The Point Team

by J. B. Hadley

  “Of course. By that you mean you need to discuss it with me—what do you say, pick my brains? Yes? Well, let’s discuss it and perhaps I can help. Maybe you won’t be able to manage without me.”

  Mike shook his head. “Andre, you’re past doing this one. I think our table is ready.”

  They were led to the garden section of the restaurant, a glass-roofed area with pink stucco walls covered with white latticework. There were paving stones beneath their feet, wicker chairs about the tables and big plants in brass pots. Verdoux immediately got into a heavy conversation in French with their captain, and Mike indicated to him that he should order for both of them.

  Verdoux tested the bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet and nodded to the sommelier. He said to Campbell, “Ah, you think I’m past my prime, don’t you? I’ve never enjoyed women, cognac, and haute cuisine more in all my life—why not soldiering, too? Young men don’t know how to appreciate what’s given them. You have to wait till my stage in life to really know how to live!”

  Mike told him everything that had happened so far on the project.

  “I don’t like this ad in the newspapers,” Verdoux commented. “You will collect all kinds of questionable types—including myself, of course!”

  “There was nothing else I could do. I’ve seen eighteen applicants so far and have hired only two. The first was Joe Nolan, an ex-Green Beret now in Youngstown, Ohio. He’s really still a kid—a bit of a floater, never settled down after the war. Yet he knows what he’s doing as a fighting man, although he’ll always need someone with common sense to keep an eye on him. The other was an ex-Marine in Flemington, New Jersey. His name is Harvey Waller. Strange individual—bit of a fanatic, I suppose— but I can handle him. I’d certainly rely on him in a fire fight, but he may not be too tightly wrapped headwise.”

  “You always were good at figuring a man out,” Verdoux said. “Did you tell them where you were going and why?”

  “No,” Campbell replied. “I let everyone infer it was Southeast Asia, of course—I had to—but beyond that I allowed them to believe we might be after MIAs.”

  “Good. This is a touchy subject now, particularly since Washington is making no progress on these issues. You have to assume that at least one of the men you spoke to is an informant.”

  “Sure. I just hope it’s neither of the two I hired.”

  “It’s strange to know I’ll be going back there again,” Verdoux mused.

  “Andre, you won’t.”

  “When I first went to Vietnam,” Verdoux continued as if he had not heard Campbell, “I had hoped to get into the plantation business there as an agent or something after I got out of the French army. The reality of what I found there was a little different from what I had been led to believe at home in France. Our glorious colonies were growing tired of us. Then our defeat by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. We could not believe what was happening to us. I stayed in the army. For the debacle in Algeria.” He shook his head sorrowfully and sipped his wine, but his sad expression instantly evaporated when they were served their appetizers of snails in butter and herbs, each in its own little porcelain dish. Andre talked about snails for a while and the pros and cons of serving them with or without their shells and gradually veered off into his days as a mere in the Congo.

  “Another disaster!” he summed it up for Mike. “Is this why you don’t want me along with you? Because I’m unlucky?”

  “Certainly, Andre. I blame you personally for all France’s losses in Indochina and Africa.”

  Verdoux’s crab stew with a pastry top arrived, along with Campbell’s Basque-style roast chicken. More talk from the Frenchman about the quality of the food. Then Angola. Mike and Andre had served alongside each other in that part of Africa as mercs on Holden Roberto’s—the losing—side. Taking advantage of America’s paralysis after its disaster in Vietnam, Russia sent Cuban troops into the newly independent Portuguese colony to side with the left wing in a civil war. The CIA gave some halfhearted aid to Roberto’s side, but the Cubans proved to be the deciding factor in the war.

  “Remember Turner?” Andre asked, tasting the first glass of a new bottle of wine.

  Mike knew he was meant to be softened up by all these reminiscences of their being comrades-in-arms, softened up enough to agree to take Andre along on his mission to Vietnam. At first he had regarded it as being simply out of the question—the man was fifty-four—and he was along only for the pleasure of Andre’s company. Then Mike found he badly needed to discuss his project with a mature, seasoned soldier, which Andre certainly was. Mike now discovered with wry amusement that perhaps his mind was not completely closed to taking Andre along. It was still highly unlikely. But not out of the question.

  “Turner was a crazy bastard,” Mike said. “First time I ever rode with him in his Land Rover, we were going into FAPLA territory and we could have been ambushed at any minute. We spotted this African by the roadside—probably one of their spies on his way to our territory. I thought Turner would have him executed on the spot. Instead, he asked him if the road was mined from this point on.

  “‘No,’ the African replied, ‘I know for a fact it is not.’

  “We grew suspicious of the positive way he answered us. So Turner tied him to the iron grille in front of the Land Rover.

  “He told him, ‘If you see a mine in the roadway, raise your right hand.’

  “We’d only gone a few hundred yards when the man waved us to a stop at a small bridge. He claimed he couldn’t remember where exactly the mines were, but we could go no farther than this bridge. Turner shot him in the head with his pistol and turned back.”

  “Turner was a mad dog,” Andre contributed. “He became an animal—and we French do not think much of the English, but we do not expect an Englishman to become a hyena. Finally, of course, he turned on his own men and killed them when he could not beat the Cubans and FAPLA. I remember he had a row with one English mere—I forget about what—and he would have shot him were it not for the mere pulling the safety pin from a fragmentation grenade and holding it out before him. If Turner had shot him, his hand would have released the pressure trigger and everyone there would have been cut by the metal fragments. Next day I think Turner had something else to distract him, and he forgot about the incident. He was a maniac.”

  They had both heard each other tell these stories before. It was like they were ritually displaying the tokens of their previous friendship to establish their standing with each other now. They were still friends from way back. But were they still on an equal footing as fellow mercs? Andre fought to dispel this question from Mike’s mind. He had no doubt he was as good as he had ever been.

  What neither of them mentioned was the incident which had cemented their friendship. Campbell and Verdoux were at the back of an open Land Rover manning an M60 machine gun as they went from observation post to observation post. An Angolan drove the vehicle, and three others mounted guard at front and sides with their FN automatic rifles. It was only another routine patrol. However, day by day these patrols grew more chancy as the FAPLA columns advanced. All that was holding them back now were the destroyed bridges which had to be rebuilt and mined roads which had to be made passable for their Russian-built tanks. Once the tanks got through, there could be no holding back the FAPLA leftists with their Cuban officers.

  For a while the Land Rover bounced across open rangelands devoid of livestock and wild game—all shot by troops of both sides either from hunger or for fun. They reached a narrow asphalt road that had once led to a group of Portuguese farms and that was free of mines since it had no strategic importance. Long brown grass stood motionless in the afternoon heat on either side of the road. Campbell adjusted his machine gun and swiveled it on its mount, while Verdoux rechecked the ammunition feed belts. Both men’s activity revealed their uneasiness in these surroundings, without their being aware of what they were doing. The Angolans peered into the long grass nervously, and the driver picked up speed.

&nb
sp; The Angolan beside the driver saw him first, opened fire with his rifle and missed him. After that, it was too late. He was a tall, skinny black man, in green fatigues, who had suddenly stood up in the chest-high grass near the edge of the road a hundred yards ahead of them. Campbell swung the machine gun around to bear on him, but never got a bullet shot. The man already had the RPG2 launch tube on his right shoulder, his right hand on the forward pistol grip and his finger on the trigger. For an instant he sighted along the top of the tube at the Land Rover, then released the free-flight missile. The Soviet-made antitank missile hit the front of the vehicle with a violent thump.

  The driver and the man next to him were killed instantly in the fiery impact. The four other occupants of the Land Rover were thrown onto the road. AK47 rifle fire raked the air above Campbell’s head, and he saw little black spurts of tar knocked out of the road surface by bullets ricocheting off it. He rolled for cover behind the burning wreck of the Land Rover, which lay on its side still holding two charred corpses and sending a mournful column of black smoke up into the motionless air of the blue sky.

  Andre Verdoux came rolling in a split second after him, pursued by a hail of gunfire that spattered off the steel of the disabled vehicle. The two other Angolans were not so lucky. One was almost cut in two by the hail of fire and curled into a twisted knot by the edge of the road. The second man lay on his back in the middle of the road, either dead or unconscious as a result of being thrown from the vehicle. Automatic fire ripped into his prone body and bounced it along the road with his arms waving in a grotesque imitation of life.

  Mike stopped Andre from unstrapping his FN rifle from his back. He pointed to the long grass on the western side of the road, pulled two British L2A1 hand grenades from his belt and handed one to Verdoux. The Frenchman nodded that he was ready. Together, they pulled the safety pins and, momentarily rising from behind the cover of the burning Land Rover, threw their projectiles at the enemy and ducked down again. The grenades had a 4.3-second fuse, and the thin sheet steel case of each contained a coil of notched wire that broke into many lethal fragments on explosion.

  As the charges blew almost simultaneously, the two ran and disappeared into the high grass. They stumbled through the growth, bent almost double for a while. Then the grass showed signs of thinning out the farther they got from the road.

  “Let’s lie low and see what happens,” Mike gasped to Verdoux, restraining him by the arm.

  They unstrapped their Belgian FN 7.62-mm automatic rifles. They had plenty of spare twenty-round magazines. Mike fitted the tubular bayonet over the flash suppressor at the tip of the barrel. Sounds of the FAPLA soldiers’ voices drifted toward them. Campbell and Verdoux did not risk peering over the top of the grass to see what was going on. They could guess. The voices were quieter now as the men spread out and beat through the grass, searching for them. The Angolans kept in touch with one another in subdued Portuguese larded with words from their own African languages. Only one voice was loud, instructing the men to move this way and that, in Spanish, not Portuguese.

  “Goddamn Cubans,” Mike muttered.

  “They’ll come at us in a line,” Verdoux whispered. “If we can slip through that line and stay behind them, they’ll never find us.”

  Mike nodded his agreement. He knew the chances of this happening were not good, since it sounded as if they were being searched for by a full platoon of twenty-four men. What neither had bargained for was that the Cuban officer could not keep the Angolans in a Northern Hemisphere-style straight search line. These Africans knew more about finding their quarry in their own landscape than military training could improve on. They ignored the shouts of the Cuban and performed their own private circling motions, each man working independently of the others. Campbell and Verdoux recognized they were in deep trouble at the approach and retreat and new approach of searchers crashing through the grass near where they lay.

  A man rustled through the grass, and they could tell by the ever closer crunch of his boots on the dry stalks that he was going to walk right into them. Mike waved Andre back to cover him and knelt in waiting for the soldier. The FAPLA trooper did not see Mike until he was only a couple of feet away, whereupon Campbell drove the bayonet into his midriff. The Angolan gasped and crumpled. His AK47 did not go off.

  “We’ll stay here,” Mike rasped to Andre, after waiting to make sure none of his fellow troopers had noticed the demise of the FAPLA soldier.

  The searchers were all about them now, calling to one another, laughing loudly to give themselves courage and making plenty of noise as they advanced in the hope that whatever evil lay hidden in the long grass would flee before them. Mike and Andre waited.

  Soon another soldier stumbled on them. This one was more alert than the previous one and would have returned their fire if he had not been distracted for a moment by the sight of the corpse of his comrade Mike had bayoneted. The dead man was not a pretty sight.

  Verdoux took the Angolan with a burst of fire. Now that their position was revealed, they ran again, keeping stooped beneath the top of the high grasses. They could hear the Cuban screaming at the Africans behind them. They hid in a dense stand of grass and listened as the din of voices quieted and the search got under way again.

  Gradually, the FAPLA troops neared them again in their apparently random search through the tall grass. This time, Campbell did not give the man a chance to discover them. When they heard him coming, they got ready to run. Then Campbell blasted him through the stalks of grass, and the trooper died without knowing what had hit him.

  More panic. Shouting. Maneuvering. The hunt resumed. Campbell and Verdoux lay low in their new hiding place, having agreed on which direction to run on their discovery. They noticed that the Angolans were now less enthusiastic and, judging by their voices, moving about in small groups rather than singly. Verdoux smiled with satisfaction at Campbell. This was what they wanted. Although they were trapped in this area of tall grass, they were far from being taken. The sun was getting lower in the western sky, and there were no more than two hours of daylight left.

  Finally they were approached by a group. From the voices, they reckoned there were six or seven. Verdoux and Campbell could afford no mistakes. Mike gestured he would sweep from center to right. Verdoux nodded. Both realized they could not leave anyone standing after they had emptied their twenty-round magazines. A single man could take out both of them while they reloaded.

  Again, Mike did not wait till they were in full sight. He cut from center to right with full automatic fire and then cut a full swathe from right to left. Verdoux performed a mirror image of Mike’s action. His bullets sawed through the grass and the figures it concealed till he ran out of ammo. Momentary silence settled, broken by a nearby groan and then the Cuban officer’s shouting in Spanish. Mike and Andre reloaded as they crept away from the scene of carnage.

  The Angolans gathered about their fallen comrades for a time and seemed unwilling to resume the search once again. None of them wanted the misfortune of being the ones to discover the mercs. They set grass afire along the edge of the road, but it burned slowly since there was no wind to make the flames travel. Soon the brief equatorial dusk would fall, then the darkness of night.

  Mike and Andre considered attacking them. Before they could decide on tactics, the Angolans and their Cuban officer moved off down the road on foot. No doubt they had vehicles not far away.

  As darkness fell, the two mercs set out for their base camp, about a hundred miles away. A detour to one of the forward observation posts could end in disaster if the post had been abandoned or overrun. They had a little water each, but no food. After following the road a little way, they branched off on a dirt trail in the direction they needed to go. It was during this walk that the friendship between the two men grew. They trudged all night by the light of the huge stars and talked to keep themselves warm and awake. They had been walking more than seven hours before being picked up before dawn by a market truck in s
afe territory. Not long after that, they had another long talk and decided to get the hell out of Angola while they could. They were among the last white mercenaries on Roberto’s side to escape over the border to Kinshasa in Zaire. Those left behind died in battle, were executed or still rotted in nameless jails in Angola’s communist state.

  The Lutece house specialty of chilled raspberry soufflé was served to them, and they followed it with coffee, Armagnac and a replete feeling that all was well with the world, or almost.

  “I really would have gone into business in Indochina if it hadn’t been for the defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu,” Andre Verdoux mused. “That’s why I picked up a good working knowledge of Laotian and Cambodian as well as Vietnamese. I can manage to communicate in a number of the Montagnard languages, too, although these tend to change every few miles you go. That sort of knowledge could come in handy in your mission, Mike.”

  “Possibly,” Campbell grudgingly conceded.

  “You know a bit of Vietnamese, I suppose,” the Frenchman said condescendingly. “Special Forces lingo you picked up in the field?”

  “That’s about it, I suppose.”

  “A lot of people there speak good French,” Andre went on. “I’d hate to try to make my way with only a little Vietnamese and a lot of English.”

  “We don’t expect we’ll be chatting with that many folks, Andre. You imagine I’ll be stopping people to ask them the way?”

  “I know a lot about their customs, too,” Verdoux added.

  “I doubt we’ll be attending any folk dance festivals,” Mike said shortly.

  “These two you’ve hired, you think they could help on this level?” The Frenchman answered his own question by shaking his head vigorously. “They’re triggermen. Gun-slingers.”

  “You’re pretty fast with a gun yourself, Andre.”

  “Oh no, my friend, I am old and slow according to you. This mission would be too much for me.”