We were back in minutes. Erikson drove while Wilson and I dripped water on the floor of the cab beside him. It was crowded because we had taken the seabags inside with us to keep them out of the rain. “Isn’t this weather a blinder?” Wilson asked.
“It could be a break for us,” Erikson answered. “Or it could have been if that fool Slater hadn’t fouled up.” He scowled. “I liberated this pickup from the motor pool and picked up our crates from the holding warehouse. They’re in the back. I’d have been along sooner, but I stopped off at the combat intelligence center to check out the current defense and security situation. We don’t want to be poking around the perimeter in the dark completely out of touch as to installations.”
The metronomic slap-slap of the windshield wipers punctuated his words. “The whole station is on hurricane alert, which means everyone’s going to be too busy to pay much attention to us. From the way this thing is making up, I’d say it won’t be long before everyone is hanging onto something solid to keep from being blown away.”
“It’s a hurricane?” Wilson asked.
“Not yet. I checked at the met office. Wind is now up to force seven and predicted for force nine. That would mean gusts up to seventy miles an hour. It’s a good time for us to move out.”
“But what about Slater?”
“We’re going after him now. Drake, this is going to be your bag. Whatever it takes to do it, we’ve got to get Slater out.” I opened my seabag, took out my.38, and stuffed it into my waistband beneath my poncho. Erikson saw the movement. “I don’t want anyone killed!” he said sharply.
That didn’t jibe very well with the remark about whatever it took to get Slater out, but I didn’t say anything. Erikson slowed the truck to a crawl near a low, T-shaped building on our right. It sat in the center of a circular plot of ground outlined by a curving road that surrounded it like a moat. “That’s the brig?” I asked.
“That’s it.”
“Drive around it.” Erikson circled the drive. The front portion of the building was wooden frame structure and the el in back was concrete block. Barred and wire-mesh-covered windows marked it as the cell block. The building was a tin can. I doubted that there were even reinforcing rods in the cinder block. “Not even a fence,” I said.
“Superfluous,” Erikson replied. “The base has two fences around it with a well-guarded area in between. Castro provides another guarded area beyond that. No prisoner is going anywhere.”
“I’ve seen all I need to out here. How about the inside?”
“Play it straight from my cues when we go in,” Erikson said.
He parked the pickup and led the way in. There were three people in the outer office, a Marine corporal with a holstered.45 at his side, a buxom, auburn-haired Wave in a blue uniform, and a three-chevroned sergeant behind a desk with a nameplate saying SERGEANT OF THE GUARD.
“You three are the only ones on duty?” Erikson asked.
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant answered after springing to his feet at sight of Erikson’s insignia. “Plus Corporal Gates on cell duty inside.”
“I’m Commander Erikson. You’re holding a man named Slater on charges?”
The sergeant glanced at the Wave who had the crossed quills of a yeoman embroidered on her sleeve. Her young face had a wide mouth. She was smirking at Wilson who was staring boldly at her well-filled tunic. She had overlapping incisors, which gave her a minx-like look. She realized belatedly that the sergeant was looking in her direction. “Yes, sir,” she said hurriedly. “We do.”
“I’m detailed to investigate the case,” Erikson said. “Can you provide space for me to interrogate these witnesses?”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. “You can use the O.D.'s office right there.” He pointed. “He was called out on some trouble down at the motor pool.”
Like a liberated pickup truck, I thought. “In there, you two,” Erikson said to Wilson and me. I pointed to an electric water cooler at the far end of the room next to the barred outer doors leading to the concrete section of the building. Erikson nodded permission. I walked down to the cooler and let the cold, slightly brackish water rinse out my mouth while I studied the barred doors. From where I was standing I could see another set of barred steel doors inside a narrow corridor beyond the first set.
“Well?” Erikson said to me when we were all in the O.D.'s office. The half-glass partition let us look outside into the larger room, where the three on-duty personnel were seated.
“Nothing doing from the inside,” I reported. “The two sets of doors are electronically operated. The sergeant has a key, and the corporal inside the cell block has a key. Both would be needed to open the doors, and at a quick look they’re operated from separate control boxes.”
Chico Wilson had been smiling at the Wave through the glass partition. The girl was watching him and doing no work. She looked like a rabbit fascinated by a snake. Wilson turned his head to look at us. “So let’s take these three out here an’ crush out of the place,” he said.
Neither Erikson nor I said anything. We both knew it was impossible because of the timing involved. Even if we immobilized the sergeant, the armed guard, and the Wave, the corporal inside could button himself up and thumb his nose at us. “What about asking to have Slater brought out here so you can question him?” I asked Erikson.
“Normally the sergeant wouldn’t have the authority without the say-so of the O.D.,” Erikson said doubtfully. “We’ve nothing to lose, though. Try it.”
I went outside to the sergeant’s desk. “The commander wants to question the prisoner now,” I said.
“You know I can’t bring him out here without the O.D.'s okay, sailor,” he answered.
“Maybe you’d like to try telling the commander that?” I tried to bluff him.
“
I started back to the partitioned office. Chico Wilson was seated on a corner of the Wave’s desk, speaking to her in a low tone. She was smiling and reapplying pale pastel lipstick. When I passed her desk, the large-breasted girl was snickering. “Just like you figured,” I told Erikson. “He says he can’t do it. Do we have the plastic explosives that I put on your original ‘want’ list?”
“Yes. They’re in the smaller crate on the pickup. Why?”
“I can shape a charge and peel off half the back wall of the cell block with no more fuss than a taffy pull. It wouldn’t even rattle their coffee cups inside here.”
Erikson’s eyes narrowed as he stared at me. “What about the guard inside?”
“He’d be in between the two sets of locked doors. No problem. Even Slater would only get an earache. I can muffle the blast so nobody can hear it a hundred yards away in this storm. That doesn’t go for the people in the office here. They’d have to be tied up while we siphoned Slater out of the back end and took off.”
Nobody ever said Erikson couldn’t make up his mind. “Wilson!” he called.
Chico Wilson left the simpering Wave and strolled into the office. He was smiling. “Guess what?” he said.
“Wilson, go out to the pickup and open the smaller crate—”
“Guess what?” Wilson said again, interrupting in unmilitary fashion. “Slater isn’t here.”
“Isn’t here?” Erikson echoed.
“I told the chick Slater was in for doin’ what I wanted to do to her, an’ after she got through sayin’ ‘Oh, you!', she mentioned that an officer an’ two guards took all the prisoners out on a work detail.”
“But the sergeant said—”
“She said in the rush nobody entered it in the log. The sergeant doesn’t know. An’ she said the work detail is supposed to be takin’ down the outdoor movie screens on the base.”
“You earned your dollar today, Wilson,” Erikson said. We left the office. “I’ll be back to speak to the O.D. later, Sergeant,” Erikson said on his way out the door.
“Are we any better off having to look for Slater all over the base?” I asked Erikson as we climbed into the pickup again.
“You’re not thinking like a military man, Drake,” Erikson said as he shot the pickup down the road. “If any movie screen is going to be saved, you can damn well bet the very first one will be the screen at the officers’ quarters.”
The pickup plowed through the buffeting rain. We passed the White Hats Club and the CPO Club before we came to the Officers’ Open Mess. It was a low, rambling building with a large swimming pool lashed by the rain. Just beyond it was a sloping, fan-shaped concrete slab covered with form-fitting plastic theater seats. A dozen men
