Escape by Paul Dowswell Page B

terrible, terrible silence there. No one’s allowed to talk, and the guards even wear soft shoes to cut down on the noise. You get just enough food to keep you alive, and that’s it.
    René and I got two years apiece, but sometimes men get five years. That would kill you just as surely as any guillotine or firing squad. I kept sane by tapping messages out to other convicts and chasing the centipedes that infested my cell. I spent a lot of the time in a sleepy daze, dreaming about girls, and countries I could visit, and my childhood.
    I had friends among the convicts who helped clean the block, and they probably saved my life. They smuggled in a coconut every day, and five cigarettes. The coconut kept me healthy, and the cigarettes I rationed out to break up the day. René, he had the same thing, but they found him out a year and a half into his sentence. No coconuts, no cigarettes. Then he got a bad fever and never really recovered. He died just a month before his release date.
    I’ll never forget the day I walked away from that place. After two years in a tiny cell, I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. People talking – that was frightening, especially when they shouted. And big, big wide-open space. It was bewildering. But I came out even more determined to escape.
    This time I was more cautious, and picked my travel companions with a lot more care. After a year I managed to save up enough to join another escape plan. There were five of us this time. We all put up funds for a local fisherman, Bixier des Ages, to take us to Brazil.
    It went really well to start with. Des Ages met us where he said he would, we handed over the money, and off we went down the river. Des Ages was a good sailor, and he’d taken us out to the Atlantic Ocean by dawn of the next day. He seemed OK, very quiet and distant. He just sat there puffing his pipe. Then later on the first morning, he said we’d have to sail near the coast, and navigate through some tricky sand banks.
    As we got to the sand banks, he told us we’d all have to get out and push the boat over a particularly shallow piece of water. So off we got, and immediately sank in the mud up to our knees. No sooner were we all off the boat than des Ages fired up the motor and pulled away a few feet. We all stood there in the water, wondering what on earth was going on.
    Then he went into the cabin and got out a rifle. It was all over so quickly… I remember him quite clearly, standing on the side of the deck, pipe in his mouth, calmly picking us all off, very business-like, a shot a piece. He came to me last, and I just stood there, completely frozen, like a rabbit cornered by a snake. Everything seemed to move very slowly. Everyone around me was dropping in the water, and he pointed the rifle straight at me and his finger squeezed the trigger.
    Nothing happened.
    Des Ages looked a bit rattled then, and he started to fiddle with the bolt on the gun, and curse to himself.
    I turned and waded off as fast as I could through the mud and into the jungle, which came right up to the coast. I expected a bullet in the back of the head at any second, but des Ages must have run out of ammunition. I could hear him laughing. A horrible mocking laugh.
    â€œYou run off, you little maggot,” he yelled. “There’s plenty in the jungle to finish you off.”
    But this time I was lucky. As I made my way along the coast, I came across a rickety raft made from four barrels lashed together around a couple of ladders. Whoever had been using it even left a paddle next to it. I found out soon enough why they’d abandoned it. As I pushed the raft out to sea, intending to drift with the current away from French Guiana, I was quickly surrounded by sharks. But I’d come too far now to stop.
    The sharks circled around me, but they soon got bored and by nightfall I’d almost reached the Brazilian border. There was a small settlement by the