Help I Am Being Held Prisoner by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake [Westlake, Donald E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

21

At eleven-thirty, one hour exactly after Phil and Jerry were supposed to have been here, Eddie roused himself from his parade rest stance in front of the gate-facing window and said, “Very well. We’ll have to improvise.”

Improvise. The bus was gone. There was no way off the base but the main gate, and our identification just wasn’t going to be good enough to get us through that main gate with this damn carton full of death and injury. In thirty minutes the relief sentry would arrive to take the place of the one we had tied up, and the alarm would then be sounded for fair, and this entire camp would be searched with a fine-tooth comb. And not just with a fine-tooth comb, either; there would also be floodlights mounted on jeeps, and men armed with rifles and machine guns, and tracker dogs, and maybe even helicopters. We were going to be caught, my insane friend and I, absolutely no later than one hour from right now. And when we were caught, we would really be caught. Our very presence on this base was an even more serious offense than our absence from the penitentiary. Then there were the uniforms that we weren’t authorized to wear, and the fake ID, and the grand larceny of all this shit in the carton, and the assault on the sentry…

A persistent image kept entering my brain. One summer vacation when I was a teenager my parents and I took a cottage by a lake in Maine. It rained all week, of course, but that isn’t the point. The point is, there was a fireplace, and we kept a fire going in it for a little warmth and dryness, and one time after my father tossed a flat piece of old board on the fire I noticed there was an ant on it. The piece of board was about four inches wide, making a kind of highway through the flames, and the ant just kept running back and forth on that highway, trying to find some way the hell out of there. Improvise. We were now, like that ant, going to improvise.

I said, hopelessly, “I suppose the only thing to do is try the main gate. Maybe, if we go through without the carton, just maybe they won’t look too closely at—”

“We will not abort,” Eddie told me sternly. “Put that out of your mind once and for all, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. When it doesn’t matter what you do, you might as well do what comes easiest, and right now the easiest thing to do was to go along with Eddie’s delusions. His delusion that he was a Captain, for instance, and that I was a Lieutenant. Not to mention his delusion that there was some way off this board and out of the fire.

He said, “Where’s the carton?”

“Right here,” I said, and patted it where I had placed it on the chest-high desk in the guard shack. “Do you think maybe

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.