The Point Team Page 26

  The lieutenant’s agonized howl from so close by in the thick bushes caused the hair to stand up on the nape of Campbell’s neck. Seconds passed before he even recognized it as a human sound. The dozen boys bunched close together and looked around them with fear-widened eyes, obviously expecting to see some kind of Oriental demon bear down on them out of the bushes.

  The Montagnard village was the typical collection of thatched huts—these were well-made and cared for. Crops grew in the well-tended fields about the houses. Domestic animals wandered freely all over the place, children ran up to look at them, women hurried past with openly curious looks.

  “Every man in the village is peering along the sights of a barrel at us right now,” Mike warned, “so keep your movements slow and your hands off your weapons.”

  A dried-up old man, though sprightly enough on his feet, emerged from one hut. Andre greeted him. He greeted Andre. They seemed to be spending some time complimenting each other, judging by the old man’s smile and a wink to Mike from Andre. The Frenchman was handling the village language well.

  “He says he’s heard of us,” Andre finally informed the rest of them. “Apparently the Montagnards we and the Hmong killed when we first crossed the border into Vietnam were some kind of procommunist renegades. Mike, you want to show him the ID you took off the lieutenant who skewered himself on the booby trap?”

  The old man looked at the papers for a moment. Mike wondered whether he could read Vietnamese—he certainly didn’t seem able to speak it. The Montagnard’s face remained expressionless, and he went into the hut. They waited where they were in the hot, dusty street of the village. The sun beat down but was not unbearably hot at this altitude. Baby pigs, dogs of all sorts and hens competed with each other to sniff or peck at their feet. The children and women had by now formed a silent half-circle about them, but for some giggling and pushing.

  A young man now emerged from the hut, carrying the lieutenant’s ID papers. He was in traditional Montagnard dress, except for a Los Angeles Angels T-shirt he had obviously just pulled on for their benefit. He smiled at them all and spoke fast to Andre first in Vietnamese, then in his Montagnard language.

  From him they learned that they were heroes because they were credited with the death of the notorious Tranh Duc Pho, who had always promised to “bring progress to these backward communities.” They were given a feast, attended by the whole village, of pork stew, rice, bamboo shoots, tubers and many unidentified odds and ends, followed by fruit and cheese. They slept the night in hammocks strung in a large, clean hut and woke the next day never wanting to trek through the jungle and sleep with night creatures on the forest floor again. The Montagnards provided them with two guides who would take them safely across the border into Laos and two day’s march into that country along a mountain spur. As a parting gift, Mike presented the headman’s two teen-age sons with an AK47 each. Every man in the village got some kind of gift—a knife, a pistol, a compass, ammo … They had become quite loaded down before arriving in the village with the spoils of their victories and were happy to lighten their load among friends.

  They spent the two succeeding nights in Montagnard villages on their journey, and these basic, not to say primitive, comforts buoyed the five mercs in both mind and body. The twelve- and thirteen-year-olds couldn’t have cared less if they’d been told to sleep high in the trees. However, everyone’s good spirits slowly wore off after their two Montagnard guides left them and they continued into the hot, jungle-clad hills of Laos. Mike reckoned they had a four-day march in front of them, all going well, till they reached the Mekong river. Once they crossed the Mekong, they were in Thailand and home free. Four days, covering twenty miles a day …

  At an easy walk, over level open ground and with no need for concealment, a man can travel twenty miles in four hours. Crossing hills, valleys, swamps, jungles, avoiding populated areas and chance meetings, plodding forward with equipment in equatorial heat, a man traveling at the limits of his physical endurance can travel two miles in the same four hours. Things were not that bad all the time. Only some of the time.

  The worst parts were the swamps, where they waded through stagnant black water, raising clouds of mosquitoes from the aquatic plants and feeling primitive life forms slither against their legs. Humid jungles were the next worst, because not only did plentiful varieties of insects attack, but so did just about every kind of animal. They had to watch especially for a light green snake with a white belly and orange eyes that curled up in the leaves of overhanging branches and dropped on its victims as they passed beneath. Andre said its bite was deadly—he had known it in Cambodia, where it was called the hanuman.

  They had to avoid the coral snakes, whose venom glands were so large that in some they extended for one-third the length of the body, displacing the heart backward to make room for them. The cobras were dangerous because they were so aggressive—they did not bite in defense only, they came chasing after you. However, most of them were nocturnal, and since the group did not travel in the dark, they did not come across many. Pit vipers were among many other kinds they had to watch for, but their main problem was with kraits. These snakes ate other snakes, but struck at humans without warning and were highly venomous. Murphy managed to stand on one over three feet long. He realized what he had done only when he looked down to see what was hitting the upper surface of his boot. The snake was trying to drive its fangs through the leather, and Murphy jumped high in the air like a Russian ballet dancer before the reptile got around to trying his ankle instead. By the time Murphy came back to ground, the snake was gone.

  Campbell’s mania was disease. He repeated his claim several times a day that in the tropics disease killed more soldiers than enemy bullets. He doled out pills each night, and every morning he gave everyone a close look to search for telltale symptoms of fever. Leeches were his special worry—he claimed they transmitted more disease than anything else. The leeches clung to their bodies while they waded through water, they picked them up by brushing against damp leaves or long grass, and some, like the deadly green snakes, dropped from branches overhead— and these slipped down inside the collars of their shirts to begin their blood-sucking meal. Campbell didn’t smoke, but for hours on end he kept cigarette after cigarette going to burn off these pests with its glowing tip.

  There were also deadly spiders, leaves that caused skin rashes on contact, thorns whose punctures swelled into little abscesses, dysentery, two of the boys sick with mild malaria, depression, exhaustion, at times despair …

  For the first two days they saw no one. It was with a kind of savage delight that they surprised three armed militia men at the edge of a settled area, mowed them down and took their valuables as well as their weapons to make it look like bandits had attacked them.

  Then they saw soldiers by the side of a highway they had to cross.

  “They’re Vietnamese,” Andre hissed.

  They seemed to be anchoring timber poles floating in the water to the edge of the small canal that ran alongside the road.

  “They’re setting up an ambush,” Nolan warned.

  “No,” Andre disagreed. “When rebels blow a hole in the road with explosives, they use these poles to bridge the gap and keep the traffic moving. The Viets are very efficient at this, since they themselves invented most of the tricks the rebels now use.”

  In a short while the soldiers finished their work, paused to smoke a cigarette on the roadside and then mounted their bicycles and headed south. After they had gone, Mike & Co. used the poles to cross the canal.

  They spent a lot of time skirting areas where the rural population was heavy and people streamed along the country roads in throngs found only in cities in the West. Campbell and Waller felt their large frames to be so out of place here, they were freaks. Even at a great distance, they knew they could not pass without drawing attention to themselves. Yet Campbell held ruthlessly to his twenty miles per day minimum, and no one dared question him on how the hell he
was measuring it, since it felt more like forty miles per day to everyone else.

  When they were totally exhausted and felt they could go no farther, Campbell would turn and say things like, ‘This is too good to last. We’re having things too easy. Enjoy it now while you can, there’s rougher times ahead.”

  With his rough laugh, he would stride forward energetically, shaming the rest of them into trailing after him as best they could.

  Late in the afternoon of the third day, they heard the drone of a small plane. Then another. Or it might have been the same one. The plane was flying low, clearly on an aerial reconnaissance of the terrain beneath. That evening, just before dusk, while they were looking for a secluded place to bivouac not far from a highway, a convoy of eighteen military trucks went north on the road. No one made direct remarks about this new military presence, but already they were recalling their adventures with bird-eating spiders and vampire bats in inaccessible jungles with a warm nostalgia. Campbell said very little.

  The next dawn he was a different man, checking equipment, lecturing the slow-moving, all the time repeating variations on the magic phrase, “Tonight we cross the Mekong, at dawn tomorrow you will see the sun rise in the free world.”

  After only a limited time in the oppressive communist world, the team members were beginning to see the beauty of this statement. As for the boys, it electrified them into a frenzy of action. Each time Mike urged them on, they grew wilder. No one could stop them now! Murphy and Verdoux laughed together at the simple, direct power Campbell held over people as a leader. Yet in spite of their knowledge of what he was doing and how he did it, they admitted he infected them, too. Waller and Nolan, less complex individuals, joined with the Amerasian youths in their heightened, fierce determination to cross over into Thailand.

  Not long after they set out on what they expected to be the final leg of their journey, a small single-engined recon plane crossed their path. They froze till it was out of visual range. In the next two hours, seven more of the small planes crossed the sky.

  “Bastards know we’re coming somehow,” Waller ground out.

  “All they got to do is follow the dead bodies we leave behind,” Murphy said jokingly.

  “We ain’t been so bad recently,” Waller said defensively. He grinned his loony grin. “I can hardly remember when I killed my last commie, it’s been so long ago.”

  Murphy laughed. “Holy shit, Waller, you’re going to miss it when you get out of here.”

  “Naw. There’s always work to be done, no matter where a willing fella like me finds himself.”

  Waller was not joking now. Murphy let it pass.

  They had a break when the country turned to forest with a high canopy, giant trunks and relatively passable vegetation on ground level. In a large, clear-cut, lumbered area, as they threaded their way among the three-foot stumps, they met a ground-search unit of Lao troops. Campbell had a big eye-opener about the fighters under his command. While the Lao troops broke for cover, the kids and the team members never missed a step in their implacable forward pace. They advanced in an even line and threw lead from the hip as they came. One by one, the Lao troops flopped down like targets struck at a fairground booth.

  They moved on without delay, pausing only to dispatch the wounded with a pistol shot to the head.

  “I don’t want anyone talking about who we are at this stage,” Campbell declared. “We can’t afford it. So anyone who sees you—man, woman or child—kill them. You want to be kind to them, make sure they don’t get to see you.”

  Campbell himself saw the effect of his leadership on the kids. He had turned them into monsters! Now even his own men (mercenaries!) had to strive to compete with these ravening little savages.

  Verdoux muttered something wise in French about the hunger or thirst for liberty turning its holder into something else.

  “Ah, the frog is thinking about wine and women again,” Murphy said.

  “I’m so desperate now, Bob,” Andre said sarcastically, “I’d even settle for Australian wine and an Australian woman.”

  Nolan joined the conversation. “You know what they say about Australian girls, frog? They got what it takes down under.” He indicated the area of the body he meant, in case they didn’t get the joke.

  Andre sighed dramatically and moved away.

  They wiped out two small armed parties and hid the bodies in the undergrowth. So far they had not received a scratch themselves. Their frenzy rose with the killing, and all of them began to feel that nothing could stop them now. They were nearing the Mekong, only hours away. Verdoux claimed he could already smell Thailand!

  Then things took a different turn. First Campbell realized that he had driven his unit harder than he thought. With three hours of daylight remaining, they were descending ahead of schedule into the broad valley of the Mekong. There was no holding back now. They had not been precisely located, but the military was closing in. Campbell saw their best chance as establishing a position on the bank of the Mekong and holding out till dark. He had only one objective now—get to the river. When he got there, he would decide what to do.

  The next happening that changed their circumstances was a run-in with a Lao unit of forty-eight or more men. The two Lao platoons exchanged fire with them beyond effective range, and then fled before either side had taken any casualties!

  Murphy roared with laughter. “They’re the first ones we’ve met with any sense!”

  Campbell was dour. “They’ll radio in our position. Those were probably a bunch of peasant conscripts who didn’t want to tangle with us. Now they’ll call in hardened troops. I reckon we’re no more than forty minutes from the riverbank. Let’s make an all-out break for it and try for a quick daylight crossing. That means run, you bastards, run, run, run!”

  He didn’t give them time to think—kept them on the move. Now they ran across fields in which peasants were working, passed women carrying pitchers of water from a well, stopped bicycle and ox-cart traffic on a dirt road as they crossed it in a pack, and ran down among fishermen repairing nets on the muddy bank of the wide river.

  Mike picked on two of the fishermen, who looked like father and son. He forced them to stand at gunpoint with their hands clasped behind their necks.

  “Ask them if we can wade across the river here,” he told Andre.

  The older man replied to the Frenchman’s question. Andre translated, “He says we can.”

  Campbell barked, “Tell him that both of them lead the way and if the water gets above their waists, I’ll gun them down.”

  Andre conveyed this information to the two men, listened to their reply and translated, “They say it would be quicker to cross in their boats. The boats are hidden in the bushes fifty meters down the bank. But they complain it is dangerous for them—”

  Mike held up a hand for him to stop. He took a wad of Thai bahts from his shirt pocket and let the two fishermen look at the bills. They nodded, unclasped their hands from behind their necks with a smile, and set off down the river-bank at a half-run.

  What Andre translated as “boats” turned out to be two canoes. Mike didn’t have time to go back and force other fishermen to cooperate with him. There were other canoes, but he guessed they were better off overloading two craft with experienced boatmen than trying to handle the temperamental, fragile craft themselves in the fast-flowing river currents.

  The canoes sank in the water almost to the gunwales under their weight, and every time anyone moved out of sync with the others, the craft threatened to tip over. They finally all piled into the canoes in shallow water and stabilized their loads. With a few expert strokes, the fishermen shot their craft into the currents and maneuvered across the river at a 45-degree angle, using the swift waters and the calms like a car driver weaving in and out of crowded traffic lanes on an interstate highway.

  Even Campbell thought they had it made, with three-fourths of the river covered, when a big chopper swept over the waters from upstream and touche
d down on its skids on a gravel bank in a foot of water behind them.

  “Go! Go!” Campbell yelled to the boatmen.

  They did not need his message to be translated for them. They paddled the canoes into the fastest downstream rushes of water they could find. The helicopter landing was sloppy. The unloaded troopers could not fire at them because the chopper rotors whipped up the river water and obscured their vision. They took longer than they should have to unload a heavy machine gun, keep it out of the water, set up its tripod on the gravel bank and mount it. The chopper lifted off.

  Campbell’s canoe, paddled by the old man, hit the shore. Mike threw the notes to him and, as they jumped out, yelled for him to head downstream as fast as he could. Another message that needed no translation.

  The younger Laotian’s canoe was farther out. Mike gestured to its occupants to abandon it and get to shore. They wasted valuable time in trying not to upset the craft—which they didn’t—and the first wild burst of heavy machine-gun fire whipped over their heads as the soldiers adjusted their weapon out on the gravel bank.

  Verdoux and Nolan, who had also been in Campbell’s canoe, returned fire but ineffectively. The troops were crouched behind the machine gun, and their support lay in the water and presented little in the way of a target.

  The next foray of the machine gunner was more successful. As they splashed toward shore, the bullets danced off the water just downstream from them. Murphy yelled for all of them to lie behind a sandy shoal before the gunner zeroed in on them.

  Two of Eric’s friends panicked. They saw the shore of Thailand only fifty yards away—freedom!—and they ignored Murphy’s command. The stream of bullets found them a few seconds later as they splashed toward shore hysterically, cutting them down in the water … It’s especially pathetic the way an automatic stream of heavy bullets chops up a child’s body, which does not have the bulk to absorb the impact of the high-velocity slugs.