We took advantage of extensive renovations that were being carried out on the internal security-force building-a two-storey office and interrogation block near the main entrance gate at the front wall. We were working as maintenance gardeners. The guards who pulled shifts in the area saw us every day. When we went to work there, on the day of the escape, they watched us for a while, as usual, and then looked away. The security-force building was empty. The renovation workers were at lunch. In the few long seconds of the little eclipse created by the guards' boredom and their familiarity with us, we were invisible, and we made our move.
Cutting our way through the chain-link fence that closed off the renovation site, we broke open a door to the deserted building and made our way upstairs. The interior was hollowed out by the renovation. Unplastered walls showed the skeleton structure of uprights and load-bearing beams. The bare, wooden steps on the stairway were white with dust, and littered with fragments of brick and plaster. There was a manhole in the ceiling on the top floor.
Standing on my friend's strong shoulders, I punched out the wooden trapdoor in the manhole and climbed through. I had an extension cord with me, wrapped around my body under my coveralls. I uncoiled it and pulled it free, fixed one end to a roof beam, and passed the other down to my friend. He used it to climb up into the roof-space with me.
The roof stretched out in zigzag waves. We scrambled toward the narrowing pinch of space where the roof met the front wall of the prison. I chose a spot on one of the troughs to cut our way through, hoping that the peaks on either side would conceal the hole from the gun-towers. It was dark everywhere in the roof- space, but in that narrow wedge near the wall it was blacker than a guard's baton.
With a cigarette lighter for a lantern, we worked to cut our way through the double-thickness of hardwood that separated us from the tin on the outside of the roof. A long screwdriver, a chisel, and a pair of tin snips were our only tools. After fifteen minutes of hacking, scraping, and stabbing at the wood, we'd cleared a little space about the size of a man's eye. Waving the flame of the hot cigarette lighter back and forth, we could see the glint of the metal roof beyond the small hole. But the wood was too hard and too thick. With the tools we had, it would take us hours to make a man-sized hole.
We didn't have hours. We had thirty minutes, we guessed, or maybe a little more, before the guards did a routine check of the area.
In that time we had to get through the wood, cut a hole in the tin, climb out on the roof, use our power extension cord as a rope, and climb down to freedom. The clock was ticking on us. We were trapped in the roof of the security building. And any minute, we knew, the guards might notice the cut fence, see the broken door, and find the smashed manhole. Any minute they could come up through the manhole into that black, sweating cave, and find us.
"We've gotta go back," my friend whispered. "We'll never get through the wood. We've gotta go back, and pretend it never happened."
"We can't go back," I said flatly, although the thought had screamed through my mind as well. "They'll find all the broken stuff, the fence we cut, and they'll know it was us. We're the only ones allowed in the area. If we go back, we're in the Slot for a year."
The Slot was prison slang for the punishment unit. In those years, that unit, in that prison, was one of the most inhumane in the country. It was a place of random, brutal beatings. A failed attempt to escape through the roof of the security-force building - their building, the head office for the punishment unit guards - would ensure that the beatings were less random and more brutal.
"Well what the fuck are we gonna do?" my friend demanded, shouting with everything but his voice. Sweat dripped from his face, and his hands were so wet with fear that he couldn't hold the cigarette lighter.
"I think there's two possibilities," I declared.
"What are they?"
"First, we could use that ladder-the one that's chained to the wall downstairs. We could go down again, break the chain off the ladder, tie the extension cord to the top of it, slam it up against the wall, climb up, and throw down the cord on the other side. Then we can slide down to the street."
"That's it?"
"That's the first plan."
"But... they'll see us," my friend protested.
"Yeah."
"And they'll start shooting at us."
"Yeah."
"They'll shoot us."
"You said that."
"Well, fuck me," he hissed. "I think it bears repeating. It's a fuckin' salient point, don't you think?"
"I figure that one of us will get through, maybe, and one of us will get shot. It's fifty-fifty."
We considered the odds in silence for a while.
"I hate that plan," my friend shuddered.
"So do I."
"What's the second plan?"
"Did you notice that buzz saw, on the ground floor, as we came up here?"
