It wasn’t until after the guards finished their inspection that he pulled a chair up to the windows and got his first real look at the surrounding terrain since he had looked out of the window during his hospital stay. The gray-brown mountains in the distance ran north and south, which told him he was looking directly west from his cell.
At that point Bogner sat down on the edge of the table and began to review what he had learned thus far. The airfield, the expanse of tarmac, and the hangars had to be to the east, on the other side of the confinement quarters, out of view. Still, he could tell from the sound of the aircraft both arriving and departing that the airfield was close. If it was that close, the building housing the Nasrat
Pharmaceutical complex was also close by. The switching yards, on the other hand, had to be situated to the north. He could see one set of tracks running parallel to a seldom-used paved road that was briefly visible between two buildings similar to the one where he was being confined.
Bogner wasn’t certain what good the information would do him, but at least he had some idea of what he would find when he finally managed to get outside the building.
All of this brought him to the point where the chess game began. He knew Fahid’s offer was a setup and that Fahid was banking on him both being predictable and at the same time making a mistake. Should he make his move, as Fahid had suggested, when the orderly brought his evening meal — or could he figure out a way to take Fahid by surprise? There was still time.
So far he had determined he had two options, neither of which sounded overly promising. He needed a third. In the first option, the moment he managed to get out of the cell, he bolted for the first door that would get him outside the confinement building. In all probability, that was exactly what Fahid expected him to do. The second obvious option was to get out of the cell but hide somewhere in the building. But that plan had an equally obvious weakness. In a two-story building there weren’t that many places to hide. Fahid could comb the building until he found him. What he needed was a third option, one that was completely unanticipated.
Again he began to review what he knew. The doors were constructed of steel and the walls of rough masonry bricks. Apparently the only people who had keys were the guards. The nurse had been forced to wait until someone unlocked the door for her. The two windows had steel casings and were too narrow for him to crawl through.
The only other opening into the room was the metal grate covering the opening to the ventilation system. It was located in the ceiling, in the center of the room. He hadn’t figured out how, but there was a possibility he could worm his way through the opening and into the vent tunnel. In order to do that, though, he needed something to pry the grate loose.
Bogner started to grin as the idea began to take shape. He had listened carefully to what the two guards did when they finished their inspection of his area. They left and worked their way down the hall, and it was several minutes before he heard them stop and unlock another door to conduct still another inspection. Conclusion number one.
There was no one in the cell adjacent to him. Conclusion number two. If he had the guard’s key, he could get out of his cell and into the adjacent cell. All he needed was something to make the guards believe he had escaped. With that, the second and most important piece of the plan had just tumbled into place. Now, all he had to do was pull it off.
What little daylight there had been coming through the windows had disappeared when Bogner finally heard him coming. With any luck at all the routine would be the same. There would be a guard and there would be a cart. The guard would unlock the door, open it, take a metal container off the cart, walk into the room, and set the container on the table. Bogner would then be informed he had approximately fifteen minutes to finish. At that point the guard would turn, walk out, lock the door from the outside, and proceed to the next occupied cell.
Fortunately for Bogner, the sequence played out pretty much as he hoped it would. The guard was the same one who had brought his meal in the morning. Compared to the two that had conducted the inspection, this one was obviously not one of Fahid’s finest. He shuffled into the room, set the tin container on the table, gestured at his watch, and left. By the time Bogner heard the door lock he had already opened the canister, removed the utensils, crawled up on the table, and was using the blade of the knife to loosen the screws on the cover to the vent. He laid the vent on the table, peeled out of the camouflage uniform top Jahin had given him, and began to unwrap the gauze the nurse had used to cover the bullet wound in his left arm. Then he laced the gauze back and forth through one of the openings in the center of the grate, lifted it back into place, tightened the screws just enough to hold it in place, and waited.
The stage was set when he heard the guard returning.
At the last minute he placed the lid of the food container close to the edge of the table, spilled some of the canister’s contents onto the tin plate, and waited. He sat down at the table with his back facing the door, then heard the key in the lock, the door open, and the guard’s footsteps as he crossed the room. Bogner held his breath — this was it — the next twenty seconds were going to determine whether he faced Fahid’s firing squad or pulled off a scheme that in all probability had less than one chance in ten of succeeding.
Bogner knew the guard was as close as he was going to get, so he bumped the table with his knee and the canister lid clattered to the floor. Some272 where, sometime, an Iraqi mother had trained her son well; the guard bent over to pick up the lid-one of the irrefutable laws of physics — an action and a reaction. Bogner sprang to his feet and before the guard could react, Bogner had leaped on him, encircled the man’s neck with his wounded left arm, shoved his knee into the small of his back, pulled him backward, grabbed his face with his right hand, and jerked. There was a ugly, semi-muted cracking sound, followed by a series of maniacal gulps for air before Bogner jerked the second time and released his grip. The guard’s final protest was manifested by a series of momentary twitches. When he slumped to the floor, his neck was broken.
Bogner reeled backward with pain shooting up his left arm. He realized now that if the man had been able to put up any kind of resistance at all, he might not have been able to pull it off. He bent down, removed the guard’s watch and the cartridge belt with the aux pack, pulled off his jacket, and searched through his pockets until he found his keys. Bogner took a deep breath; phase two had worked even better than phase one.
He paused just long enough to regain his equilibrium, picked the man up, and lifted him from the floor to the table. Bogner knew that as weak as he was, this was going to be the hardest part of all. He crawled back up on the table, straddled his victim, released the grate over the vent for a second time, picked up the guard, strained, and finally managed to get the man’s head and shoulders through the opening. After that the task became even more difficult. Every article of the man’s clothing seemed somehow destined to catch on the edges of the vent system. Bogner t continued to lift and push until the hips were through — but he could feel his arm throbbing and he was getting both weaker and more unsteady as he struggled. The last hurdle was the feet. Bogner could feel the sweat running down his face as he pushed the man’s body further into the vent system.
He gave the body one final shove, and realized he had it far enough in that he could put the vent grate back in place. He tied one end of the gauze around the man’s boot and pulled the gauze knot into full view so it would appear that he had crawled into the ventilation system and pulled the vent up and into place after him.