But the fact was, I didn’t want to get into a human rights discussion with Mad Moira. I wanted to get out of here. She sensed my uncertainty.
“So what’s it gonna be?” she asked. “You want to try it, or not?”
“My brain says there’s too much we don’t know. My gut says now or never.”
“Right on,” she said. “When?”
“Tonight at 2:00 A.M. Pray for fog.”
Our prayers were answered. At a few minutes before 2:00 A.M. I took one final look out the windows and saw a solid wall of fog. I’d thought about flashing a signal out into the woods with the room lights, but not with this pea-souper outside. All I could see out the windows was the glow of lights down in the exercise yard.
I was dressed in my exercise jumpsuit and shoes, minus the KKK headgear. There was nothing I needed to bring from the room. Moira had told me the sequence for fiddling the bathroom doors. She’d tap three times on her door with her bathroom card. I’d tap three times on mine. Then we’d position our respective cards, and next she’d tap four times slowly but in a definite rhythm with something hard. On the fourth tap, we’d simultaneously swipe our cards. According to Moira, either both doors would open, or alarm bells would go off downstairs. Or both, she’d said, sweetly.
In the event, both doors yielded and we met in the bathroom. We each rolled up two bath towels in case we ended up having to go over the fence. We listened for a few minutes to see if anyone was coming down the hallway in response to our simultaneous card swiping. I could hear Moira breathing fast, and realized that, for all her bravado, she was as scared as I was. If the guards came now, we could claim that we’d been getting together for some boy-girl fun. But once we left the rooms and got out into the building, there’d only be one explanation for what we were doing out there.
Even if we got to the fence, there was still that tiny little problem of the hellhound. And if my people were not there, we’d be making our stand with our backs to a river. It put me briefly in mind of the old bear joke: I didn’t have to outrun the rottie; I only had to outrun Moira. I decided not to share that thought with her just now. She saw me smile.
“What?” she asked.
“This is about the worst-planned escape attempt I’ve ever considered,” I said.
“Yeah, but think of it the way the jihadis do: They never set a date and time for doing anything. They plan the operation, and then they wait. They see an opportunity to strike and they do. There’s no way for military intelligence to know in advance because the jihadis don’t know in advance.”
“And you know this how?”
“I believe the whole Iraq war was based on a lie,” she declared. “I’m always on the side of the freedom fighters. In the case of Iraq, that ain’t us.”
“You say shit like that in public a lot?” I asked.
“All the time,” she said. “I’m one of those people who believe we brought 9/11 on ourselves, and that they hit precisely the right people when they did it.”
I had to take a deep breath. The air in the bathroom was getting warm, and I was suddenly not so sure I wanted this left-wing nutcase along. I thought about cold-cocking her and taking the damned card. But she knew the building and I did not. Plus, she wasn’t trying to con me: That’s how she felt, and there it was.
“We make it out of here,” I said, “you’re on your own. If my people are out there in the woods, we’ll get away from here. But after that…”
“My sentiments exactly,” she said, her eyes defiant.
“Okay,” I said. “Swipe that sucker.”
She did, and we both heard the door lock click. She opened it and we stepped out into the hallway. We closed the door and stopped to listen, but the only thing we heard was the click as the bathroom door card reader LED reset itself to red.
Our rooms were on one corner of the building. The elevator and the fire stairs were at the other end. On the outside wall were the room doors. On the inside wall were some cleaning-gear closets and one marked as a linen closet. There were red dry-chemical fire extinguishers mounted on the wall every fifty feet. The floor was more of the polished linoleum that decorated the rooms. Half the overhead fluorescent lights were off. My government saving electricity.
We hurried down toward the other end of the hallway. I didn’t see any surveillance domes in the ceiling or along the walls, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone watching. On the other hand, it was an old building, with concrete interior walls and ceilings, so back-fitting built-in cameras and wiring would have been difficult. When we got to the fire stairs, though, we discovered that Moira had been wrong about card readers. There was one, and its LED glowed bright red.
“Oops,” she said.
I felt a pit in my stomach. Trust a liberal to fuck it up. Then we heard the elevator machinery start up, and saw the green numbers over the elevator doors begin to light up in sequence as the elderly machine ground its way toward our floor, probably filled with a Marine reaction force.
To our right was another hallway, identical to ours. Rooms on the outside, closets and storage on the inside wall. The building was probably a hollow square, with an air shaft in the middle. There was a set of fire stairs down at the far end, but even from where we stood, we could see another little red light laughing at us. That pit in my stomach was growing. I looked at Moira, whose face was tight with fear. The green light marked 2 went off, and the green light marked 3 lit up.
Then I remembered what I’d done to Billy the Kid. There was a fire extinguisher mounted right next to the elevator door. I grabbed it and told Moira to grab another one and get back here. She understood immediately and ran to our right, so that she’d be out of the sight line when the elevator doors opened. The green light on 3 went out, and the light for 4 came on. Here they came. Thank you, Moira: wrong about damned near everything. Or part of the detention program.
She was back, and I showed her how to remove the seal without firing it. I positioned her on one side of the door, and myself on the other.
“That door opens, step in front of them and pull the trigger. It shoots low, so aim just above their heads. We want to blind them, pull them out, get in the ’vator, push B for basement, and then hit the door-close button.”
Assuming it went to the basement, I thought. And that it didn’t require a card reader to operate. My pit was becoming a bowling ball.
I readied my extinguisher and hoped like hell it was charged. The green light for 4 emitted a tiny ping. If the reaction force was properly constituted, there’d be no guns. Prisons had learned a long time ago never to arm the guards if they were going into the population. The elevator thumped to a stop behind the sliding doors. The doors opened in a blaze of yellow light. I nodded to Moira, and we stepped out.
We faced two very startled Marines. Fortunately, they were neither armed nor dressed out in any particular kind of SWAT gear. They wore the usual cammies and black gloves, and each carried a police baton under one armpit like a swagger stick and what looked like a black mace canister in his hand.
I fired first, but Moira was right there with me. In an instant the Marines’ faces were covered in white powder and they had dropped the sticks and canisters in an attempt to protect their faces. I stopped shooting for a second, and they instinctively went into defensive crouches, and then I resumed, coating their hands and spraying more white stuff in their faces. Moira’s extinguisher piled on with equal fervor. Then I dropped mine and grabbed the first Marine by his right sleeve and flung him out of the elevator, where Moira turned and continued to spray stuff into his face. The second guy tried to resist, so I kicked him hard in the shin and then flung him on top of the other guy.
“In,” I said to Moira, and in she jumped as I hit door-close and then B for basement. The doors shut with agonizing slowness, but Moira had kept her extinguisher and continued to shoot it fiercely at the two white figures on the floor until the doors closed. I let out a big sigh of relief when the elevator began to head dow
n.
Now it would be a matter of how fast the two disabled guards could make contact with their control center and get someone to intercept the elevator before we got to the basement. I hadn’t seen any shoulder mikes or radios, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a security phone they could get to. Once they could see.
Moira bent down and collected the Mace cans and the batons. We were leaving 4 and headed for 3. “These might be useful,” she said.
“Forget the batons, but we’ll keep the Mace cans,” I said, and I showed her how to fire the Mace. We passed 3 and headed for 2.
“Why not the sticks?” she asked.
“You ever fought a man with a stick?” I asked. “There’s an art to it.”
We passed 2 and headed on down to 1. That’s where we’d find out if we were going to make it to the basement or have to fight our way out the front door, which, of course, wasn’t ever going to happen.
As we came up on the first floor, I heard voices shouting in the hallway outside, but the elevator, bless it, kept going. A few moments later, the door dinged and opened into the basement vestibule. I had my Mace can ready and pointed at the doors in case there was a welcoming committee, but the vestibule was empty. I jammed Moira’s fire extinguisher in the elevator door to disable it. The fire stairs did make it down to the basement, and I tipped a fifty-five-gallon drum of floor wax under the handle just to slow things down a little. Now we had to find those loading docks.
The basement layout matched the floors above in the hollow square configuration, except all the interior walls were steel mesh interspersed with concrete structural columns. The lights down here were single bulbs in metal frames, and instead of rooms there were storage cages, holding tools, boxes of old files, and supplies. The ceiling was crisscrossed with pipes and electrical cables, and the whole area smelled of old pipe lagging, dust, and heating oil.
“Which way?” I asked.
“Down this way,” she said, pointing straight ahead, and then indicating we’d need to go left to the other corner. “That’s where the loading docks should terminate.”
We took off, running this time and making no effort to be quiet. From here we could see that the building was built in the shape of a capital B, with two air shafts, not just one. There was heating and air-conditioning machinery at the base of the air shafts, and we were running from the lower left corner of the B, across the base, and up to the middle area where I remembered the loading area ramps ought to be.
Then all the lights went out.
We stopped running but kept moving, using the light from the heating and air-conditioning machinery control panels. I visualized some Marines coming around the corner with their rat pistols and night vision gear, but hopefully they’d secured by now. I glanced at my watch-two ten. At least we were on my timeline.
We pushed forward in the darkened passageway, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were not alone. I wondered where they kept that rottweiler at night if not in the basement-outside the fence? I gripped the canister of Mace even harder.
Feeling our way along the wire mesh walls, we got to the corner of the first passageway and turned left. All the storage cages on our right appeared to be stuffed to the gills with cardboard boxes marked MEDICAL RECORDS. To our immediate left was a boxy, oil-fired boiler, whose orange flame was visible through the boiler front inspection port. The boiler room wasn’t really a room, but more of an area enclosed in wire mesh walls with chain-link fence doors. The area stank of heating oil, and wisps of low-pressure steam were visible in the nest of pipes leading up into the main building. Two ancient water pumps ground away in one corner of the enclosure.
I couldn’t see much of anything ahead, where the loading docks should be. We desperately needed some light, because the farther away we got from the boiler room, the less ambient light there would be in the passageway. Behind us we heard banging on the door jammed by that steel drum. We weren’t going to be alone much longer.
“Gotta hide,” I whispered to Moira. The question was: where? If they were wearing night vision gear, there wasn’t going to be anyplace to hide down here.
Except.
I grabbed her arm, and we turned around.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“The boiler room,” I said, as I started trying doors. “That flame will interfere with their NVGs.”
The banging was getting louder. It sounded like someone was using a fire axe on that door. The chain-link doors into the machinery room were padlocked.
“Climb, quickly,” I said, and we scrambled up the chain-link, bent over the tops of the wobbly door, and slid back down to the floor on the other side.
Up close the boiler gave off tangible heat over the sustained low roar of the burners. Down the passageway we heard that steel drum bang down onto the concrete floor and go rolling. We scrambled around behind the boiler and crouched down between two large air ducts. The place was littered with boxes of rags, tools, and spare valve parts all stacked behind the boiler, and we made ourselves a nest out of these.
For the moment we were safe, but that wasn’t going to last long. They’d spread out on NVG, search the entire basement area, and then realize that none of the doors to the outside had been opened. Since we’d jammed the elevator and the fire doors, they’d know we were still down there, somewhere in the basement area. They’d turn the lights back on and go cage to cage.
Or go get the dog.
There might be another set of fire stairs and elevators on the west side of the building, but they probably had people on those already. It was just a matter of time before they’d come in here. We needed a diversion, and quickly.
Moira tapped me on the arm and pointed. Between the two metal air ducts there was a space of about six inches, and we saw two ghostly figures slipping by in the glow of the burners. They walked by too fast for me to see if they were carrying weapons, but they were definitely wearing night vision headgear.
Just a matter of time.
A fuel pump lit off under our feet and the boiler ramped up in response to a demand from a thermostat somewhere upstairs. More air began to rattle through the combustion supply ducts.
“We need a diversion,” I said softly.
“A fire would do it,” she said, pointing to the glowing firebox. The machinery was making enough noise to mask our voices.
“Without a way out?”
“Fuck it,” she said. “I’m not going back inside. Besides, they’ll evacuate the building. They’ll have to turn off the security system to do that.”
That might be true, I thought. Or they might just isolate the basement, pull the handle on some kind of fire suppression system, and wait it out. Two more figures swept past the boiler room, walking slower this time. I thought I heard tactical radio voices.
Sooner, rather than later.
We had to do something.
“Okay, fire it is,” I whispered. I turned around and found a large ball-peen hammer. I slithered out of our nest of boxes and crawled to the boiler front. I looked both ways out into the passageway, but couldn’t see anyone. That, of course, didn’t mean they couldn’t see me, but that orange glow from the glass inspection port ought to show up as a bright, foggy plume on their NVGs, which would make them avoid looking in my direction.
The inspection port was a five-inch-diameter circle of heat-tempered glass. I turned over on my back, cocked an arm, and whacked it. The first whack produced a crack; the second one, harder, shattered the glass, at which point a jet of flame roared out of the hole and blew all the way out through the chain-link and into the passageway itself. It singed the sleeve of my jumpsuit, and I ducked back out of its way to the side of the boiler, which was now making noises like a jet airplane spooling up on the tarmac as the burners went unstable. Anyone on NVGs looking my way would be stone blind with all that light and flame. Then I smelled heating oil, and saw Moira whaling away on the fuel-supply line filter housing, which was already spurting thin streams of
pressurized oil across the floor. Goddamned woman was a born fighter, but she might not appreciate what was going to happen next.
“Time to boogie,” I said, no longer trying to keep quiet.
We slithered through all the boxes at the back of the boiler enclosure to a side wall made of expanded metal screen. Then we waited. The jet airplane effect didn’t seem to be getting any bigger on the other side of the boiler, but it wasn’t getting any smaller, either. There wasn’t much smoke forming because that jet of flame had the entire basement’s supply of oxygen to play with. Then the spreading pool of heating oil must have made its way under the boiler and out to the front, where it found a partner in crime. The ensuing fireball easily engulfed our hideout, accompanied by an ear-squeezing whumping sound. And now there was lots of smoke.
I nudged Moira, and we began scrambling over the wire mesh wall, using the supporting studs as footholds. First one and then two fire alarm bells went off somewhere in the basement, followed by an entire chorus of smoke detectors. The fire was getting bigger by the second, and would soon discover all that paper piled up in the wire cages across the passageway.
We’d climbed from the machinery cage into the adjacent storage enclosure, which was empty. The passageway we wanted was right in front of us, but there would still be Marines out there, so we kept climbing through the row of cages, one after another, as the glare from the oil fire behind us got big enough to light up the whole basement. It was hard going, and the edges of the hardware cloth were tearing up our hands.
Then we saw the loading dock area, suddenly visible ahead and to our right-where four Marines were crouching down and talking anxiously on shoulder-mike radios. They had their NVGs pulled down, and their young, scared faces were orange in the reflected firelight.
We hung there, frozen halfway up the sidewall of the storage cage like a pair of lizards, as that light got brighter and brighter. If they’d looked up, they’d have seen us immediately, but they were all focusing on the loading ramp door. One kept trying the handle, as if they’d asked someone to unlock it remotely. The noise of the fire behind us suddenly increased, probably as a fuel line melted down and put the heating oil out onto the floor at full throttle. A modern system would have shut itself down long ago, but that boiler plant had to be 1940s vintage. I looked at Moira, who was staring at the four Marines in pure disbelief. Then a horn went off and one of the steel loading dock doors started to roll upward.
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