The pirates all but dragged him out onto a sturdy tree branch, where a plank landing had been constructed, the only point of access to the suspended holding cell. He was pushed into a haphazardly constructed cage of wooden bars tied with hemp rope and already dangerously overcrowded with half-naked native hostages. Before he could pick himself up, the cage was pushed away from the tree branch and allowed to swing over a pit of crocodiles that waited lazily, mouths frozen open it seemed, thirty feet below.
Crocodiles, thought Dodge, adding the information to his escape plan without a hint of trepidation. More important to him at this moment was the possibility of finding allies among his fellow captives. After the pirates had moved off, he addressed the group. “Anyone here speak English?”
The hostages had barely stirred upon his arrival. They were battered and emaciated; it wasn’t too hard to believe that Krieger had deprived them of food and water since dragging them off from the mission nearly two days previously. One young man perked up at the sound of his voice. “Anglais? Non. Parlez vous francais?”
Dodge understood that much, but no more. He shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t parlez francais, so this is going to be a little harder than I thought. We’re going to escape, okay? Um, liberte?”
He didn’t know if that was the right word, but several more heads turned when he said it. The young man shook his head and pointed at the ravenous beasts below. “Les crocodiles.”
He gave the young man a comforting smile, as a parent might a frightened child. “You let me worry about the crocodiles.”
He already had the beginnings of a plan that would get them as far as the jungle. The voracious reptiles were key to that scheme; or rather their captors’ belief that the mere threat of being eaten alive would keep anyone from attempting to break through the prison bars. The pirates would trust their scaly watchdogs to do the real work of guarding the prisoners, and their initial response to any perceived escape effort would be slow and unenthusiastic. With luck, that would buy them enough time to swim around the palisade barrier and gain concealment in the forest. From there, he could lead them to Marten’s boat, which hopefully was still stranded on the marshy bank. The plan was a good one, if hasty, but he wondered how many of his haggard cellmates would survive to its conclusion.
On the river below, the airplane engine turned over and began to roar. Dodge craned his head around to observe the Grumman JF “Duck” as it taxied into open water and then charged skyward. The little single-engine biplane looked a lot more at home on the river than the enormous X-314 had, and that image brought a pang of sadness, particularly when he thought about the fiery-haired pilot whose kiss still lingered on his lips. He knew he would see Hurricane again; somehow, he couldn’t imagine a world without the giant Hurley, but Molly’s impression on his life had been too brief to leave him with that kind of confidence. Instead, he was filled only with fear and dread concerning her fate.
Forcing the dire predictions from his mind, he turned back to the other captives, focusing primarily on the young man that had spoken. He touched a palm to his chest and spoke his name.
The man nodded and mimicked his actions. “Claude.”
“Okay, Claude… and the rest of you, too. Here’s what we’re going to do.” Using pantomime, he demonstrated his plan. When he got to the part where they all fled into the jungle however, Claude snared his wrist and shook his head emphatically.
“Notre femmes.”
Dodge blinked uncomprehending, then emphatically repeated himself. Claude shook his head, and then turned to the other men who had begun to take more interest in the exchange. He spoke rapidly in a language that sounded nothing like French to Dodge’s unskilled ears, and a few of the prisoners nodded sympathetically. More words in the unusual tongue passed between them, then Claude abruptly turned back to Dodge, an anxious but eager smile on his bruised visage.
“That settles it then,” Dodge announced. “And no time like the present.”
He had actually debated waiting until nightfall, but thought better of it. Any advantage afforded by darkness would be offset by the inherent peril of traversing the jungle in pitch black. The pirates were certainly as tired as Dodge, having spent a night trekking through the forest and boating upriver, and the lassitude borne of confidence in static security measures— namely the crocodile pit below the hanging cage — would make them slow to react to any disturbance. Or at least that was what Dodge was going to bet his life on.
He gazed up at the rope connecting them to the tree limb. The hemp was swollen with moisture, impossible to untie given the load it bore, but showed signs of rot and fraying. Dodge once again cursed his shortsightedness in failing to acquire a pocketknife; he was going to have to do this the hard way.
He turned his eyes to the bars running vertically down the sides of the cage. All of them were fashioned from thin but mostly straight tree branches. The rough bark had already sloughed away, leaving gray weathered wood, likewise bound with twine. He selected one at random and gave it a sharp kick. The entire structure shuddered and started to spin, but there was no turning back. A lone pirate roaming below had already raised his eyes to observe the strange behavior of the captives.
The near ancient pole fractured on his fifth kick, splitting down nearly half its length as it broke in two. Dodge wrenched the longer section loose, initiating a second round of vibrations that prompted his fellow prisoners to clutch at the remaining bars. The crocodiles below seemed to sense that something was afoot; the long black reptiles began rolling around in their enclosure, gaping their jaws skyward in anticipation. Dodge decided not to disappoint them.
“Get ready!”
Using the broken branch like a saw, he began rubbing it vigorously across the single rope that held them fast to the tree branch. The fibrous line yielded quickly to the friction and in a few moments the remaining strands, stretched to their breaking point, snapped in two and the cage plummeted.
At the last instant before the break, Dodge and his new friends grasped the overhead bars and lifted their feet off the lattice-like floor. When their prison abruptly dropped more than three stories into the crocodile pit, they were spared the initial impact, but the reprieve was infinitesimally brief. Instead of taking the crash landing on their feet, it was their hands and arms that blossomed with pain as the full weight of their falling bodies hit the stopping point.
The cage’s flimsy construction alleviated some of the burden however. It did so by disintegrating. When it hit the shallow pool full of ravenous crocs, some of the kinetic energy was absorbed by its collapse. The crocodiles were stunned by the unexpected crash, but their leathery hides spared them mortal injury, and after an initial moment of animal panic, they regained their voracious ferocity. That moment was enough however for Dodge and the others to wrestle free of the wreckage and escape the death trap.
Dodge gripped the length of wood and brandished it like a sword as he splashed out of the pit and onto solid ground. The pirate sentry was still staring in stunned disbelief, but his body language revealed a conflict of priorities — sound the alarm, or take action to halt the escape? Dodge knew that he had only seconds to prevent the man from doing either, and as the fellow clutched at his holstered sidearm, a swipe from the cudgel eliminated both threats simultaneously. By that time however, the commotion had alerted the entire camp. Dodge wheeled on his compatriots and pointed toward the river. “Swim for it!”