“Nothing went off,” said one of the men from the tower. “It was coming in through the vent.”

The uniformed prisoner opened the door to the stairwell and ushered them inside. He knew that there were inmates with strangling cords, backed up by his partner with the rifle in case things went wrong.

By the time his partner emerged from the stairwell, he had the door of the tower propped fully open and the ventilator fans turned on high and clearing the air of the poison he had sprayed in.

In the stairwell, the inmates who had strangled the two men from the north tower were busy dressing two prisoners in their uniforms. At the same time, other prisoners were executing identical attacks on the southwest tower and the southeast tower; the four guards stationed there were killed and their uniforms taken. The three towers yielded six rifles with scopes, 2,100 rounds of ammunition for them, six more expandable batons, and six more tear gas–and–pepper spray canisters. There were now sixteen armed prisoners dressed in guard uniforms.

3

Captain Humphry was worried. The seven-man trouble team that had gone out twenty-eight minutes ago had not returned. He left his desk and went out to the Operations room where Paul Scott was watching the monitors. “Have you been able to bring up C Block yet?”

“Yes. It looks like there may have been some kind of power glitch. It looks all quiet there, with all the inmates in their cells and nobody fighting or anything.”

“Do you see the trouble team?”

“There hasn’t been any sign of them since the visual came back. They could have taken somebody out of the block to the infirmary or isolation. Turning off the power for a minute or two could have been a part of that.”

Captain Humphry lifted one of the handheld radios from the counter and pressed the talk button.

It was too late to use the radio. An inmate named Albert Weiss, a life-sentence offender from Florida, had already turned on an electrical device he had made in his cell over the past few months. He could have done the work in a few hours if he’d had the proper parts delivered in a single order from an electronics supply distributer. Instead he’d had to get other prisoners to let him take apart their radios and various other possessions, and to ask their relatives to send other approved items he could cannibalize. He had also taken pieces from many devices in the prison—television sets, toasters, a microwave oven, disc players, and other appliances had all contributed to his radio jammer.