A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  Humphry said, “This is really too bad. I’ve been afraid that someday one of them would find a way to hotwire the locking system. I hope this wasn’t the day. They’re like one big organism with stuff like this. By next week all of them would know how, and we’d be dealing with something like this every night.”

  “Sir?”

  “What?”

  “Something else just happened.” He pointed at one of the other television screens on the big wall of monitors. “Now the cameras on Block C aren’t showing anything.”

  The seven guards reached the gate at the end of the hall before the entrance to Cellblock C. Pelletier, the sergeant, inserted his key card into the reader, punched in his code, and stepped back. The bars rolled out of the way into the wall, and the seven charged past—first McGovern, Ciccio, Decker, Yashinsky, Tiedemann, and Polk; and then, in accordance with procedure, after he’d stayed long enough to see the gate across the corridor roll shut and lock, Pelletier pivoted and ran to catch up.

  Pelletier was through the door to the cellblock before he saw that the disturbance wasn’t a couple of stupid inmates who had arranged to fight over some insult. It was something else entirely. The steel cell doors on all sides of the semicircular block abruptly opened and three prisoners dashed out of each one and threw themselves on the guards from all directions.

  The first two men out tackled the nearest guard, one high and the other low, so the guard was sure to go down. The third piled on and made sure the guard stayed down, using impact, weight, and strength to disable him. In some fights the third man’s dive onto the guard’s torso broke ribs, and in others a guard’s arm would be broken. Within ten seconds all seven guards had been swarmed and put down, but it wasn’t over, because there was a fourth man.

  The fourth man carried a ligature made of shoelaces or twine or braided leather attached to a pair of wooden handles. He sat down, slipped the ligature over the guard’s head, braced himself by placing his feet on the guard’s shoulders, and tightened the ligature around the guard’s neck.

  The guards of the trouble squad had been chosen for their size, strength, and athleticism, but they were all dead within minutes. As each guard died, his assailants removed his uniform. While one of the inmates put on the guard’s uniform, the others dressed the guard’s body in his prison clothes. They dragged each guard into a cell, lifted him onto a bunk, and arranged him to look as though he were sleeping.

  The seven prisoners dressed as guards hurried out the cellblock door to the gate that prevented prisoners from entering the corridors and stairways. Martin Ortega, the one who was now dressed as a sergeant, used a key card to make the gate of iron bars roll aside into the pocket in the wall. He held the card there while Ed Leonard, the first man out after him, reached the hallway side of the gate, took out a screwdriver made from the sharpened handle of a spoon, and removed the screws from a maintenance panel in the wall to reach the electric motor and gears for rolling the heavy gate aside. He tore the wires out of the motor, took out a tube of epoxy cement stolen from the prison repair shop, and jammed the gears by sticking the tube of epoxy cement between them and moving the gate a few inches manually to burst the tube.

  Cellblock C was now open and could not be closed again remotely or manually. The seven inmates in guard uniforms moved on, using the same method to jam open the gate at the bottom of the steps to the second tier, the one in the second-tier corridor, and then the one by the third-tier steps.

  They split up into three groups of two and a lone sergeant. They emerged from the last steps onto the system of catwalks that ran above the cellblocks and Main Street.

  The first pair to find one of the riflemen patrolling the catwalks came striding up together, both looking concerned. One of them said, “We’re filling in from the day shift tonight, and we’ve got to make an extraction from a cell. They warned us he’s a badass, and he’s got a history of fighting back. Would you mind helping us out? If you’ll stand by with the rifle where he can see you, things will go a lot easier.”

  “Sure,” said the catwalker. “Where is he?”

  “D Block, cell eighty-nine.” The first one set off ahead, and his companion let the catwalker go next while he followed. He took a couple of steps before he had the metal baton from the dead guard’s belt extended. He swung it downward into the rifleman’s head. The impact made a hard, hollow sound, and the guard collapsed. As he started to fall, the first man pivoted and wrenched the rifle out of his hands, took the guard’s spare magazine from his belt, and set them on the catwalk. Both men hoisted the guard by the arms and draped him over the railing. Then they squatted to lift his legs and released him headfirst.

  The second and third pairs of inmates found the other two catwalkers within a few minutes and let them drop to the pavement of Main Street too. Now the seven uniformed inmates had three military-grade rifles and six loaded magazines. They came together at the door to the passage to the outer wall and climbed the steps.

  Three guard stations overlooked the outer yard of the prison. They were referred to as “towers,” but they were fixed concrete turrets built along the top of the wall. Each held two men with scoped rifles, mounted spotlights, and binoculars. These men were the deterrent of last resort, the certain way to control the open yard, the top of the wall, and the entrances and exits of the prison if everything else went wrong. The towers were fortified against most kinds of attack, and they contained large caches of ammunition in case of a lengthy standoff. Prison policy, ever since the mission of the prison had been revised, was for the tower guards to lock themselves into their towers for the whole shift, not opening the door for anyone until they were replaced at 7 a.m. The lights inside the guard towers were dim, like the dashboard lights of a car, to keep their vision of their targets bright.

  The north tower was the first to come under attack. One of the inmates in a guard’s uniform climbed to the top of the wall and crawled along beside the inner railing of the walkway so he couldn’t be seen. He verified that the description of the tower was correct. The steel entrance door, the bulletproof-glass windows, and the reinforced-concrete structure of the tower were not vulnerable. The ventilation system was.

  The tear gas–and–pepper spray combination on the guards’ belts was occasionally used to get a barricaded inmate out of his cell, and the mixture had always worked. When the uniformed inmate reached the right spot beside the tower, he found the ventilation outlet where the fan pushed out stale air. It was a pipe that extended out and down, so rainwater couldn’t seep in, and had a screen so insects couldn’t creep in. He plugged the outlet by inserting a layer of paper under the screen. But there was also an intake for fresh air, and he found it by listening for the whirr of a fan on the opposite side of the tower. The intake pipe also faced downward and had a screen over its opening to keep out insects. The prisoner removed the screen.

  The design included a carbon filter that looked like a can of charcoal chips with screens on both ends, to provide some protection from tear gas that might drift all the way up there during the quelling of a prison riot. The prisoner simply pulled the filter out of the pipe and set it aside. He was carrying the gas canister from his belt and the canister from the belt of his partner, and had another piece of paper folded in his pocket. He unfolded the paper and formed it into a funnel, with the larger end covering the intake. He took the two canisters out of their leather cases, pushed the first one into the small end of the funnel, and began to spray the gas into it.

  For a minute or two there was nothing but the sound of the aerosol spray. Then there were noises from inside the tower. There was a voice, and then a thump, something like the sound of a chair being kicked over, and then two voices. The prisoner left the canisters and the paper and ran around to face the tower door.

  The door of the tower flew open, and the two snipers burst out, coughing and rubbing their faces. They staggered a few paces from the door before they saw the uniformed inmate.

  “Guys, com
e this way,” he called. “We’ll get you help.”

  The two seemed to see only that he was wearing a guard uniform, and that he was trying to get them to follow him, so they hurried behind him as he trotted toward the stairwell.

  “Did you have a tear gas grenade go off in there?”

  “Nothing went off,” said one of the men from the tower. “It was coming in through the vent.”

  The uniformed prisoner opened the door to the stairwell and ushered them inside. He knew that there were inmates with strangling cords, backed up by his partner with the rifle in case things went wrong.

  By the time his partner emerged from the stairwell, he had the door of the tower propped fully open and the ventilator fans turned on high and clearing the air of the poison he had sprayed in.

  In the stairwell, the inmates who had strangled the two men from the north tower were busy dressing two prisoners in their uniforms. At the same time, other prisoners were executing identical attacks on the southwest tower and the southeast tower; the four guards stationed there were killed and their uniforms taken. The three towers yielded six rifles with scopes, 2,100 rounds of ammunition for them, six more expandable batons, and six more tear gas–and–pepper spray canisters. There were now sixteen armed prisoners dressed in guard uniforms.

  3

  Captain Humphry was worried. The seven-man trouble team that had gone out twenty-eight minutes ago had not returned. He left his desk and went out to the Operations room where Paul Scott was watching the monitors. “Have you been able to bring up C Block yet?”

  “Yes. It looks like there may have been some kind of power glitch. It looks all quiet there, with all the inmates in their cells and nobody fighting or anything.”

  “Do you see the trouble team?”

  “There hasn’t been any sign of them since the visual came back. They could have taken somebody out of the block to the infirmary or isolation. Turning off the power for a minute or two could have been a part of that.”

  Captain Humphry lifted one of the handheld radios from the counter and pressed the talk button.

  It was too late to use the radio. An inmate named Albert Weiss, a life-sentence offender from Florida, had already turned on an electrical device he had made in his cell over the past few months. He could have done the work in a few hours if he’d had the proper parts delivered in a single order from an electronics supply distributer. Instead he’d had to get other prisoners to let him take apart their radios and various other possessions, and to ask their relatives to send other approved items he could cannibalize. He had also taken pieces from many devices in the prison—television sets, toasters, a microwave oven, disc players, and other appliances had all contributed to his radio jammer.

  This was a familiar project to Albert Weiss. He had made his first radio receiver at age ten and his first transmitter at twelve. The most effective jammer was simply a more powerful radio transmitter working on a particular band. He had gone to college at Florida State to become an electrical engineer and learned to complete much more complex and difficult projects.

  He had built his transmitter as a clone of the walkie-talkies the guards used. He had started with some experimental work. Two-way radios intended for recreational use could be tuned to a wide variety of channels, but the pro models worked only on certain channels on reserved frequencies. Once he had made a crude, toy-like receiver, he had used it to find and listen to the frequencies and channels the guards’ radios used. Next, he simply built a more powerful radio transmitter that could transmit on the same ones.

  Over several months Weiss had assigned other inmates to use their cassette recorders to record the voices of guards walking up and down the cellblocks talking into their radios. He had used three recorders so there were at least three different sets of guards talking simultaneously on his master tape, all of them using standard prison radio codes and jargon. Some of them were from the night shift, so there would be familiar voices among them.

  When Humphry turned on his handheld radio in the Operations room, what he heard was a powerful transmission of several voices talking simultaneously about routine operations, emergencies, questions, observations, and things that took place months ago or days ago. Some voices were mumbled or slurred, others loud and insistent, but no speech was comprehensible beyond three or four words. Humphry tried to break in by pressing his talk button several times and speaking. He tried saying, “This is Operations,” and then, “This is Captain Humphry,” but nothing interrupted the flood of words. He tried switching to the first alternative channel, but there was the same cascade of meaningless chatter. The second alternative channel was the same. He set the radio back on the console. “Now the radio system is screwed up too. Did we take a lightning strike or something?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  The arsenal had no markings on its door, and no inmate was ever allowed on the corridor where it was located. Plenty of inmates probably didn’t know it existed. The key that the man wearing the sergeant’s stripes carried wouldn’t open the steel door. The only key that worked was kept in the Operations section in the warden’s desk. The steel door was too sturdy to be battered in by force, so the man in the sergeant’s uniform said, “Go get Joe Lambert and tell him to bring the thermite.” One man went and the other two got busy cutting off the electrical feed to the security cameras.

  In a few minutes Lambert was there carrying a large plastic bottle made for laundry detergent. He set it down and fitted a metal trough over the door handle so its end was held against the door lock, and then poured a generous portion of the dark powdery substance from the plastic bottle into the trough so it slid down to gather around the lock and bolt.

  The substance was a mixture of aluminum powder filed from the under parts of a folding chair and common rust from an iron dumbbell rack in the exercise area that had its paint chipped off a few months ago so the rain would corrode it, the undersides of several iron benches bolted down in the yard, and a few other rust-production areas. The final ingredient was magnesium in the form of thin strips that had reached the prison inside the bindings of several books.

  Lambert produced a flint-and-steel spark lighter, stolen from the welding kit in the maintenance shop, and lit the magnesium. It took a few seconds to get the sparks to start the magnesium, but then he succeeded and the thermite caught.

  The tray sent out bright flying bits of metal, as though that part of the door had been transformed into a big sparkler. The uniformed inmates stepped backward, with their hands up to protect their eyes, but the reaction intensified, heating the steel door and the hardware attached to it higher and higher.

  “How long?”

  “Until the color is right.”

  Ortega, the man with the stripes, stood eye to eye with Lambert. “This is going to work, right?”

  “Yes. The hard part is getting the reaction to start, and we’ve done that. Metal burns at incredibly high temperatures. We could melt the whole door if we had enough thermite.”

  In five more minutes, the door was so hot it radiated like a furnace, and it was hard to stand near it. Lambert stared at it some more, then quickly stepped up and gave the door a stomp-kick beside the door handle. The door swung inward into the room. They could see that the lock had stayed where it was, with the bolt still stuck in its receptacle and the hinges still attached to the jamb, but the thinner steel of the door had softened and melted away from them.

  The uniformed inmates formed a single file and stepped around the door into the arsenal. There were dozens of rifles in racks along the walls, olive drab steel cans of ammunition, and twenty-round magazines. On one whole wall was a display of identical semiautomatic pistols. The men armed themselves as heavily as possible, most with a rifle and two pistols, and then they were joined by some of the other uniformed inmates, who took extra arms and ammunition for others who were occupied in different sectors.

  * * *

  Humphry came out of his office and looked over
Scott’s shoulder at the monitors. “Keep looking for them. Check each sector, one at a time, until they turn up. Start with the infirmary and isolation if you want, but let me know.” He went away again.

  After a few minutes, Scott came to Humphry’s office. “I’ve been looking, but I haven’t found them. And now I’m getting these intermittent outages. I’ll check on a place and it all seems fine. Then I’ll come back to it and there’s no visual. I’ll go off it and look somewhere else, and then the visual is on again, and there doesn’t seem to be anything out of place, but the seven men never show up.”

  Humphry said, “Is there anything off right now?”

  “One of the hallways. And the infirmary.”

  “Not the front gate or the yard?”

  “Not so far. It’s all random places.”

  “Great. That means nobody’s trying to get out. The only serious problem is that the trouble squad hasn’t come back yet. How do you propose we could solve that?”

  “I tried calling them again and the talk button didn’t get me an override.” He knew what Humphry wanted and he was reluctant, but Humphry was staring at him, waiting. He gave in. “Do you think I should go out and look for them?”

  Humphry shrugged. “That might do it.”

  “Would you mind holding down the office by yourself while I go, Captain?” It was his only way of retaliating. He knew Humphry hated being alone in the office running from phone to phone and watching the monitors.

  Humphry said, “I don’t expect you to answer the phones when you’re not here. When you find them, tell Pelletier to come see me.”

  “Yes, sir.” Scott turned and left Humphry’s office. By the time he passed his work station at the monitors, the outage at the infirmary had been restored. A glance showed him the reception desk and the secure area where the sick or faking inmates waited to be examined, and the dimly lit ward with sleeping inmates on narrow beds. He reached for the handheld radio. Maybe everything was working again. It wasn’t. The continuous chatter of guard voices was loud, if not clear. He set the radio down and hurried out.