The Point Team

by J. B. Hadley

  “What about the way they treat black people?” Mitch asked. “Hanging them in trees and not letting them live with whites.”

  “Do you believe that crap Hanoi puts out?” Eric asked incredulously. “That’s propaganda. Everyone in America can do what he likes. He has a big car. A big house. Lots of dollars. If we three were in America, we would all have Cadillacs.”

  “I’d prefer a jeep,” Red said.

  “If that’s what you wanted,” Eric assured him.

  “You mean we’re thirteen years old and we could drive our own cars?” Mitch asked a little doubtfully. He suspected that Eric at times exaggerated a little when he was talking about America, but Eric talked with such authority that Mitch never quite had the courage to voice his doubts.

  “In America you get your driver’s license at twelve,” Eric told him.

  “Twelve!” Red repeated in awe. “Over there I could have been driving for a year by now!”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “You could pick up your telephone and call one of your girl friends and take her to a drive-in movie tonight with a case of beer in your Cadillac or jeep.”

  Mitch and Red looked at him, silenced and overawed by the possibilities of their lives in America. As Eric had explained, all they needed to do was complete these videotapes…

  “Do you think we should take the chance?” Mitch asked on the way. “They’ll be on the watch.”

  “No one will expect three kids to have video equipment,” Eric answered. “They won’t look at us twice.”

  “This is different,” Mitch said. “Before this we’ve been filming local militiamen or Vietnamese Army soldiers harassing civilians. But these are Russians unloading a Russian ship. We don’t even know what we’re going to film.”

  “Grow up,” Eric told him. “We got to face the fact that one military secret in our videotapes will get us more attention than a thousand bleeding-heart shots of kids living in huts and mothers being separated from their babies. We got no choice.”

  “I’m more scared of those smugglers who promised to kill you than I am of the Russians discovering us,” Red said. “We’ll be right in their territory down on the docks.”

  They pushed a homemade barrow constructed of odd pieces of lumber and two bicycle wheels. It was loaded to overflowing with vegetables from their garden.

  As they neared the dock area, Eric went over his instructions again.

  “Remember it’s the Russian ship with all the odd-shaped crates that we want the best view of, including crates piled up on the dock. We’ll need to shoot from several angles and make sure any lettering on the crates is photographed. The Soviet ship next to it seems to be unloading mainly pipes. We’ll give them a quick look-over with the camera, but it’s all them odd-shaped crates that we got to concentrate on. You two just stand and watch them working and move the barrow along every now and then.”

  “We get it,” Mitch said.

  When they reached the dock area, in a deserted alley between two windowless warehouses, the three boys removed the vegetables from the barrow, exposing the video camera beneath. Eric climbed into the barrow, set the lens of the camera in one peephole, and looked out another peephole with the viewfinder.

  “It ain’t great,” he said, “but I can hardly miss if you point the barrow directly at what we need to film.”

  The other two threw the vegetables in a mound on top of him and resumed their journey.

  They could not read the Cyrillic characters on the stern of the Soviet ship, but the red flag with a hammer and sickle was identification enough. The wooden boxes were being unloaded over the side by derricks and slings. Teams of sweating stevedores freed the boxes on the dock and stacked them by hand.

  “Look at the way it takes four men to lift even the smaller ones,” Mitch said. “I bet there’s rockets and such inside them.”

  “Nuclear warheads,” Red suggested.

  A voice rose from beneath the vegetables: “Shut up, you assholes, and get a move on.”

  At first they kept a distance away. Then they got bolder when no one paid any attention to them. Apart from one dock foreman who yelled at them to keep out of his crew’s way, they could move about as they needed to get clear shots of the crates. When four Russian crewmen came up on deck and started down the gangplank, they pointed the barrow at them. A Vietnamese was with them, talking in Russian. The Russians were laughing, and one was so unsteady on his feet he nearly fell off the gangplank. His comrades caught him, and this made them laugh even louder. One of them pointed to the barrow.

  Red and Mitch started to wheel it away fast. They ignored the shouts of the Viet who was with the Russians. The man was anxious to please the foreigners and ran after them.

  He said in Vietnamese, ‘They won’t steal your vegetables. They’ll give you a good price for them.”

  One of the crewmen said something in Russian.

  The interpreter translated it for them into Vietnamese. “They’ve been at sea for weeks and want to buy everything you have for the ship’s kitchen. They’ll pay you well.”

  “No,” Mitch said. “We have to deliver them to an important party function. The cadres will be annoyed if they don’t get them.”

  The drunken Russian sailor almost toppled over the barrow as he grabbed an armful of vegetables. Then he started singing and grabbed a huge double armful out of the barrow. Eric looked up at them from the bottom of the barrow with a bright smile on his face and tried to cover the video camera with his body.

  The three youths stood before an elderly man sitting at a table. He was their judge at the District Action Committee Against Youthful Delayers of Socialist Progress. Their prosecutor was an energetic young man whose eyes seemed to sparkle eagerly behind his glasses. The judge was tired and weary by comparison.

  “Is there any evidence to show that the American television crew hired these youths to film antisocialist lies?” the judge asked the prosecutor.

  “No. They seem to have stolen the equipment and done this on their own.”

  The judge nodded. “Have they shown any understanding of how their actions run counter to the people’s wishes?”

  “They show no repentance for their crimes or even much understanding of the new order of society that is everywhere springing up with such abundant energy. Particularly the middle boy, Eric Vanderhoven … ”

  The prosecutor made a mess of the pronunciation of the Western name.

  The judge interrupted, “Why hasn’t he been given a Vietnamese name?”

  The prosecutor consulted his papers. “It appears that this is his legal name. He refused to change it. He’s the one who insists, despite our records of his birth in this city, that he is a CIA agent who parachuted last year into the Mekong Delta.”

  A flicker of amusement crossed the judge’s wrinkled face. “I think we might give our young CIA man an opportunity to get to see Vietnam close up, so to speak. Perhaps a season of work in the rice fields would make it clear to him and his two friends here what it means to be patriots in a workers’ republic.” He looked at the three severely. “Have you anything to say for yourselves?”

  Mitch and Red were silent.

  Eric ground out, “Better watch out how you treat me. I’m a personal friend of President Reagan.”

  Chapter 4

  THE trailer camp was an oasis in the dusty, scrubby Arizona landscape. Folks watered miniature lawns in front of their mobile homes. You could tell how long people had lived in the park by how pretty and settled their little gardens looked. They planted shrubs to remind them of back home. This made some others mad. They claimed they had come out here to the clear desert air to get away from pollen and allergies, and now these clowns were spoiling everything for them. Those who liked the shrubs that reminded them of back home saw no reason to plant prickly pears in their lawns because of some invalid’s psychosomatic hang-ups.

  Michael Campbell was not involved in this dispute, since all he did was throw empty bottles and cans in fron
t of his trailer and kill plant growth by urinating on it in the middle of the night. His girl friend Tina always cleaned up after him the next day, and no one complained too much since word got round about him practicing out in the desert with a machine gun. More than one person said that they could “feel” enormous reserves of violence in Campbell. And he was definitely peculiar.

  A tall, lean man, tanned, lined, and scarred, restless, maybe in his late thirties, but it was hard to be certain—he could be in his early forties—gray eyes, calm, helpful. Friendly, except for going off and sitting on a rock for hours or walking off into the desert in the midday sun. Or he might read for days. Or live on yogurt and do exercises for a week.

  The occasional booze-ups and empty bottles were a lot less alarming to his neighbors than these less familiar pursuits. It was recognized that his eccentricities were in some way linked to his days as a Green Beret in Vietnam. Everybody in the trailer park had seen TV shows about how Vietnam vets suddenly hop up and slay everyone around them because of a sudden delusion these easygoing Americans are Cong attackers. More than a few in the camp mentioned the possibility that they all might fall victim to Campbell in some evil way.

  When word of this got back to Mike, he laughed and said to Tina, “If only they could sometimes look into my head, they’d hitch up their damn trailers and move on.”

  Tina was small, dark, and shapely. She lapsed easily into Spanish when excited or annoyed; mostly she was cheerful and busy and apparently unaware of Campbell’s moods and doings. When Campbell disappeared for months on end, as he did occasionally, she never betrayed the least anxiety and assured those who asked that he’d be back soon, just as casually as if he’d driven into town for the afternoon.

  The residents of the trailer park had their own sinister interpretations of his absences. For the most part, they were retired people who now looked back with fear and suspicion at the world from which they had been superannuated. For once, this kind of lurid gossip fell far short of the bloody actuality of Campbell’s doings while he was away. The park residents’ imagination did not go much beyond trucking marijuana and illegal aliens across the border or being a hit man for a New York “family.” Most of them would never have heard of the countries which employed Campbell for his very special talents. The problems of Namibia, Costa Rica, Bahrein, or the Sudan were not everyday conversation topics in this Arizona trailer park.

  But now Campbell had been home for many months and was growing restless. His treks across the desert became more numerous, his fitness regimens came and went more often, he was seen practicing his marksmanship with a variety of weapons—including throwing a knife against the side of his trailer one morning … He was primed and ready to move. With nowhere to go.

  Campbell’s tossing and turning in his sleep had woken Tina. Once awake, she had not been able to go back to sleep again. She climbed out of the bed, over his sleeping form, and flicked on a reading lamp in the dining area. Settled in an easy chair and puffing on a Vantage, she turned the pages of People magazine. Outside, the lights of the trailer park shone on empty cars and patches of grass. A few places had left a string of lights burning along the edge of a canopy. She tapped her cigarette ash into a white cup with a blue castle and the words Walt Disney World. She looked up when Campbell moaned and thrashed about on the bed. He steadfastly refused to see anyone about these dreams. Like going to a shrink. There was nothing more she could do about it, except put up with them. Like he did.

  Col. Michael Campbell, known as “Mad Mike” to his men in the Special Forces, looked at the sergeant. “What’s wrong with Green?”

  Sgt. Harper responded, “You know what they be saying about the lieutenant?”

  Campbell grinned. “That the NVA haven’t read the same military textbooks as him?”

  “I’m just repeating hearsay, sir. I wouldn’t bad-mouth an officer.”

  “No, but you might frag the bastard if you thought he was going to have you all killed. You saying that this is one for you and me and leave the kids at home?”

  The sergeant nodded.

  “You got it,” the colonel said. “How many men can you raise?”

  “Nineteen, including me.”

  “Call the choppers.”

  They went airborne in two Chinook gunships which would give them air-to-ground support after they were landed.

  “We got one green smoke, sir,” the pilot of Campbell’s chopper said, “but it’ll be nearly an hour old when we get there. The flare will be dead, but I know the place without it. Maybe when they saw no response right away, they relaxed again.”

  “Or maybe they’ve had time to arrange a welcome for us,” Campbell said.

  “We got a hundred-plus North Vietnamese regulars according to the sighting,” Sgt. Harper clarified.

  “Too far for artillery to be accurate,” Campbell growled.

  “Yeah, sir, at this distance they got as much chance of hitting us as them, even with exact coordinates.”

  “Mortar teams, Sergeant?”

  The sergeant looked at the colonel. “They been called in, sir.”

  Both knew this was a bullshit conversation—that twenty Green Berets were going into the jungle after a hundred or more North Vietnamese army trained men. These were no farmers-by-day and guerrillas-by-night Cong. They would be combat-hardened troops fighting for their lives. And a hundred-plus could mean a thousand! The mortar teams would not be in time. The helicopter gunships would have to pull away under ground fire. They would be on the ground by themselves. Which of course was why Sgt. Harper wanted Campbell along in the first place instead of an inexperienced lieutenant. The fact that the colonel always volunteered to go on this kind of mission was part of the reason he was called Mad Mike. The rest of the reason was how he behaved in actual combat.

  “Landing zone is that clearing at two o’clock,” the pilot radioed to the other one. “I’ll go in first while you cover me.”

  The chopper lurched and lost altitude fast. They went down into the clearing, the men tumbled out on the ground, and the Chinook was lifting off again in seconds with the gunner anxiously searching the treetops through the open side door. Nothing. Either the NVA had moved on or the landing had taken them by surprise.

  The second chopper went in fast also, but came under fire from a machine gun a couple of hundred meters southeast of the clearing. The bullets ripped a few holes in the fuselage without causing serious damage. The men jumped out, and the machine took off northward from the clearing and drew no further fire.

  The nineteen men now lay in the cover of knee-high grass at the edge of the trees. The helicopters were circling about trying to locate the machine gun to fire a rocket at it. The NVA were not wasting ammunition on them.

  “All right, Sergeant,” Col. Campbell said, “at least some of them are southeast of this clearing. Wanna go see?”

  The sergeant designated a man to stand point in a five-man scouting party and sent them ahead of the main group. The men spread out in a single file with about twenty yards separating them and slowly worked their way forward through the trees a little way in from the perimeter of the clearing. These were all experienced men and needed no last-minute exhortations or warnings.

  The NVA would guess that the landing party would not stay put on any account, Campbell thought as he made his way, but they could not tell on which side of the clearing they might approach or whether they would head off in some other direction. On their part, they would know that he, Campbell, had no idea or only the sketchiest notion of their deployment and numbers. Campbell was fairly sure of just one thing. Their strength and intentions would be tested by the enemy fairly soon. Like any moment now.

  As they moved, they searched the trees for snipers, scanned the ground for trip wires and sharpened sticks, peered through the undergrowth ahead and on the side for shadowy forms, glanced back over their shoulders to make sure the man behind had not died silently … They clutched their Ml6s in sweaty palms, the selectors swi
tched to full automatic. Frayed nerves had cut their reaction time down to almost zero. At that moment, anything moving in the forest and not instantly recognizable would have bought it in a big way with at least ten pounds of lead.

  The man at point dropped to the ground, and those behind him broke for cover. In a few minutes, the man at point crawled back, and the colonel and sergeant crawled forward to meet him.

  “They haven’t seen us,” the soldier said.

  “How many of them?” Campbell asked.

  “Five. And same as us, they’re spread in a file, about a hundred yards front to back. Coming right at us.”

  “Are they coming fast?” Campbell asked.

  “No. They’re on tiptoe. Scared as shit. We got three or four minutes.”

  “We got to take ‘em, sir,” the sergeant said. “We need the room to move.”

  “Take charge, Harper.” The colonel pulled his machete from its scabbard and crawled rapidly forward with the point man.

  As he passed each of the forward men, he gestured to his machete and whispered, “Let ’em all come through. I make the first move.”

  Campbell brought the point man with him to the advance position in case, as he said, “There’s more than five of them.”

  There were no birds or animals in the midday forest heat to give away their hidden presence. The men simply lay in the silence, waiting, making neither sound nor movement.

  The North Vietnamese army scouts came into view, taking one step at a time, looking around them, skittery as deer in the hunting season. Campbell could see the taut face and neck muscles of their man at point. His eyes darted here and there beneath his peaked cloth cap, and he held his AK47 in one hand for a moment as he beckoned the others to follow him. After only a few paces, he paused to listen. He probably figured that since Americans were big and noisy, if he couldn’t hear them they weren’t there.

  He passed only fifteen feet away from Campbell. Another man in the colonel’s position would have sworn he’d be visible to the North Vietnamese, but Campbell knew better. As long as he made no movement, his camouflaged fatigues broke up his outline enough to let him merge into the background. The NVA regular passed him and the American point man, passed the next man, and moved on, watching and listening, listening…