The Point Team

by J. B. Hadley

  Mike laughed. “You can’t be serious! Not only do you want us to go into the middle of communist goddamn Vietnam and grab one of their citizens, who happens to be a minor and may not want to come for all I know—not only all that, now you want me to take along a TV crew to cover the action. What do we do, pause for commercial breaks? Coming to you live from Vietnam, via satellite, Mad Mike Campbell abducts a rich American’s grandson from under the very nose of Russia’s puppets in Hanoi. Our own Katie Nelson is providing a live commentary, and we’ll be back with Mad Mike after this word from Budweiser …”

  “It’s very possible that Miss Nelson has such a scenario planned,” Vanderhoven replied. “However, I’ll leave it up to you to make arrangements with her. I recommend that you promise her whatever she wants. What you actually deliver would be your concern. I don’t care.”

  “Money?”

  “What will you need?”

  “For me alone, one million.”

  “I see.” Vanderhoven paused. His face was expressionless. “Very well. The full amount if you succeed, half if you fail.”

  “OK. I’ll also need a hundred thousand each for five men, plus another half million in expenses. That will include weapons, training, transportation, bribes, the lot. This kid will cost you a total of two million.”

  “Each of my seven wives has cost me twice that.”

  “Eric is all you have left?”

  “Right. One of my boys was drowned while still at school. The other, later Eric’s father, I tried to keep in school and out of the war with a student deferment. He was having none of that, particularly because the peace demonstrators had already begun to picket our factory that made napalm. I got him nominated to the U.S. Air Force Academy out in Colorado Springs. He was delighted—never saw that I was sticking him in school for four years anyway. He came out of there a second lieutenant four years later and the damn war still hadn’t finished. He was out there less than a year when his plane was shot down south of the DMZ.”

  “Missing in action?”

  Vanderhoven shook his head sadly. “Not even that hope. No, they found his body. He’s buried in Arlington.”

  “So are a lot of good men.”

  “My son was a better human being than I am, Campbell. Seems as though my mean personality must have skipped his generation and been inherited by this young fellow, Eric. You think that’s possible?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. When I bring him back, you’ll find out for yourself.”

  The old man brightened. “You’ll go then? We’ve got a deal?”

  “A million dollars up front. I run everything, you ask no questions.”

  Vanderhoven offered him his hand and over their hand shake gave him a crafty, jeering look. “Good luck, Mad Mike.”

  “Thank you, Old Bastard.”

  “You’ve put on weight, Harper.”

  “I’m fit as you any day, Mike.”

  They threw a few playful punches at each other, and the burly black man in a well-tailored business suit gestured to a cream and chocolate-brown Lincoln pulled up near the airport entrance.

  “Come on, before I get towed away,” he said to Mike.

  On the drive across Detroit along the Edsel Ford Freeway, Harper began to sound Campbell out. “You know I ain’t going to help some jive-ass white farmers in Africa because they claim the Zulus is communist.”

  “This is nothing like that.”

  “Better not be. Now that time we was in South America. That was OK.”

  Campbell laughed. “That’s not what I remember you saying while we were there.”

  “You’re right. We were lucky to escape out of there alive.”

  That mission had been the only one on which Campbell had persuaded his former sergeant in the Special Forces to go along as a merc. Harper could not be persuaded to go near the continent of Africa with a white mercenary group under any circumstances, although several other black soldiers who had served with them both in Southeast Asia had gone along.

  Campbell gave him a quick rundown of the mission, omitting all names and actual locations within Vietnam. If Harper agreed to go, it would cut his work in half. Had he thought it would make any difference, he would have offered him a higher cut than the hundred thou. But Harper was already a millionaire—the only one of the old unit who had hit it big moneywise after returning home. Campbell waited for his answer.

  “I want you to see my latest place,” Harper said, pulling the Continental onto an exit ramp from the freeway. “Just opened it a couple of months ago.”

  “How many does this make?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Not bad,” Campbell said admiringly.

  The Continental pulled into the parking lot of a large, spread-out, single-story restaurant.

  “Same formula as the others, except this one’s much bigger,” Harper explained. “Family places, reasonable prices, nothing real fancy, not expensive—just real American food that hasn’t been frozen or kept in a can for a year.”

  They were well into their meal before Harper announced that he would go on the mission. They discussed the other possible members, all of whom had served with them in the Green Berets and had been along on one or more of Campbell’s later mere missions. The men were given an order of preference—the first four available would go. Harper would take care of this. Campbell would come back to Detroit again in a week and they would finalize a timetable together.

  Harper looked about his big, thriving restaurant as if he were seeing it for the first time. “I got a wife. I got kids. I got this. Yet I agree to go back to Nam with you. That’s crazy.”

  “Probably.”

  On their way back to the airport along the freeway, Campbell kept glancing back over his shoulder. He said finally, “We’re being followed.”

  “Mike, you’re getting uptight. I been watching you just now. You were eyeballing that blue Regal that left two exits ago. Now you think it’s that tan Plymouth. Right?”

  “Damn right,” Campbell said. “And I bet the Plymouth peels off a few exits from now and we’ll have something else on our tail.”

  Harper laughed at this but kept a wary eye in his rearview mirror. The Plymouth left the freeway as Mike had predicted. It could have been replaced by any of three cars behind them, none of which followed them into the airport turnoff.

  Campbell shrugged.

  “This is Motor City, Mike,” Harper joshed. “Don’t get paranoid about cars in this place.”

  “I wasn’t paranoid on my way here. I was sure I wasn’t being followed. What worries me is that the guy who’s backing this mission told me he first tried to get action in Washington and then in Switzerland. That would have put them onto him. I knew none of this when I went to see him. We’d have done it differently if I had. So someone saw me, maybe.”

  “Maybe not,” Harper put in.

  “My imagination.”

  Three days later Campbell, back at the trailer park in Arizona, got a phone call from Harper.

  “I got a phone call from the Internal Revenue Service yesterday afternoon,” Harper said. “When I called them back this morning, a dude said they might want to discuss my last seven years of finances with me. Said they were looking into the situation. He’d let me know. Next I get a call from Washington. Fella says he wants to fly up to review my hiring practices—equal opportunities for women, how many blacks, whites—he wants to know how many people of Asian background I employ; I thought he kind of leaned on that one a little. Why the hell would a black man serving Middle Western food in Detroit hire Asians? Yeah, you got it. The state and city health departments may recheck my places, I’ve heard from the city fire department—and this is all in one day!”

  “And the others?” Campbell asked.

  “All four have heard from the IRS yesterday or today. Also, Nicholls heard from his parole officer, although he’s not on parole anymore.”

  Campbell knew that Harper was giving him this information deliberately over a
line they both knew must be tapped. Harper had realized that his own involvement was finished, as was that of the four men he had contacted. All he could do now was provide Campbell with the opportunity to realistically cancel everything.

  Campbell said, “Abort the mission.”

  He hung up quickly and hoped that whoever listened to the tape in Washington would believe him.

  “I’d swear these things have been moved around,” Tina said when they got back to the trailer from having dinner with friends forty miles west of there.

  Mike opened a drawer. His .38 Smith & Wesson revolver was still there. He checked the shells in the chambers and tucked it in the front of his belt. The rifles and shotgun were still locked in the gun rack on the wall. Then he checked the secret compartment in the floor of the trailer. The seals he had made with solder were broken. He unscrewed the cover. Inside, intact, were his submachine gun, ammo, Ml6, and pistols. Nothing had been taken. But the compartment had been discovered and opened. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. Yet not even they could escape Tina’s sharp eyes.

  “They’ve been through everything,” she said, “from recipes and electricity bills to cups and saucers.”

  “Stay here,” he told her. “I’m going to take a look around outside.”

  He slammed the door after him and walked up the lighted pathway past three other trailers before he cut between them, away from the lighted center of the park, out into the pitch-black, scrubby desert that surrounded them on all sides. He stood motionless out in the open land until his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and what had once been blackness now assumed different shades of gray and black in the starlight.

  Campbell moved slowly and gently, carefully placing each foot as he made his way back to the rear of his trailer. Out here, only twenty yards from the tattered lawns and light bulbs of civilization, it was a different world. Things slithered along the ground at his feet, and small dark shapes ran swiftly and noiselessly in his peripheral vision. Every time his legs pressed against plants in his way, their thorns pierced his skin and sank into his flesh. There were no daisies or lambs out here, only lean spare creatures and plants that could defend themselves.

  He had eased his way almost directly behind his trailer before he noticed something unfamiliar, almost like the column of a cactus, quite near him. Campbell knew there was no cactus in that place. Then his brain sorted the information his eyes fed it. It was a human figure, standing rigid, pointing something at his trailer.

  Although he knew he should creep away to check the area further before acting, sudden anger overwhelmed Mike. He covered the ground between them in a few giant springs and leapt into the air so he hit the dark figure in the right shoulder with both his feet, flexing his legs to deliver a powerful double kick.

  In spite of the darkness, Campbell’s timing was good. He felt the tremor as his frame absorbed the shock of his jackhammer double kick, and he felt the sudden release as the man’s body lost its resistance and footing. It hit the ground with a dull thud, and before it could make a move, Campbell had thrown himself knees first onto the back of the prone figure, squeezing the remaining air out of the lungs in a long wheeze. Mike grabbed the man’s hair, hauled his face out of the dirt, and gave him a chance to breathe.

  “Who are you?”

  “Kelleher, FBI, Phoenix office,” the man gasped.

  Campbell did not budge. “What were you doing?”

  “I was holding a directional microphone toward your trailer.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Campbell, get off my back, you big lug.”

  Campbell got to his feet, pulled his Smith & Wesson .38 from his belt, and let the man feel its muzzle against his forehead. “Your ID,” he demanded.

  He had to reach inside the man’s jacket himself to get the ID, and noted warily the revolver in the right hip holster on the man’s belt, the position favored by FBI men. The ID checked out, so far as he could see by the light of a trailer window.

  “Where’s your backup?” Mike asked.

  “Other side of the trailer camp. Asleep. I was going to wake him and go after you’d gone asleep.”

  “You wanted to hear whether we’d spotted your break-in, eh?”

  The FBI man said nothing. Mike picked up his listening gear and handed it to him. Kelleher left without a word. Which was sporting of him, Mike figured, since he could have trumped up all sorts of charges. But then he’d have his own illegal break-in to answer for. No, Kelleher went quietly because he was under orders to go quietly.

  Campbell walked around the trailer and climbed the steps to its door. He found himself looking into the unwinking big eye of a shotgun barrel inside the door. Tina was at the other end of the gun.

  She took the weapon from her shoulder, dropped the hammer on her thumbnail, and set about unloading the gun. “Thought I heard something out back.”

  “It was me.”

  One of Campbell’s unbreakable rules was for him not to involve Tina in anything. No matter what he got himself into, he wanted her to be innocent of it. She’d spot the FBI men soon enough herself if they kept hanging around—and since she knew nothing, she had no reason to be careful of what she said over the phone or elsewhere.

  He fetched himself a bottle of Dos Equis from the refrigerator and sat down to think. Tina found something on TV so that he could sit there staring at the screen and let his mind concentrate on the decisions he had to make. Harper, his old sergeant, was out, along with the four men he had contacted. There were others from the unit, and some he had met later as a merc. All good men. Little to choose between any of them. But all known to Washington as soldiers of fortune, and known to be associated with him.

  Campbell knew what the attitude of the Washington bureaucrats would be. A lot of the top politicians there would privately be supportive of Vanderhoven’s mission to get the kid out, but the desk-bound know-it-alls of the State Department would lay the law down. They were taking care of everything through diplomatic channels—which was bullshit—and all anyone else could do was make them look bad if they succeeded or “embarrass” the American government if they failed. So far as Mike was concerned, so much crap had gone on in Washington in recent years, he doubted very much if he could come up with anything new to embarrass anyone.

  The only idea Mike had come up with since receiving Harper’s phone call had been to recruit total unknowns in unexpected places. A classified ad in local newspapers would be one way to go. He’d have a lot of traveling to do to check the applicants, but expenses were no problem, and it would take him no more than a minute or so to decide whether he wanted a man along. It was a cumbersome way of doing the job, yet probably the most effective. Chances were better than good the FBI wouldn’t spot it if he kept the newspapers he used widely scattered and in fairly densely populated areas.

  He’d have to be careful of the wording. “Combat-hardened veterans …” He liked that, and it almost certainly meant service in Vietnam without mentioning the name. He’d put it under the first word veterans, then “combat-hardened only, big-money enterprise.” That was as near as he could get to making it sound legit and fast money at the same time. Then a box number. He would probably get some law-enforcement officers answering to check him out. He figured he could spot them fast, or at least not recruit anyone he had the least doubt about. He’d drive into Phoenix tomorrow and find the names and addresses of newspapers in the library.

  Chapter 6

  JOE Nolan was in Youngstown, Ohio, and out of work. Not only had they closed the steel plants, they were even knocking some of them down. Takes an optimistic man to believe a plant will open again after it has been demolished. Some of his friends had taken off for Texas and other places. Others just hung out. All this was no great calamity to Joe. He always did wander from job to job, woman to woman, drink to drink … It was a guy in a bar who showed him the ad in the paper.

  “Joe, you was in the Green Berets?”

  “Mmmmm.”r />
  “Says here big money for combat-hardened veterans.”

  Joe looked up from his glass of beer. He was thin as a rail, with a long face, hollow cheeks, light brown hair, and long yellow teeth like a horse. He often got mad when people said he looked a real hillbilly, though sometimes he thought it funny, and his very bright blue eyes would dart about unpredictably. These eyes now lit at the words about big money his friend had just read.

  “Shit, that sounds right for me,” Joe said.

  “Naw,” the barman grinned. “It says combat-hardened, Joe. Man told me you was a cook over there. And all those little scars on your neck and arms that you say was shrapnel, those were caused by pieces of eggshell in hot grease.”

  The barman poured Joe another draft beer while he said this and gave it to him on the house.

  “You know, if I’d been a cook in Nam, I’d a learned something,” Joe said, acknowledging the beer. “Way I came back, unless you want to knock off some guy who’s buggin’ you, I ain’t good to you for no other job. Not for long, anyhow. Can’t put up with just standing in a place doing something stupid I never wanted to do in the first place.”

  “You find yourself a nice girl, Joe, and settle down,” a wizened man down the bar offered. “She’ll take all you can give and knock the stuffin’ out of you. You’ll quiet down real fast.”

  “What I need is to make some good money,” Joe muttered.

  “Right now Youngstown is a great place for that,” another man at the bar remarked sardonically.

  “There’s folks here who’ve lots of bread,” Joe told him.

  “Yeah? I wish you’d bring ’em round here some time.”

  “They ain’t my friends. But I know who some of them are,” Joe said. “They ain’t hurting for money.”

  “Everyone I know in this town is as piss-poor as I am. Point out your rich friends to me some time, Joe.”

  “Maybe I will,” Joe said cryptically. He finished his beer and left.

  He drove his battered Chevy a ways before pulling over onto a waste lot. He left the engine running while he took a pair of Pennsylvania registration plates out of the trunk and fitted them over his Ohio plates. He pressed down on the tops of the plates so that the clips he had welded to the back of these plates fitted tightly. A minute’s work. He had taken the second pair of plates from a wrecked Toyota that had been hit by a truck out on 76 near Petersburg. A whole family had been wiped out, he’d heard. Pennsylvania people. It was dark enough for him to switch on his lights as he drove along Canfield Road on the southwestern edge of the city. There was still some snow in patches.