Prison Code

by Don Pendleton

  “You want some water?” Patrick inquired. “I brought some water.”

  “That’d be good.”

  Bolan felt a plastic bottle prodding him in the leg. He reached for it and gratefully poured some of the precious liquid onto his face. He took several long breaths and then several long swallows. The water felt a little uncomfortable going down, but he didn’t get the pressured, nauseous telltale feeling that presaged internal bleeding.

  “Thanks.” Bolan passed the bottle back and gingerly twisted onto his stomach. He crawled to where he had shoved Renzo’s carbine, and crooked it in his elbows, then moved forward to make room for Patrick and Rudy. “Come ahead.” The soldier couldn’t see behind him, but he heard Patrick twisting himself around the junction with the pliancy of youth, and in one-tenth the time it had taken Bolan.

  “C’mon around, Dad!”

  Bolan kept moving ahead. Behind him a steady stream of swearing ensued as Rudolpho the Elder pitted himself against the hairpin corner from hell.

  “You got it, Dad! Grab my foot and pull! Pull!”

  The scrabbling and swearing suddenly subsided into gasps. Rudy called out in exhaustion, “I want a presidential pardon, too, Cooper! In fact, I want two of them!”

  One corner of Bolan’s mouth quirked despite his own exhaustion. He broke the holiest law of prison etiquette for the second time in a day. “Did you do it?”

  Rudy muttered something under his breath.

  “I did!” Patrick volunteered. “Caught red-handed!”

  One of Bolan’s grunts of effort turned to a snort of amusement. “That’s very honest of you, Patrick.”

  “Isn’t that the point of a pardon? Being forgiven?”

  “You freely admit all your sins?” Bolan asked.

  “I cannot tell a lie!”

  “Oh, really?”

  The young man’s voice grew serious. “Not to you, Cooper. You helped my father, and saved me from a life of butt-piracy at the hands of a man whose nickname is Rolling Thunder. I may be young, and I got caught, but my father raised me right. I understand a debt of honor.”

  It was too bad Patrick’s father hadn’t steered the young man clear of the Family business, but it was the Family business, and Bolan had to give the young man points for maintaining a positive attitude in a very bad situation. “You all right back there, Rudy?”

  “You know, I thought I was going to enjoy this Great Escape bullshit.”

  “You freaking out?”

  “A little. I’m really starting to hate being here. I can feel it pressing down and closing in.”

  “You’re doing great, Dad!” Patrick encouraged.

  “Rudy, take the water, pour some on your face, take three deep breaths, then three swallows, and start crawling. It’s a straight shot from here. We’ll get you out of the cold ground and into a nice filthy sewer system.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Bolan began kneeing and elbowing forward. He could sense that the tunnel was sloping downward slightly. The crawl was interminable. It had taken them fifteen minutes just to get around the bend. “Rudy!”

  “Yeah!”

  “How many bars we got down here?”

  Rudy laughed raggedly. “Mr. Cooper, I regret to inform you that you are outside your coverage area.”

  Bolan lifted his chin as he crawled on, and sniffed deeply. He had never been so happy to smell human waste in his life. “Hey, Rudy!”

  “What!” Rudy’s voice was tinged with irritation. Bolan would take anger over fear any day.

  “Guess what I smell?”

  A measured amount of hope crept into Rudy’s voice. “The nutraloaf you ate last week?”

  Patrick laughed.

  “Give the man a cigar,” Bolan acknowledged.

  “You just get me to Shit Creek, Cooper. I don’t need a paddle. Just get me out of this endless goddamn grave.”

  “Done!” Bolan followed his nose toward effluvium. What was left of his team had been through hell, but they were still salty. The end game was close at hand. Bolan’s light played on concrete and an open hold ahead. His hands met stone where the Puerto Rican tunnelers had breached the sewer, and he reached the smell at the end of the tunnel.

  Bolan stuck his head out and played the tactical light around a far more spacious tunnel. It was the typical poured-concrete cylinder of a sewer section. A bit of raised walkway girded both sides of the sluice. Bolan held his light on fresh footprints on the dry walkway. They were scuffed, but the soldier made it two pairs of boots and two pairs of convict shoes. That made it Warden Linder, Link, Schoenaur and Scott.

  Bolan eased himself out the tunnel and his bare feet gratefully met solid stone. “Come ahead.”

  He gave his two teammates a hand out, and all of them straightened and stretched. “Which way?” Patrick asked.

  The soldier pointed at the prints. “They head that way, and that way also leads to the old mines.”

  Bolan turned off his flashlight, flicked on the light mounted on Renzo’s carbine, and broke into a run. “Let’s move.”

  The Hills

  THE WARDEN TOOK a deep breath and looked down at his castle. From his vantage point in the hills he could take in the entire tableau of D-Town’s downfall. Smoke still rose from the demolished west wall. Well over a hundred state and local police vehicles formed a cordon around the prison, and a sea of news crew vans formed their own parking lot out in the field. Three police helicopters orbited the sky over Duivelstad.

  Linder sighed. He had really enjoyed his run as warden and firmly believed in the line from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” He had made Devil’s Town earn its name, and had enthroned himself as Lucifer. He thought it was fitting that Duivelstad would end burning in radioactive fire.

  Linder held out his hand. “Give it to me.” Whitmore handed over the detonator. The detonation device was simply a D-Town issue, multiband tactical radio. “The frequency is set?”

  “You can transmit anytime,” Whitmore confirmed.

  Scott finished pulling on the clean civilian clothes Schoenaur had secreted there at some previous time. They had all changed. Schoenaur had shaved off his mustache, and both he and Linder wore state police uniforms. Whitmore wore a windbreaker and chinos and looked like a librarian. Scott wore a suit and sunglasses and looked downright distinguished. The Aryan crime lord laid his Thompson submachine gun lazily across his shoulder and grinned down at his former home. “This should be interesting.”

  Schoenaur looked at the detonator in his former boss’s hand and then at Whitmore. “Can we watch it go up, or will we go blind or something?”

  Whitmore was still shaking from his trip through the sewers and the mines. “The weapon is inside A Block, so the initial flash will be contained.”

  Scott was mildly disappointed. “No mushroom cloud?”

  “Well, it’s only five kilotons, but if you’ve never seen one live, it should be spectacular.”

  Scott sighed happily. “Good.” When he assassinated the President of the United States, his entourage and everyone else with several city blocks, he definitely wanted a mushroom cloud. He wanted that mushroom cloud front and center on every newscast and on the front page of every newspaper in the world. “Warden?”

  Linder clicked on the radio, held down the transmission button and punched in 6-6-6 on the keypad. The four men gazed down into the valley expectantly. Law enforcement light bars continued to flash atop vehicles. Choppers continued to circle the sky. The warden punched in the detonation code again. “Is there some kind of delay?”

  “No.” Whitmore stared down at the prison complex worriedly. “It should have detonated immediately.”

  Linder punched in the code a third time and then handed the radio back to Whit
more. “Are we on the wrong frequency?”

  Whitmore checked the setting and punched in the code himself. “No, everything is correct. D-Town should be gone.”

  Linder turned a baleful eye on the old man. “Link, I’m very disappointed with you.”

  Whitmore shuddered in open fear beneath Linder’s gaze.

  Scott cocked his head in reflection. “You don’t suppose our boy Cooper happened to storm A Block and defuse that firecracker, do you?”

  Whitmore grasped at the change in conversation. “I can’t imagine any way for him to do so. Even if he somehow got past all your men, the only way to diffuse the weapon would be to disassemble it. That’s takes special tools.” He toed the backpack that held his belongings. “And I have the only set outside the Pentagon.”

  Schoenaur took out his radio. “Should we try mine?”

  Linder continued to glower at Whitmore, but nodded. “Give it to him.”

  Whitmore took the radio with shaking hands. He set the frequency and sent the signal several times. “Something is wrong.”

  Schoenaur snatched the radio back. It had been screeching with guards and staff trying to get hold of him, but that had ceased when he went under the earth. “You want me to call in to see if anything has changed inside?”

  Linder nodded. It was a small risk. “Do it.”

  Schoenaur clicked on the guard frequency. “Renzo, sitrep?” The former captain jerked his head back at the blast of static he got in return. “Jesus!” Schoenaur turned down the volume and tried again. All he got was static. “Boss?”

  Whitmore punched buttons on the other radio and got half a dozen short bursts of static. “We’re being jammed.”

  “What?”

  “Across the spectrum. The tacticals, the police and emergency bands? Everything. No one down there can send or receive, either.”

  Schoenaur scowled. “How the hell do you jam everyone’s radio?”

  “You would need one hell of a powerful transmitter locally.”

  Scott laughed aloud. “Or a military electronic warfare satellite.”

  Linder, Schoenaur and Whitmore stared.

  The Aryan chief shook his head in admiration. “Cooper isn’t Special Forces. He’s goddamn James Bond, or a reasonable facsimile.”

  Linder spit in disgust. “Link, weren’t you supposed to be some kind of hot shit CIA guy? Why didn’t you figure this out?”

  Whitmore stammered. “I—I...”

  “I’ll tell you why, because you’re a goddamn degenerate hophead, that’s why. Never trust a junkie, never depend on one.”

  “Please, Warden...”

  “You’re shaking, Link. You need to fix?”

  Whitmore couldn’t keep the eagerness out of his eyes. “Warden, I—”

  “Force, you figure you know how to set the weapon yourself?”

  Scott nodded at Whitmore. “I paid attention in class.”

  Linder nodded to Schoenaur. “Rog, give Link his fix.”

  Whitmore suddenly found his wrist engulfed by one of the most powerful hands in Pennsylvania. The old man cried out as Schoenaur squeezed. Whitmore’s fingers curled into an involuntary fist and the veins across his hand stood out in high relief with the pressure. Schoenaur held up a hypodermic needle. “Sweet dreams, Link.”

  “Please! God!” Whitmore shrieked. “No!”

  Schoenaur stuck the needle into the vein between Whitmore’s ring and little finger and injected. He left the needle in Whitmore’s hand and let him go. The old man staggered back a step. His eyes fluttered as the hot shot surged through his bloodstream and pure heroin pulsed through his brain. Whitmore’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell like a boned fish into the weeds.

  Linder spit on the dead man. It was most likely the last time he would get to degrade a convict. He jerked his head toward the entrance to the mine behind them. “Rog, throw him down the shaft. Scott?” Linder nodded toward the van with state police markings. “You’re driving.”

  The Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  “GOT HIM!” AKIRA Tokaido threw his fists skyward in victory. “Short burst, low power radio transmissions! The dumb-ass tried to send the signal five times!”

  Kurtzman rapidly typed orders to the satellite two miles above Pennsylvania tasked with listening to Duivelstad. “Zeroing in.” He watched his screen as the satellite tracked the signal and his computer laid out a map grid. The signals originated in the hills, just to the east of Duivelstad.

  “He sent again!” Tokaido glowed with scorn. “Man, what a dumb-ass!”

  “We have a location. Mack’s instincts were right. The transmission origin is just outside one of the old sulfur mines. I need eyes on. Get me imaging.”

  Tokaido ordered the satellite whose job was to stare at D-town to use its high-resolution imager and zoom in. “I have two individuals and a van. Sending you the video stream.”

  “Two?” Kurtzman frowned at the window that popped up the gray images in the feed. “Mack said he thought there would be at least four. Definitely Linder, Schoenaur, Scott and Whitmore.”

  “Maybe they split up already?” Tokaido suggested.

  “That wouldn’t be good.” Kurtzman pondered. “There are scores if not hundreds of inmates loose in the hills. There will be dragnets and roadblocks everywhere. The only way Linder and his crew can get through is if they pass themselves off as law enforcement. Pull the imaging back.”

  Tokaido zoomed out. “There’s only one road that leads up to the mine. I don’t see any vehicles on it. Nothing going cross-country. Maybe there was a double cross? Linder and Schoenaur killed Scott and Whitmore? Or vice versa?”

  “Possible...”

  “Should we send in the cavalry?” Tokaido asked. “Or at least alert them?”

  “If we alert law enforcement, we no longer have a say in the situation. I want to at least wait until Mack surfaces and makes contact.”

  Tokaido enumerated the worst-case scenario. “What if he doesn’t? What if they already fought it out down below and Team Linder came out on top?”

  “Even if that’s true I’m not sure we want to initiate a standoff. I don’t think Linder is normally the suicidal type, but he sure as shooting doesn’t want to go to prison. He might just set the weapon off in spite, and if it’s Scott? That man is one of the top dogs in American white supremacy. He might just enjoy going out in a radioactive blaze of glory. Better to let them run to ground and think they’re safe. Then we can have Able Team launch an assault by surprise.”

  “So we just wait and see?”

  “We wait for Mack, and we track that van if it moves.”

  * * *

  BOLAN CLIMBED. SOMEONE had recently reinforced the vertical shaft’s ladder with fresh rungs of new wood. Linder had hired someone to dig a fairly sophisticated smuggler’s tunnel that connected the abandoned sulfur mine to the old sewer system. Bolan highly suspected that particular someone and his construction crew were probably dead and rotting in one of the abandoned side shafts.

  The soldier hauled himself ever upward. It was better than squirming beneath the earth, but climbing a hundred feet of ladder wasn’t doing him any favors. The saving grace was that he was climbing toward fresh air and there was light at the top of the shaft.

  The light suddenly occluded and Bolan saw Schoenaur.

  Bolan was thirty feet below, in the vertical shaft’s well of darkness, and he knew Schoenaur couldn’t see him. The guard captain had Lincoln Whitmore slung across his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Schoenaur shrugged Whitmore off and tipped him into the shaft.

  “See you in hell, Link!” Schoenaur said before he disappeared.

  Whitmore’s body came tumbling down like a rag doll.

  Bolan hugged the ladder and hissed down at his teammates. �
��Hold on!”

  The soldier watched the corpse bounce off the walls and thud and clatter against the ladder. Bolan rammed an arm out as Whitmore dropped. His palm hit flesh and he tried to deflect the dead man to the other side of the shaft. The old man’s foot brutally clubbed Bolan in the shoulder, and he nearly lost his grip on the ladder. Patrick stifled a yelp.

  Whitmore continued his descent and disappeared in the darkness. The thuds of his bouncing path down the shaft ceased a few seconds later. Bolan had already started moving again, and he climbed for all he was worth. He reached the top and unslung Renzo’s carbine. The entry shaft was wide and had tracks for mine cars. Bolan broke into a run toward daylight. He could feel his legs failing beneath him, and his lungs burned. He could hear an engine turn over out in the sunshine. The soldier redoubled his efforts. Patrick had already caught up and easily ran by his side.

  The two of them burst out of the mine.

  The soldier had spent an hour beneath the earth, and the sunshine slammed into his eyes with whiteout intensity. Bolan staggered and dropped to one knee. He shouldered his weapon and brought the carbine’s optical sight up to his streaming eyes. He could make out the blurry shape of a van driving away at speed halfway down the hill.

  Bolan lowered his weapon.

  “Shoot!” Patrick shouted. “Why don’t you shoot?”

  The soldier took a ragged breath. “Because if I don’t take out the van, they get away and know we’re right behind them. Then it’s anybody’s guess what they might do.”

  Patrick saw the wisdom of it. “So we let them think we’re still in D-Town, and that they got away clean.”

  “And we hope to hell my people are tracking them.” Bolan looked back as Rudy emerged from the mine, squinting and grimacing. “Rudy, are my people tracking them?”

  He held up the tablet. Kurtzman’s voice came on over the speaker. “We’re tracking them, Striker.”

  “Bear?” Bolan looked down on the sea of flashing lights in the valley below. “I need a car.”