The Point Team

by J. B. Hadley

  Campbell motioned for Verdoux to stay as the others left his hotel room. He turned off the radio and they went down into the noisy crowded street.

  “We go early tomorrow?” Andre asked.

  “Yes. You think the others guessed it was tomorrow, not the day after?”

  “If they are using their minds, they did. But they’re so busy fucking their brains out, perhaps they did not register what they didn’t want to hear.”

  “I’m sure all of us are under some sort of surveillance,” Campbell said as they threaded their way through the crowds. “It must be child’s play around here. If the cops believed we’re not leaving till the day after tomorrow and if Washington is relying on local forces to do their bidding, maybe we can get clean away tomorrow morning.”

  “A big maybe,” Andre said pessimistically.

  “I agree. I think the CIA will try to hit us when we move out.”

  “Sounds logical,” Andre agreed. “Or at the weapons drop. Where do we pick them up?”

  “Just this side of the Laos border. We go by road. I didn’t mean to originally because it’s a journey of more than three hundred miles from here to the border with Laos. I had a plane chartered for tomorrow morning under an assumed name. Obviously we’re not going to show up for that. If they’re anywhere, they’ll be at the airport waiting for us.”

  “Do you have a driver?”

  “We’re on our way to see him now,” Campbell said. “I want you along to speak Thai and maybe to cause a diversion in case we’re followed.”

  They caught a taxi on one of the less-congested thoroughfares. “Klong Toey,” Campbell told the driver, who looked at them oddly in his rearview mirror.

  “I don’t go in,” the driver said when he came to the edge of the shantytown.

  Mike paid him off, and he and Andre walked down one of the refuse-strewn lanes that wound through the one-room huts. These shacks, constructed of every conceivable material from palm fronds to plastic sheets, were built next to each other. Through the open doorways, they caught glimpses of the crowded life within—women cooking, children playing. Others carried containers of water—there seemed to be no plumbing.

  On one lane they came upon eight or nine men with the emaciated bodies and glazed eyes of opium or heroin addicts. The men confronted them and spoke angrily in Thai.

  Verdoux translated for Mike. “They say they want money or they will kill us.”

  Mike said, “Tell them we’ve come to meet Nart Yodmani.”

  When Verdoux mentioned this name, they fell back. None of them were threatening anymore.

  Mike held up a U.S. ten-dollar bill. “Andre, get that one to take us to Nart.”

  As they followed the addict through the extensive slum, both men continued to check behind them for a tail, although they recognized it was hopeless. Anyone who wanted to know where they were going had only to ask the addicts.

  “Who is this Nart Yodmani?” Andre asked.

  “An associate of Cuthbert Colquitt. Cuthbert said to contact him if we needed local help in a hurry while in Bangkok. For some reason he lives in the middle of this slum himself, while he has six or seven sons who own big houses in the suburbs.”

  Sweat ran down their faces and inside their shirts as they followed the addict over the uneven, dusty lanes through the never-ending vista of hovels. The addict held up his hand and said something.

  “He says to wait here,” Andre translated.

  After a last anxious look at the ten-dollar bill still in Mike’s hand, the Thai loped off around a turn. He was gone for about ten minutes. Then they saw him walk back with a huge Thai, muscular and grossly overweight as a Sumo wrestler, and a small nervous man with a thin face, a mustache, and a machine pistol in his right hand. The addict snatched the ten dollars from Mike and seemed in a hurry to depart.

  “I am Nart Poonsiriwongse, the third son,” the blubbery giant announced in American-accented English.

  Mike told him who he was and that he wanted to see his father. The son did not respond much one way or the other. In a little while Mike saw why. A tall, thin man with a nervous tic in his left eye came up to them and introduced himself in English as Nart Yodmani. Campbell saw he was not going to come any closer than this to Nart’s hideaway, so he got down to business.

  “I want you to hire three vans as nearly identical in appearance as possible. You must hire them legally—I can’t afford police trouble on some minor issue. That’s for eight tomorrow morning.”

  Nart nodded.

  Mike continued, “The day after tomorrow I need you to collect our belongings at our hotel, pay the bill and hold our baggage for us. We go tomorrow without taking anything with us, since we will be watched.”

  Nart nodded again.

  Mike went on, “We’re being watched by the Bangkok police, probably Thai government intelligence and definitely the CIA. Though I have to admit I haven’t been able to spot any tails.”

  Nart glanced at his son, who said, “Their taxi had no tail when it arrived in Klong Toey.”

  Nart turned to Campbell. “We have been following you.”

  Mike paused a moment to consider this. “The CIA hired you?”

  Nart evaded the question. “I do much work for the United States. But they pay bad. You pay more?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where you go tomorrow? Laos? Cambodia?”

  Mike hesitated a fraction of a second. “Laos.”

  “Ten thousand U.S. dollars, we take care of everything.”

  “Surveillance, hotel, three vans and drivers?”

  “Everything.”

  “OK,” Mike agreed. It was daylight robbery, but it was Vanderhoven’s money, so all it amounted to was one rogue thieving from another.

  Nart pointed at his mountainous son. “Poonsiriwongse will drive you back to the city center. He will collect all the money in advance.”

  Hard looks were exchanged as the team ate breakfast in Campbell’s hotel room at seven the next morning.

  “You mean we’re going in on an hour’s notice?” Richards complained above the sound of the loud radio.

  “We have to leave all our things behind?” Nolan bitched.

  “You’ll be wearing camouflage fatigues and the boots you broke in last week in South Carolina,” Mike said. “You can bring cigarettes, whatever, but no transistor radios or tapes or dope or booze. You can bring ID if you want. If they take you alive, they won’t believe it anyway.”

  “Who’s they, Mike?” Bob Murphy inquired.

  “We cross Laos into Vietnam—so there’s going to be a lot of ‘they.’ Take your pick.”

  “We after MIAs?” Waller asked.

  “More or less,” Mike said, deliberately vague.

  Richards got to his feet. “Are we on some crazy job to assassinate Viet leaders?”

  “No,” Mike said evenly.

  Richards subsided into his chair. “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  “Let’s get moving,” Campbell said. “No phone calls. No talking to anyone outside the team. Remember the rooms are probably bugged. Take what you can get in your pockets. No bags. Got it? Dismiss.”

  The men wore looks of mixed feelings on their faces as they left the room. The way Campbell talked, he was the colonel and they were soldiers again. That was what they had come for, but all of them were a bit angry at having the mission dropped on them like this with less than an hour’s notice.

  Poonsiriwongse was on time. At eight exactly he arrived outside the hotel in a brown Volkswagen van with heavily tinted windows. Campbell and his team of five climbed in and the van pulled out into the heavy traffic.

  “Everything set?” Mike inquired.

  “All OK,” the Thai said with a big smile.

  After driving for ten minutes, they pulled into a gas station and into the big garage at the back of it. An identical brown van was waiting inside it with a heavy-set driver and four or five Thais inside. Mike waved for them to go, and the brown van pulled
out of the garage.

  “Anyone following us won’t have time in this traffic to figure out what the hell’s going on. They’re headed down the peninsula toward Malaysia, right?”

  “They’ll go south as far as Ban Na Kha and spend the night there before turning back,” Poonsiriwongse said. “It’s two hundred and fifty miles or more there—they will be lucky to make it in one day on that road.”

  As they picked up speed leaving the eastern part of the city, another brown Volkswagen van came out of nowhere and sped alongside their own. The Thai driver gave Poonsiriwongse a cheerful wave, and they proceeded to race and weave in and out of the thundering, brightly painted trucks that were themselves involved in races of their own.

  The huge Thai laughed at their apprehension. “Out here there is no police to worry about. The one who is fastest and has most courage rules the road.”

  “It helps too if you have a ten-ton truck,” Mike observed wryly.

  “The other van will take the main road north to Vientiane. We branch off to the east a few miles from here. Again we have created confusion, I think.”

  They had passed through a rice-growing region and were now in higher ground where corn and other plants grew. The two vans continued to interweave in and out of traffic in this upland section. It was considerably more than a few miles before the hills began to drop down into low-lying, waterlogged rice fields again, and the second van departed on the road to the north. Men, women and children stooped to their tasks in the fields, usually knee-deep in water. Women carried burdens by the roadside, and children watched over enormous water buffalo wallowing in the river mud or sat on their broad backs as they waddled along pathways. Men fished with nets and visited fish traps in canoes. Ducks paddled in convoys, and long-legged water birds rose flapping with huge wings from clumps of reeds.

  Poonsiriwongse pointed to mountains to the south. “The Dongrak range. Beyond that is Cambodia. There are a hundred thousand refugees in that area alone, but you won’t see any of the camps this far inland. The Vietnamese army is trying to seal this border between Thailand and Cambodia, but it will be impossible for them to do so. The communists wrecked Cambodia, and even they now need Thai goods. Stupid men.” He drew his finger across his throat to show his solution to the problem of their existence.

  “Do they smuggle opium around here?” Larry Richards asked.

  “No. That comes from the north, and most of it comes into Thailand from Burma. We allow the Americans to come in here to help us stop the growers. Do you know what happens? The hill tribesmen agree to destroy their poppies and plant tea or plums or peaches instead. Yet when they try to sell their tea, the merchants in Bangkok don’t want it, and when they try to sell plum wine, the government will not give them a distiller’s license. So they have to go back to the opium poppy. They make only about 2000 baht—less than a hundred dollars for a kilo of raw opium, so they’re not the big-money men in the business. That only starts after the drugs leave Asia.”

  “You sound like you know the business fairly good, Poon,” Joe Nolan said.

  Poon—as they had taken to calling him—gave Nolan a big smile and said nothing.

  They drove on in the hot sun, Poon refusing all offers to spell him at the wheel. They stopped at an inn for a meal of fish, beans and rice and drank excellent Thai beer while they waited for Poon to wake from his siesta. When they were on the road again, the heat and beer made the others sleepy, except for Mike, who was growing increasingly edgy. He had refused to tell Poon their final destination—only that it was a small village on the bank of the Mekong river beyond the sizable town of Ubon Ratchathani. Poon insisted that the police would be watching for them at that town, so they would have to skirt it by back roads.

  “Poon, your father as good as admitted to me that the CIA is paying you to watch us,” Mike said. “Where does that leave us with you?”

  “The CIA is not paying me,” Poon said indignantly. “They paid my father, and he in turn paid some of his sons to watch you. Then you paid him, and so he paid the rest of his sons to get you away from our brothers. We will see which is the smartest set of brothers.”

  “The CIA field agent is not going to understand this. He will think your father cheated him.”

  “Why should he? He was unlucky to get the stupid sons, and you got the smart ones.”

  “Are your other brothers really stupid?”

  Poon laughed loudly. “They think they are smarter than me.”

  Campbell found none of this very reassuring, but he readily accepted Poon’s explanation of his role. Mercs on a mission normally do not expect to attract to their aid the more stable and less venturesome elements in society. They ask few questions and hear a lot of lies.

  Darkness was falling as they neared Ubon Ratchathani and veered south of the town. The border with Laos was an hour away. After driving for a while on what were little more than water buffalo paths, Poon announced that because of the failing light they would have to go back onto the road again.

  “We’re well past the town,” he said. “It will be safe here till we get to the river.”

  He picked up speed on the surfaced road and was about to switch on the headlights when he saw a line of flickering lights ahead.

  “Keep your heads down,” Poon yelled to the others and accelerated. “They won’t see us till the last moment.”

  Mike sat upright beside the driver, staring through the windshield and trying to figure out what the lights were. As they neared, he saw. A line of oil barrels stretched across the road, with an open-flame lamp on top of each. In the wavering light behind the barrels, he saw police or soldiers with rifles standing guard. Mike saw them peer into the darkness as they heard the van’s engine approaching but could not see the vehicle. Two of the men unstrapped their rifles from their shoulders, but the rest seemed less concerned.

  Then Mike saw fear across those faces in the lamplight as they suddenly realized that the unlighted vehicle was bearing down on them at high speed out of the night. He braced himself against the dashboard as the Volkswagen van hit two of the barrels and scattered the armed men.

  Poon flicked on the headlights for a second to get a glimpse of the road ahead. It lay empty, and the van sped on into the total darkness, with a few metallic scrapings as bullets ricocheted off its sides.

  “Police!” Poon said with disdain. “If they had been soldiers, they would have been waiting with a machine gun on this side of the roadblock in case someone broke through.”

  “It seems that maybe your brothers are not so dumb after all,” Mike said.

  Poon shrugged. “How do you know that roadblock was meant for you?”

  “If it wasn’t, the next one will be, after those guys get on their radio,” Mike replied. “What will you do after you drop us off?”

  “I’ll pull the van off the road behind some trees, sleep there tonight and tomorrow return to Bangkok by daylight. If they stop me to ask questions, I’ll tell them where I dropped you. By then you will be in Laos. You must cross over tonight, or they will catch you on the Thai side tomorrow.”

  “We’ll cross if we can,” Mike said.

  “You just have to wade across,” Poon exclaimed. “We won’t have the rains for another month. The Mekong is at its lowest. Which village do you wish to go to?”

  Mike told him, and they lapsed into silence as the van sped along the pitch-black country road. The headlights were on now, making them an easy target.

  “Here it is,” Poon said, slowing to a halt among a collection of thatched bamboo huts, many of them on stilts on the riverbank, all without a sign of life in the beams of the van’s headlights.

  All six climbed out of the van and stretched their limbs. Poon sat behind the wheel and watched what they would do. Mike decided he would rouse someone in the nearest hut and then get Poon to leave, but meanwhile they needed the lights of the van to see by.

  “Michael Campbell!”

  An American voice came out of the darkn
ess. They whirled about to see three Westerners in white shirts and khaki pants approach them.

  “Glad to see you, Mr. Campbell,” one of them said.

  They looked the polite sort who would have shook hands all around if they each hadn’t been holding a Colt Cobra revolver.

  “My name is Parker, assistant military attaché at the embassy. Phillips and Wiley are on staff, too.”

  Parker and the two others loosely slapped them down for weapons. When they found none, Parker made a point of putting his pistol in his belt. The others did also.

  “Mind if we look in the van?”

  Parker, followed by the two, opened the side door and peered into the van. He then climbed in. Wiley got in, too, while Phillips stood outside.

  Mike called in to them, “You won’t find anything there.”

  Campbell caught Poon’s eye. The big man very deliberately put the VW van’s stick shift in gear. Mike got the message. He winked to Poon, turned quickly, and pushed Phillips off-balance through the open side door. Simultaneously Poon took his foot off the clutch, and the van shot away with the three CIA men inside.

  Chapter 16

  AS soon as the van roared off into the night, the village that had seemed deserted until then suddenly came to life. Verdoux spoke in a loud voice, and half a dozen different voices responded to him at the same time as oil lamps were lit and figures climbed down the ladders of the thatched huts on stilts.

  “They say we must go now,” Verdoux told them. “We must take our weapons now. They will lead us across the river and bring us to the place where the Laotian mercs have been waiting for us a couple of days.”

  “Tell them we’re ready to move out,” Mike said.

  Almost twenty men and boys accompanied them by the light of the oil lamps to the middle of a bean field. The boys scraped away the earth from a ten-by-ten-foot area and revealed heavy timber boards. The boards roofed a pit lined with plastic sheeting to keep moisture out. Mike jumped down and made a quick inventory of what was there.