When Civil Servants Fail

by John Schou

only an open metal stair up there, not much of sight protection and even a guard near to it. I passed him without showing any interest and in that moment, something happened: A woman started to scream in the opposite end of the hangar. Some people talked loudly to her but that failed to calm her down, on the contrary, she was crying and shouting, in another sense, distracting the attention of everybody else. Even the guard in front of the stairs felt an obligation to mix himself up, and that was my chance, if ever there was one. Cautiously, I entered the stairs and nobody must have seen it.

  As soon as I was up there, I lay down and crawled. I looked back after a few yards. There was still a tumultuous chaos and a terrible acoustic in the hangar, amplifying the screaming and many voices but I could not see anybody. Nevertheless, just lying up here did not satisfy me, if there was a better disguise. There were no rooms up here but in the wall, a tremendous tube let into what was supposedly part of an air conditioner. Possibly it was required if they worked with engines in the closed hangar, currently no wind was felt from it. There was kind of a grid in front of it but the screws had been removed and it was loosely attached, invisible from the distance but apparent in a close view. The noise was getting lower and if I should produce any myself, I better hurry up. The tube was big enough for me to crawl into and it made a turn immediately, the only disguise in this hangar, it seemed. An average American would not have any chance but I was young, somewhat sporty and slim. In order to close the grid properly, I had to enter with my feet first. It was a bit difficult to turn around the corner.

  “Hey you there, scram, this is my disguise,” a voice whispered from behind.

  There was one here already; that is why the grid was loose, he had done the first part of the work.

  “I’m sorry, I am probably here for the same reason as you. I have no intention to leave. Besides, as long as I stay here, I can’t betray you,” I whispered back.

  My predecessor, if I may call him so as he was first here, was fast to understand and answered, “Okay, but then remain silent. It may be a long stay. I hope nobody else is coming.”

  Shortly afterwards, somebody indeed tried. The guard quickly returned to his post and shouted: “What are you intending to do? It is forbidden to go up there!”

  My guard whispered, “Great, I hope he will take better care now.”

  “You are an egoist,” I replied.

  “Possibly, that is a precondition for surviving in this cruel World. And now wait till the night.”

  “Right, by the way, what’s your name?”

  “I don’t have any”

  “Sounds sensible. You may call me Jack.” I pretended that I could also keep my name secret.

  “To you, I am Bob. And now stay silent!”

  I realized that my plans were necessarily overthrown. This was the possibility and there would not be a second one. How good that I had just visited the toilet, and how sad that I did not take anything to eat.

  It was indeed a long wait, and I must have slept sometime during the afternoon. Suddenly I felt a grasp on one of my feet. “Stop snarling,” Bob snared.

  “I’m sorry, I must have slept.”

  “If you turn around on your side, you may sleep further without waking everybody else.”

  The survival artist was right, and the monotony helped me to kill some more hours that way. I was woken up around 10 pm East-Coast time, my wristwatch claimed, when a man from below loudly said:

  “We have a plane leaving for San Francisco soon. Does anybody care to take it?”

  The noise from the floor indicated that everybody wanted to get away from here. Even I considered doing so for a moment, but then I remembered that why I was here, that our prison was prepared and we were barred from any contact with the rest of the World.

  Perhaps they had wanted to check some sort of a passenger list, but the pressure from behind was enormous as reaction to the ill-placed humorous remark. There was a lot of loud and demanding talking, and you could hear the man from before try to ascertain the people that “there is room for everybody”. Slowly, the hangar emptied, it may have taken half an hour. A little later, a distant voice said: “The toilets are empty.” A second voice shouted, the other rooms are empty,” and quite near a third voice claimed, “the gallery is empty.”

  I believe I heard a relieved sigh from Bob. Shortly after, he whispered: “Look at your watch, Jack. We shall stay one hour after the last sound.”

  “Then I hope they are not going to clean the floor up.”

  “Wait and see.”

  I saw nothing – that is, the light was turned off and there were no sounds except the breathing of the two of us. We heard a jet start.

  “Off towards Hawaii,” Bob murmured.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t, it could be the North Pole or the Azores Islands in the Atlantic. I only have the feeling that they shall never arrive. Besides, the Pacific has the advantage that the plane is initially following a westward course as its partly professional passengers expect. I don’t really care. I am only satisfied that I am not on board.”

  He was not sympathetic, my fellow escape-convict, but he had a professional hold of the matters. I was looking forward to get a view of him.

  “Shouldn’t we get out of the tube and stretch the legs at first at the gallery?” I asked.

  “Nope, we shall stay here. Just imagine that there is a light turned on upon the slightest movement and everything is lost. One hour, as I said.”

  Exactly at a quarter to midnight on my watch, Bob granted freedom. “But silent, slow movements, we are still not out of danger,” he emphasized.

  I took off the grid and pushed it aside so that I could get out. I offered Bob a hand but he refused it. Our eyes had been accustomed to darkness but there was almost no light revealing anything but contours. Therefore, we had lost the ability for walking straight.

  With stiff legs and one hand supporting on the wall just beside the tube, Bob stood and urinated. “Not the fine manner,” I argued.

  “One more reason to do it,” he said. That convinced me, too, so I followed his example.

  We cautiously approached the ladder and went down. Now I realised that somebody had left the light in the corridor in front of the toilets and that the small rim of light coming under the door gave our accommodated eyes enough light to see rather detailed the scenery of the emptied hangar.

  “Bob, I think I can recognize some cookies here,” I whispered. We should both be hungry.”

  “Don’t touch them; there may be tranquillisers in them.”

  “But then some bread?”

  “There is a higher probability that it is clean, but don’t eat it now, wait till after we get out of this airport, if at all possible.”

  “All right, chief,” I said and stuffed some bread and a can of coke into my pocket but let the cookies stay where they were. Bob did the same. There could be no doubt that he was more professional in the business of escaping.

  Before we proceeded, he asked me, “Do you know that we are not in the main airport of Cleveland but in the adjacent NASA Research Center?”

  I nodded, “Our welcome committee told us so.”

  “That makes it even more difficult to get out of here. The airport is probably surrounded by a fence, this one then by a double fence with dogs in-between and armed guards patrolling around. And it may be as difficult to get out as to get in. I have no plan but we must first observe the surroundings without stirring-up any attention, least of all from belling dogs.”

  The first stage would be to get out of the hangar. However, Bob decided to get all useful objects with him, and that necessitated an inspection of the office and other small rooms under the gallery. Fortunately, they had been unlocked as they searched for hidden passengers. Bob avoided going into the toilet because he was afraid that the light might betray us, once we opened the door. In a small room in the middle, we found some high cupboards. They were locked, but i
t posed no big challenge for Bob to change that. Each of them contained a uniform, including a cap. Unfortunately, there were no ID cards attached, probably the owners needed them to get into the area.

  “Okay, you are now Lieutenant Jack Jackson, I am Captain Bob Franklin, should anybody ask.”

  In the office there were some car keys that Bob grasped, hoping but not knowing then if he would find the vehicle that fitted the keys.

  “Now we only need a plan of, how to get out of the area,” Bob said. That, however, was not to be found anywhere. Having searched all, my watch now showing close to 2 a.m., we made the big step and opened the door from the hangar to the outside world. No, we did not simply open it, first we found it locked but Bob easily unlocked it from the inside, then opened it to a ridge of perhaps one inch, then spotting no living soul opened enough to get his head out and then finally waived me out, too.

  “Point of no return, Lieutenant Jackson.”

  “Aye, Aye, Captain Franklin.” After having stumbled around in near total darkness for several hours, it was almost daylight here in comparison. Now I recognized that Bob was one of the Arab persons who had latest entered the hangar. He also looked at me sceptically: “Fairly young for a lieutenant, I guess.”

  “Don’t envy my youthful appearance, general.”

  Just around the corner, we found the car that fitted the keys. It was a closed-up military jeep.

  “It’s no use as long as we don’t know where to drive. We better find out first by foot. Preferably without being spotted. Nobody knows we are here, that is our sole advantage, the later they find out, the better. Best, of course, if they did not find out at all, but that is too much to hope for.”

  We could easily see that left of the hangar, if you were standing in front of it, there was nothing that looked like an entrance to the area. Three of the four planes were still standing there. Then there was probably simply open to the landing and take-off paths. To the right, there were more hangars and dark buildings, and then we spotted the tower before they spotted us.

  On the backside, already the fence was running. We saw nothing of the dogs which Bob had prophesized but we also did not want for sure to know, if they were there. But not so far away, we recognized an entrance. A car was just coming in and had stopped for check-in. A little later, another car drove out and hardly stopped.

  “That is our chance,” Bob said jubilant. They check incoming traffic but not outgoing. Let’s get out of here!”

  In the car, Bob instructed me how to salute the guard at the gate. He then drove off, approaching it and braking just before reaching the bar but even then not completely. I saluted towards the guard and this one just opened the gate before Bob collided with it – or perhaps he would have braked hard in the last second. We were out, yes, we were free! That is, not quite free, we were also haunted.

  “Is this the first car you steal?” Bob wanted to know.

  “Frankly spoken, I never thought there would be one,” I answered.

  “There will soon be a second one,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are only driving this over to the civil airport and there steal another one.

  “But why?”

  “First, you cannot drive far in a military car, even with a key in it. Our uniforms do not suit the mark of the car and on the first occasion, we’ll land in a military jail; and second, because there is still a small hope that nobody will miss us. When they find the car nearby with the two uniforms neatly packed, they may not speculate very deep into the matter, how it got there. So far, they were perhaps responsible for a dangerous and successful mission at NASA, and they might not want to admit that something failed ...”

  “Such as letting two passengers escape?” I supplemented.

  “Exactly,” he grinned.

  “Then let us take a bus into town.