Free Cobra Strike by J.B. Hadley Page A

around, and the trailer camp folk’s constant gossip
     and questions amused her more often than annoyed her.
    The truth was that she had no more idea than they did of where Mike went and what he did there. She knew, of course, that
     he was a mere and that each time he left he was leaving for war and that she might never see him again. Some of the old Southwest
     lingered in her attitude in that she did not find it odd that women stayed home and worried while their men did crazy, dangerous
     things. She knew Mike told her nothing in order to protect her. And it had to be nothing. She never even knew what continent
     he was leaving for. None of Mike’s associates, even his close friend Andre Verdoux, knew her name or where to find her. A
     couple of times each day, Mike checked with a phone-answering service in Phoenix for urgent messages, and he picked up his
     mail there once a week.
    That was plenty of contact for him with the outside world. Increasingly he had come to enjoy near solitude, except for Tina
     and his nosy neighbors in the trailer camp. They bugged Tina but mostly let him alone. They knew he practiced with automatic
     weapons out on the desert and still remembered with gratitude the time he single-handedly chased off a marauding biker gang
     from the trailer camp with a machine gun. The retired folk felt they hadn’t too much to worry about alone out on the desert,
     so long as Campbell was around, though this did not stop them from bitching about his not earning a decent, straightforward,
     nine-to-five living.
    When Campbell got back from his week-long cruise on the aircraft carrier, there were a half dozen phone messages from Andre
     Verdoux at the answering service. Mike drove twenty miles to a tavern, loaded the box with quarters, and phoned England, only
     to be told that Andre was not in his hotel room at the moment. A few drinks and one hour later, Mike phoned again and this
     time got him.
    Andre was brief and careful about how he worded things. When he had finished telling Mike what he had been doing and what
     had happened to him, culminating in the dogattack at the airfield, he mentioned the finances and suggested, “You might consider coming here, Mike, with some of your
     associates. I can supply the two cameramen from this side. I don’t think any special equipment will be needed, apart from
     a few standard pieces, which should be fairly easy to obtain in Liverpool. Three men and yourself should be enough. No need
     to bring the Aussie.”
    “I’m confused, Andre.” Mike’s voice was humorous, yet had an edge to it. “Is this your mission or mine?”
    Andre paused. “Well, if you come in on it, you’re the chief.”
    “Then I’ll be the one who decides how many go and whether or not the Aussie goes, won’t I?” Mike was not going to tolerate
     the continuing feud between Andre and Australian Bob Murphy.
    “All right, Mike, you call the shots,” the Frenchman said in his accented colloquial English. “I suppose I will have to consider
     myself lucky if you include me.”
    “I also want to put things together over here, not in England.”
    Andre did not want this, but he could not argue with the logic he knew was behind it. A mere mission was best organized far
     from the field of operation, so that when the team arrived, they knew what their roles were and more or less what would be
     expected of them. To bring in an unorganized group of men and to try to set things up in the field of acton was to court disaster.
     Even though this photography thing would hopefully be a noncombat mission, Andre knew Mike would organize it as if they were
     going inside the Kremlin. That was how Campbell succeeded where others failed.
    “Mike, I’m in a big hurry with this. It would be much quicker if you and the others could come straight to Liverpool. We could
     go to the Lake District or the Yorkshire moors, even the Scottish Highlands, to get ourselves in shape—”
    Mike interrupted,