Stephen Leather - Breakout

Eventually with much shrugging, head-shaking and gesticulating, the guards resumed their normal routines and the prisoners and visitors were left to carry on with their activities. Harper had been thinking furiously while they had been held for the head-count and he had formed a rough plan. ‘We need to be low-profile for the moment,’ he said, ‘but we have to find a way to bust out of here and quick. Even if Don Lorenzo doesn’t get us, that chief warden is not going to let me - or us - out of here for any amount in bribes. And if you were right about why Scouse was being held, Lupa, it may well already have occurred to Don Lorenzo that one sacrificial Inglés will do as well as another, and funnily enough, I’m not that keen on the idea of spending the rest of my time on earth concreted into the foundations of a hotel or an office block.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘I’ll tell you, but let’s get back to the cell first, we’re too vulnerable out here in the yard.’

Harper waited until they were back in their cell, with the door locked, and then said, ‘Right, here’s my plan, but feel free to suggest any changes or improvements. This isn’t a dictatorship, we’re all at risk here and we all need to feel confident in the plan we choose.’

He watched their faces fall as he outlined what he had in mind, but as they talked it through, it was clear that, with only minor modifications, they accepted that while it was risky and even desperate, it offered a better chance than anything else they could come up with.

‘So first off, we need some weapons,’ Harper said.

‘They’re banned and the guards will seize any they find.’

‘But in practice, as we’ve already seen, the guards very rarely venture into the sections and the police never do at all.’

‘Not even when murders happen,’ Lupa said with a shudder.

‘So while we can assume that the guards will confiscate any weapons like those Colts you found for us in Santa Cruz, if we or any visitors tried to bring them in, they can’t intercept any that we get made in here.’

‘But we can’t just start manufacturing weapons.’

‘Can’t we? I agree we can’t produce Kalashnikovs, Armalites or anything sophisticated, but we can make single-shot pistols easily enough. They’ll be muzzle-loaders like guns used to be way back in the day and we’ll have to fire them using a taper or a smouldering bit of rope to ignite the gunpowder, just like they used to have to do before flintlocks were invented, but since we’re a bit more sophisticated these days, a cigarette end would do the same job for us. To make the actual weapons we could probably just use some lengths of bamboo, but then we’d really have to try and hold them against a wall while we were firing them, which would be awkward, but if we didn’t, the back-blast would be potentially dangerous to us and it would also seriously compromise the power of the weapon. So we’ll be better using some metal piping and some basic metal parts that should be easy enough to get. Plumbers’ copper piping is too soft, it’ll bulge and split if you try to fire a round through it, but the sort of narrow-bore steel piping they use as conduit for electricity cables would do the job perfectly. There’s bound to be some kicking around here somewhere and the guys in the forge can make the other bits we’ll need, including the rounds we’ll fire.’

‘And what about Don Lorenzo while we’re doing all this?’ Lupa said. ‘He’s not going to sit back and politely wait while we do all this, now is he?

‘No and we’ll undoubtedly have to deal with him and his thugs before long, but I’m fairly confident that they’ll wait for darkness tonight before they come calling on us, so at least we do have a few hours to prepare. So let’s get to it.’

With Lupa translating any technical terms, Harper talked to the blacksmith about what he wanted and after a few questions, some diagrams scratched in the dust on his table and the sight of yet more US dollars, he eventually nodded, shook hands and held up five fingers to signal how many hours he would need to do it. As Harper turned to leave, the blacksmith said something in Spanish to Lupa. ‘What did he say?’ Harper said, as they walked back to their cell.

She grinned. ‘He said if we manage to escape, he’ll be sorry to see us go, because life has been a lot more interesting around here since we arrived!’

While they were waiting for the blacksmith to work his magic, Harper sent Lupa and Ricardo to collect handfuls of gravel from the yard, bits of glass from the broken beer bottles littering the ground outside one of the bars and any rusty screws, nails, and small shards of metal they could find in the waste heap outside the blacksmith’s forge.

Harper sawed the spare bamboo pole they had left in their cell into fifty centimetre lengths. He jammed a wad of rags into the bottom of each one and tightly sealed it with mud. He dried the mud over the stove, then filled each piece of bamboo with alternating bands of black powder and metal, glass and gravel shrapnel, tamping the powder down gently with the end of a stick, and using circles of thin cardboard cut from an empty box as wadding to hold each layer in place. A thin strip of rag ran the length of the inside of the bamboo tube and protruded a few centimetres from the top. ‘All we need now,’ he said, ‘is something to ignite it. Paraffin or kerosene would do it, and plenty of prisoners seem to have small stoves, so I’m sure that wouldn’t be a problem, but some of that Caiman alcohol might be even better.’

‘I’ll see to it,’ Ricardo said, peeling a couple more notes from the dwindling roll Harper held out to him.

Late in the afternoon, Harper and Ricardo went back to the forge to collect the improvised weapons the blacksmith had made. There were six of them, each with a twenty centimetre length of steel tube, with one end reinforced with steel and welded to a steel handle. That end of the tube was closed but a narrow hole had been drilled through the tube a couple of centimetres from the closed end. The blacksmith had also made the rounds that these primitive guns would fire. There was no rifling on the barrels, of course, so the rounds were not bullet shaped but like the old musket balls fired from flintlocks before the invention of cartridges in the nineteenth century. The blacksmith had made them by dropping globules of white hot metal into water and then filing off the tail of the metal to leave a round ball.

As Harper paid the blacksmith and was about to leave, he spotted a couple of metal clamps on a shelf and picked them up. ‘These too?’ he said.

The blacksmith nodded. Harper shook his hand and said to Ricardo. ‘Tell him when he gets out of here, he can make a very good living as a straight craftsman.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Ricardo said, ‘but he’s in here on a thirty year sentence, so he won’t be doing that anytime soon.’

‘What’d he do?’

Ricardo shrugged. ‘The usual: murder.’

CHAPTER 15

Dusk was beginning to darken the sky as they walked back to their cell, Harper noticed a couple of Don Lorenzo’s men lounging against the courtyard walls. They avoided eye contact, trying to appear as if they were ignoring them, but as Harper entered their cell, he glanced back and saw one of the thugs hastily drop his gaze. The other one was half-turned away but talking into a mobile phone and it was clear from the sideways glances he darted at Harper that he was the topic of conversation.

As soon as they got inside the cell and locked the door behind them, Harper tested each of their improvised pistols and then loaded them with black powder, wrapped in twists of newspaper and the iron shot the blacksmith had made. He carefully tamped the powder down with a blunt-ended stick and used more thin cardboard discs as wadding. When the weapons were loaded, Harper carefully tipped a little more black powder into the firing hole drilled in the side of the tube.