I ESCAPED FROM PRISON in broad daylight, as they say, at one o’clock in the afternoon, over the front wall and between two gun-towers. The plan was intricate and meticulously executed, up to a point, but the escape really succeeded because it was daring and desperate. The bottom line for us, once we started, was that the plan had to succeed. If it failed, the guards in the punishment unit were quite capable of kicking us to death.
There were two of us. My friend was a wild, big-hearted twenty-five year old serving a life sentence for murder. We tried to convince other men to escape with us. We asked eight of the toughest men we knew, all of them serving ten straight years or more for crimes of violence. One by one, they found an excuse not to join in the attempt. I didn’t blame them. My friend and I were young first-offenders with no criminal history We were serving big years, but we had no reputation in the prison system. And the escape we’d planned was the kind that people call heroic if it succeeds, and insane if it fails. In the end, we were alone.
We took advantage of extensive renovations that were being carried out on the internal security-force building—a two-storey office and interrogation block near the main entrance gate at the front wall. We were working as maintenance gardeners. The guards who pulled shifts in the area saw us every day. When we went to work there, on the day of the escape, they watched us for a while, as usual, and then looked away. The security-force building was empty The renovation workers were at lunch.
In the few long seconds of the little eclipse created by the guards’ boredom and their familiarity with us, we were invisible, and we made our move.
Cutting our way through the chain-link fence that closed off the renovation site, we broke open a door to the deserted building and made our way upstairs. The interior was hollowed out by the renovation.
Unplastered walls showed the skeleton structure of uprights and loadbearing beams. The bare, wooden steps on the stairway were white with dust, and littered with fragments of brick and plaster. There was a manhole in the ceiling on the top floor. Standing on my friend’s strong shoulders, I punched out the wooden trapdoor in the manhole and climbed through. I had an extension cord with me, wrapped around my body under my coveralls. I uncoiled it and pulled it free, fixed one end to a roof beam, and passed the other down to my friend. He used it to climb up into the roof-space with me.
The roof stretched out in zigzag waves. We scrambled toward the narrowing pinch of space where the roof met the front wall of the prison. I chose a spot on one of the troughs to cut our way through, hoping that the peaks on either side would conceal the hole from the gun-towers. It was dark everywhere in the roof-space, but in that narrow wedge near the wall it was blacker than a guard’s baton.
With a cigarette lighter for a lantern, we worked to cut our way through the double-thickness of hardwood that separated us from the tin on the outside of the roof. A long screwdriver, a chisel, and a pair of tin snips were our only tools. After fifteen minutes of hacking, scraping, and stabbing at the wood, we’d cleared a little space about the size of a man’s eye. Waving the flame of the hot cigarette lighter back and forth, we could see the glint of the metal roof beyond the small hole. But the wood was too hard and too thick. With the tools we had, it would take us hours to make a man-sized hole.
We didn’t have hours. We had thirty minutes, we guessed, or maybe a little more, before the guards did a routine check of the area. In that time we had to get through the wood, cut a hole in the tin, climb out on the roof, use our power extension cord as a rope, and climb down to freedom.
The clock was ticking on us. We were trapped in the roof of the security building. And any minute, we knew, the guards might notice the cut fence, see the broken door, and find the smashed manhole. Any minute they could come up through the manhole into that black, sweating cave, and find us.
‘We’ve gotta go back,’ my friend whispered. ‘We’ll never get through the wood. We’ve gotta go back, and pretend it never happened.’
‘We can’t go back,’ I said flatly, although the thought had screamed through my mind as well. ‘They’ll find all the broken stuff, the fence we cut, and they’ll know it was us. We’re the only ones allowed in the area. If we go back, we’re in the Slot for a year.’
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