Sea Hawke by Ted Bell

Author:Ted Bell [Bell, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

“Wake up, boss.” Someone was shaking him. He opened his eyes.

“Whassup, man?” Hawke said, cracking an eye, deliberately imitating Stoke’s street talk.

“You, I hope. Nine o’clock. You said we had work to do tonight. What kinda work we going to do in here? Besides trying to beat Brock at cards, I mean. That’s real work.”

Hawke smiled at him. “Oh, I don’t know, Stoke. A jailbreak, maybe.”

“Jailbreak, huh? I hear you, brotha man. How the hell we gonna do that? I mean, what about the guards?”

“What about them?” Hawke said.

“I’ll tell you what. They go cruising by here every half hour, that’s what.”

“Right. Regular as clockwork,” Hawke said. “If those clowns are what passes for guards in this joint, we’re good to go.”

“Okay, I can dig that,” Stoke said. “So now what?”

“I’m going to show you. Let me get down from this window. Oh, and hand me that ball-peen hammer, will you, please?”

Hawke started tap, tap, tapping with the hammer on the rear wall of the cell. There was a window above him, open to the elements, with six iron bars. It looked out over swampy marshland and thick green jungle, which helped to orient him as to his location. He wondered how many men had stood up on a stool and looked at this same view, puzzling over how the hell to escape this fortress of pain.

Tap, tap, tapping on the stone with the ball-peen hammer, Hawke was waiting to hear that hollow sound that would mean he was in the right place. But he came up empty.

“Want some help?” Stoke said.

“Yeah. The sooner we can find it, the better.”

“Find what?”

“You’ll see, Stoke. You’ll see. Here, take this claw hammer and start tapping lightly. You’re looking for a deep, hollow sound. If you hear one, let me know. Give Harry this mallet and tell him to do the same.”

Twenty minutes later, Stoke said, “Got a live one over here, boss.”

Hawke was all over him.

“Let me hear it.”

“You got it,” Stoke said, and tapped the plastered wall three times with the hammer. “Bingo?”

“Bingo,” Hawke said.

Hollow as a bone.

Hawke’s smile was a mile wide.

“That’s it, Stoke. You found it. Our doorway to the Secret Garden.”

“Our doorway to what, exactly?”

“Our ticket to the great outdoors,” Hawke said, pulling a chisel out of his jacket and handing it to Brock. “We need to open up a hole in this wall big enough for us to squeeze through. So we start to work now. And the sooner we’re out of here, well . . . we don’t want to be banging away in here when the sun comes up . . .”

As it happened, with all three of them working feverishly, they managed to create an opening large enough for each of them to crawl through in less than an hour. This was too easy, Hawke thought. Unless someone, say Fidel and Raúl, had long ago plastered it over to avoid detection while they plotted their escape.

“Bring those candles, Stoke,” he said. “We might need them.

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