2954-10-14 – Tales from the Service: The Inside Job
There have been some questions as to when this account claims to have taken place. From clues in the message it was provided in, it seems these events took place before Håkøya was fully liberated, perhaps midway through the ground campaign, when there remained a remote possibility of Incarnation prisoner breaks.
McCallum never got his chance, as it transpired. When Prisoner 5514043 made her move, neither he nor Sorab Bokori were on duty.
They heard about it over coffee in the guardhouse the next morning from the outgoing shift, while the camp brass paced outside the fence trying to appear like they were on top of the situation. Late the previous night, a group of POWs had engaged in a loud brawl in one of the barracks buildings, prompting guards to rush in and break up the melee.
Whether this was spontaneous or part of an escape conspiracy was yet to be determined, but what was known was that while most eyes in the guard towers were diverted toward the bright lights and commotion, '43 had made a breach in the electrified wire below the north corner guardpost and made a dash for the trees.
Search parties were dispatched, of course, but these were given strict instructions not to tangle with the prisoner, at least not yet. An escapee who returned to the camp telling stories of the trackless forest would be a beneficial force in the camp, after all.
As it turned out, Sorab and McCallum pulled duty in the north tower, and so their first assignment of the day was to repair the breach in the wire in their sector. This was a simple matter of pulling out the slotted boards the prisoner had used to lever the lowest wires off the ground and re-tensioning the lattice to make such an escape far more diffucult the next time. A few prisoners watched them work through the loose screen of guards who'd rushed the escape point inside the camp and prevented anyone from following the first escapee.
As their work was finished, Sorab studied the ground outside the wire. The first five yards or so were a mass of muddy soil, cleared of all but the smallest plants to deny a creeping escapee any cover. A line of prints ran quite clearly from the breach toward the trees. It was all very cut and dry, but there was something about it that bothered him.
"Problem?" McCallum prodded Sorab with the tensioning spanner. "Come on, let's get topside."
Five minutes later, they were sitting in the tower, sipping more coffee and watching the harsh blue-white orb of Håkøya's stellar parent creep over the hills to the west, sending long, stark shadows through the prisoner enclosure. The camp commandant's voice was droning over the loudspeakers, probably discussing the probable fate of '43 for those who were still within the wire, but it was unlikely that any of the prisoners were listening any harder than the guards.
Sorab's mind was on the escape itself. Since the guard towers' bulletproof glass walls were slanted outwards, he could lean out of his chair a little bit and see down to that trail of footprints. He saw now what had been bothering him when he saw them on the ground – the escapee hadn't cut the quickest route out from the wire to the trees. Instead, she'd gone slantwise across the five meter cleared zone, nearly doubling her time in the open. That made no sense. When every millisecond was crucial, why waste multiple seconds like that?
McCallum saw Sorab's attention wandering to matters outside the camp. "The runner's not our problem, Bokori." He chuckled. "Damned good for her she's not, too."
"There's something weird about the whole thing." Sorab frowned. "Seems too cut and dry for me."
"That one's been looking for a way out since she got here. You've been watching her like a hawk for a week and a half." McCallum threw up his hands. "Now everyone can see you were right, and you won't accept it?"
"I was right. But what about the motion alarms? Should have tripped the moment she started mucking with the wire, and she couldn't have known about them. We haven't had a perimeter alarm since that group came in." The alarms, tied to the electrified wires, were so sensitive that sometimes even a strong wind would set them off.
"How do you know she didn't overhear something? Anyway, with that brawl, she had time to work those boards in slow enough not to set anything off."
"Maybe." Sorab's frown deepened. "Why run slantwise across the open ground, though?" He gestured down at the prints below. "The outer sensors would have tripped by that point, and that gives whoever's up here plenty of time to see them."
McCallum leaned over Sorab to look at the line of prints. "Yeah, that looks pretty dumb. But she got out clean, right?"
Sorab said nothing, waiting for the gears to turn in his compatriot's head.
"Right?" McCallum said again, less convincingly.
"Whoever was up here wasn't as keen on taking the shot as you." Sorab stood up. "Think you can hold things here for a few minutes? I want to go down there and have a look around."
McCallum grunted. "You know that's not our job."
"Probably not. I was right once. Let's hope I'm not two for two."
