“I’ll take my chances. And if I can get to my computers, they’ll wish they’d never ever tangled with likes of me.”
Her computers had probably been reduced to burned blobs of plastic in a landfill, but I didn’t tell her that. I was busy rearranging my covers to hide my reaction to her little tease. “Where does the ‘Mad Moira’ business come from?” I asked.
“Because I’ll do absolutely anything once,” she said with that sly, half-crazy look. “Even you, big guy.”
Then she was gone, and the light on my bathroom door was green again. I got up to look out the window, just to make sure I hadn’t been dreaming. On my way back to the bed my bare feet discovered a filmy little unmentionable.
Okay, I thought. I hadn’t been dreaming.
Time to think. A redhead with a radical left political agenda who admitted to being part crazy wanted to light off an escape attempt from a prison run by Marines. What could possibly be wrong with that proposition?
The next morning, I heard the familiar sounds of guards in the hallway escorting prisoners, excuse me, detainees, to exercise. My turn came two hours later, and I shuffled down to the elevator with six other people, all indistinguishable in their jumpsuits and hoods. If my newfound ally was among the group, I had no way of telling, but it seemed as if they didn’t let adjacent rooms out together.
Once outside, I went through my regular routine. There were guards here and there, but they seemed almost uninterested in what the detainees were doing, or not doing-some just sat on the benches against the side fence and smoked. There was no smoking permitted in the building, but cigarettes were provided to the real addicts when they came out for their fresh air.
I covertly watched the other people, trying to see if I could make out Mad Moira in the group, but it was impossible. The jumpsuits were identically baggy, and the hoods revealed nothing that would indicate the gender of any detainee. I did glance up at the top floor to see if I could see a face at her window, but the glass appeared reflective. No luck there, either.
Then a detainee tried to escape.
It was almost ordinary. I was doing some stretching to relieve incipient cramps in my legs from the sprints when I saw a detainee who was three lanes away walk calmly over the end chalk line to the final fence and begin to climb. He didn’t bolt or yell or do anything dramatic. He simply crossed the line, grabbed a handful of chain-link, and began to clamber up the wire. I looked around to see what the guards would do, and was surprised to see them do absolutely nothing. One guard who had stopped to watch when the man started up the fence lit a cigarette and then sat back down on a bench. That gave me a bad feeling: If the guards weren’t concerned, the escapee had better be. They were expecting a show.
The orange figure climbed steadily until he reached the top. He looked back as if expecting machine-gun fire from within the exercise yard, but the guards were all just watching and still acting unconcerned. There were no guard towers or other weapons stations around the building-just that fence. There were three strands of barbed wire at the top of the fence, tilted inward, but the detainee pulled a couple of bath towels out of his jumpsuit, doubled them over the barbed wire, wobbled for a moment at the top of the fence, and then tumbled over.
The other detainees had all stopped doing whatever they’d been doing and stood there, watching, just like I was. I expected sirens, a prison escape alarm-some kind of institutional reaction to the escape attempt, but there was only silence and the watching guards. Who had to know what was about to happen.
As the orange-clad figure began climbing down the other side of the fence, I heard a bang from over my left shoulder. I first thought it was a gunshot, but then realized it was a large wooden trapdoor opening and closing in the building’s wall. I saw something come through that door, something black and moving fast. It was a large rottweiler. Full grown, ugly as a stump, and rounding the far corner of the fence at the speed of heat in that bearlike gait they have. It made not a sound, but ran as hard as it could to the point just below the detainee, who’d by now seen the dog coming. He stopped his descent about halfway down the fence and stared. I could see the dog’s spittle flying as he came, head down, ugly pig eyes locked on to his prey, and those massive black haunches driving him forward. The escapee was still a good eight feet in the air, and he’d frozen in midclimb, his arms stretched one over the other, and his feet in a similar disposition, one up, one down.
He started back up as the thick black dog arrived, but he might as well not have bothered. The rottie screeched to a stop, took one measuring look, barked once, a nasty, wet sound, and then jumped up onto the fence, all four legs driving. To my amazement, the damned dog began scrambling up the fence, using his enormous teeth to help him climb. He overtook the man’s lower leg at probably ten feet off the ground and clamped down on his ankle. Then he let go of the fence. The man screamed in pain as the dog’s clamped-on, dead weight took effect. I almost thought I could hear the bones crunching, and I could absolutely see bright red blood spurting out of those clenched jaws. The man screamed again, and clung to the chain-link with white knuckles, his free leg swinging in the air now while the dog just hung from the other leg, growling and biting down harder, the froth in his mouth running red from the terrible damage he was doing to the man’s lower leg and ankle.
It was no contest. The dog must have weighed over a hundred pounds, and between the dead weight, the horrible slaughterhouse noises, and the dog’s own squirming, the man simply could not hold on. They both fell to the ground, and I held my breath. I thought surely the rottie would let go and then go for the man’s throat, but he didn’t let go. He began pulling the screaming man along the fence, back toward the corner from which he had appeared, matching each scream with a growl of his own and a sharklike shake of his massive head, as if determined to drown out the human’s piteous cries and simultaneously rip off his prize. He dragged that poor bastard all the way down the fence line, jerking backward around the corner, and then backed into the trapdoor, where they both disappeared into sudden silence.
I remembered to breathe. I looked over at the guards, who had gone back to their routine of walking back and forth along the interior walkway, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The rest of the detainees in the exercise area were still frozen in their tracks, as was I. I’m sure we were all wondering what would happen next, inside that door, but the show was definitely over and that was that. It had taken all of maybe ninety seconds. I glanced back up at the top floor, and this time I thought I saw a blurred white face in Moira’s window.
Okay, neighbor, I thought. Still want to make a run for it? I looked back out at the fields and woods beyond the perimeter fence. The trees were perhaps two hundred yards across the open field from the fence. I assumed the river was just beyond that tangle of willows, scrub oaks, and haphazardly piled flood debris.
But then I saw a welcome sight.
Frick and Frack were looking back at me. They were sitting just inside the tree line, clear as day, if you were looking.
When I recovered from my surprise, I began walking casually toward the perimeter fence, conscious of the fact that absolutely no one else was getting anywhere near it. I was sure the guards were watching and wondering if the madness was contagious, but then I turned around at the chalk line and did a light jog back to the other end of my pen. I did this twice more, and each time confirmed that I could see my shepherds’ heads sticking up through the weeds just inside the tree line, watching me.
Okay, I thought, if they’re watching me, then there’s a human out there, too, hopefully with binocs. On the third trip back to the perimeter, the whistle blew. I scoped the guards out of the corner of my eye. They were gathering to assemble the detainees to go back into the building. I got to the white line, stopped, stretched, got down on one knee with my hands on the ground, and pushed the other leg out behind me. Then, keeping my body between the guards and my hands, I made an imaginary pair of scissors out of my two hands
and mimed cutting through the fence. I got back up and walked casually to the other end, where a guard was waiting for me. I heard another Marine bark out a command, reminding the small line of prisoners that there was no talking allowed.
“Nice pet you-all got there, Marine,” I said. “What’s his name?”
“Kibble and Bits,” he said. “Step out. Fall in. No talking. Clear?”
Clear as a bell, I thought. I stepped out, fell into line on the sidewalk, and shut my yap. If the dog hadn’t already done it, they were going to have to amputate that poor bastard’s foot.
That evening after supper I went in to use the bathroom. There was a message soaped on the mirror: Well? It was signed MM and followed by the words erase this. I erased the message with a wet cloth, picked up my soap bar to reply, but then put it back down and went about my business. On balance, I still didn’t know if I could trust Moira to be who and what she said she was. First of all, what were the chances they’d put a man and an attractive woman in conjoined rooms? Even with all the elaborate key card security, she’d still managed to get into my room. And how had she done that? With a conveniently dropped key card, which was never reported missing? Third, she was a wild-eyed redheaded female. I’d tangled with one of those in my younger days, and tangled was the operative word. In my view, red in the head meant Celt in the blood, and that tribe had always and only been about mortal combat.
I wedged my door open with a towel, retrieved her skivvies, and put them on the edge of the sink. Then I retreated to the relative safety of my room. Whatever I was going to do about escaping, I wasn’t going to complicate it with Mad Moira.
Unless, of course, I wanted use of that magic key card.
I sat down at the little desk and thought about it some more. Obviously, there was no going over the fence in broad daylight with that thing on ready-alert. So: first things first. See if my guys out there got the message about cutting the fence. I got up and looked out the window. It was raining again, and now there were tendrils of fog creeping up from the river through that band of trees where I’d seen Frick and Frack. Maybe tonight, they’d make their move.
The next day was gray and overcast, but without the rain. I took my usual exercise period, this time around midafter-noon. Which exercise pen you got depended on the whim of the guard, but I’d noticed that the first guy in the lineup after coming out of the building went to the first pen to our left, and so on. I set myself up so that I was shut into the same pen as yesterday.
I did my standard exercise package, but ended up near the perimeter fence instead of the base of the pen, where I faked a leg cramp. I sat down on the grass and did a little kabuki, pretending to suffer through the act of straightening out my “cramped” thigh muscles. In between grunts and twitches, I examined the fence. I was looking for signs that it had been cut, but it hadn’t.
Well, shit. So much for that.
Then I scanned the grass and weeds outside of the pen. Immediately beyond the fence was the perimeter running track the Marines used. Beyond that, it was just wet weeds and foot-high grass all the way to the edge of the woods. And, yes, there were signs something had come across that field to the fence. Subtle signs, but to anyone who’d done any tracking, they were there.
I examined the fence again. I had to be very careful here. I had to assume there was a video camera focused right on me because I was lingering near the forbidden fence and the white line of death-by-rottweiler inside the pen.
I stood up, and then sat right back down again with a grunt of simulated pain. Two feet closer to the fence. I stared hard, but the fence was intact. What wasn’t intact was all the clips along the bottom of the panel of chain-link wire in this pen. They were all there, but they had all been severed. Assuming there was enough slack in this fence, I should be able to push my way out under the bottom of the chain-link.
Okay. The guys had been watching.
I got back up again and hopped around on my good leg while trying to make the other one work properly. In the process I turned out toward the woods, pointed at my watch, and then stretched three fingers against my stomach. Then I began limping back toward the other end of the exercise pen. I saw one guard watching me, but he looked more sympathetic than alarmed. I hobbled back to the end of the pen and sat down on the ground again, continuing to massage my thigh muscle.
“You okay?” the Marine asked quietly through the fence.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Fucking cramp.”
“Heard that,” he said, one workout guy to another.
I kept up the gimp act all the way back to my room. I heard the last cohort of exercise-bound people being mustered out in the hallway, and it sounded as if my next-door neighbor’s door had opened and closed. I waited fifteen minutes, and then went into the bathroom, where I took a long, hot shower to soothe my “cramped” limbs. When I was finished in the bathroom, I soaped a single word onto the mirror: talk.
The lights went out throughout the facility at ten o’clock. Mad Moira was in my room ten minutes later. This time she was wearing her jumpsuit, and I could confirm what I needed to know-she was slim. I was the one who was going to have a problem getting under that fence, assuming we could even get out to it. I told her I was going out tonight.
“Wow,” she said. “That was quick. You have someone waiting?”
I ducked her question. “Can you get us to the exercise pen that’s the third from the left?” I asked.
She thought about that for a moment.
“I can get us to a door that goes outside; after that, it’ll depend.”
“On?”
“On the alarm system-the hallway room door card readers are locked down after ten o’clock. I don’t think the bathroom doors are. I think it’s a fire safety thing-they want one door that can be operated by a housekeeping card in case the main system goes down.”
“You think?”
She shrugged. “Well, I can hear the room card readers click off at 10:00 P.M.; I’ve listened to the bathroom hallway door reader, and it doesn’t.”
“So it’s still possible there’ll be an alert the moment you key that door?”
“Sure.”
She must have seen the look on my face.
“Look: The difference is, that door will open. These room doors won’t. There aren’t any readers on the stairwell doors-again, think fire safety. My plan was to key the door, open it, and run like hell for the fire stairway. After that…”
“Yeah,” I said. “After that, it could get really interesting.”
She shrugged again. “I’m ready to give it a shot. I’ve seen loading dock ramps that go down to the basement on the back of the building. The first floor is where the security station probably lives. I’d say try for the basement, then out.”
“That’s where that damned rottweiler came from,” I said. “If he’s loose in the basement, we’re hosed.”
“The dogs aren’t loose down there,” she said.
“And you know this how?”
“The Marines hang out down there at night. They use pistols,. 22s, to hunt rats. They do it with rat-shot, so’s to avoid ricochets. They drop garbage in the basement corridors, turn off all the lights, wait for a while, and then go out with night vision goggles. They wouldn’t do that if there were dogs loose.”
“And if they’re down there tonight? Maybe the basement is the wrong objective.”
“If they are, they’ll be drinking beer right now. They like to get a buzz on before they go killing things in the dark. But they’re usually done by midnight-the major gets them all up at five thirty for
PT.”
It was my turn to think. I’d mimed the number three and pointed at my watch. Hopefully, this had been observed by my pals with binoculars hiding in the woods. Assuming they’d known it was me under that hood, and assuming they were even there. Lots of assuming. If they’d understood what I meant, we had to roll out of here a little after 2:00 A.M. to make it to the trees by three. One minute to get f
rom the door to the stairs. Two to get down into the basement. And then?
“Do you know if those stairs go to the basement or just to the first floor?”
“Basement,” she said.
“You really party with these guys?”
“Nothing else to do,” she said. “Why the hell not? They’re physically fit. Besides, they’re just doing a job, so the guard thing isn’t personal. They didn’t put me in here.”
“I wonder what the major would say if he knew his guards were sexually abusing the female prisoners.”
“It’s not abuse, big guy,” she said with a grin. “And the major most certainly knows about it. Besides, from what I hear, he’s not too crazy about holding American citizens. Iraqi insurgents? That’s different.”
“You suppose you could sweet-talk one of your guard buddies to look the other way if he caught us trying to get out?”
“Nope,” she said promptly. “These are Marines. They have a duty, and they’ll do it, no matter what they think about it.”
“Even if they think it’s wrong for American military people to be holding American citizens?”
“The major tells them that higher authority knows what it’s doing, and points out that nobody here’s being tortured, interrogated, or otherwise mistreated.”
“Unless, of course, you try to go over that fence.”
She winced and nodded. “Yeah, I saw that. But even then, it wasn’t a Marine gunning down a detainee. The major keeps reminding them that, mostly, we’re being kept out of circulation for the convenience of something they call higher headquarters.”
“Right. The only thing we have to do is submit. That’s the attitude that made the Gestapo possible.”
She snorted. “If you knew anything about the real Gestapo, you wouldn’t use that word,” she said.
“Ge-sta-po,” I replied. “ Geheime Staatspolizei. Secret state police. Heinrich Himmler’s flower children. Started as brownshirts, keeping order at meetings of the Nazi faithful. Graduated to much bigger things, didn’t they. If this place is any indication, just give it time.”
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