Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

by Donald E. Westlake

  Eddie had been on the verge of switching off the interior lights and shutting the door. Now he paused, glancing in quick annoyance at the sentry, and said, “What was that, soldier?”

  “I can’t let you take any supplies from this building, sir, without a special requisition order from Major Macauley.”

  “But I have one,” Eddie said. “I showed it to you.” The sentry and I both looked at him in bewilderment. He had one? That was news to me.

  And to the sentry, who said, “I don’t remember seeing it, sir, I’m sorry.”

  “No problem,” Eddie said. “I prefer to see alert young men, on the job—” While saying which, he was reaching inside his uniform blouse, to suddenly pull out the small pistol he’d pointed at me that very first day in the gym. “Just take it easy, soldier,” he said. “No reason to get yourself shot. Lieutenant—” that was me “—relieve the young man of his rifle.”

  “Aa-uh,” I said. I was standing holding a carton of explosives in my arms, between one man with a rifle and one man with a pistol. But the sentry hadn’t moved, was still at port arms as though frozen in that position, so maybe there wouldn’t be any gunfire after all. Hastily putting down the carton I approached the sentry, noticing just how white were the whites of his eyes, and how equally white were the knuckles of his hands gripping the rifle; it was a bit heartening to know he was every bit as scared as me. Maybe more so, since he had no idea what was going on.

  “I’ll take that,” I said, and put my hand on the rifle. It trembled like a puppy beneath my hand. The sentry was staring, wide-eyed. I was blinking like a shipboard semaphore.

  “You can’t—” he started to say, and then stopped, swallowed, and started all over again. Whispering this time, he said, “I can’t let go.”

  “Yes, you can,” I assured him, and tugged slightly on the rifle. His knuckles really were white.

  Behind me, Eddie said, “Step to one side. Lieutenant. If he won’t give up his weapon voluntarily, I’ll have to fire.”

  The sentry’s hands snapped open, and I just barely kept the rifle from falling to the ground. But I did keep hold of it, got it into two hands, and backed away with it.

  “All right, soldier,” Eddie said. “Into the building, on the double.”

  We’re right in the glare of floodlights, I thought. We’re in the middle of an Army base, in the glare of floodlights, disarming a sentry. How did I get involved in this?

  I realized I was holding the rifle at port arms. I wanted to shift to some other positon, but I couldn’t think of one, so I stayed the way I was.

  Meantime, the sentry was scooting into the building. Eddie and I followed him, and I immediately put the rifle on top of a stack of cartons, well out of the way.

  Eddie said to the sentry, “Let me see your orders of the day.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sentry too, I noticed, couldn’t get past the idea of treating Eddie like a superior officer. He reached into his breast pocket, took out a folded piece of rough paper, and handed it across.

  “Good.” Opening it, Eddie said, “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “Bunfelder, sir. Private First Class Emil Bunfelder.”

  “At ease, Bunfelder.”

  Bunfelder’s hands went behind his back, his feet moved to a position twelve inches apart. By God if he wasn’t standing at parade rest!

  Military men receive their assignments in orders of the day, typewriter-paper-size sheets with perhaps a dozen different names and assignments, all in military abbreviations. This was what Eddie was reading, and when he found what he wanted he looked up and said, “You’ll be relieved at twenty-four-hundred hours.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the sentry.

  Eddie checked his watch. “Two hours forty-seven minutes from now. It won’t be a difficult wait, Bunfelder.”

  Doubtfully, not sure what was meant, Bunfelder said, “No, sir.”

  Now Eddie issued both of us orders, calmly but briskly, and we followed them with dispatch. The sentry sat down on the floor with his back against a support post. He removed his belt, and I used it to tie his wrists behind the post. I then used his necktie to gag him and his shoelaces to tie his ankles together. When I was finished, Bunfelder wasn’t going anywhere before his relief arrived at twenty-four-hundred hours.

  “Good work, Lieutenant,” Eddie said. “Now it’s time for us to go.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Outside again, Eddie carefully locked the door while I picked up the carton. Then we set off down the street.

  As we walked along, certain inconsistencies in Eddie’s manner began to bother me, and finally I said, “Eddie, do you think that building we were in might have been bugged?”

  He frowned at me. “What say?”

  “Do you think there was a microphone in it, anybody listening to us?”

  “Of course not,” he snapped. “Don’t be paranoid.”

  “Oh,” I said. The carton was getting heavy; I shifted it to a new position.

  “Come along Lieutenant,” Eddie said. “We don’t want to be late for the rendezvous.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  20

  It took nearly an hour to walk to the west gate, and in that time I saw more methods of destruction than most sane people see all their lives. After the quonset hut full of chemicals and the second ring of supply buildings full of miscellaneous materiel came endless tall rows of stacked shells, parking lots lined with stripped-down jeeps and medieval-looking armored cars and big-tired trucks of various sizes, low concrete block structures full of ammunition and explosives, row upon row of self-propelled artillery, and a veritable invasion force of massed tanks, all with some sort of white cap over their out-thrust turret guns, as though they were being treated for a venereal disease.

  Sentries marched back and forth at their posts, and though we passed very close to some of them, not a one asked us who we were or where we were going or what we had in the carton. Every once in a while a jeep with two or three white-helmeted MPs in it would drive slowly by, but they too accepted our uniforms at face value and went on without questioning us or wondering why we were roaming around out here after dark with an anonymous carton. Given my present circumstances I was happy for their attitude, but given the tools of mayhem available all over the place, I found myself wishing some of these people were a little more suspicious, a little more alert.

  Eddie spent most of the walk pointing to this or that engine of death and telling me its nomenclature and particular qualities, plus whatever anecdotes it had put him in mind of. He also called me ‘lieutenant’ from time to time. Dante had it good; he only went through Hell.

  We were supposed to rendezvous at the west gate with Phil and Jerry at ten-thirty. We arrived ten minutes early and sat down in the unused guard shack to rest while we waited. The carton had become very heavy after a while, so I did a lot of flexing of my arm muscles, trying to get rid of the aches I’d developed. Looking back the way we had come, at the tanks and guns and armored cars and all the rest of the armament hulking there beneath the floodlights, it began to look to me like a true battle scene, frozen in time, with white flares glaring overhead and all the panoply of destruction poised beneath, ready to kill anything that moved.

  This gate and its blacktop road were not in normal use by any of the Camp Quattatunk personnel. The main gate, where Eddie and I had come in, was the only one generally open. This one here, and several other supplementary entrances around the perimeter of the huge compound, was used exclusively for movement of stored materiel in and out of the base. Those tanks over there, for instance; if one of Eddie’s friends decided to use them to level Cleveland, they would exit through here rather than plunge through all the other weaponry to get to the main gate. Otherwise this entrance was kept locked. And, as the signs facing outward warned us, it was also kept electrified.

  At precisely ten-thirty Eddie stepped outside the guard sha
ck and peered into the darkness on the other side of the gate, looking in vain for Jerry and Phil. “They’re late,” he announced.

  “They’ll be here,” I said, trying not to sound as fatalistic as I felt.

  “That’s not like Phil,” Eddie said, and snapped his cuff back to look at his watch. The radium dial glinted in the darkness. Then he came back into the guard shack, a small square clapboard structure with windows on all four sides and room enough within for a chest-high desk, a couple of stools and a wooden bench. I was perched on a stool, gazing alternately at the petrified battle scene and the darkness beyond the fence, but Eddie preferred to stand, taut and serious, gazing steadfastly out the window toward our non-present gang. Once again he reminded me of a ship’s captain, this time on the bridge, gazing out at the expected sou’wester.

  By twenty of eleven, I was beginning to hope that maybe somebody had been caught leaving the prison, or there was trouble about the stolen car. Maybe something really serious and time-consuming had taken place and we wouldn’t be able to steal the goddam laser after all. And if we couldn’t steal the laser we wouldn’t be able to pull the bank robbery.

  That was something to look forward to.

  On the other hand, if Phil and Jerry didn’t show up, we could be in big trouble. There was no way for us to get through that electrified gate, since Phil was the expert in that department, who would be bringing the bypass wires and the rubber gloves and all the other things needed to de-electrify the gate without alerting the MPs back at their headquarters. Which meant the main gate was our only exit, and the last bus left the base for town at eleven o’clock. That was twenty minutes from now, and my calculations had us a good hour’s walking time from the bus stop. Could we stroll out the main gate on foot at midnight and hope the MPs there wouldn’t do more than glance at our ID cards? I somehow doubted it.

  I said, “What time is it?”

  Radium dial glistened greenly in the dark. Eddie said, “Twenty-two forty-five hours.”

  I translated that, and it came out quarter to eleven. I said, “Eddie, I don’t think they’re coming.”

  “Of course they are,” he said.

  “We’ve only got fifteen minutes to catch that bus.”

  There was enough illumination from the distant floodlights so I could see him scowl at me. “What bus?”

  “The last bus back to town. Eddie, we can’t just walk out that main gate in the middle of the night without—”

  “Paragraph one,” Eddie said. “Our transportation will be coming, I have every confidence in Jerry and Phil. Paragraph two: we could not take the bus even if we were close enough to reach it, which we aren’t, because we would not be able to board it with that carton of materiel.”

  “We’ll have to leave it,” I said.

  “Abort the mission? You can’t be serious.”

  “Eddie, we don’t have any choice.”

  “Lieutenant,” he said, and his voice was icy, strong, controlled, “we will have no more defeatist talk.”

  “Eddie, I—”

  “Captain, if you please!”

  “Uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I said, and turned to look out the window toward the gate. Beyond it I saw no headlights approaching. Parking lights; they wouldn’t use headlights. Well, I didn’t see any of them approaching either.

  “Did you hear me, Lieutenant?”

  There are three rules one should live by, if one intends to make it successfully through life: Don’t carry a sofa upstairs by yourself. Don’t get involved with a Scorpio unless you mean it. And don’t argue with crazy people. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  21

  At eleven-thirty, one hour exactly after Phil and Jerry were supposed to have been here, Eddie roused himself from his parade rest stance in front of the gate-facing window and said, “Very well. We’ll have to improvise.”

  Improvise. The bus was gone. There was no way off the base but the main gate, and our identification just wasn’t going to be good enough to get us through that main gate with this damn carton full of death and injury. In thirty minutes the relief sentry would arrive to take the place of the one we had tied up, and the alarm would then be sounded for fair, and this entire camp would be searched with a fine-tooth comb. And not just with a fine-tooth comb, either; there would also be floodlights mounted on jeeps, and men armed with rifles and machine guns, and tracker dogs, and maybe even helicopters. We were going to be caught, my insane friend and I, absolutely no later than one hour from right now. And when we were caught, we would really be caught. Our very presence on this base was an even more serious offense than our absence from the penitentiary. Then there were the uniforms that we weren’t authorized to wear, and the fake ID, and the grand larceny of all this shit in the carton, and the assault on the sentry…

  A persistent image kept entering my brain. One summer vacation when I was a teenager my parents and I took a cottage by a lake in Maine. It rained all week, of course, but that isn’t the point. The point is, there was a fireplace, and we kept a fire going in it for a little warmth and dryness, and one time after my father tossed a flat piece of old board on the fire I noticed there was an ant on it. The piece of board was about four inches wide, making a kind of highway through the flames, and the ant just kept running back and forth on that highway, trying to find some way the hell out of there. Improvise. We were now, like that ant, going to improvise.

  I said, hopelessly, “I suppose the only thing to do is try the main gate. Maybe, if we go through without the carton, just maybe they won’t look too closely at—”

  “We will not abort,” Eddie told me sternly. “Put that out of your mind once and for all, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. When it doesn’t matter what you do, you might as well do what comes easiest, and right now the easiest thing to do was to go along with Eddie’s delusions. His delusion that he was a Captain, for instance, and that I was a Lieutenant. Not to mention his delusion that there was some way off this board and out of the fire.

  He said, “Where’s the carton?”

  “Right here,” I said, and patted it where I had placed it on the chest-high desk in the guard shack. “Do you think maybe we could toss the laser over the fence and then come back tomorrow and—”

  But he wasn’t listening to me. He was opening the carton, and then he was fishing around inside it. “Fine,” he said, and took something out. “Carry the carton outside, Lieutenant,” he told me.

  “What are we doing?” I felt very mistrustful all of a sudden. What had he taken out of there?

  “We are altering our plan of withdrawal,” he said, and marched out of the guard shack. “Come along. Bring the carton.”

  I went along. I brought the carton.

  Outside, he pointed to the side of the shack facing the battle tableau. “Put the carton down there, against the base of the building. Sit down next to it, with your back against the wall.”

  “Eddie, what are you going to do?”

  “Move, Lieutenant. We don’t have much time.”

  “I really want to know, Eddie,” I said.

  In a very soft voice, he said, “That’s twice you have failed to address me in the proper manner. Is this a mutiny, Lieutenant?”

  There was no way I was going to answer that question yes. Not when Eddie had his gun on him. “No,” I said. “No mutiny.”

  “What was that?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Get on with it, Lieutenant,” he said.

  Reminding myself that I had no future anyway, so that it hardly mattered what lunacy Eddie had in mind, I turned away from him, carried the carton around to the back of the guard shack, put it down, sat down next to it, leaned my back against the wall, and gazed at the tableau mordant in front of me with bitterness and despair.

  Eddie came in sight around the corner of the shack, with something in his hands. “In position, Lieutenant? Good.”

  I looked at him, and saw that it was a hand grenade he was holding
just as he pulled the pin. “Jesus Christ!” I yelled, and jumped to my feet as he tossed the grenade underhand toward the gate. Then he stepped forward, casually stiff-armed me so that I lost my balance and went over onto the ground again, sat down next to me, and said, quietly, “Eight, nine—” The explosion made the ground jump, as though surprised. Red-yellow glare beamed through the guard shack windows, which didn’t break; though in counterpoint to the whump of the grenade going off I did hear the tinkle of broken glass from the other side.

  I was still trying to unscramble my brains when Eddie was already back on his feet, looking around the corner of the guard shack toward the gate. “Good,” he said, with satisfaction.

  It was a way. It was crazy, but by God it was a true way through that gate. If we went through now, ran like hell, hid in the woods whenever we saw anybody coming, we just might make it. (We wouldn’t, but on the other hand we might.)

  I climbed up the guard shack to my feet and ran around the corner to look at the gate. There was a smoking hole where it had been. Live wires fizzed and spuckled on both sides, creating short-lived tiny fires in dead leaves. Twisted remnants of gate hung from sprung hinges. “You did it, Eddie!” I cried, feeling a sudden surge of ridiculous optimism. Then I corrected myself: “Captain, you did it!” I turned to him, and found him rooting in the carton again. “I’ll carry that,” I said. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Calmly he reached up, handing me one of the .45 automatics. Taking it—obedience was becoming second nature to me by now—I said, “Captain, we don’t have much time. They’ll be here any minute.”

  “Don’t fire that at anybody,” he said briskly. “It isn’t loaded.” Then he got to his feet, holding a .45 of his own, and faced back toward the camp. “Here they come,” he said, still calm, still quiet, still brisk.

  I looked. Here they came, all right, a jeep bouncing hell for leather through the aisles of tanks, with another one maybe fifty yards behind it. They weaved and darted and ran through the tanks as though they were under bombardment and taking evasive action. In the middle of the petrified battle scene, one element had come into furious life.