The Game of X: A Novel of Upmanship Espionage by Robert Sheckley Page B

Marcantonio Guesci clasped me to his breast and breathed heavy waves of appreciation in my face.
    “I watched everything!” Guesci said. “From the moment you left the Sacca di San Girolamo I had you fixed in my binoculars.”
    “That helped a lot,” I said, disengaging myself.
    “Ah, but you needed no help. The speed at which you crossed the Lagoon—”
    “—was inadvertent,” I said. “But I don’t suppose you had much trouble finding us.”
    “About as much trouble as I would have in locating a forest fire,” Guesci said. “One might wish that you had made a little less noise in your approach.”
    “One didn’t have time to install a muffler,” I told him.
    “It was a noisy boat,” Guesci admitted. “But all of that is behind us now. You and Mr. Karinovsky are practically safe.”
    “Practically?”
    “Well, of course, we must still extricate ourselves from the Veneto coast. But that is a mere technical consideration. We have outfoxed Forster at every turn, and we shall outfox him now for the final time. Come, we go this way.”
    I was worried about Karinovsky. His arm had taken a considerable beating in the boat, and the wound had reopened. A slow trickle of blood was beginning to drip from his fingers. We had to support him as we moved away from the boat. I didn’t think he was up to much more helling around.
    “How are we going to outfox Forster this time?” I asked.
    “We are going to do it—magnificently!” Guesci said. “To appreciate the plan, you must first consider our position.”
    “I’ve already considered it.”
    “Not fully. You know of the motor launch which is moving in behind us. But perhaps you do not know of Forster’s other dispositions.”
    I knew not, neither did I care. But there was no avoiding a majestic flow of extraneous information. We trudged through wet grass while Guesci (heir to the Borgias, poor man’s Fu Manchu) outlined the position.
    “Forster had to assume that you might escape from Venice; it was the only practical assumption to make with a man of your calibre. Therefore he set up a secondary line of defense, centering it on the Venezia-Mestre Causeway. His deployment to the south of the causeway, along the line Chioggia-Mestre, does not concern us; we are no longer in that theatre of war, so to speak. But on the northern front, tangential to the line Mestre-San Dona di Piave, our war is very active indeed. Consider, if you will, the main topographical features of our battlefield—”
    “Guesci,” I asked, “couldn’t we skip all of this until later?” But my plea went unnoticed. General Guesci was showing his staff that amazing grasp of terrain so necessary in an intuitive and unorthodox commander of fighting men.
    “The following features present themselves to our attention,” Guesci said, metamorphosing smoothly into a brilliant instructor of tactics at military college. “We find ourselves on a square of land roughly 25 miles to a side, whose geographic homogeneity is maintained by the Venetian Lagoon to the south, the Alpine foothills to the north, the river Brenta to the west, and the Piave to the east. Within this operational area, moving northward from the Lagoon, Forster will guard the one arterial road which runs between Mestre and San Dona di Piave, plus the network of five secondary roads connecting the towns of Cazori, Compalto and Cercato. There is also a railroad, but this he can ignore since no train is due for another 30 hours. Thus, his arrangement has us hemmed in tightly between the Lagoon and the coastal highway. Viewed as a set piece, this scheme might seem irresistible.”
    “It does sound pretty good,” I said. “How do we get out of it?”
    Guesci had no intention of telling me just then. He continued to lead us across marsh and thin woods and stubbled fields, and he continued to explain the position.
    “So that is the problem with which I was confronted,” he said, sounding a little like C. Aubrey Smith in Four