Martin caidin, p.1
Martin Caidin, page 1
CHAPTER 1
Jake Marden hated the low hill country of north central Florida. He hated the dirt farms and the narrow roads and the marshy land that infested the countryside. He especially hated the town of Starke and nearby Hawthorne and Waldo and Keystone and the rest of the crumbly shitheel burgs with their tourist-hunting cops and dirty gas stations and redneck shacks that the flatheads accepted as restaurants.
He hated all these shitheel towns that lived off the institutions dotting the countryside. The biggest of them all sprawled across more than seventy-thousand acres of scrub pine and weak soil. Camp Blanding. A great flat shitheel military training camp for all sorts of high-firepower maneuvers. He hated Blanding and all it stood for. Because there came those times when the good old U.S. Army loaned its Cobras and other killer choppers and hundreds of armed soldiers, loaned these assholes to the other shitheel institutions of the countryside. The prisons. The hardtime prisons. Correctional institutions, they called them. Bullshit. But you name it and north central Florida had it. The whole fucking countryside was a splattering of incarceration camps.
The worst of them all was Old Millford Prison and it was the worst for a whole bunch of reasons, the primary one being that Jake Marden was a return visitor to The Rock. He'd made a trip before to what the crazy-grin cons called Rock Motel. Jake Marden's first visit had been for shit, but then, nobody ever had a good visit, for Christ's sake. He'd been a lot younger then and he'd been wet behind the ears.
Brilliant, he was. Pure genius in many ways. If they'd measured his IQ they would have stamped his papers with the word GENIUS. The problem for Jake was that he was also as stupid as all get-out. He was brilliant but he didn't have the common sense to pour piss out of a goblet without a roadmap. He also had the malady common to strapping adolescents. He spent half of every day goaded and driven by a crowbar-stiff erection that seemed to propel him from one hour to the next in search of juice-overflowing pussy. Along with outbreaks of zits went his perpetual hard-on and his ability to perform sexually without respite through several hysterical ejaculations. Jake met his match-or his Waterloo, depending upon the side from which one weighed the matter-in a fluffy little thing by the name of Lisa with a wasp waist, outrageously up thrust breasts, and the blessing of nonstop orgasms that thrilled her soul and body whether she performed vaginally or orally. Lisa and Jake appeared locked in a raw sexual embrace of pleasure and combat in which they were both winners, until that moment that Lisa discovered there was more to physical relationships than being dicked. There was that subtle pleasure of power, and noting Jake's reaction to her absence for even a few days led her to her own daring experiments.
If they hadn't been pounding their loins so wildly it would have been a classic case of cocktease. Lisa sniffed with an elevated nasal posture. "Don't you do anything except screw?" she pouted.
"I never hear you complaining," Jake countered. "I'm not complaining. But a girl's gotta' think about her future, y'know."
Jake had never considered Lisa capable of thinking. Except to remember to remove her clothes before he plunged into her. "No, I don't know," he answered. "Jesus, Lisa, what are you talking about?"
"How are we going to live? I mean, on what?" "That's dumb. Real dumb. Like asshole-dumb," he said with open contempt. "You know what my old man's worth." She knew. Millions. But she was also under the tutelage of her mother. Get control now, Lisa. Get control now and you'll control him later.
"What are you worth? Y'know, what can you do? You got all those computer things, I don't understand them, but what good are they?"
He wasn't about to start school instruction with Lisa. What he liked about her head was her lips and tongue and her mouth and the terrific things she could do with that equipment, but he'd never considered that anything worth mentioning might rest between her ears. "I can do plenty," he said, feeling nettled at her unexpected sharpness. What the hell was she after?
"Could you make money with it? The computers, I mean?"
"Shit, yes."
"How?"
"You wouldn't understand."
"Sure I would. What would you do?"
He thought that over. Just outside New Tamiami Airport the Westinghouse corporation had built a sprawling research facility. It was also a main terminus for computer hookup to the rest of Westinghouse, as well as DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It was supposed to have ironclad security, but the people who designed security programs did so for their own ilk, and not streetwise smartasses who were also teenaged electronic geniuses.
"I could make that Westinghouse outfit, you know, down at Tamiami? I could make them pay plenty if I ever got inside."
She laughed at him. At him. She'd never done that before. She teased him and she ridiculed him and he didn't know which would give him more pleasure, fucking her to insensibility or beating her to the same condition. "I'll show you," he said quietly, unaware that those three words had brought more misery to youngsters than any other phrase coined by youth throughout the world.
He and a close friend, Loose Louie, who had a body seemingly composed of flexible rubber and who could squeeze through spaces only a rat should have traversed, broke the security system at the Westinghouse computer center. Louie was an absolute natural for sensing and feeling his way through everything from motion detectors to infrared-activated lasers. He was as adept with alarm systems as Jake Marden was with the main computer systems. They didn't simply break in; that was too clumsy and too prone to failure. They got inside through the contacts of Moishe Green, lawyer for the Marden family, so that Jake and Loose Louie could apply for jobs in the packing and shipping departments of the company. Once inside it didn't take Louie long to plant his equipment and set up his interrupter system on the alarms for the warehouse section of the building. Everything else was like moving down one security domino after another.
Then Jake went to work, installing in hidden places his software trapdoors so that later he could use the computer database system to call in through telephone lines and get just about any information he wanted. Once he accessed the main computer databanks he figured he'd collect some really top secret or sensitive information, present it to their top people, and "sell" what he knew and how he accomplished his task to Westinghouse. Presto; he'd be a hero, Westing-house would be grateful to plug the holes in their security system, he'd get a bucketful of money and then he'd kick Lisa's beautiful ass up and down the street. Besides, with what he'd probably cop from Westinghouse, he figured it was worth at least a hundred Gs, and he was starting to lose interest in Lisa.
It didn't all work out the way he planned. He couldn't get his software to perform the way he expected, because Westinghouse was using advanced systems still foreign to the outside world. With a touch of anger and a bit of hard desperation, Jake went to breaking into the main hardware systems with his own devices. Loose Louie knocked out the security alarms, Jake tied in beautifully to the Westinghouse hardware, and the whole time they were inside half a dozen video cameras, out of sight and using zoom lenses, made a wonderfully sharp recording of the two teenagers.
So instead of copping a hundred grand-and Westing-house, if they hadn't had all that video film, would have been glad to pay off in millions to plug their security gaps-young Jake and his cohort found themselves pissing up a long rope held by the law. Westinghouse had had enough of hackers and meanies and bust-ins and they pressed very hard charges with a very tough bunch of legal eagles. Because federal security contracts were involved there simply wasn't any way out. They found their asses nailed to the wall of the federal courthouse.
It could have been worse. The law gave Jake Marden eight hard years. "Mind your manners, son," said the unkindly judge who had the insipid manner of the lecturer who's holding both the bible and the gun,
"and you can get parole in three years. Get some religion, boy. Read the good book instead of those computers of yours. Three years or eight years. It's worth thinking about, boy."
Right; sure. They sent him to the Rock Motel where the guests waited with nervous, wet lips for fresh meat like Jake Marden. Twenty-three years old, and to the anxious, horny hardtimers the first sight of the kid as he came shuffling in with the heavy chains about his feet was lovely virginal flesh. Places like Old Millford were whorehouses and it was the filthiest and worst-kept secret of the whole goddamn national
prison system. But to Jake Marden the issue was very local, very immediate, because they were bidding for his ass and that beautiful mouth before the guards ever removed the chains and laughingly sent him off to the "wedding chambers."
Jake didn't get out in three years. No way. Being young and spoiled didn't spell an easy or a soft mark.
Jake Marden was anything but. He was a big bastard and in the University of Miami he'd been a top man in just about every sport in the business from football to karate, and he was a skindiver and a skydiver and a boxer and a wrestler and all that crazy stuff. He was also a graduate of Little Havana and some very nasty disputes usually carried out with fists, feet, and knives. For a guy from a nice family he buddied with a lot of nasty scum.
All that barely saved him. Just barely. The Rock's oldtimers with wet lips and hard dicks nailed him in a darkened corridor, four very tough hombres who'd been running the prison system in their wing, and they were all going to enjoy this six-feet-four piece of meat and they promised to fuck his brains out. He fought them, but this was a graduation level a notch above even Little Havana. They were tough as concrete and they chopped him i
body. An ugly face with zits and scars was close against his and grinning while the others held him down and he knew, he absolutely knew, he must not let this happen or he'd be dead inside himself the rest of his life. He couldn't move his hands or his arms or his legs as they held him in a long-practiced vise of muscle, and the only part of him he could move was his head. He heard the animal behind him grunting at the edge of violent anal penetration and with everything he had left, with his last ounce of strength, he let himself go mad and he lunged forward with his shoulders and his head just enough to reach the zits and scars before him with his teeth.
They didn't expect that. The ugly face smiled and twisted his ears to hold him for a violent kiss and Jake opened his mouth and he screamed and his teeth came down like those of a pit bull, clamping against the lower lips of the subhuman before him, and with the madness upon him Jake ground his teeth together and twisted his own head violently. They heard the scream echoing down the darkened corridor and along the cell blocks. They'd heard that primal scream before and the older prisoners smiled without humor. Screams are old shit in the jungle. They didn't know it was different this time.
The animal jerked backwards with the savaging of his mouth and Jake shook his head like a starving shark holding a great chunk of bloody lips and chin and cheek in his teeth. Hot blood splashed everywhere and Jake yielded to the madness, no longer caring if he lived or died. He hardly felt the nails raking his scrotum as his shoulders, now free, swung around and he got one hand loose so he could jab out with his thumb. He knew this bullshit of fists and punching would only get him raped and maybe killed and his thumb stabbed deep into an eyesocket. He clamped his fingers along the side of the head, grinding into the temple and the eyeball popped out like a great dead white grape trailing slivers of flesh and mucous and more spraying blood and there was a hell of a lot more screaming.
Jake took a foot in the mouth and he felt teeth loosen and he grinned when his own lips split with the blow, because now he had his other hand free and it snapped forward, a striking rattler of hooked bone and nails. Forefinger and middle finger hooked upward into the nostrils of another face and when he felt skin split and sensitive bones breaking he twisted his hand with all his might. With full maniacal strength he twisted the nose completely away from the face.
He didn't bother listening to the terrible shriek. There was still one left, that animal with the tremendous hard-on about to ravage him. The bastard also had a long shiv in his right hand and it came expertly at Jake. He knew he must accept the cut to gain final advantage. His left arm came up to take the blade but the rest of him was inside the swinging arc of the knife. His right hand went down and forward, hooked and rigid as a great claw and he grasped that hard-on and tightened his fingers and in a single snapping downward motion jerked his hand toward himself.
They talked for years about that moment. No one had ever seen a man's dick de-skinned in a single incredible wet snap!
Gasping with the pain now embracing him, Jake tore the blade loose from his arm and flung it away. He
dragged shorts and pants back to his waist and staggered down the corridor. He stopped before stunned guards, swaying, but still on his feet and covered with blood. "Where's my fucking cell?" he rasped in a voice he barely recognized. The blow to his throat would damage him forever and he would always talk in that angry, rasping sound. Without a word, two guards opened the cellblock door and led him to a cell. He stumbled inside, squeezing his arm to stem the pulsing blood and he eased in terrible pain to the floor, back to the wall, staring upward with great unblinking eyes. "Get the fuck outta' here," he snarled.
The guards were gone. Red haze and rushing darkness toyed with his brain. He looked up into a black face. "Don't fight me," the voice in the black face said from a hundred miles away. "I'm gonna' help you."
Jake nodded and yielded to hands that had fixed many a torn body. He didn't sleep that night. He didn't sleep for three days and for three nights, and the black man, this Sergeant Jubal Bailey whose name he didn't even know yet, guarded him, fed him water and soup. By the time Jake lapsed into sleep the legend was full-blown.
No one ever touched him. Not ever. No one tried. He'd been tested and against all odds, against all reason, he not only survived his savage welcome, but had whipped his tormentors. The man whose face had been torn away died and another spoke forever in a wet, lisping drivel because his face was permanent hamburger. Another was blind in one eye. The last man, the one whose dick he'd de-skinned, stumbled along the cellblock corridor, screaming, until the guards slapped him with a club on the side of his head and strapped him onto an iron cot in the infirmary where he slowly regained penile skin but never his sanity.
On the fifth day he saw the black face clearly. "Who the hell are you?" Jake asked through a throat still clogged with pain.
"Bailey. Sergeant Jubal Bailey. I'm the head nigger, the head man, the head everything on this cellblock and I've been feeding you and taking care of you like a little white baby since you got in here. Man, you look like shit."
Jake blinked. Thoughts whirled through him. Thinking was coming back. Realization; rational thinking.
No shit talk anymore. "You saved my life," he said to Sergeant Jubal Bailey.
"Yeah. By the way, call me Jube. You earned it."
"Earned it?"
"Yeah. The scum here call me Mister Bailey. I am a very large, very mean, very dangerous motherfucker.
You better get up. The warden wants you for a parade in his office."
He stood in manacles between four guards before the unblinking old hollow eyes of Herbert J. Spunt, longtime warden and shitheel master of Old Millford Prison. Herbert J. Spunt didn't have much of a chin.
His lower lip was almost blue in color and it seemed to flow right down the turkey-like skin of his throat and bunched up around his Adam's apple. He had wet lips and thin hair and eyes that were cold and pitiless. "You're a mess," Spunt said. "And you smell. Very badly."
Jake stood before the desk, weaving slightly, missing teeth, his face bruised and his lips hugely scabbed, his arm a giant throb of pain and his scrotum slowly grinding knives in his lower belly, but his brain worked and he pushed aside any stupid ego. "Yes, sir," he said and not a word more. Colorless eyes widened in Spunt's face. No games here today.
"You want the whole story or just the decision, Marden?" Nothing personal. The warden talking to one more useless piece of human shit. If Spunt got crap he dished out terrible punishment. If he got cooperation he went easy. Simple rules.
Spunt looked at the lead guard. "In the hole for a month. Bread and water. Get him out of here. Then send some men in here and fumigate this place." A hand moved limply. "Take him away."
Jake didn't think he'd live out the month. No infirmary. No antibiotics. No decent food. The poison was already in his arm. By the time the month passed it could rot right down to the bone. He sat in his cocoon of pain in the dark cell on the cold and unyielding floor. They shoved a tin cup of water and a chunk of bread through the sliding plate at the bottom of the cell door. Fuck you, Jake said to nobody and everybody. "Eat the fucking bread," his own voice said aloud to him.
That same night the plate slid back. A muffled voice came through. "You still alive?"
"Yeah." Jake was already a different person. He didn't waste his words anymore.
"There's hot food on the floor. Eat it slowly. There's sulfa powder and penicillin tablets. Take them."
"Who the hell are you?"
He recognized Bailey's voice. "God. I'm God," Bailey said. "Don't forget it. I'm your survival, your redemption." The metal plate thumped back into place and the voice was gone. In the darkness Jake ate like an animal with his fingers. He took the antibiotics. He tore open the sulfa powder package with the teeth still together on one side of his face and by feel sprinkled it on the festering arm wound. ,£j A week later, for the first time in a week, he neard Bailey's voice again. "You exercising yet?"
"What?"
"Don't go mind-dumb on me, you asshole. Start exercising. You want to live, you exercise. Otherwise the Hole will beat your white ass." The plate thumped.
