This was a familiar project to Albert Weiss. He had made his first radio receiver at age ten and his first transmitter at twelve. The most effective jammer was simply a more powerful radio transmitter working on a particular band. He had gone to college at Florida State to become an electrical engineer and learned to complete much more complex and difficult projects.

He had built his transmitter as a clone of the walkie-talkies the guards used. He had started with some experimental work. Two-way radios intended for recreational use could be tuned to a wide variety of channels, but the pro models worked only on certain channels on reserved frequencies. Once he had made a crude, toy-like receiver, he had used it to find and listen to the frequencies and channels the guards’ radios used. Next, he simply built a more powerful radio transmitter that could transmit on the same ones.

Over several months Weiss had assigned other inmates to use their cassette recorders to record the voices of guards walking up and down the cellblocks talking into their radios. He had used three recorders so there were at least three different sets of guards talking simultaneously on his master tape, all of them using standard prison radio codes and jargon. Some of them were from the night shift, so there would be familiar voices among them.

When Humphry turned on his handheld radio in the Operations room, what he heard was a powerful transmission of several voices talking simultaneously about routine operations, emergencies, questions, observations, and things that took place months ago or days ago. Some voices were mumbled or slurred, others loud and insistent, but no speech was comprehensible beyond three or four words. Humphry tried to break in by pressing his talk button several times and speaking. He tried saying, “This is Operations,” and then, “This is Captain Humphry,” but nothing interrupted the flood of words. He tried switching to the first alternative channel, but there was the same cascade of meaningless chatter. The second alternative channel was the same. He set the radio back on the console. “Now the radio system is screwed up too. Did we take a lightning strike or something?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

The arsenal had no markings on its door, and no inmate was ever allowed on the corridor where it was located. Plenty of inmates probably didn’t know it existed. The key that the man wearing the sergeant’s stripes carried wouldn’t open the steel door. The only key that worked was kept in the Operations section in the warden’s desk. The steel door was too sturdy to be battered in by force, so the man in the sergeant’s uniform said, “Go get Joe Lambert and tell him to bring the thermite.” One man went and the other two got busy cutting off the electrical feed to the security cameras.