Free Understrike by John Gardner Page A

tickets.
    Boysie and Chicory, leaning back in their comfortable airline-type seats, held hands and wordlessly tried to wipe from their minds the picture of Joe Siedler’s face contorted by fear and anguish as the great slim snake clung to his arm. As the bus turned down the ramp into the Lincoln Tunnel, heading towards the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the full dimensions of what had happened suddenly rammed home into Boysie’s whirling mind. He felt unclean, as he always did when death moved near to him. The black mamba had been meant for him. By rights it should be him, and not Joe Siedler, lying in a mortuary, cold and rigid as frozen meat. For once he seemed to be facing the situation with relative calm. Shock had pushed out panic. But those clear blue eyes gleamed hard and the left corner of his mouth jerked up in the reflex which was almost his trademark. Both were signs of the ingrained fear, which Boysie Oakes had to fight nearly every day of his life.
    At the same moment, the skull-faced youth was standing in a telephone booth in the big, glistening babel that is the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal.
    “ Yea, kid, we just heard,” said Cirio at the other end of the line. “Thanks, kid. You’d better come on over here. We all got work to do.”
    In his office at the Club Fondante Cirio put down the telephone and gazed across the desk at a disconsolate Ritzy.
    “ You’re the boss,” he said—sort of snide.
    “ Yea. I’d better call head office,” said Ritzy.
    *
    Mostyn was just about to leave the headquarters building off Whitehall when his secretary brought in the decoded cable from USS One : the Department’s undercover man in New York. Mostyn was a very worried man. The signal, now on the desk in front of him, read:
    ONE ATTEMPT TO ABDUCT ONE TO LIQUIDATE ‘L’ YOUR DEPUTY OBSERVER PLAYBOY AND TREPHOLITE TRIALS STOP CIA ESCORT KILLED STOP ‘L’ AND OUR FEMALE ESCORT NOW EN ROUTE STOP ADVISE STOP
    Mostyn felt lonely. His intuition had been right again. The final word, ‘ADVISE’ winked at him hysterically from the paper. The ball had been pitched firmly into his court. Somehow Boysie was in it again. Right up to his neck. “Hope to God he’s got his brown suit on,” muttered Mostyn as he picked up the direct line telephone to the Chief.
    The Chief had already left. Mostyn got through to the Duty Officer. “Number Two here.” He spoke rapidly, his senses alert to the urgency which, presumably, lay behind the cable. “Get me the Chief. Top Priority.”
    *
    In the middle of the afternoon they stopped, along the Turnpike, at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Mechanicsville—a regulation building of clean stone with a slate roof. It reminded Boysie a little of the quiet afternoon he had spent in the Cotswolds on his last leave. Elizabeth, the girl who had been with him then, was very different from Chicory, and his world far more peaceful. They ate Mr Johnson’s celebrated Southern Fried Chicken (which tastes not unlike his American Baked Ham—so fine is the art of cutting the highs and lows off the taste spectrum) and French Fries, washing the meal down with scalding coffee. The whole business took only twenty indigestible minutes. Then, rest stop over, the bus grumbled its way out on to the ribbon of tarmac once more.
    Night closed in and the bus ploughed into the neon jungle of advertising which is the unnatural scenery of the Eastern States: Piggly-Wiggly Stores, Go TWA, Shop at Schneiders, El Rancho, Bar-B-Q, He’ll be Safe With Jukey’s—Best Morticians in Town. Indianapolis went by unnoticed in the early hours, and when they woke the view was of the long tobacco fields, elegant clapboard houses and high barns of Indiana.
    Throughout the day they chatted in fragments, Boysie shifting the conversation over to Chicory’s past whenever the talk came dangerously near to his own. By the time they reached Springfield, Missouri, he had heard about her childhood in Joplin (Springfield made her