Strangers

beautiful Jenny Mae Alexander, a freshfaced young bride.
        Incarcerated in that Central American prison, he had been sustained by the knowledge that Jenny waited at home for him, missed him, worried about him, and prayed each night for his safe return. Throughout his ordeal of torture and periodic starvation, he had clung to the hope that he would one day feel Jenny's arms around him and hear her marvelous laugh. That hope had kept him alive and sane.
        Of the four captured Rangers, only Jack and his buddy Oscar Weston survived and came home, though their escape was a near thing. They had waited almost a year to be rescued, confident that their country would not leave them to rot. Sometimes they debated whether they would be freed by commandos or through diplomatic channels. After eleven months, they still believed their countrymen would bail them out, but they no longer dared to wait. They had lost weight and were dangerously thin, undernourished. They had also suffered unknown tropical fevers without treatment, which had further debilitated them.
        Their only opportunity for escape was during one of their regular visits to the People's Center for Justice. Every four weeks, Jack and Oscar had been taken from their cells and driven to the People's Center - a clean, well-lighted, un-walled, unbarred institution in the heart of the capital - a model prison meant to impress foreign journalists with the current regime's humanitarianism. There, they were given showers, deloused, put in clean clothes, handcuffed to prevent gesturing, and seated before videotape cameras to be politely questioned. Usually, they answered questions with obscenities or wisecracks. Their answers did not matter because the tape was edited, and answers they had never made were dubbed in by linguists who could speak unaccented English.
        Once the propaganda film had been made, they were interviewed over closed-circuit television by foreign reporters gathered in another room. The camera never provided close-ups of them, and their answers were not heard by those who asked the questions; instead, once again, unseen intelligence men, stationed at another microphone outside the camera's range, answered for them.
        At the start of their eleventh month in captivity, Jack and Oscar began making plans to escape the next time they were transported to that far less secure, less heavily guarded propaganda facility.
        The once-formidable strength of their young bodies had been leached away, and their only weapons were shivs and needles made of rat bones, which they had painstakingly shaped and sharpened by rubbing them against the stone walls of the cells. Wickedly sharp, those instruments nevertheless made pathetic weapons; yet Jack and Oscar hoped to triumph over gun-toting guards.
        Surprisingly, they did triumph. Once- inside the People's Center, they were remanded into the custody of a single guard who escorted them to the showers on the second floor. The guard kept his gun holstered, probably because the facility was a detention center inside the larger detention center of the capital city itself. The guard was certain Jack and Oscar were demoralized, weak, and unarmed, so he was surprised when they suddenly turned on him and, with shocking savagery, stabbed him with the bone shivs they had concealed in their clothes. Pierced twice in the throat, his right eye skewered, he succumbed without producing a scream that might have drawn other police or soldiers.
        Before their break was discovered, Jack and Oscar confiscated the dead guard's handgun and ammunition, then made bold use of the hallways, risking notice, alarm, and capture. But it was, after all, a minimum security "reeducation" center, and they were able to make their way to a stairwell and down to a dimly lighted basement, where they progressed swiftly and stealthily through a series of musty storage rooms. At the end of the building, they found the loading docks and a way out.
        Seven or eight large boxes had just been off-loaded from a delivery truck, which was backed up to the nearest of the two big bays, and the driver was engaged in an argument with another man; both of them were shaking clipboards at each other. Those two were the only men in sight, and as they turned and headed toward a glass-enclosed office, Jack and Oscar raced silently to the recently unloaded boxes and from there into the back of the delivery truck, where