“Gunnar Wolfe, this court has found you guilty. Although you have served your country bravely in the past, your refusal to cooperate in our investigation leaves me no choice than to sentence you to the maximum penalty for your crimes …”
Ten years. Gunnar felt as if he was falling from a precipice. He turned to face Rocky, shocked at her expression. His fiancée actually seemed … relieved.
As they led him away in restraints, only the Bear had the stomach to look him in the eye.
When it comes to assigning the guilty to a correctional facility, the Bureau of Prisons has its own hierarchy. Nonviolent and white-collar offenders are sent to level-one camps—dormitory-style prisons often dubbed “Club Feds.” Medium-security prisons fall into categories two, three, and four, the level of security increasing progressively. Vocational training is emphasized in these institutions, where inmates get their first real “education” about life in prison.
Level-five institutions house the most violent criminals. These are society’s outlaws, the unreformable—career criminals with violent pasts. Sociopaths. Murderers.
Gunnar Wolfe had been accused and convicted of a crime that had given the Defense Department a public black eye. There would be hell to pay, and the former Special Ops guru was going to pick up the tab.
Despite his service to his country, the Bureau of Prisons assigned him to Leavenworth—the oldest, toughest level-five correctional facility in the nation.
First-timers are rarely sent to Leavenworth. Most of the twelve hundred inmates imprisoned there have spent half their lives in other prisons, finally earning their way into the “Hot House.”
As he rode to Leavenworth in the prison van, his last glimpses of the outside world obscured by bars, Gunnar Wolfe realized his life was over. He had lost his country, his comrades, his commanding officer, and the woman he loved; and now, somehow, he had to bury his emotions and toughen up, or be eaten alive.
Gunnar and the other “fish” passed through the yellowed limestone administration building in leg irons and tether chains, the “black box” severely limiting their movements. When entering a maximum-security prison, an inmate has an immediate decision to make. Will he allow himself to be used and abused? Is he willing to fight? Every move, every expression, every action or reaction is scrutinized.
As the electronic gate closed behind him, the farm boy from Pennsylvania didn’t care if he lived or died.
Leavenworth is composed of four cellblocks and a center hall that connect to a main rotunda like spokes on a wheel. The hellhole prison sits on twenty-two acres, and is surrounded by a four-foot-thick brick wall, which rises thirty-five feet above the yard and descends thirty-five feet below it. Strategically placed atop the wall are six gun towers.
Within the yard are basketball courts, tennis courts, a weight-lifting pit, and other recreational fields. The prison hospital and disciplinary unit (hole), as well as the four-story UNICOR building (housing a textile shop, furniture factory, and printing plant) can also be found there.
Seventy percent of the inmates at Leavenworth are assigned to two-man cells. Pulling a few strings of his own, the Bear artfully arranged to get Gunnar into a single cell, a status usually reserved for protective custody, medical reasons, or inmates too violent to have a cellmate. It would be the last break Gunnar would get for years to come.
Like most maximum-security prisons, Leavenworth is a concrete jungle. Prisoners have a wolf-pack mentality, body language often determining the difference between predator and prey. Cons, like beasts, herd themselves along racial and ethnic lines.
At the top of the food chain are the gangs, classified by law-enforcement personnel as Security Risk Groups. Latin Kings, Muslims, Crypts, Bloods, Aryan Brotherhood, La Cuestra Nuestra Familia (the Mexican Maha)—all well-organized groups, motivated by the desire to survive and the spoils of illegal prison activities.
Then there are the “wanna-bes,” individuals in the protracted process of seeking formal gang membership. Those convicts are often linked to the most violent prison yard episodes as they attempt to impress their recruiters.
Drifting through the jungle like solitary rabid animals are the sociopaths and psychos. You never knew when one of these lifers might slip out of his twilight zone and attack. Look at one of them the wrong way during breakfast, and you could find a shiv in your belly before lunch.
Like the jungle, prison has an unwritten code for survival. Leave your cell in the morning and you enter a world where it is take or be taken, kill or be killed, never knowing for sure if you will return to the relative safety of each night’s lockdown.
Every movement watched. Every weakness probed. Society’s worst predators, always evaluating, instinctively separating the strong from the weak, the focused from the distracted.
Though an elite physical specimen and highly trained fighter with a hundred different killing reflexes, Gunnar entered Leavenworth Prison an emotional wreck, his self-identity gone, the injustice of his situation, combined with years of guilt from his actions in the field robbing him of his will to survive. Severely depressed, he drifted through his first hours of hell like a zombie.
He might as well have been a bleeding fish tossed into a swimming pool full of sharks.
Gunnar’s first “mud check” happened during his second day. Inmates at Leavenworth are permitted to roam the yard relatively unchecked. Anthony Barnes was a lifer, a “J-Cat” (needing mental treatment) doing 104 years for kidnapping and murder. He had just been transferred to Leavenworth after spending eighteen years at the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut, where he had killed three inmates; two because they were black, one because the man had made the mistake of refusing him sexually. Barnes was being actively recruited by the Aryan Brotherhood, one of the most savage of the white prison gangs. Before gaining his lifetime membership to the AB, he was required to “make his bones”—killing another person targeted for death by the “Commission.”
The Commission had targeted Gunnar.
It is unusual for the Aryan Brotherhood to go after Whites, but tensions between the AB and the Muslims had been rising of late, and the outnumbered Aryan Brotherhood were not looking for a war, they just wanted to end “soldier boy’s” misery before their Black and Hispanic rivals could get to him—
—killing him out of “kindness.”
The eyes of the jungle watched as Gunnar walked the yard, his mind doing “hard time,” his psyche unable to come to grips with the sudden reality of a prison sentence too unfair to accept, too long to imagine. As Barnes approached, the other road dogs instinctively backed off, leaving the new inmate on his own.
The shank in Barnes’s hand was an eight-inch piece of metal, ingeniously taken with great patience from the back of a radio. One end, ground against cement, was as sharp as a razor. The other end was wrapped in cloth for a firm grip by hands that had crushed many a throat.
His mind preoccupied, Gunnar never saw the man coming. Only when the blade penetrated his lower back—millimeters from a classic kidney stab, did Gunnar’s commando instincts finally take over.
Ignoring pain that would paralyze a normal man, Gunnar pivoted to face his assailant. Looping his left arm over and around both of Barnes’s arms, he pinned them in a viselike grip while the heel of his free hand exploded into the convict’s face, shattering his occipital bone. Passing on the temptation to crush the larynx, Gunnar opted to slam his shoe sideways against the medial section of his attacker’s right knee, tearing the collateral and cruciate ligaments from the bone, crippling his would-be assassin.
From that day forward, the former Ranger was regarded as a convict, a prisoner who was to be respected. A week’s stay in the hospital was followed by the mandatory twenty days in the hole.