Without saying anything else to the pair of them, Graf turned and walked back to the waiting car. All but two of the armed men went with them. With Taylor and Whitaker unarmed and in handcuffs, they must not have seen the pair as any kind of threat.
They knelt there quietly for several minutes, waiting. Eventually, boredom got the better of the guards, who began talking to each other in German, taking their attention away from Whitaker and Taylor.
“Sorry,” Whitaker whispered. “I froze and couldn’t come up with somewhere fake to send him. I had to say something, so I told him the real location.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. Even with everything we’ve gotten, the journal was still the most likely bit of proof that ties everything together. Without it, we can’t show why Graf was asked to kill Frieda. We’re already weak on evidence. If we want to get out of this, we need that journal.”
“Well then, I guess we’re going to have to go get it.”
“How? I’m all out of ideas, here.”
“We could...” Taylor started to say before he was stopped by a rifle butt smacking him in the back of his head.
“Quiet,” the guard behind Taylor said, stepping closer to Taylor.
Taylor managed to not fall forward on his face, but just barely. He was lucky the guy hadn’t gone all out with the reminder to be quiet. Rifles make fairly effective clubs, and the guard could have knocked Taylor out if he'd wanted to. It was probably only Graf’s instructions that kept them from being more brutal. If they wanted to make this look like a legal arrest that went sideways when Taylor and Whitaker tried to escape, they couldn’t afford for the pair to be beaten to a pulp first. Not if they wanted to make the escape attempt look believable.
That all worked out in Taylor’s favor. Although his head now hurt like hell, this was the moment he’d been waiting for. He fell forward, pulling a leg up to keep from falling over. Instead of kneeling on two knees, he was now up on one bent leg and one knee.
The trick his friend had taught him about positioning his wrist to make room in the handcuff hadn’t been about comfort when being arrested. It had been step one in how to escape from handcuffs, which is why several of the guys in his unit had tried to learn it. Working in remote places with not always trustworthy locals, there was still a chance someone would try to detain them, and this would be a trick that could save their lives. It turns out that was now coming true, in a manner of speaking.
The first step, adjusting the wrists to make room in the handcuffs, was the easiest step and have the person cuffing you properly secure the cuffs to keep you from making them looser than they should be.
The next one always sucked, which is why Taylor had only tried it once or twice. Step two required him to dislocate or break his thumb since he wasn’t double-jointed. Breaking the thumb was the easiest way, since dislocating the joint wrong would break the bones there regardless. It would also put that hand out of commission for a while. Dislocating was harder, but a doctor would be able to put it back in place fairly easily. The downside of trying to dislocate your own thumb was the possibility of dislocating the first CMC joint at the base of the thumb instead. If he did that, he’d need either a cast for six weeks or surgery to correct the damage. With everything still left to deal with, Taylor couldn’t afford any of those other outcomes.
Still, the chance for this moment was why he’d set up his left hand as the one he was going to try and slip the cuffs with. If things went wrong, he’d still have his shooting hand, which he was going to need. Taylor folded his thumb inside his palm and then closed his fingers around it. Squeezing hard with his fingers using pressure pushing away from the base of the thumb, Taylor pulled his thumb until he felt a pop, followed by what felt like a bolt of lightning as pain seared its way up his arm.
He clenched his teeth, holding back the scream that wanted to come out. The whole motion had taken seconds, and the guard was already starting to turn his attention back to his buddy. Taylor couldn’t afford to draw attention to himself. Even with the now dislocated thumb, he would still need a minute to pull his hand out of the cuff, which would entail some thrashing. If the guard was paying attention, it wouldn’t be that hard to stop Taylor if he’d wanted to.
Thankfully, Whitaker had been paying attention. She didn’t know about his thumb trick for getting out of handcuffs, since he’d never expected to need to use that particular skill and it had never come up. She did know Taylor well enough to know when he was up to something.
“You son of a bitch,” she said, trying to half stand, only to get pushed back down again by the guard next to her. “I’ll rip your goddam balls off.”
She then let loose with one of the vilest strings of expletives that Taylor had ever heard. A small part of his brain not needed for getting out of the cuffs was mildly impressed. He was hard-pressed to think of any moment, even in the service, where someone used such colorful language so expertly.
It did the trick, though. Both men had stopped moving, standing still as they watched Whitaker near foaming
