The Point Team Page 9

  “You got it from me,” the VP said warmly.

  “Me too, kid,” the producer answered her.

  Katie was looking forward to dinner after the evening newscast. She usually headed out on her assignment in the morning and was back at the studio by three at the latest for editing and timing of her tape. Depending on the evening’s newscast, she would often take on a second subject or a rush assignment or fill in for someone who was away. She argued for the favorable placement of her segments and tried to prevent them being cut to mere seconds by the editors. By the time she dressed and made up for the newscast, did her piece or pieces on the show and came down from the high anxiety after it was done, she was normally exhausted. This evening was different.

  She had run some old tapes from the files on the man who was taking her to dinner. They had footage of Michael Campbell as a colonel in the Green Berets in Saigon, back from relieving a beleaguered column in the north, a film of him in a Montagnard village someplace in the Central Highlands, and two minutes of exciting action as he and a unit were dropped by helicopter under enemy fire in the rice fields of the Mekong Delta. The lean, battered colonel was photogenic and quite affable with the reporters on each of the occasions, explaining the purpose of what he was doing in straightforward terms.

  All in all, Katie decided she could handle this handsome warrior and get him to do her bidding. The Four Seasons had been his suggestion for dinner. She would not have thought a professional soldier or mercenary or whatever Campbell was these days would have chosen such a glamour hole as the Four Seasons—she would have expected a steak house or even a burger and fries on a checkered tablecloth at a macho bar. The nickname Mad Mike she found less appealing. She was definitely of the opinion that a man named Michael would be more useful to her than one called Mad Mike. But men were silly. He’d probably once drunk a gallon of beer without taking a breath and earned that nickname forevermore. His buddies would be calling him Mad Mike when he was ninety with no teeth and in a wheelchair.

  She was late. Of course. She was familiar with how the very ordinary entrance of the Four Seasons on 52nd Street suddenly blossomed into art, marble and flowers inside, and she ascended the grand staircase. A page led her past the Grill Room through a glass-and-marble walkway that overlooked the lobby of the Seagram Building and led to the Pool Room—an enormous square room with a ceiling several stories high. The windows ran from floor to ceiling and everything else was paneled in dark wood, and in the center of the room water babbled in a pool surrounded by trees. The tall, spare man she had seen in the TV footage sat alone at a table, not looking a day older or softer than he had in those rice fields in the Delta.

  She joined him in a dry martini, and they took stock of each other.

  “Who knows of this operation at the network besides yourself?” he asked.

  “You’re not much for small talk, are you?” she parried.

  “Not when I’ve more important things to discuss. Let’s get them out of the way so we can enjoy our food and conversation without worrying about what’s coming next.”

  She smiled. “All right. They know I’ve been invited back to Vietnam of course, since they had to approve the trip, and they know—a few people, my vice-president and producer and a few people higher up—who Eric is, a Vanderhoven. They’ll keep quiet about that in case the Times or another network steals it from us. None of them know about you. They think it’s just a good story as is.”

  “Without Tarzan swinging out of the jungle and snatching the kid?”

  “They might have second thoughts about that,” she said.

  “That’s how it’s going to be, for all intents and purposes. You realize that?”

  She nodded.

  He persisted. “No second thoughts?”

  “I never have them.” She laughed. “If I did, I wouldn’t last in this business.”

  “I’ll be frank with you, Miss Nelson, when I say my chief concern in dealing with you is that whether the mission is a failure or success, you win either way, since you get your media coverage of the event.”

  “No, you’re wrong, Colonel.”

  “I’m retired, Miss Nelson. Call me Mike.”

  “If you call me Katie. Mike, sure I can use a segment of you being grabbed by the Vietnamese and being hauled off in a cage. Except that’s not what people want to see. They’ll want to see Eric rescued from a communist slave camp and brought back to America to inherit billions. So far as I’m concerned, I don’t even want you or any of your bloodthirsty friends to show your faces for one second in the coverage.”

  “Good,” he said. “We think alike on that. Another thing you must understand. When we move in to evacuate Eric, you and your crew become part of my team for that period. Which means you obey my orders, do not question my judgment and will be shot if you endanger our safety by disobeying orders. I want you to consider that carefully.”

  “No problem,” Katie said easily. “Why should I disagree with what you want to do? Good Lord, I was never even in the Girl Scouts. I wouldn’t know how to tie a knot.”

  Campbell was alerted by her too-easy acceptance of his conditions and semihumorous dismissal of them. He knew any further talk on this subject with her would be wasted. He had stated his position clearly, and she had agreed to it. He would hold her to it.

  She had a pâté of salmon and crabmeat as an appetizer, and he, crisped shrimp filled with mustard fruits. As the main course she ate quail with deep-fried grapes, and he, sautéed calf s liver. They washed these down with two bottles of Pouilly Fumé and finished with the restaurant’s famous chocolate cake. Katie noticed a definite softening in his attitude toward her as the meal progressed.

  “I’m kind of surprised,” she said, “to find that someone like you, with a reputation as a hard-boiled soldier of fortune, has any use for fine food and wine.”

  “It’s when you go without something for long periods of time that you develop an appreciation for it. If our plans work out, I expect I’ll be living on rice and bits of dried meat in the jungle not so long from now. The thought of that is enough to make me savor every bite of good food while I can.”

  She nodded her head vigorously. “The food in Vietnam is awful. If Burger King opened in Ho Chi Minh City today, there’s be riots. Tell me, does this—what I mean to say is that I expected to find you a sadistic bully.” She paused, a bit confused, both by him and the wine. “You’re not. And I lied when I said I thought you’d be a bully, because I reviewed some tapes of you on file when you were in Vietnam during the war. How can you kill people like you do and not turn into an animal?”

  “That’s putting it straightforwardly.” He smiled and squeezed her hand to show her he was not annoyed. “A lot of people who have never seen combat think that a soldier goes out and murders soldiers on the opposite side. Cold-blooded murder sometimes happens, but it’s a lot rarer than the armchair philosophers realize. Most of the fighting happens on a kill-or-be-killed basis. There’s no time to think, or if you try, that split second you hesitated could cost you your life. So you have to do your thinking before you go. When you’re on the battlefield, it’s too late to start having doubts. I make sure I’m on the right side going in—on what I believe is the right side anyway. Obviously things happen to change a man’s mind—but even then, his first duty to himself is to get out alive.”

  He continued, “So far as this mission is concerned, I think it’s worth rescuing the son of an American father who is being persecuted because that is what he is. Any totalitarian government that takes away the liberty of individuals is worth fighting. I’m not going to kill anyone who doesn’t try to stop me. I’ll respect their lives. But what you’ve got to realize is that communists these days are very free with bullets. They’ve given up on the gentler forms of persuasion, since no one is fool enough anymore to hand over everything to them out of free choice. If I come across any of these types, I can only hope mine will be the finger first upon the trigger.”

 
She told him about the mothers she had seen separated from their babies in the compound outside Ho Chi Minh City. “That’s why I don’t feel I’m doing something bad against them after they’ve invited me back—I’m sure they’ve asked me only because they expect to make use of me.”

  “Vanderhoven told me you’ve made inquiries about Eric.”

  “They told me where he is,” she said. “I have a map for you with the exact location of the reeducation camp. Somebody at the Pentagon confirmed the camp’s existence there from a satellite reconnaissance photo taken for Mr. Vanderhoven. The Vietnamese have given me permission to meet Eric and perhaps even photograph him.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Mr. Vanderhoven thinks it’s to goad him,” Katie said. “He thinks that the Hanoi government wants American money—so-called reparations they claim Nixon promised them—before they’ll release any prisoners they still may have and most of these American children. They release small numbers of children every now and then as bait, or allow some information on MIAs to leak out to keep interest warm. Eric Vanderhoven has become just another pawn in their game.”

  After they left the Four Seasons, they stopped off at P.J. Clark’s on Third Avenue for a nightcap.

  “I live just around the corner on Second Avenue,” Katie said. “Why not come around and see the view from my window? I’m very proud to be living on the thirty-second floor up among the clouds and skyscrapers—which is quite something for a girl from a place as flat as Nebraska.”

  Mike found she had not exaggerated the view from the giant plate glass windows of her apartment. This night, long streaks of low-lying clouds trailed in front of the floodlit spire of the Empire State Building like overdone stage effects. Katie joined him at the window and leaned her long supple body against his. Nothing needed to be said.

  Campbell felt her warm, firm thighs against his. The food, wine, view, and comfort of her luxury apartment made for a big change from his usual simple life in the trailer in Arizona. Tina would be mad as hell if she saw him now. Yet he would not exchange her and his trailer for this big-city aerie and sexy TV lady. Not that he was going to turn down Katie, either …

  He ran his hands gently over her body and kissed her full on the mouth, darting his tongue between her eager lips. He felt her body relax into his, and he ran his lips over the smooth skin of her neck. His manhood was stiff with urgency, and her lower belly tremored in response to the pressure of his giant probe.

  They looked deep in each other’s eyes. Again, nothing needed to be said. Afterward they would have love play, fondling, and dalliance—right now their animal longing was too strong, had to be eased. They walked quickly hand in hand to her bedroom, peeled off their clothes, and gazed avidly at each other in naked, open lust.

  Campbell touched her, and she drew a sharp breath. They lay beside one another on top of the bed and embraced. Then she slid beneath him, parted her legs, and raised her knees in submission to his throbbing member.

  He thrust his full length into her warm, moist, welcoming depths.

  They could not be sure in the gathering dusk which village it was. Lt. Tranh Duc Pho and his fifteen-man unit had been on patrol since shortly after dawn, except for a three-hour break in the hottest part of the day. The lieutenant liked to keep the morale of his men up by frequent stays in mountain and foothill villages. Army rations and no women were bad for the nerves. They had been lucky to find this village. And he had the means to celebrate. They had taken three bottles of Japanese Suntory whisky from a smuggler that morning. One bottle for him, two for the men. They would sleep it off tomorrow.

  “Montagnard?” he asked one of his men.

  “Can’t tell in this light.”

  “We’re down off the mountains far enough so they could be Vietnamese,” another said in a cautionary tone.

  “Yes,” the lieutenant said sarcastically, “but what kind of Vietnamese?”

  All the men listening knew what he was referring to. With a Montagnard or other hill tribe village, they could behave almost as they pleased. The Montagnards were regarded as confederates of the Americans, antiprogressive in the Leninist sense and plain damn hard to control in the everyday administration of the new peasants’ and workers’ paradise. The hill tribesmen could not complain about the behavior of loyal communist forces. There was no one to listen to them. A Vietnamese village was different. They would have party cadres, and a complaint from them would go straight to the highest military command. Soldiers behaved like angels when party cadres were about.

  But there were Vietnamese and Vietnamese. The lieu tenant suspected that these villagers might be dispossessed peasants from another area or translocated city people who had moved up into the foothills for pernicious independence and seclusion from party influence. The existence of such backward communities was well-known if not often discussed openly, and soldiers in such a place need not be on their best behavior.

  Lt. Tranh Duc Pho pointed. “Let’s go in.”

  The men spread out, with at least five yards between each man, their AK47s hanging casually on shoulder straps. They strolled into the village in a familiar nonthreatening way, although their weapons were switched to full automatic and ready to fire.

  “They’re Vietnamese,” the word came back.

  The lieutenant knew there would be courtesies to be observed. He would visit the house of the village leader and pass verbal pleasantries with the elders while his men found out if there were any party cadres present, how the village earned its livelihood, if there were pretty women. His unit knew the routine.

  In the village leader’s house, seven elders were gathered. Lt. Tranh Duc Pho occupied the place of honor and insisted that they taste some of his Japanese whisky. He poured some in a bowl and they passed it from hand to hand after careful sips. The lieutenant almost smiled at the deep politeness to a stranger which prevented them from screwing up their faces and spitting the fiery liquor out.

  “No, get me my American glasses.” The lieutenant was very proud of the two clear, heavy bar tumblers he had been given by a superior officer. “Those pottery bowls hold bacteria and spread disease,” he lectured the elders.

  They were too polite to ask him what bacteria were.

  Tranh Duc Pho set about drinking the whisky, filling up half a tumbler at a time and adding a little water from a second tumbler. The elders glanced nervously at him and at one another as the effects of his huge swallows of alcohol became obvious.

  Two of his men entered the house. One spoke. “These people are smugglers. Parasites. The women are preparing us food.”

  The elders were silent, waiting for the officer’s reaction.

  “Get me a woman,” he said in a slightly slurred voice. “I’ll be along after I’ve eaten.”

  “No! No! No!” a chorus of the elders shouted.

  The soldiers ignored them. The one who spoke before addressed the lieutenant. “What about us?”

  Tranh Duc Pho leered at him. “Hold the prettiest one for me, untouched. Then help yourselves.”

  “No! No! No!” the elders kept shouting.

  One not quite as decrepit as the others leapt to his feet. “We won’t allow you!”

  The lieutenant gestured to him to be seated, and when the man had squatted down, the officer spoke in an undertone to one of the men. The soldier left the house, but was back in a couple of minutes with a military-green canvas sack. The soldier untied and loosened the rope strung through the top of the bag and handed it to the officer. Tranh Duc Pho reached in and scooped out a handful of what looked like dried peach halves. He dumped them on the table before him and scooped handful after handful out of the bag so that they ran off the pile on the table and lay scattered around the floor.

  The village elders looked impassively at the dried human ears.

  The lieutenant held up one for their inspection. “They’re like pebbles from a riverbed. They look better when wet.”

  He dropped the ear into the tumbler of
water. True enough, it immediately looked fresh and newly severed.

  The officer looked about him and asked in a drunkenly sentimental voice, “Do you think that if they could, the owners of these ears would listen to me now?”

  None of the elders made a reply.

  The lieutenant held out the whisky bottle and poured a little into one ear lying at his feet. He shouted at it, “Can you hear me now?” He pointed to another ear, this one facing downward on the floor. “He’s still not listening.”

  Tranh Duc Pho ordered the two soldiers. “Food. Women.”

  They left grinning.

  The elders made no sound.

  Chapter 9

  AT fifty-four, Andre Verdoux was over the hill. Mike Campbell wasn’t serious about hiring him for the mission when he arranged anonymously to meet Verdoux in response to the latter’s reply to his ad. But he did give the Frenchman a clue. He arranged to meet him for lunch at Lutece.

  “I knew it had to be you, Mike,” Verdoux greeted him in the little front room of the Manhattan restaurant, “when you arranged to meet me here.”

  “What the hell are you doing reading small-town Maine newspapers?” Campbell said, shaking his hand. “I thought you never left the city except aboard the Concorde for Paris.”

  “I’m looking for an old trawler to convert. I thought I might see one for sale in local New England papers. You know how your eye drifts out of curiosity. I saw your ad.”

  “I hope nobody who shouldn’t got too curious,” Campbell said. “I’ve got some replies I don’t like the look of, so I’m not contacting them.”

  Verdoux ordered a kir and raised his glass to Campbell. “Your health. So it’s a genuine mission?”

  “Forget it, Andre, you’re not coming. This meeting’s just for old time’s sake.”