Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather [Leather, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

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.

‘There we are,’ he said. ‘To fire them now all you need to do is touch a cigarette end or a bit of smouldering string to the powder and Bang! So we’ve now got single-shot pistols and crude grenades, but we’ll not be needing the stove again so we might as well make use of the gas cylinders too.’ He turned off the two cylinders under the stove, disconnected the rubber tubes that fed gas to the burners and used the clamps he had got from the blacksmith to seal the pipes. Then he turned the gas back on and checked for leaks. ‘Should do it,’ he said, ‘release the clamp, strike a match or a lighter and - shazam! - you’ve got yourself a flamethrower. Now one more thing - have you ever heard of napalm?’

‘The stuff the Americans used in Vietnam?’ Lupa said. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it. What about it?’

‘Well we could make our own version of it. All you need to do is boil up petrol with some sort of soap. Soap flakes are ideal but you can just chop up a bar of soap and use that instead. We haven’t got petrol, but kerosene should do the job. You just boil it up till it turns into a gel, and then throw it at the target and toss something after it to make it ignite.’

‘No, Lex,’ Lupa said. ‘I don’t mind the weapons, not even your bombs and home-made flamethrowers, but napalm is too horrible. Please don’t use that.’

‘No?’ he said. ‘Well, maybe you’re right. In any case we probably don’t have time to make anything else now.’ He took a cautious look out of the cell window. In the gathering gloom he could see that Don Lorenzo’s two thugs had now been joined by six others, and the attention of seven of the eight of them was wholly focussed on Harper’s cell. The other thug was running water into the pool in the centre of the yard.

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