The Shield of Darius (12 page)

ELEVEN

The plan would work. Ben was sure of it. He just couldn’t convince Jim Cannon.

“This whole system can’t be that loose,” Jim continued to argue. “The guards have to know how many are in each room”

Ben knelt up from his fiftieth push-up.

“Let’s test it then. New guards come in tomorrow morning. We’ll make up my bed as an extra, hang the blankets down over yours, and I’ll slide under it when they bring breakfast. If there’s no reaction, we’ll figure they don’t know I’m here.”

“Yeah, and if they do? What then? You get the gun crammed down
your
throat.”

“I curl up in a little fetal ball and act crazy. If there are many of us in here, someone’s bound to have lost it by now. You just say I’ve been like that all night – hiding under the bed.”

When the guards’ steps sounded in the hall outside the cell the next morning, Ben rolled under the bed and pressed his back against the wall, still able to see his captor’s feet as one of the men entered with the tray. The feet walked quickly to the table, deposited the tray and left abruptly. Ben slid halfway out onto the floor.

“What’d I tell you! They didn’t even look around for me.” He jumped to his feet, pumping his fist as if he had just made a diving stop on a hard hit ground ball, and thrown the runner out by a step. “I told you it’d work. They don’t have any idea who’s in here.”

“He could have thought you were in the bathroom. I’m not going to risk this on one test.”

“The bathroom door’s open. And the guy didn’t even pause. I tell you, they don’t know.”

“Let’s do it again then. I guarantee ya, they’ll start looking pretty soon.”

They repeated the experiment with each visit until the guards changed. The man bringing the tray showed no concern that Jim was alone in the room.

“They must think I eat a helluva lot,” he said, looking at the few leftovers on one of the evening trays.

“I don’t think they think anything. They bring these in, pick them up, and don’t want to know more than that.”

Jim frowned skeptically. “If they’re that tuned out, let’s change on them next shift. One day you go under, the next day I go under.”

With the next guard change they ran the new series, finishing with both of them sitting on their beds when the three bearded men came to their room on the last day of the shift. The tray carrier went directly to the table, put down the meal and left.

Jim shook this head. “I’ll be damned. Why do you figure they keep us here if they don’t even know who’s where, or how many they’ve got?”

“Someone knows,” Ben frowned. “And I don’t like what I think this means. If there were five of us, or ten, even a man who doesn’t know what’s going on would recognize faces and combinations. But if there are twenty or thirty rooms, some with one, some with two…. Maybe some that change from week-to-week, with new people coming in and others being shuffled around. And like I said before, many of us must look similar to them like they do to us. Good Lord, there may be fifty or a hundred of us in here. You begin to see why they might not pay much attention.”

“But we haven’t seen much sign of anybody else since you got here,” Jim said, fingering his heavy beard. “We heard that shouting a few nights back, but it was too far away to tell what it was all about, or even if it was in the building.”

“This place could have a couple hundred rooms. Spread out fifty people and we wouldn’t hear much. These walls don’t let much sound through.”

Jim shook his head nervously. “It all seems wrong to me. This is no way to guard prisoners.”

“We’re still here, aren’t we?” Ben looked out at the deepening evening twilight. “But I think it’s dark enough to get to work.”

He turned his stool upside down and twisted loose one of the four round dowels that ran as braces between the legs. At one end of the short wooden rod, a half- inch deep groove had been cut into the spindle, the work of hours of tedious scraping against the rough edge of the angle iron that held Jim’s mattress in place.  Into this groove Ben slipped a flat, oddly-shaped piece of steel, straight on one side and gradually curved on the other like a thin cross-section of airplane wing. Where the pointed trailing edge would normally be, the steel piece had been broken square and when pushed into the slot in the wooden rod, protruded half an inch beyond the handle, leaving a flat, squared metal tip.

Finding this piece of steel had almost driven the two to give up the escape plan. Except for the waterless bathroom faucets and the angle iron mattress frames, the cell was metal-free. They had started at one corner, fruitlessly scouring the room for most of one day without turning up anything that looked like it would do the job.

“Hell, enough of this,” Jim said finally. “It’s an omen. Means we aren’t meant to get out.”

“Means we just haven’t found it yet. It’s here somewhere.”

“It’s going to have to fall in our laps then.” Jim collapsed onto his bed. “I’m through looking.”

Ben awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of Jim straining and puffing across the room.

“You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“What’re you doing?”

“I figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

“Where we can get a screwdriver tip.”

Ben rolled slowly onto his feet and felt his way to where Jim was disassembling his bed in the dark.

“We already went over these. There’s nothing there.”

Jim pointed at one of the bed legs. “Hold that real tight.” As Ben grasped it, the big man yanked up sharply and pulled the iron side railing free. Welded to the end of the length of angle iron was a metal plate cut to form two thin flat hooks that slipped into slots in the legs, fastening the two firmly together. Jim tapped proudly on the hooked plate.

Ben knelt in the dark to admire the piece. “What made you think of these?”

“You started me dreaming again. I was having one about my girls when they were young and I was carrying them up to their old bunk beds – the kind you could stack or use separate. I put those beds together from scratch and they had mattress railings like these.”

“How’re we going to break a piece off?”

“I found it. You figure that out.”

The solution was simple. By slipping the hook partially into its slot and levering the rail back and forth, the thin plate slowly bent, then creased and broke free, leaving a flat elongated steel teardrop. Ben reinserted the pointed end and worked it until it broke flat, producing what he now used as a makeshift tip for his screwdriver. By pushing Jim’s reassembled bed tightly back into the corner, it managed to stay together with the broken hook.   

With the bit in place and secured with a length of flexible wire scavenged from one of the room’s dead electrical outlets, Ben pulled a stool to the window and systematically removed the eight large screws that held the rectangular wooden panel. Taking the screws out for the first time had taken nearly a full evening, working carefully to avoid scratching the paint or stripping a screw in its hole. As he had finally pulled the panel away, the plan had suffered it second setback. Loose wooly fiber filled the space between walls and he had thrust his fingers into the mass, feeling for the rear board.

“Jesus!” he hissed loudly.

Jim had been watching from beside the stool. “Must be bad. Never heard you say ‘Jesus.’”

“That wire screen in the window runs all the way up through here.” He pulled away a chunk of insulation, exposing the heavy linked mesh.

“The wire’s only half the problem,” Jim muttered. “We’ve also got to get rid of that wool. Can’t exactly flush it down the john.”

“Bed springs,” Ben suggested. “We can poke holes in the bottom of the springs and stuff it up in there. But this wire’s going to be a problem.”

He had pulled the rest of the insulation away and found that the wire wasn’t an extension of the heavy window screen, but was welded to the inside of a steel box that framed the old air conditioner opening. The solution had again come from the angle iron.

Jamming the metal brace into the wire links along the edge of the frame, they would yank sharply away from the plate, listen for footsteps, then yank again. They worked only during daylight when outside noise masked the banging in the cell, breaking spot welds or bending the wire until it finally snapped. Ben left the right side attached, letting the mesh swing in and out like a fence gate.

As he worked his way through the wall, he realized that all the fill-in work had been done from the inside. The outer panel was fastened using L-shaped brackets, with another eight screws holding the board in place. Tonight they would remove those fasteners.

As Ben pulled back the screen and began to twist the screws free on the outer panel, he felt again the electrifying rush of the Damascus bazaar. He had now been in the prison seventy-eight days, and for three weeks now they had been developing a detailed schedule for the escape. The woman in the compound across the alley washed only one day a week. If the weather was decent, she left the clothing up overnight. Ben needed to break out on the night the wash was still on the line. Since the guards changed every four days, a switch occurred the day following the wash once in twenty-eight days. The two came together at the end of the next guard rotation.

He eased out the last of the bottom screws and checked that the two across the top were loose but still in place. The workers who removed the air conditioner had been sloppy and the board didn’t fit. Because of the gaps, he feared the board might be faced on the outside and pushed out slowly but firmly against the bottom corners. It yielded without resistance and swung outward on the two top screws. Ben turned back into the room.

“I’ve got her loose. Bring me the wire.”

Jim fished beneath his mattress, retrieving two small coils of electrical wire, also scavenged from the wall by wrapping a free end around the screwdriver handle and giving the wire a sharp jerk.

Ben unwound the wire, looping a piece around each end of the suspended panel. With the board still loosely attached by the top screws, he could pull on the wires and draw it snugly back into place.

“You going to be able to get the thing far enough out to get through?” Jim peered skeptically up into the open wall.

Ben pushed the panel out gently. “I can still loosen these top screws some. And if we need to, we’ll take all but one out and swing the board to the side. As long as you hang onto these wires, you should be able to pull it right back into place, put in a few of the other screws and from the outside, nobody’ll know the difference.”

He leaned forward, easing the board outward with the top of his head and peered cautiously down the outside of the building, turning slowly left and right to be certain no one was in the alley.

“All brick, just like we guessed. We’re about twenty feet up. Maybe a little more,” he whispered.

“What’s at the end of the building?”

Ben twisted his head farther to look along the outer wall, holding tightly to the wires to keep the board from pushing free.

“Big building…a hundred feet or so to the corners. We’re about in the middle. Maybe closer to the left end. Down to the right it looks like there might be a larger street. I can see headlights.”

“Is there a window right below us?”

“Yeah. Just under this one.”

“Can you miss it climbing down?”

“I think so. The top of the frame sticks out and I think I can push to one side when I get there.”

“Can you see lights anywhere – in any of the windows?”

Ben shook his head, then realized Jim couldn’t see the gesture.

“No lights. The whole place is dark.” He drew back into the room and pulled at the wire loops, easing the board back against its brackets. With the bottom screws back in place, he pulled the wires through into the room, coiled them again and handed them to Jim. Ten minutes later the inner board was back in place as if it had never been touched.

Jim sat silently on his bed, looking very old and tired in the darkness of the room.

“Four more days and I’ll be alone again,” he said with a melancholy smile. “I was almost hoping we wouldn’t get through.”

Ben crouched in front of him and rested a hand on the trucker’s arm. “I’ll get us both out of here. Before you know it, I’ll have someone back here for you.”

Jim leaned forward onto his knees and looked across the room into the darkness.

“Suppose you do get away? How’ll that help me?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jim. We’ve gone over this before. I can tell people where you are. They won’t let you just sit here.”

“They held hostages before for years with people knowing exactly where they were. Knowing isn’t going to get me out.”

Ben straightened up. “Do you want to try to go out with me? I’m willing to give it a shot. We can figure out how to get both of us down.”

Jim slowly shook his head. “Then neither of us’d make it. Your idea of dressing up like a woman is pretty crazy, but if it works, it’ll only work for you. I’m a foot taller than any woman out there. And hell, look at my eyes. No blue eyes out there. We might be better off to both wait. They aren’t treating us bad…and this can’t go on forever.”