Gris shows off the official documents from the Grand Council backing Mission Earth, all the while assuring Heller that only the very best agents would be considered for it. In response, Heller asks for his watch. So Gris summons the guard, who turns out to be a "wreck" of a cripple, and therefore presumably the most badass person in the prison for being able to survive the depredations of his coworkers despite a limp.
Heller finally gets his electrified shackles off (is it me or does constantly electrocuting a prisoner for days at a time sound counterintuitive if you want to keep him alive?) as the guard hands over some food and drink of dubious quality, but not Heller's possessions. The grunt claims he's off-duty now, so Gris has to summon another guard, a huge man covered with scars. Gris has to promise payment to get the brute to cooperate, and I once again wonder how it is that the Apparatus hasn't self-destructed yet.
Scarface returns with a fresh wound for his troubles and Heller's clothes, but no watch. Gris sends him off again while Heller cleans himself up a bit, and when the thuggish guard returns he finally has the prisoner's timepiece. But he objects to Gris' ten-credit note, claiming that he spent sixty just to get the watch back, and attacks.
Gris is able to deflect the guard before he makes it to Heller, but when the Apparatus agent tries to use his "blaststick," Heller sends the weapon spinning away. Then the book's hero, despite four days of mistreatment and malnutrition, uses his awesome kung-fu abilities to send the guard flying against the wall to land in an unconscious heap. And then, just to underscore how wonderful Jettero Heller is, he gets Gris to cough up seventy credits and wakes up the guard he just KO'd to repay him for the trouble of getting the watch back. The chapter ends with a now timepiece-possessing Heller wanting to take a closer look at the Mission Earth documents.
So what was the point of any of this? Why did untying a prisoner and getting him his clothes have to become a four-page ordeal?
Hubbard has two goals with this book - to underscore the villainy of the Apparatus and by extension the CIA they're a "satire" of, as well as show us how amazing his hero is, who I suspect is a bit of a self-insert or at least a form of wish-fulfillment. So an action that would normally take a sentence or two - in this case unshackling a prisoner - gets expanded into an ultimately unnecessary sequence to get across details that a better author could much more naturally work into the narrative.
And that's the central theme of The Invaders Plan in a nutshell - unnecessary distractions from the main plot. Sequences of Gris being sneaky and Heller being messianic that a movie adaptation would cut in a heartbeat. Padding and filler to reestablish character traits over and over again.
Back to Chapter Two
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