No Man's Land (9 page)

Colonel David Williams stopped halfway to the office door as his
mind tried to make sense of what he’d just heard. He pulled off his
helmet and put it under his arm.

“What did you say?” As he hadn’t seen who had issued the
statement, he asked the question to the room. The guy with the hair.
The one sitting at the extra desk closed his cell phone and opened
his mouth.

“You’ll need to do as little damage to the facility as
possible,”

he said.

That’s what he thought the voice had said. As the anger rose in
his throat, the colonel started to speak but swallowed it. Instead,
he turned to the warden.

“Who the hell is this guy?”

Romero looked embarrassed. He sucked air through his bottom teeth
and ran a finger around his collar before answering.

“This is Mr. Asuega. He’s Deputy Director of Security
Operations for the Randall Corporation.”

“Ah,” Williams said. “The folks who run this place. That
figures.”

The heels of his boots beat a slow cadence on the floor as he No
Man’s Land crossed to stand in front of Dallin Asuega. “Worried
about your building are you?”

Asuega showed him an acre of teeth. “Meza Azul is a
state-ofthe-art facility,” he said evenly. “The cost of
replacement would be—”

The colonel cut him off. “Before you start in on the facts and
figures, Mr. . . .”

“Asuega.”

“Mr. Asuega. Let me make a few things clear to you.” He
hesitated long enough to ensure he had everybody’s attention.
“First off, you need to understand I don’t give a hill of beans
for your ‘state-of-the-art’ facility. The only thing on my agenda
is the safety of the men under my command. If it takes razing the
building to the ground to keep my men safe, I’ll do it.” Asuega
raised a finger. Williams raised his voice. “Second, you seem to
have failed to notice your ‘state-of-the-art’ facility is
presently being run by the inmates. Leads me to believe that your
‘state-of-theart’ systems must have left a great deal to be
desired, so maybe you all ought to rethink your definition of state
of the art.”

Williams checked his watch. “It’s twenty-two-forty,” he
announced. “We’re going in at twenty-three hundred sharp. I’m
going to have the first two Strykers put a salvo of fifty-millimeter
cannon fire through that third-floor walkway where all the fire is
coming from. Once those assholes figure out we can kill them right
through the bricks, I’m guessing most of them will be feeling a
whole lot less feisty.”

He nodded at the assemblage. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said,
before turning on his heel and marching from the room.

“You figure the boys will put up much of a fight?” Corso asked
as they descended the stairs.

A harsh laugh escaped Driver’s throat, the kind of studied humor
that gave sane men pause to wonder. “Hell no,” he said.

“Couple dozen of them may prefer ‘death by soldier’ to
serving out their sentences, but . . . the rest of them . . . they’re
not soldiers. They’re rabble. The scum of the earth. First heavy
arms fire they see will send them scurrying back to their cells like
lemmings.”

They were at the bottom by then. Driver pushed his way through an
unlocked door and suddenly they were in the modern version of a
boiler room. Sans the boiler. All electronic gauges and digital
readouts. Took Corso less than half a minute to see that Driver had
been down there before. That whatever he was doing to the furnace was
something he’d worked out on a prior visit. He watched as Driver
manipulated the dials and gauges. Watched as he pulled the great wad
of gum from his mouth, reached inside the service panel at the bottom
of a heating and air-conditioning unit and slipped the gum into
place. What the gum’s function might be was lost on Corso.

Driver didn’t bother to close the door. Instead he crossed the
room to the far wall, to the cluttered desk, where he picked up the
telephone receiver and set it gently on its side. Corso stepped in
closer. Watched as Driver unscrewed the mouthpiece and began to pull
wires loose. It was too dark for Corso to make out exactly what
Driver was doing. Only that he was attaching the colorcoded wires to
one another in a fashion unintended by the phone’s designers.

Satisfied, Driver screwed the cap back into place and set the
receiver in the cradle. Corso followed along as Driver returned to
the same set of dials and gauges he’d messed with before. He’d
pushed only a couple of buttons when the hissing began. Deep and
insistent like wind through a crack in the door. And then that rotten
egg smell and the beginnings of a painful heat in the lungs. Gas. No
doubt about it. Natural gas was pouring out of the furnace at a
prodigious rate, filling the room, causing Corso’s eyes to tear and
his lungs to stall.

Corso covered his mouth with his jacket, stood there with his eyes
screwed shut, breathing the smell of himself as the gas folded itself
around him. Driver took him by the elbow and led him back to the
stairs. Closing the basement door behind them, Driver pulled Corso
along as he climbed the stairs to the main floor and found their way
outside, where they stood wheezing and wiping their eyes, until the
sound of a diesel engine snatched them from their lethargy.

Kehoe was easing a tandem tanker truck around the side of the
cellblock. Driver raised a hand and began to motion him forward. Come
on, come on, until finally he stiffened his fingers and had him bring
the big rig to a stop. He used his index finger in a throat-cutting
sign. Kehoe shut off the truck, which now sat in the darkness
hissing, and climbed down. “I don’t know what you got in mind,
Captainman, but it damn well better be quick. Those old boys out
there look like they’re about ready to go.”

As if to reply, Driver pulled one of the tanker’s delivery hoses
from its bracket on the side of the truck, used the metal end to
break the window in the upper half of the administration building’s
back door and pushed the hose most of the way through.

“Don’t just stand there, Cutter,” he said. “Hook this damn
thing up. We need to pump the front unit about two-thirds of the way
out.”

Kehoe’s eyes narrowed. “Right into the building there?”

“Big as life,” Driver said.

Kehoe didn’t move. His face was hard as stone. “You know, Doc
. . . one of these days we’re gonna have to address this you givin’
me orders thing.” His face cracked into a smile. “But in the
meantime, I sure like the way you think.”

In the hours since Paul Lovantano had been dragged from the cab of
his truck and locked in a cell with half a dozen other truck drivers,
he’d come to believe his life might have turned out differently had
he been subjected to this kind of treatment during his formative
years. With the specter of death looming and with a little time to
think, he’d come to a number of revelations concerning such matters
as who he was and how he’d come to be driving a diesel delivery
truck in bumfuck Arizona on the day a prison riot was destined to
take place. Not coincidentally, he’d also come to realize that he’d
managed to get through forty-four years on the planet without ever
taking the time to sit and wonder about the choices made and the
roads not taken. Like he’d just been along for the ride on the
delivery of his life. Wasn’t like he was some sixth-generation
redneck like some of the folks around here. Eking out livings cutting
wood and working as handymen. Wearing the same winter coats until the
fabric fell off their backs. Married to one of these hatchet-faced
desert queens, so bony and brown they looked like overcooked chicken
wings.

No . . . he’d had every advantage. Every chance to make some-No
Man’s Land thing of himself. Like everybody else born and raised in
Larchmont, New York, Paul had faced a fairly codified set of
expectations. It was quite simple really. All that was expected was
that he graduate at the top of his high school class, ship off to
Princeton or Columbia, become a doctor or a lawyer or something
spiffy like that, then make it big in the Big Apple before bringing
his burgeoning family back to Larchmont just in time to take over the
family manse and shuttle the old folks upstate to Shady Rest. He
could see now that the difference between the success scenario and
the situation in which he currently found himself was predicated on a
small number of ill-considered moments that had sent his future
spiraling out of control and left him adrift in the dire straits of
the present predicament.

It all started with knocking up Mary Ellen Standish in the
eleventh grade and then, as his parents had insisted, denying
responsibility. He could see it clearly now . . . how something about
that particular subterfuge had gnawed at his gut every day for the
past twenty-seven years and how the experience had created within him
a sense of unworthiness, a sense he was doomed to failure, a sense
that he didn’t deserve any better than he was getting.

That feeling made it easy to get kicked out of Brown University
after his father had pulled every string he could muster just to get
him admitted. Made it easy to take that trip out West the summer
before he was scheduled to pick up the pieces at the local community
college. Made it easy never to go back. Made it easy to marry Edith
and then Sherry and Wanda June. To have half a dozen kids floating
around the Southwest somewhere. Kids whose faces he couldn’t
conjure without the aid of a photograph and whose names he’d never
quite had straight. It went on and on. One bad decision after the
next until he found himself in his present position, sitting in a
prison waiting his turn to die. That’s how he had it figured. Only
way it made sense. They were taking them out one at a time and
shooting them. That’s why none of them came back. Why he wasn’t
going to come back either. So when the cell door opened for the fifth
time, it was no surprise that Paul Lovantano’s heart began to race.
His mouth wanted to beg, but something inside of him would not permit
it. Maybe that Mary Ellen Standish thing. Who knew? The cell door
opened with a rattle. The huge con had acquired what looked like an
Uzi since his last visit.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Your turn now, buddy.”

The smell of diesel hung heavy in the air. The rush of fuel
flowing into the building nearly drowned the sound of the pump.
Driver was up on top of the front tanker, pointing his flashlight
down through the hatch into the tank. Most of the small-arms fire had
stopped as the calm before the storm set in.

“Shit’s gonna be knee deep in there,” Kehoe said with a
laugh.

“We best hope nobody lights a match before we get outta here.”

Driver looked up from what he was doing. “Turn the pump off,”
he said to Kehoe.

With the hum of the pump suddenly ended, a final spurt of fuel was
followed by a short series of drips, then a short period of silence
before a volley of gunfire and a series of screams echoed from inside
the cellblocks. Sounded like somebody was begging for his life. Two
more shots suggested the pleas had been in vain. Kehoe heaved with
both hands, sending the delivery hose through the hole in the door.
“What’s it gonna be, Captainman? Whatever the hell you got in
mind for getting us the hell outta here . . . now’s the time.”

Driver walked to the passenger side of the cab, reached up, opened
the door and dragged a tight bundle out onto the ground. He scraped
up the tape end with his fingernail. The tape came away with a hiss;
the bundle unfurled to reveal several pairs of bright blue coveralls,
red rubber boots and helmets, black breathing masks. Driver sorted
himself out a pair of coveralls and sat down on the ground, where he
inserted one foot, then the other, before rising to his feet again
and pulling the zipper all the way up to his Adam’s apple. He
looked over at Kehoe and Corso. “I found these haz-mat suits in
with the rest of the guard equipment. We’re gonna get inside that
front tank there and ride it right the hell out of here.”

A moment of stunned silence ensued. “Inside the tanker?”

Kehoe asked.

Driver nodded, then smiled.

“Sittin’ in diesel fuel?”

“Just about waist deep now,” Driver said.

“That shit’ll kill us.”

Driver pointed to the bundle on the ground. “Not in these
haz-mat suits it won’t. At least not right away.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kehoe demanded.

“It means that sooner or later the diesel is going to eat its
way through the plastic. Either that or the filters on our breathing
apparatus are going get saturated and we’re going to find ourselves
breathing diesel fumes in a closed environment. Either way, we end up
dead.” He shrugged. “Look on the bright side: they probably won’t
find us until whatever’s left of us clogs up the pump system.”

“How long you figure we got in there?”

“Couple of hours . . . three max.”

“Jesus,” Kehoe muttered. “This is your big deal fuckin’
plan?”

“We been letting drivers leave with their trucks all day,”
Driver said. “Everybody should be used to the drill by now.” He
patted the side of the tanker truck. “It’s a local company. If
the driver’s got a family, I’m betting he gets to them as soon as
he can. If not, he’ll want to get to his favorite bar and tell the
story. Either way, I’m figuring he gets rid of the truck as soon as
possible.

Minute he leaves, we get out and get up the road. It’ll be a
couple of days at least, before they get things squared away enough
to know for sure we’re missing.”

“And if they decide to search the truck?” Kehoe asked.

“Only way to do that will be to get in there with us. I’m
betting they’re no more anxious to climb inside than you are.”
Before anyone could respond, Driver produced a black wireless phone.
“Beside which,” he said. “I’ve got a little surprise for
them. Something to keep them occupied while we get some sea room.”