Escape from Camp Orken.
The first thing to say is, this book is scary. I wouldn’t want to live in this environment. Camp Orken, (‘a crack in the legal ethics code’ of the United States), otherwise Deathsville, is a prisoner camp set in Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, near Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, somewhere in central Arizona. It is a hot, smelly, harsh, cruel place, reeking with despair. The inmates are the dregs of the human population; the guilty ones, that is, because it seems with a payment of money to the truck driver, Ervin, almost anyone can find themselves in Camp Orken, if they happen to fall foul of the wrong policeman.
Ervin’s job is akin to delivering lifestock to the factory, but considerably more dangerous, even if the pay is better. He actually gasses the inmates in his trailer (up to 200 at a time and smelling of ‘sweat, urine and excrement’), until he gets to camp Orken. This is because they are so dangerous that if they wake up, they are liable to escape, kill you and then spread out across the nearby countryside and infest the place like a biblical plague of locusts.
The camp is run on a commercial basis. The inmates have an opportunity akin to the choice of jumping into a pit with lions, or a bug pit of insects (I’d choose the lions). They train some of the inmates to become mercenaries where leaders from various dubious, banana republic countries will use them to beat down the local militia or whatever segment of the local population has risen up against them. Unfortunately, the training is brutal to the extreme and even includes live ammunition, so a lot of the inmates die in training. The chances are, they won’t make it through wherever they are sent alive, but as it is unlikely they will survive Camp Orken, on the whole, I think I’d rather take my chances anywhere other than Camp Orken.
The book is unremitting in its grittiness. There is no escape from the sheer nightmare that is the people and the place. The atmosphere is one of unrelenting dust, heat and despair where men lie dying, pleading for morphine, and buzzards circle waiting for the next man to die from gunshot wounds or simply from exhaustion and exposure to the desert heat. The medical care is so bad and the doctors so misguided or insane that one doctor continues to amputate the leg of a prisoner to ‘save him’ even thought the man has died. There is no hope and no redeeming characters.
Apart, that is, from Chelsea, Rosie and her friends.
Chelsea’s pregnant and the father is Rudolph, who Ervin took on board illegally at the side of the highway at the beginning of the story from a corrupt police official for a bribe of three thousand dollars. She is a romantic and determined to rescue her beloved Rudolph, who only wanted to be a pastry chef, from the Camp’s clutches. To do this she enlists the aid of Rosie, who runs a roadside truckers cafe and who also happens to be Ervin’s girlfriend.
Oh, and they have a band and intend to get into the camp that way. On the whole, I think I’d rather try and fly through Borg territory.
Review by Roy Hunt
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Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2017
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Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2017
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A future where convicts are trained, armed, made to brawl and then auctioned off as mercs in a Mad Maxianesque near future
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2017