The Point Team

by J. B. Hadley

  “This new model still have the cleaning rod mounted beneath the barrel?” Campbell asked.

  “Sure thing. Just like a damn old musket.”

  “Handy thing, though,” Mike said. “Give me six of the AKMs. With night scopes.”

  “You got ’em, boy. How about some nice Uzis as well?”

  “The Uzi is a nice gun, Cuthbert, and we need a submachine gun. But you’re talking about almost eight pounds in weight for each gun, and we’re on foot—not touring the scenery in a personnel carrier. What about an Ingram?”

  “The M10 model is a bit over six pounds, and I can give it to you in .45- or 9-mm parabellum. The M11 weighs only three and a half pounds and takes 9-mm shorts in a 16- or 32-round box magazine. You can’t beat the M11 for lightness and reliability. Only thing is, you’re giving away a lot in effective range when you compare it to a Uzi.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Mike said. “The Uzi is about two hundred meters, while the M11 is only fifty.”

  “The Ingram M10 is seventy-five meters.”

  “No, I’ll take the M11. Give me six of them, with sound and flash suppressors.”

  Cuthbert whistled appreciatively. “I can just see all them dead commies lying all over the place already.”

  Mike guessed that Cuthbert Colquitt had never in his life shot at anything bigger than a jackrabbit, but when it came to accurately describing the capabilities of weapons, he knew no one better at it than this Southerner. They continued to discuss in detail all Mike’s requirements, comparing weapons and equipment. He could see Cuthbert was impressed that so far Mike had never asked the price of anything. Mike intended to bargain only after he had got a satisfactory array of hardware together. When they had covered all his conventional needs, Cuthbert heaved himself out of his chair.

  “Come on, Mike. I want you to see some things I got in my warehouse.”

  Campbell feigned reluctance, developing a resistance to Colquitt’s steamroller salesmanship. “I don’t know, Cuthbert. I’ve seen very good stuff in Sweden and Belgium recently. I don’t think you could match it.”

  Colquitt looked hurt. “Foreign junk! These here goods I’m going to show you is fabulous made-in-USA stuff, all-American. Come on, Mike, bring your bourbon and take a look. Maybe you want to stop off on the way and attack China with the shit I got in my showroom. You’d win.”

  The Gulfstream Commander Jetprop took the team to the airport outside Charleston, where a limo picked them up and conveyed them to a seventy-foot yacht top-heavy with a flying bridge, two decks, sun canopies, a ton of chrome, glistening clear varnish, and dazzling white paint. The “captain” of this elegant craft saluted them as they came aboard. He had a lot of gold braid on his peaked hat and starched white shirt.

  “He looks more like an out-of-work actor than a seafaring man,” Bob Murphy muttered to Mike Campbell.

  “We don’t have to go to sea with him, just in among the islands.”

  Two immaculately uniformed stewards stowed their baggage, seated them at café tables on the aft deck and adjusted umbrellas to keep the sun off their faces. They were served drinks.

  “Looks like this is going to be a real mean bitch of a mission,” Murphy said happily, relaxing back in his deck chair and rattling the ice cubes in his glass as a signal to the steward to refill it.

  Mike noticed that Joe Nolan from Youngstown, Ohio, and Harvey Waller from Flemington, New Jersey, were much more ill at ease in all this ostentatious luxury. Both glowered at the captain and the stewards. Nolan went out of his way to stamp out his cigarette ends on the gleaming deck boards. And neither of them did anything to hide their antagonism toward what Waller called “the foreigners” on the team, the Australian, Englishman and Frenchman. They were careful, however, not to cross swords with Campbell.

  Andre Verdoux, in his turn, was behaving in a somewhat superior manner to his four teammates. No one could doubt his attitude was meant to suggest that this mission was Mike’s and his, and that the rest were merely porters and water bearers.

  Murphy seemed unaware of all these alliances and animosities, chattering on in a loud voice above the ship’s engines as they made their way across the water. Richards said very little to anyone.

  The splendid vessel, with the captain clutching its walnut wheel as if he were rounding the Horn in a gale, made its placid way over the calm waters along the Intracoastal Waterway between James Island and the mainland. Farther north, they passed inside the shelter of Sullivans Island, the Isle of Palms, Dewees Island … At last they came to a small island, perhaps a mile long and half that in width, that seemed little more than a glorified sandbar. A wooden dock stretched out from the landward side of the island, which was salt marsh near the water and covered with bushes and low trees in the middle. Beyond the trees, high dunes hid the ocean from view. They could hear the waves breaking on the beach.

  “Mr. Vanderhoven’s cottage is this way, sir,” the driver of the first dune buggy come to meet them told Campbell and Murphy.

  The others, except for Verdoux who stayed to supervise the baggage, piled into the second dune buggy. Vanderhoven’s “cottage” turned out to be a huge, two-story stone house built in imitation of some old European style and sheltered in a hollow with dunes to one side and pine trees around the others. Because a big meal had been prepared for them, Campbell had not the heart to refuse it.

  He warned his men as they sat at the dining table, “We’ve come here to lose flab, not gain twenty pounds. After this meal, this house is out of bounds. We have six mattresses in the attic above what were once stables. That’s where we’ll live. So, gentlemen, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we train.”

  “I want you bastards to run, run, run,” Campbell bellowed at them as he kept up the pace on the hard sand along the ocean’s edge. “You may be able to shoot, fuck and sing, but you goddamn cripples can’t run worth a shit.”

  As long as Campbell himself did whatever he demanded of the others, none were in a position to complain without admitting that they couldn’t take it. They muttered among themselves for the first few days and began referring to Campbell as Mad Mike with emphasis on the first word, but no one dared rebel. They ran and ran and ran. Up and down the wet hard sand of the beach. Through the soft deep sand farther back that drained a man’s energy and burned the bottoms of his bare feet. They ran up the sides of giant dunes where the sand gave way beneath their feet almost as fast as they could climb, with the result it was almost like running in place. From dawn to dusk, with breaks of an hour at a time, they ran around the island, up and down it, across it …

  “Solely as a matter of intellectual curiosity, Mike,” Andre Verdoux asked on the third day, “why are you doing this to us? We are all reasonably fit, and we hope to fight our way to and from our mission goal, not run like hell. Why?”

  “You see the way everyone, including yourself, Andre, was giving everyone else the business on the way here on the plane and in the boat?” Mike asked. “I said to myself, to hell with this, I got a bunch of civilians here, this is not a fighting team. What I need is soldiers—guys with disciplined minds as well as physically fit bodies. After a couple more days of this, everyone will have forgotten all their petty little bitcheries from the civilian world. Or some of them anyway.”

  “It’s hard, Mike. Damn hard.”

  “I told you that you were too old, Andre.”

  The Frenchman scowled and never questioned Mike’s running program again.

  Apart from heaving smooth rocks approximately the same shape and weight as hand grenades into a circle marked on the beach, they fired some rusty old rifles retrieved from the house at Driftwood. Mike had thought Vanderhoven’s rifles would be in better condition and had brought along two target practice nose-marker versions of the high-explosive antitank (HEAT) 75N Energa rifle grenade. They fired these inert practice grenades with ballistite rounds. The grenade had a reusable marker which left a colored chalk mark on the target after each shot. However, the rifles
were in such bad condition, they never could get down to some serious competitive shooting among themselves.

  On the fourth morning, two South Carolina State Police helicopters landed on the beach, one in front of and one behind the six running men. A voice over a loudspeaker commanded them to surrender, as heavily armed state policemen in riot helmets jumped from the choppers onto the beach. They surrounded the six barefoot men dressed only in boxer’s shorts.

  “We got this here search warrant.” The sergeant waved it in Mike’s face. “We heard from Washington you’re training a private army down here.”

  “You’re looking at them.”

  “We kinda expected at least forty or fifty men,” the sergeant said. “Aside from Mr. Vanderhoven’s staff, there’s no one else on the island?”

  “Except for you people.”

  Mike heard him radio from the chopper, apparently sending back two boatloads of reinforcements.

  “We’re gonna take a look around,” the sergeant said menacingly to Campbell.

  In a while they came back with the two HEAT rifle grenades. Campbell took them apart to show that they were duds, but the sergeant took them anyway—“as evidence,” he said.

  Mike commented to Verdoux as they left, “You notice they didn’t touch a damn thing of Vanderhoven’s?”

  “You were expecting them, Mike?” Andre asked and answered himself, “Which is why we had no proper weapons.”

  Campbell said shortly, “If we let Washington stop us, they will. If we don’t, they won’t.”

  Chapter 15

  THEY interrupted the long plane ride from New York to Bangkok with a day in Tokyo and six hours in Hong Kong. The oppressive heat and incredible traffic jams on the way to their Bangkok hotel from the airport, combined with their exhaustion, rendered them semicomatose. However, the memories of R&Rs spent in this Thai city during the Vietnam war were awakened at the sight of particular things—ornate Buddhist temples, neon signs for go-go bars, crowded streets and, most of all, the graceful ivory-skinned women of extraordinary beauty.

  “You giving us some time here to get acclimatized?” Bop Murphy asked Campbell in the hotel lobby.

  “Is that what you call what you were doing in Tokyo and Hong Kong?” Mike countered.

  “Come on, Mike,” Bob said. “Larry Richards has never been here before. I want to show him the sights.”

  “We have a couple of days,” Mike admitted with a grin. “You better pack whatever you can in, because we’ve all got some lean times ahead.”

  Campbell was surprised at how well Verdoux spoke Thai. Although many of the people here spoke some form of rudimentary English, particularly the ones who had something for sale, the ability to speak their language opened up a different world for the Frenchman. The Thais were flattered that a Westerner had learned their difficult tongue, curious about him—which was not so welcome—and anxious to please.

  “What do you think has changed most since you were last here?” Andre asked Mike.

  “It’s almost ten years. I guess the place seems even more crowded than it was before.”

  “Would you believe that since then the population has doubled to more than five million?” Andre went on. “I heard one American describe the city as ‘downtown Thailand.’”

  That evening Mike and Andre wandered over to Patpong Road, the honky-tonk section. The area was crawling with Japanese, American, and European tourists, with relatively few American servicemen to be seen.

  “They run sex tours from Tokyo these days—a few days away from the wife and kids,” Andre said.

  Mike indicated a flashing neon sign ahead. “I remember this place from the old days.”

  An American flag hung below the neon sign which flashed ranch in the dusk.

  “We used to call it the Raunch,” Mike said. “You want a beer?”

  In the dark interior a dozen bar girls, unusually modestly dressed, were serving heaping bowls of vegetables, rice, and fruit to four monks in saffron robes with shaved eyebrows and heads.

  The madam approached them quickly and spoke in English, “You boys come back in a while, yes? We get blessing now for fifteen years open today.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The girls take off their clothes and we put up naughty pictures on wall again. OK? We were afraid maybe monks change their minds and stop being monks. You come back in a little while,” she repeated as she expertly pushed them back into the street.

  Andre smiled after she had gone. “At least we’re old enough to see the humor in the situation.”

  “You may be,” Mike said.

  Bar girls accosted them in the street, many in cutaway camouflage fatigues. Others were clad in tight silk dresses that rippled tautly as they moved. Tourist buses disgorged scores of Japanese businessmen who all plunged into a single bar at the same time, grabbing whatever was there while the place next door was empty.

  “Remember how a lot of Americans would come down here to fight?” Verdoux asked. “I often wondered if some of them ever got laid.”

  “Frenchie, you got a lot of things on your mind.”

  Verdoux did not like Campbell to call him by this name, although he accepted it from the others. He realized his mistake had been in criticizing Americans in any form to Campbell. Campbell himself said what he wanted about Americans, and he never objected when other Americans, such as Nolan or Waller, said negative things—but when anyone not an American, even an old friend like Andre, said something the least uncomplimentary about America or Americans, they got to know real fast that Campbell’s ear was not sympathetic.

  They hit a few places along the way. Mike secretly wished he were back in the trailer camp looking forward to seeing Tina. But he was in Bangkok, not Arizona. And he had to admit that some of the sensual creatures here in their slinky outfits were enough to distract the mind of any man.

  Though Mike looked over all the slick city girls, he found himself selecting a cute girl who obviously had been a peasant working in the fields until recently. She had an earthy quality that appealed. Like all the other women, she was small, she had black hair and large brown eyes, her skin was smooth and hairless and her clothes revealed almost as much as they hid. She had two important differences from the city girls—her hands were strong, sure and capable—not useless fluttering appendages—and when she spoke her smattering of English she looked Mike in the eye and expected some response. The other bar girls said what they were expected to say and looked anyplace about the bar except at the man they were with.

  Andre Verdoux had got the most sophisticated-looking woman in the bar to talk French to, so he was happy. Mike thought to himself that if Americans liked to fight in places like this, Frenchmen seem to enjoy talking French more than having sex. He wished he had thought of this earlier. He and the peasant girl, whose name, surprisingly, was Veronique, slipped away. Mike assumed her real name was some Thai word of seven syllables. They went to a cheap hotel with rooms by the hour not far away. Mike paid for six hours and told her that any hours he did not use up, she could use the room. He had spread old man Vanderhoven’s money generously around the crew so they could have a good time. Now he might as well spend some on himself.

  The room was fairly crummy, but clean. Some people were partying in the room next door to Western rock music on a tape deck. Farther away, a flute was playing a melancholy air. As usual, the din of traffic and horn-blowing in the street rose and fell like waves on a beach.

  “Sukhothai girls give the best blow jobs,” Veronique said.

  Mike remembered hearing that joke before about the town north of Bangkok. She probably made it to English-speaking customers half a dozen times a day. He was wondering if she also had jokes in Japanese when he felt her warm, soft lips enclose the head of his cock. He had no idea if girls from Sukhothai really were the best, but at least this one was right up there.

  Next morning the police came to the hotel. Mike showed them everyone’s passport and there was much talking among the
police in Thai, which they assumed reasonably enough none of these foreigners understood.

  Andre took Mike off to one side and said quietly, “It seems we weren’t supposed to have been allowed off our plane, except someone at the passport control goofed. They’re trying to make up their minds whether they have the authority to arrest us.”

  Mike approached the police officer who seemed to be in charge. “Is something out of order?”

  “No, sir. This is just a routine check. Do not worry.”

  There was more rapid talk among them in Thai, along with some less than friendly glances. Mike began to feel a little desperate. The embarrassment would be hard to face down if his team were arrested in a Bangkok hotel and deported before the mission even got under way.

  “We’ll be leaving Thailand the day after tomorrow,” Mike said to the cop.

  This had an immediate cheering effect. “What? You go?” Then suspiciously, “Where to?”

  “Singapore.”

  “Day after tomorrow to Singapore. Very good. Let me see your plane tickets.”

  “We plan to go overland.”

  “Not so good,” the police officer said, not so believing now.

  Mike pretended to misunderstand. “Why not? I know there are troubled areas, but we’ll be traveling by day.”

  The police officer waved a hand to silence him. He collected their six passports from the other officers.

  Mike asked Andre surreptitiously, “Does he expect a bribe?”

  “I don’t think so. Don’t try unless he at least hints at it.”

  The officer handed the passports to Mike. “Forty-eight hours.”

  “We’ll be gone,” Mike answered him.

  After they left, Campbell switched on the radio to loud, atonal Thai music. He told the others, “You’ve got to assume our rooms are bugged. From now on, if you have to talk on confidential mission matters, go outside, or if you must do it indoors, keep that radio loud. Better not to talk about such things at all. Washington is going to be pissed they didn’t make fools of us. Stay away from all Americans today. Have yourselves a good time, but report in here to me before eleven tonight. We’ve got to keep tabs on each other from now on.”