shook hands and held up five fingers to signal how many hours he would need to do it. As Harper turned to leave, the blacksmith said something in Spanish to Lupa. ‘What did he say?’ Harper said, as they walked back to their cell.

  She grinned. ‘He said if we manage to escape, he’ll be sorry to see us go, because life has been a lot more interesting around here since we arrived!’

  While they were waiting for the blacksmith to work his magic, Harper sent Lupa and Ricardo to collect handfuls of gravel from the yard, bits of glass from the broken beer bottles littering the ground outside one of the bars and any rusty screws, nails, and small shards of metal they could find in the waste heap outside the blacksmith’s forge.

  Harper sawed the spare bamboo pole they had left in their cell into fifty centimetre lengths. He jammed a wad of rags into the bottom of each one and tightly sealed it with mud. He dried the mud over the stove, then filled each piece of bamboo with alternating bands of black powder and metal, glass and gravel shrapnel, tamping the powder down gently with the end of a stick, and using circles of thin cardboard cut from an empty box as wadding to hold each layer in place. A thin strip of rag ran the length of the inside of the bamboo tube and protruded a few centimetres from the top. ‘All we need now,’ he said, ‘is something to ignite it. Paraffin or kerosene would do it, and plenty of prisoners seem to have small stoves, so I’m sure that wouldn’t be a problem, but some of that Caiman alcohol might be even better.’

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ Ricardo said, peeling a couple more notes from the dwindling roll Harper held out to him.

  Late in the afternoon, Harper and Ricardo went back to the forge to collect the improvised weapons the blacksmith had made. There were six of them, each with a twenty centimetre length of steel tube, with one end reinforced with steel and welded to a steel handle. That end of the tube was closed but a narrow hole had been drilled through the tube a couple of centimetres from the closed end. The blacksmith had also made the rounds that these primitive guns would fire. There was no rifling on the barrels, of course, so the rounds were not bullet shaped but like the old musket balls fired from flintlocks before the invention of cartridges in the nineteenth century. The blacksmith had made them by dropping globules of white hot metal into water and then filing off the tail of the metal to leave a round ball.

  As Harper paid the blacksmith and was about to leave, he spotted a couple of metal clamps on a shelf and picked them up. ‘These too?’ he said.

  The blacksmith nodded. Harper shook his hand and said to Ricardo. ‘Tell him when he gets out of here, he can make a very good living as a straight craftsman.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ Ricardo said, ‘but he’s in here on a thirty year sentence, so he won’t be doing that anytime soon.’

  ‘What’d he do?’

  Ricardo shrugged. ‘The usual: murder.’

  CHAPTER 15

  Dusk was beginning to darken the sky as they walked back to their cell, Harper noticed a couple of Don Lorenzo’s men lounging against the courtyard walls. They avoided eye contact, trying to appear as if they were ignoring them, but as Harper entered their cell, he glanced back and saw one of the thugs hastily drop his gaze. The other one was half-turned away but talking into a mobile phone and it was clear from the sideways glances he darted at Harper that he was the topic of conversation.

  As soon as they got inside the cell and locked the door behind them, Harper tested each of their improvised pistols and then loaded them with black powder, wrapped in twists of newspaper and the iron shot the blacksmith had made. He carefully tamped the powder down with a blunt-ended stick and used more thin cardboard discs as wadding. When the weapons were loaded, Harper carefully tipped a little more black powder into the firing hole drilled in the side of the tube.

  ‘There we are,’ he said. ‘To fire them now all you need to do is touch a cigarette end or a bit of smouldering string to the powder and Bang! So we’ve now got single-shot pistols and crude grenades, but we’ll not be needing the stove again so we might as well make use of the gas cylinders too.’ He turned off the two cylinders under the stove, disconnected the rubber tubes that fed gas to the burners and used the clamps he had got from the blacksmith to seal the pipes. Then he turned the gas back on and checked for leaks. ‘Should do it,’ he said, ‘release the clamp, strike a match or a lighter and - shazam! - you’ve got yourself a flamethrower. Now one more thing - have you ever heard of napalm?’

  ‘The stuff the Americans used in Vietnam?’ Lupa said. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it. What about it?’

  ‘Well we could make our own version of it. All you need to do is boil up petrol with some sort of soap. Soap flakes are ideal but you can just chop up a bar of soap and use that instead. We haven’t got petrol, but kerosene should do the job. You just boil it up till it turns into a gel, and then throw it at the target and toss something after it to make it ignite.’

  ‘No, Lex,’ Lupa said. ‘I don’t mind the weapons, not even your bombs and home-made flamethrowers, but napalm is too horrible. Please don’t use that.’

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘Well, maybe you’re right. In any case we probably don’t have time to make anythin
g else now.’ He took a cautious look out of the cell window. In the gathering gloom he could see that Don Lorenzo’s two thugs had now been joined by six others, and the attention of seven of the eight of them was wholly focussed on Harper’s cell. The other thug was running water into the pool in the centre of the yard. ‘They’re filling the piscina,’ Harper said over his shoulder, ‘and I’m guessing that’s not because they fancy a dip.’

  ‘It’ll be for their other favourite sport,’ Ricardo said. ‘Drowning people.’

  All of the thugs were carrying some sort of weapon - mostly knives, coshes or baseball bats - but as far as Harper could see, none had guns. Just the same, odds of eight to three were not that encouraging, but he had faced worse odds than that before and lived to tell the tale, and he did have a few surprises in store for when they made their move.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have visitors quite soon, I think. The door’s got three locks so that will give us some protection, but that ground-floor window is obviously another way in. Ricardo, give me a hand with these.’ The pair of them manhandled the table and chairs across the room and stacked them up in front of the window.

  ‘That’s pretty flimsy,’ Lupa said. ‘It isn’t going to stop them.’

  ‘It’s not intended to,’ Harper said. ‘We just need to slow them up enough to be sure of giving them the warmest possible welcome.’

  He dragged one of the beds to the back of the room, tipped it onto its side and piled up all their mattresses and bedding in front of it. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘Fort Apache, The Bronx! You two, take two of those home-made pistols each and get down behind that barrier. It won’t stop a bullet but I don’t think they’ve got any firearms anyway, and it will give you some protection from knives, flying glass and anything else they might have, including acid or something like that. If and when they come through the window, don’t fire until I tell you to. We’ll not have time to reload, so we’ll only have six shots, and there are eight of them, so we need to make them count.’