Not knowing the prison’s routine, he decided it best to wait for a while before making his move. It would also allow him some time to recover from the beating. The first part of the operation, hijacking the truck carrying the real Ivan Karnov, had gone off without a hitch. The two drivers and their prisoner were trussed up in an abandoned house at a largely forgotten port town that was the closest to the prison.

When this op was over, a call would be placed to the village’s authorities, and Karnov would once again be headed to whatever fate awaited him here.

The second part, getting smuggled into the prison, had gone as well as to be expected. It was the third phase that gave Cabrillo pause. Max Hanley, Cabrillo’s closest friend, second-in-command of their 550-foot freighter Oregon, and all-around curmudgeon, would call it insane.

But that’s what Juan Cabrillo and his team did on a routine basis—pull off the impossible for the right reasons. And the right price.

And while this mission had a personal component for Cabrillo, he wasn’t above accepting the rest of the twenty-five million dollars they’d been guaranteed.

Over the next thirty-six, frigid hours, Cabrillo figured out the routine for solitary confinement. There wasn’t much to it.

At what he guessed was near noon, the slit at the base of his door was opened and a metal tray with thin gruel and a hunk of black bread the size and consistency of a hand grenade was passed through. He had as much time to eat as it took the jailor to feed the other prisoners on this level and empty the slop buckets the men passed out to him. Judging by the sounds of the guard doing this dreary work, there were six others in solitary. None of the prisoners spoke, which told Cabrillo that if he tried, there would be reprisals.

He remained silent, ignoring the food, and waited. A hairy hand reached back for the tray. The guard muttered, “Suit yourself. The food ain’t gonna get any better,” and the slot slid closed.

Knowing now that no one checked on the men down here other than the once-a-day feeding, Cabrillo set to work. After removing his artificial leg and opening its removable cover, he carefully set his equipment around him. He first used a key to unshackle himself from the irons. The key was a duplicate made from the original the driver carried. Not clanking around like the ghost of Jacob Marley was a relief unto itself. Putting on the shirt and jacket that had been dumped into the cell with him was sublime. Next from the leg came nearly a dozen tubes of a putty-like substance—the key to the whole operation. If this didn’t work as advertised, if Mark Murphy and Eric Stone, Cabrillo’s crackerjack researchers, had messed up, this would be the shortest prison break in history.