And seemingly nothing else in the bed which would help either.
Then he had an idea.
A brilliant, but at the same time, terrible idea.
Brilliant because it was sure to work; terrible because he didn’t want to do it.
But he had no choice.
The boots he had on were cowboy-style with soft rubber soles. They were made for walking on snow and ice, but since they were cowboy boots they had no laces.
No laces to untie meant if he held the heel with his other boot he could slip his foot out of it.
And once his foot was out of the boot he could step on his pant leg with the other boot and remove his pants.
Or at least half his pants; the half that was wedged in the wheel well.
The last thing he wanted to do was to expose his bare leg to the elements. But he could see no other way out of his predicament.
It would work.
It had to.
-36-
Marty had led a life full of adventures. That’s typical of a man who’s spent decades driving a big rig.
He’d driven over two million miles, most of it on long hauls back and forth across the country. He’d come across more accidents than he could count. He’d saved the lives of a dozen people by dragging them from burning cars, stopping their bleeding or applying CPR.
He even delivered two babies. One of them to a young couple so grateful they promised to name their baby after him.
The baby turned out to be a girl. They named her Martina. But it still counted, and many years later the couple was still in touch with him. At least they were until Saris 7 struck.
Marty had seen friends die. He’d delivered life-saving blood and organs for transplants in the worst kinds of weather.
One thing Marty had never done, though, was take his pants off on a public roadway.
As upset as he was that the gate was closed, he was also glad.
For if it had been open he most certainly would have provided quite a show for the security policemen working the gate, and might be subject to confinement for seventy two hours for a psychiatric evaluation.
He was glad no one was there to see him shimmy and shake and wiggle, but the plan worked like a charm.
Once his leg was free he wasted no time getting his pants and boot back on and he was no worse for wear.
He slipped the wire cutters into his pocket, where they shared space with the Snickers bar, and climbed through the bed of the pickup.
Once on the other side of the blockaded vehicles he made his way to the gate and shook it.
Then he cursed it.
Then he tried to squeeze through the gap between the gates.
Maybe when he was twelve and weighed eighty pounds he’d have made it.
But those days were too long gone.
He examined the top of the fence. And the two strands of razor sharp concertina wire that topped it.
No way.
He liked his blood and wanted to keep it.
He examined the bottom of the fence.
And had an idea.
The fence was standard chain link, except that it had a wire which ran along the ground, weaving in and out of the links. The ground wire was anchored to the ground, keeping someone from lifting up the bottom of the fence and shimmying under it.
Now, as good a guy as Marty was, nobody considered him a rocket scientist. A Mensa recruiter wouldn’t take a second look at him. But Marty was a smart fella nonetheless. He liked to say that books were over rated. A real gauge of intelligence was how much a man knew from life experiences.
“A man who can break down and rebuild a carburetor will always be smarter than a man who can do a trigonometry equation,” he said.
Now, that may or may not be true. But Marty firmly believed it.
And he knew darned well he was smarter than a chain link fence.
He used the wire cutters he found in the tool box to cut the ground wire in two places, about three feet apart.
From each of those cuts he cut the chain link fence itself, starting from the cut and going upward about eighteen inches or so.
When he was finished he put the wire cutters back into his pocket and admired his work.
What he’d made, in less than two minutes, was a swinging trap door.
Moreover, this trap door would fall back into place as soon as he crawled through it.
Why, unless someone came very close to it they wouldn’t even know the fence was cut. It would be virtually impossible to spot from a distance.
“Marty, old boy,” he said to himself. “You missed your calling. All those years you were driving a truck, you should have had your own traveling show.
“Harry Houdini had nothing on you.”
He hit his belly and wiggled under the fence.
-37-
Marty was a personable guy by nature.
He’d learned many years before that by being friendly he could get his way out of pretty much any situation.
Not all, but most of them.
It had gotten him out of bar fights when he was terribly outnumbered, by smiling and offering to buy a round of beers.
It got him out of a speeding ticket once when he recognized the police officer as a woman he’d changed a flat tire for several weeks before.
It got him out of a bad situation when he was winning at poker. An ace was missing from the deck and he stripped himself bare naked to prove he didn’t have it. When another player was found with the ace he went to the man’s defense and saved him from being horribly beaten.
There were some who said that Marty had the gift of gab and was everybody’s best friend.
And that he could talk his way out of any rough spot.
He wasn’t sure about this one.
Most of the situations he’d been involved in over the years didn’t involve his being held at gunpoint.
Not only gunpoint, but several gunpoints.
His hands held high, he slowly turned his head and counted.
He didn’t like what he saw.
Seven M-16 rifles pointed at his chest.
Seven fully automatic M-16 rifles.
Marty didn’t know anything about the men holding the rifles.
They might be the nicest guys in the world. The kind he’d go to a ball game with or shoot pool with. The kind of guys he’d buy a beer for under different circumstances.
Or they might be the kind of guys who’d kick a dog or curse a woman or skip out on a bar tab and leave it for Marty to cover.
All he really knew about them was that they had weapons pointed at his chest, their safeties off and their fingers on the triggers.
Oh, yes. And that it was cold outside.
Bone chilling cold.
The kind of cold that makes hands shiver and fingers twitch.
Did we mention their fingers were on the triggers?
Marty looked around and considered his options.
He did have his .45 in a holster on his belt.
He could go for it. Maybe get it halfway out of his holster before he was torn to pieces.
Nah, probably not a good idea.
He could unsling his own rifle from his back and try to get off a shot or two.
Probably not the best idea either.
He could run. But he wouldn’t get very far.
Ahead of him, in almost every direction, was a three to four foot mountain of snow he’d have to fight his way through.
And as motivated as he was to get away, he probably wouldn’t be able to go very far before the bullets caught up with him.
As much as he hated the idea, he had only one real option so he begrudgingly took it.
He smiled the friendliest smile he could muster.
And he surrendered.
What Marty hadn’t known; what he couldn’t have known, really, was this: just because the main gate to Joint Base Lackland was closed because of the blockade didn’t mean it wasn’t being guarded.
United States milit
ary installations around the world have a very large number of ways they protect their assets.
The most visible, of course, are the high fences and the concertina wire which runs along the top of the fences.
Highly visible signs, fastened at regular intervals along the fence, read “WARNING” in large red letters.
Smaller letters warn intruders that they won’t be treated kindly if caught entering the installation without authorization. It tells them that breaking into such facilities is a violation of federal law. That they risk being bitten by military working dogs.
For a lot of installations it says that deadly force is authorized and may be used against them.
The military doesn’t play.
That’s why they have sensors attached to the ground wire to alert the Security Control Center when the wire is cut.
82nd Security Forces Squadron – 1
Marty - 0
-38-
Captain Wright dropped Hannah back at the hospital and returned to his office, where he’d do paperwork until he was exhausted enough to fall asleep.
He’d lied to Hannah when he said that living in his office wasn’t so bad.
Actually it was the pits.
He didn’t think it would be that way. He envisioned the opportunity to finally get caught up on his workload, in an environment he was comfortable with, where he was insulated from outside interference.
He figured he could meet up with his friends at the dining hall and could socialize then. Perhaps host late night poker games at the office, and wouldn’t have to deal with traffic nightmares getting to and from work.
He found out it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
His workload continued to pile up, because spending all day and all night in this dismal environment was very depressing. It was an initiative killer. He was unmotivated and bordered on being depressed.
Damn those activists and their blockade. He was pleased at first that they were on the side of his client. But they sure made a mess of things for him and everybody else.
Every time he made plans to meet his friends at the dining hall they no-showed or weren’t in the mood to socialize. None of them wanted to drop by to play poker either. The sad reality was he was the only one who tramped the worn carpet of his office, day or night. Hannah was the only visitor he’d had in days, and he was miserable and longing for company.
He wished it was all over. The blockade, the court martial, the aftermath, whatever the trial brought.
He just wanted things to be normal again.
It was sheer boredom which caused him to walk to his west-facing window and peer out into the latest snowstorm.
Flashing lights caught his eye.
Something was going on at the main gate.
It was too far away to tell exactly what it was, and there were too many flakes falling from the sky and obscuring his vision. But it appeared there were a handful of security forces policemen taking someone into custody.
Probably some poor shmuck of an airman, he supposed, who was getting wire fever and was desperate to escape the base and see his family.
He wasn’t overly concerned.
If it was someone going AWOL and he was called to defend them at court martial he’d find out soon enough.
He turned off the light and made his way through the darkness to the tiny cot he’d set up in an empty storage room.
There he stretched out, fully clothed, and tried to sleep.
Tomorrow might be miserable, and it might not be. But at least it would be one day closer to the trial and the blockade being over with.
He closed his eyes hoping their visit to General Mannix had some impact on the impasse, but doubting very seriously it did.
Hannah, a couple of blocks away in the sprawling hospital complex, was worried about something completely different.
“What do you mean he left the base and never came back?”
“What’s hard to understand? He said he was taking a message to Mary Hightower’s cousins who lived near the base. He said he’d be back before nightfall.”
“Oh, my God! He should have waited until tomorrow and I could have gone with him.”
Debbie would have laughed at her comment, were the circumstances different and they weren’t so worried about their friend.
“Hannah, he’s not a kid any more. Now granted, he might act like a big baby sometimes. But he’s actually a grown man who can take care of himself.”
“I know that, Debbie. But I can still worry about him. He’s almost never late and if he says he’s gonna do something he does it. I hope he’s okay.”
“What could go wrong? He’s not driving, so he’s in no danger of being in an accident. There are practically no cars out and about to run over him, and he said he just had a few short blocks to walk. He’s fine.
“Oh, I’ll bet I know what happened. I’ll bet they were so happy to get word that Mary was concerned about them they threw a party in Marty’s honor.
“You know Marty. If there’s just one pretty girl there, he’ll dance with her all night. If there’s more than one pretty girl he’ll bounce back and forth until he wears them all out.”
“I thought you said he was faithful to Glenna.”
“Oh, he is. But he’s a lot like Frank Woodard. They’re both shameless flirts. They flirt with women half their age and think they can get away with it because they’re old and people just pass it off as senility. I’ve talked to Glenna about it and she’s not threatened. She said she knows his heart belongs to her, he was that way when they met and she doesn’t expect him to change much.”
“Do you ever miss Frank, since you brought him up?”
“Oh, I miss him all the time. He was one of my favorite people in the world. But mostly I worry about him. What happened to him, whether he’s healthy… whether he’s still alive…”
“Bringing up his name was the exact wrong thing for you to do. You’re aware of that, right?”
“Why?”
“Well, because you just told me I shouldn’t worry about Marty being alone out there in the weather. That he’s a grown man who can take care of himself and that nothing could happen to him.
“And then you brought up Frank.
“And those are the same things we told ourselves when Frank went out on a routine mission and never came back.”
-39-
Neither Debbie nor Hannah were aware that Frank was alive and well and had recently called the mine.
If they had been, perhaps they wouldn’t have worried so much about Marty disappearing, possibly never to be heard from again.
Actually Marty was quite well.
He was warm and well fed, but still wasn’t happy.
No man occupying a jail cell can truly be happy, though most try to make the most of it. They try to convince themselves it isn’t so bad. They don’t have to go to work, they can sleep as much as they want and they don’t have to listen to their wives yell, their dogs bark, or their kids ask for money.
Truth is, though, jail is a terrible and lonely place. Those who try to convince themselves otherwise are only fooling themselves. They’re setting themselves up for a big fall, because eventually even they can see the truth. False bravado turns to despair, which turns to depression.
And depression makes any sentence seem like a life sentence.
Marty was in the base brig, in the cell immediately across from the cell of a man he didn’t know, but had something in common with.
From the tiny window in his cell door he could see an index card taped to the door across the corridor which read:
MEDLEY, MORRIS
Colonel, USAF
SW
He wondered what “SW” meant.
He’d seen a movie once called Single White Female and knew what the three letter acronym meant.
A similar but shorter two letter acronym?
That was anybody’s guess and could be anything, he figured. But it was just as good as anything els
e to occupy his time until he got out.
Medley’s name didn’t register in his mind as the colonel Hannah came to help free. It never occurred to him that the man occupying the other cell knew Hannah as well.
Even if he’d known it wouldn’t have mattered much.
There was a good five feet of space between the doors and the glass was very small and very thick. Communications between the two would have been impossible.
But that was okay. Marty was content to pass the time by trying to guess what “SW” stood for.
“Let’s see now, Snow White? No, probably not.”
Marty had always had a habit of talking to himself when he was laser-focused on something. There were times in his life when he was ridiculed for it, but he took it in stride.
“Hey,” he always said in his self-effacing way, “This way the whole world can hate my guts and I’ll still have someone to talk to.”
“Southwest? Star Wars? Street Walker?”
None seemed to apply.
Then the answer hit him broadside.
SW. Suicide Watch.
And his game suddenly wasn’t so fun anymore.
To confirm his suspicions a guard walked down the corridor at just that moment, peeked in the colonel’s cell, made a mark on a clipboard he carried, and left again.
A clock on the end of the corridor read 11:10.
For the remainder of his time there Marty would witness the same process every ten minutes.
Six times an hour, twenty four hours a day, day in and day out.
Marty wondered exactly how long it took for a man to take his own life.
Given the right tools, if it were something he was really determined to do, he could surely accomplish his task in less than ten minutes.
Having a firearm in hand, for example, death could be instantaneous. Having only a very dull plastic knife, on the other hand, it could take a bit longer.
Of course, the logical thing to do would be to take away all the means.
And then there would be no need for a suicide check every ten minutes.
He finally decided that the human spirit is capable of doing anything someone really has their mind set on doing. Even committing suicide.
The Blockade Page 12