Pelletier was through the door to the cellblock before he saw that the disturbance wasn’t a couple of stupid inmates who had arranged to fight over some insult. It was something else entirely. The steel cell doors on all sides of the semicircular block abruptly opened and three prisoners dashed out of each one and threw themselves on the guards from all directions.

The first two men out tackled the nearest guard, one high and the other low, so the guard was sure to go down. The third piled on and made sure the guard stayed down, using impact, weight, and strength to disable him. In some fights the third man’s dive onto the guard’s torso broke ribs, and in others a guard’s arm would be broken. Within ten seconds all seven guards had been swarmed and put down, but it wasn’t over, because there was a fourth man.

The fourth man carried a ligature made of shoelaces or twine or braided leather attached to a pair of wooden handles. He sat down, slipped the ligature over the guard’s head, braced himself by placing his feet on the guard’s shoulders, and tightened the ligature around the guard’s neck.

The guards of the trouble squad had been chosen for their size, strength, and athleticism, but they were all dead within minutes. As each guard died, his assailants removed his uniform. While one of the inmates put on the guard’s uniform, the others dressed the guard’s body in his prison clothes. They dragged each guard into a cell, lifted him onto a bunk, and arranged him to look as though he were sleeping.

The seven prisoners dressed as guards hurried out the cellblock door to the gate that prevented prisoners from entering the corridors and stairways. Martin Ortega, the one who was now dressed as a sergeant, used a key card to make the gate of iron bars roll aside into the pocket in the wall. He held the card there while Ed Leonard, the first man out after him, reached the hallway side of the gate, took out a screwdriver made from the sharpened handle of a spoon, and removed the screws from a maintenance panel in the wall to reach the electric motor and gears for rolling the heavy gate aside. He tore the wires out of the motor, took out a tube of epoxy cement stolen from the prison repair shop, and jammed the gears by sticking the tube of epoxy cement between them and moving the gate a few inches manually to burst the tube.

Cellblock C was now open and could not be closed again remotely or manually. The seven inmates in guard uniforms moved on, using the same method to jam open the gate at the bottom of the steps to the second tier, the one in the second-tier corridor, and then the one by the third-tier steps.