Ell swallowed the port.
One of the men came in and gruffly said, “Put out your wrists.”
Ell did so and the man closed another pair of the all too familiar handcuffs over them. The man knelt and put another set of padded cuffs on her ankles that had a short chain between them. “Where are we going?” Ell asked.
The man only shook his head, then he grasped her arm and pulled her to her feet.
Ell, shuffling because of the ankle chains, made her way out of the cell. “Turn left,” he said.
They exited the building into an alley. A van with barred windows waited. The gruff man helped her into the van then got into the front. He turned to watch her through a steel grating. Another man drove. Ell assumed the other two of the four men that had come to pick her up got in the black car that had been parked behind the van, but she couldn’t know for sure.
As they drove, Allan updated her on her position from her implanted GPS antenna. “It looks likely that they are taking you to Andrews Air Force Base.”
“OK Allan, I’ve decided to go ahead and escape.” Ell said quietly. She paused to ponder the ramifications of her decision. I’ll be in flagrant disregard of the law, not just Stockton’s executive order. I’ll be an escaped prisoner under pursuit… by all the resources of the United States government.
However, she didn’t want to find herself in a prison from which she perhaps could not escape. “Wake up Amy and give her my apologies for ruining her sleep. Ask her to open the barn door and put a t-shirt, jeans, socks and running shoes in the compartment under the saddle of the new hoverbike. The one that has the winch and the low radar profile. Then fly the hoverbike out of there and down to Guantanamo in Cuba. If it gets there before I do, or before I give any other directions, have it land at point A of the locations I chose before they picked me up… Oh and have Amy put a water bottle and as many granola bars in the compartment as will fit under the clothes.”
Ell thought another minute then said, “I’ll need a small lightweight backpack too, so ask Amy to put in one of those.” She considered, “There might not be room for granola bars, they’re the lowest priority of the items I’ve listed.”
Allan informed Ell that they had indeed arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. The van drove out to the tarmac and the four men opened the back. At their direction Ell shuffled over to a small cargo plane of a type she didn’t recognize. The back of the craft was filled with boxes. They loaded Ell into an uncomfortable seat near the front. One of the men sat beside her and another behind her. The other two didn’t board the plane, presumably they returned to the vehicles from whence they came.
Three in the morning arrived and Ell slept as best she could in the uncomfortable seat. She woke up again when they took off at about 4AM. She felt a strong desire to talk to Shan about her decision, but the guard sitting right next to her made that pretty difficult. Eventually she drifted back off to sleep.
As the sun rose outside the plane’s windows, the guards broke out some rat packs and they ate breakfast. About an hour after they’d finished eating and the guards had disposed of the trash, the plane touched down on the airfield at Guantanamo.
The guards took her off the plane and were met by men in camo fatigues. The senior of the three men meeting them was a very large Petty Officer Second Class. He stared down at Ell for a minute, then smirked, saying, “My, my, looks like someone’s not as high and mighty as they used to be.”
He reached for Ell’s arm, but the hand of the gruff guard who’d picked her up in DC shot out to grab the PO by the wrist. A moment passed with the two men staring at each other, then the guard said in his gravelly voice, “She saved our entire world. She may be in trouble now, but she still deserves respect.”
The Petty Officer eyed her; then barked a laugh, “But what has she done for us lately, huh? I hear she may be bringin’ the little green men down on us. In any case,” he sketched an insolent bow, “here’s your respect. Now, get your ass over to the truck.”
The PO grabbed Ell by the arm, evidently intending to drag her to the truck. He looked surprised when, despite the ankle cuffs, she skipped along beside him as fast as he walked. They loaded her into the back of a truck with a large boxy back end that had been outfitted as a kind of rolling transport cell. Divided by a thick steel partition into left and right compartments, it had tiny windows covered with steel gratings and a hard bench down each side. They put her in the right side. As the only prisoner Ell promptly laid out full length on the bench and pretended to sleep while facing the wall.
Since the airfield was across Guantanamo bay from the detention center, Ell had wondered if they would take a ferry or perhaps she’d be loaded in a helicopter. The question was answered when the prison truck started an old internal combustion engine and drove only a short bumpy distance. After it stopped, it continued moving uneasily as the ferry beneath it shifted on the waves.
Other than the creaking of the ferry on the waves it was quiet, so while she was alone in the back of the van Ell put in a call to Shan to let him know where she was and that she planned to escape.
“Where are you going to go?”
“I was thinking that I’d go to the Habitat. It’d be hard for them to reach me there, but they’d know where I was and would focus on D5R as a place to apply leverage. Instead I think I’m going to go into hiding. Mexico, probably. Then cross the border into the States as an illegal alien and establish a new identity that way.”
“Why go to the border, then cross back? Just set yourself up in the US as an immigrant, without ever leaving.”
“Well, I’m down here near Mexico and have to come back from there anyway. I figure I’d just as well hire help from people who normally help people cross over and get IDs set up.”
“Some of those people aren’t very nice.”
There was a long pause. “You’re probably right. But if they aren’t nice to me, they probably aren’t nice to a lot of people and maybe someone should teach them a lesson.”
“Uh, that’d be fine, unless they hurt you before you teach them their lesson.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, “but, whatever I do, it’s going to be kind of risky.”
“Even if all that works, when you get up here to the States, aren’t they going to figure out who you really are from fingerprints and DNA?”
“I printed myself some fake fingerprints that I can apply if they arrest me or if I need prints for a job. If they arrest me and take DNA with a buccal swab from the mouth I have a mixture of several other peoples’ DNA that I can port into my mouth from the port on the back of my tooth. That should result in rejection of the specimen for being corrupt, but because it takes a while to process it, I should be gone before they figure out the specimen has a problem.”
“Jeez, you’ve really been giving this some thought.”
“Well, yeah,” Ell sighed, sadly, “I’d rather have been thinking about more productive things.”
“Do you want me to come join you somewhere?”
“No, I’m thinking it would be good for one of us to be legal, at least for now. Maybe, once I’m back in the states, I’ll head back up to North Carolina. You could hire me to clean house?”
“Hah! You’re not a very good maid, you know?”
“Hey, first you criticize my cooking, now my cleaning?!”
“I loooove you.” Shan said in a sing song voice.
“Hah! I gotta go. Gotta see if I can get loose from here before they start torturing me for my secrets.”
“Good luck my love, play it as safe as you can and call if you think of anything I can do to help.”
“OK.”
Next Ell put in a call to her Mom. Her mother had been pretty upset about her being in prison so Ell didn’t tell her yet about her pregnancy or plans to escape, or even that she was at Guantanamo Bay.
***
Shan mused to himself that he was in an unreasonably good mood for a man whose pregnant wife was in prison. He pondered t
his for a moment, then realized that he simply had no doubt that his wife would succeed at her jail break and illegal immigration back into the United States.
However, he still worried about how the baby would tolerate all this stress.
Chapter Seven
Pulling a sheet of OSB sheathing, Enrique Fuentes stepped from rafter to rafter as he crossed the roof. He hated walking up so high on rafters, but the older men claimed it was always the “new guy’s job.” His ribs still hurt from falling last week, striking his chest on the rafters he was falling between. However, by sprawling, he had kept from falling through the rafters to the ground. He hadn’t fallen any farther than chest deep between the boards, but it had hurt nearly as badly as it had frightened him. The other workers had complimented him on his reactions. The compliments would have felt better if his chest hadn’t been hurting so badly.
He turned to make sure he wasn’t too close to the edge.
His foot slipped.
He dropped the OSB and stretched out his body as before, not wanting to slip between the rafters, but he was at the hip of the roof. His body landed on the down-sloping rafters of the hip and started to skid!
Scrabbling with his hands he slowed the rush of his upper body toward the edge… but he couldn’t stop it.
Feeling as if he were in a slow motion dream, Enrique slid off the edge and plunged toward the ground below.
***
After her mother disconnected, Ell said, “Allan. Where is the hoverbike at present?”
“It arrived at location A about twenty minutes ago.”
“Really?” Ell said, knowing it was a stupid question to ask an AI, but she was surprised. “I thought the cargo plane would be much faster than the hoverbike.”
“Really,” the AI said tonelessly. It was merely answering a question with a fact, but the resultant dry delivery made the AI seem sarcastic. “It is correct that the plane is faster, but the plane had further to go and there was a delay before you took off. In addition, without a passenger to add weight and wind resistance and complain about buffeting, I was able to fly the hoverbike at over four hundred miles per hour.”
For a moment Ell had the sense that her AI was also teasing her about her intolerance of wind buffeting at high speeds on her hoverbike flights. She shook her head; AI’s had no sense of humor. Even attempts to program humor into them fell flat. Allan must just be reciting the reasons the hoverbike hadn’t been up to those speeds in the past. “OK,” she said, “let me know when this prison van is one and a half miles from its closest approach to the hoverbike at location A.”
Eventually, the sound of the ferry’s motors reached her and Ell felt it pull away from the dock. The heaving of the deck and van, though still mild, became significantly more than it had been at the dock. Allan confirmed that the ferry had pulled away from the dock and was in transit across the bay.
Ell examined her handcuffs. They were typical metal cuffs with two curved metal pieces called the “double strands” connected at a hinge to a curved “single strand” that had teeth on it. Those teeth ratcheted in and locked into the double strand, adjusting to a size to fit the person’s wrist. She moved over into the darkest corner of the dimly lit back of the truck. Turning into the corner to shield the view of any cameras with her body she turned on the small one ended port in the end of her right index finger so that it would open about six millimeters from the tip of her finger. She set it to open and close at 200 Hz (times per second). The small sparks of light that resulted when a port opened produced a small blue glowing area about a quarter inch beyond the tip of her finger. Because the port was opening about thirty millimeters from the port itself with most openings plus or minus 5% in distance, it made a glowing spot about three millimeters wide. Ell twisted her wrists around so that the glowing spot immersed itself into the metal of the left cuff’s “single strand.” Moving her finger slowly back and forth at a 45 degree angle to the strand caused the ports that were forming and collapsing to cut hundreds of 3.2 millimeter diameter breaks in the metal. Because they formed and collapsed at slightly different depths, a single pass of her finger didn’t completely cut the strand. But after a few seconds of moving her finger back and forth she could see a lacy slot appear in the metal. She stopped when it looked like just a tiny sliver of metal still held the cuff closed. She didn’t want the cuffs falling off while the guards might notice and she was pretty sure she could break that last little bit with a twist of her wrists.
She rotated her wrists around and, using the port in her left index finger, did the same to the handcuff on the right wrist, then pulled her feet up onto the bench in front of her and cut 99% of the single strands of each of the ankle cuffs as well.
The rocking motion diminished as the ferry docked. A short while later she heard the truck’s engine start and it bumped its way off the ferry and onto the road. Ell said, “Allan, load midazolam for my right finger and Taser darts for my left finger.”
After a brief pause Allan said, “Loaded.”
Ell held onto the grating on the small window at the front of the truck’s prisoner box. She could peer out over the roof of the cab to the engine compartment. The truck rolled through the buildings of the naval base. She recognized various buildings from her study of the satellite maps of the area. Ell set her one ended port at twelve inches. As soon as the truck turned right and started off across the low scrubby hills toward where the detention center was located, she moved back to sit on the bench just over the right rear wheel well. She pointed her index finger at where she estimated the outer sidewall of the tire would be spinning down there below her. She turned the port on at 200 Hz and began slowly waving her finger to move the other end of the port around, hopefully cutting holes into the sidewall of the tire as it spun past. The truck rolled on and on, unaffected as Ell waved the port slowly in and out and then adjusted the distance to eighteen inches.
Eventually, wondering if the port had broken down, Ell had Allan change the port to six millimeters again and looked at the tip of her finger in the shade of her hand. She could still see a fuzzy blue glow. She pointed it back down at the wheel well again and waved it slowly farther in and out.
Suddenly, she realized that the truck likely had dual rear wheels. Even if the outer one had deflated, the inner one might carry the current light load easily. She waved it slowly even farther toward the middle of the truck. Still nothing happened! Just before she was about to try the other finger, she heard a sudden bang. The truck lurched to that side and began to slow.
Even in the back of the truck, Ell could hear the Petty Officer cursing as the truck coasted to a stop. The three men got out of the front. Standing to look out the side window she saw them walking back to look at the tire. “God dammit!” The Petty Officer swore tonelessly. “Jackson, get on the horn back to dispatch. Have them send a cage car and a regular car out here to pick us up. Tell the motor pool their damn truck blew out both back right tires.”
The truck shifted as if someone had climbed onto the back bumper. Ell sat down quickly. As she’d suspected, the Petty Officer peered into the small window at the back and looked at her for a minute. His eyes disappeared from the window and the truck moved again as the large man got down.
Ell stood and peered out at them again. After carefully estimating their distance she pointed her finger through the wall of the truck at the Petty Officer’s thigh and said to Allan, “Midazolam, eight milligrams, seven feet six inches… fire.” The PO broke off from his banter with the other two guards to look down at his thigh with a puzzled look, then reached down to rub it. He went back to his conversation without further evidence of the injection though.
Ell pointed at the second man. He wasn’t as big so she said, “Midazolam , five milligrams, six feet, fire.” This time she saw a drop of fluid appear in the air just short of his thigh and fall into the dust at his feet. She said, “Midazolam, same dose, six feet three inches, fire.” The man slapped at his thigh as if he thought a bug h
ad stung him, but didn’t look away from the PO’s story.
Ell dosed the third guard with the short acting tranquilizer, then turned to the latch on the door of the truck. She’d looked at it when they’d put her in the truck and it consisted of a deadbolt thrown by a large lever on the outside. The lever fit into a slot on the outside of the truck and looked as if it were gripped by an electronically controlled servo. First Ell extended her cutting port into the door where she thought the deadbolt was and moved it around a while, occasionally shaking the door.
One of the guards came over and in a slurred manner said, “Hey! Shtop messin’ wit da door!”
Ell ignored him and kept shaking the door and stirring her port about in the area of the deadbolt with her port. After about a minute she was rewarded with a clank and increased travel as she shook the door. Although she could barely see the large lever through the bottom of the grated window, the fact that she could see it at all made the work of cutting it much faster. A little more jiggling and the door swung open.
By then all three guards looked very bleary. Sitting on their buttocks in the shade of the truck, they gazed up at her unsteadily. To her dismay, the Petty Officer leaned back and pulled out his service weapon. He pointed it clumsily in her direction and said, “How’d you ge’ tha’ door op’n?”
Ell shrugged her shoulders and, trying to look harmless, held up her wrists to display her handcuffs.
He said, “Move back from tha’ door. I’ll lock i’ righ’ thish time.”
When he put the hand with the gun down on the ground to help heave himself unsteadily to his feet, Ell shot him with a Taser dart from her left finger. She twisted her wrists to break the remaining bits of metal holding the cuffs closed and then reached down to break the last strands of her ankle cuffs as well. The right one still had too much metal in the gap so she had to run her port through it a little bit more.
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