The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 1: The Choir Boy

He should have been more careful. What was the saying in all the propaganda movies? "Loose lips sink ships." But those movies were wrong, too. The femme fatales that seduced secrets out of naïve GI's in those films were Nazi spies. Karen wasn't a Nazi, and she wasn't a spy. She was just a young woman doing what she thought was right.

And Bobby had paid for her choices with his freedom.

Bobby was confident he could escape. He'd memorized the guards' schedules. He knew their patrols down to the second. And he'd identified a window of opportunity at six in the morning.

That's when the night shift ended, an hour before dawn and two hours before reveille. During that period the night guards checked out and the day guards checked in. But that took time. Bobby had determined on average it took the guards twelve and a half minutes to sign their log books, secure their side arms, and pass over the keys.

That was twelve and a half minutes during which no one was on patrol.

That was twelve and a half minutes of empty hallways.

Bobby had also figured out how to pop the lock on his cell door.

Three weeks ago he'd shoved his fingers down his throat and wretched all over his cell. That forced the guards to strip his bunk, mop the floor, and inspect his living space. They left their key in the cell door so as to prevent themselves from getting locked in.

But Bobby had carefully placed a strip of wax paper inside the lock. He'd stolen the wax paper when he was on kitchen duty three days earlier.

The guards had no idea it was there. So when they finished their cell inspection, retrieved their key, and left, Bobby carefully fished the paper out of the lock.

To most people it would have looked like a crumpled bubblegum wrapper.

But Bobby wasn't like most people. His mind didn't see a crumpled piece of paper.

He saw a portrait.

Bobby had carefully un-crumpled the wax paper on the edge of his wash basin. Analyzing each fold, he cut apart the two-dimensional image in his mind, and re-constructed it in his imagination. He puzzled out exactly how the fold lines and, especially, the scratches on the wax, would have been caused by pressure from a foreign object.

It was a meticulous but logical next step to construct the shape and dimensions of that foreign object. It required immense concentration and an almost photographic memory.

Bobby had both of those things.

And when he was finished with the exercise in logic and imagination, he also had something else.

He had a key.

It wasn't the real key, of course. The real key was still attached securely to a guard's chain which was, in turn, attached to that same guard's belt buckle.

But it was a perfect mental facsimile of a key.

It took Bobby three weeks to transform that mental image into a physical object. He used a bed spring, twisting it and bending it over itself, with enough force to make his fingers bleed, night after night.

And tonight he had perfected it.

He hadn't tried it yet...he wouldn't do so until it was actually time to escape. But he was certain it would work.

And that is why he was so certain that he could have escaped a German prisoner of war camp. Even here, in Leavenworth, at one of the most secure prisons in America, Bobby was moments away from freedom.