The Point Team (21 page)

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 darkness. 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.

A
S
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.

Mike climbed back out and called Verdoux to one side as the others lifted the equipment out of the pit. “Andre, we don’t have
time to check the stuff on this side of the river. Those three CIA men must have stopped Poon by
now. They’ll be back here any minute with scores of armed police. How deep is the river at our crossing? Do we use a boat?”

Andre questioned a man in Thai and told Mike, “We wade across. He says the water will be waist high, no higher than our chests,
at most. They want us to hurry.”

Mike handed him two hundred dollars in ten-dollar bills. “Give one to everybody here now, as a gift. Careful how you do it,
I don’t want their pride offended. They’ve been well paid by Colquitt’s agent here and so have the Laotians across the river
who are waiting for us.”

Mike saw no sign of offense being taken in the eager way they each grabbed a bill from Verdoux.

One by one the oil lamps were quenched, and they all stood still for a moment in the bean field beneath a sky of huge stars.
Mike listened to the sound of the others breathing. Far away there was a strange animal cry.

Then they set out in single file, one of the villagers leading, then the six mercs loaded with their gear, finally four village
men with extra ammunition and grenades as a gift for the Laotians. They crossed the road to one side of the village and descended
the riverbank into water a little above their ankles. Staying close behind each other in order for each man not to lose the
man in front of him, they walked across the sand and gravel banks just beneath the water’s surface. All that could be heard
in the darkness now was the gurgles of the water and the splashing of their feet. From time to time they could see the stars
reflected in smooth patches of water.

None of the men had to be told how the human voice carries across water. Not a word was spoken. They realized the enormous
width of the river, even if they could not see it, by the length of time they walked through the shallows. Then very quickly
the water came up to their knees, then halfway up their thighs, and they could feel the greater force of the current sweeping
downstream against their legs.

The villager leading them slowed his pace as he negotiated the main channel. Even if the river was at its lowest point toward
the end of the dry season, the man still showed a healthy respect for it, taking his time to find good footing and searching
with his feet for the sand bars he knew to be there.

They felt the cool, flowing water at waist level and kept their weapons, grenades and ammo above it, knowing that at any time
they might step into a deeper hole in the riverbed or lose their footing on slippery gravel and soak or even lose their load.
After a long time they grew aware of the water level dropping slowly as they climbed out on the Laos side of the channel.
Now more serious obstacles than slippery stones began to present themselves in their minds. Could they trust these villagers?
For all they knew, they might be communists or in league with them. Were there river patrols at night on this section? Probably.
The CIA knew where to find them in spite of their maneuvers. Would the Laotians? Had the Laotians heard they were coming?
Were they, right at that moment, lying on the opposite bank watching them through night scopes? They were defenseless now,
standing in open water a little more than a foot deep, their guns and ammo still wrapped in waterproof plastic sheaths. What
the hell had they come here for? It was all a terrible mistake. They would go home. Call it all off. Never again.

Of course none of the six wanted any of the others to know of his rising panic and second thoughts, so each of them looked
mean as hell—though no one could see their faces in the dark—and they sloshed determinedly on through the water. Each man
was damned if he’d be the first to look weak. They guessed the others might be having doubts too, but only Mike sensed that
every man jack of them at that particular moment would have jumped at the opportunity to be moving in the opposite direction.

Mike Campbell had bad dreams enough alone with the woman he loved in a trailer in Arizona—he did not need to
make these dreams come true by going back to Nam, the very place that caused them.

Andre Verdoux was enjoying sex, food and wine with a greater appreciation and finesse in his mid-fifties than he ever had
in his life before. He would not have thought this possible, but it was so. And here he was, in a single irrational act, throwing
the good life away—this was worse than a teenager running off to join the Foreign Legion!