The Point Team (25 page)

The chopper swooped down lower over the road, traveling so fast it was upon them before they heard the noise of the engine.
The side-door machine gunner stitched a neat row of spurts along the center of the dirt road and through the center of the
truck from back to front.

“It’s one of our old gunships they’ve fixed up,” Nolan yelled. “The pilot’s seen us.”

The chopper followed through like a boxer on a haymaker and then swung in a tight circle to come back on their rear and give
the side-door gunner a nice view of their backs. They had no cover worth a shit.

“Scatter!” Mike yelled.

Regret flashed across his mind he had decided not to take along the Carl-Gustav M2 shoulder-borne rocket launcher and a couple
of rockets because of their weight and cumbersomeness. He had turned down the Redeye heat-seeking guided missile for the same
reasons. All he would have had to do with the Redeye was point the missile in the general direction of the chopper, wait till
the audio signal informed him that the infrared homing device had locked onto the target, then launch the missile. A booster
motor expels the missile from the shoulder-borne tube, the main motor fires after six meters, and the infrared sensor on
the missile homes on the heat of the chopper’s engine … End of helicopter.

During the seconds that these regrets were running through Campbell’s mind, his fingers worked the magazine release on his
AK47, freed the magazine from its housing, pulled back the bolt to discard the round in the chamber, loaded a special magazine
of ballistite rounds, rapped the bottom of the magazine with his weak hand to ensure that it was properly seated, unhooked
the HEAT-RFL-75N Energa rifle grenade from his H-harness, mounted it in his rifle, swung the rifle to his shoulder, took quick
aim down the barrel …

The men had scattered in all directions to cut down on their casualties from the machine gunner. Only Campbell still stood
in the roadside ditch, looking along his rifle at the helicopter bearing down to one side of him and the machine gunner sending
forward a raking seam of fire across the ground a few feet off Mike’s right shoulder.

Both the gunner and the pilot saw what Mike was doing and knew they had to move in to take him fast.

Mike took a last aim down the rifle barrel and let loose his one shot into the empty space he figured the chopper would occupy
by the time the rifle grenade traveled there. He was blown off his feet by the blast.

The high-explosive antitank grenade had done an aerial job. The others, rifles raised to empty their magazines of small bullets,
only 7.62 mm, at the pilot and gunner, or anything they could hit, were blinded by the flash. Then they felt the heat of the
explosion on their faces. The sudden blast of hot wind swept by them, bearing deadly jagged pieces of the chopper’s metal
fuselage. The sound pressed on their eardrums and painfully invaded their brains. Each man found himself standing alone in
the smoke and debris, wondering if he was the only one who
had survived. Wreckage burned in the middle of the roadside field.

They were startled when, with half-deafened ears, they heard the truck’s motor start up.

Campbell stuck his head out the cab door and yelled at them, “The engine’s OK! Move your asses! We’re getting outta here!”

A Hmong drove the truck at its maximum speed—about thirty-five mph—along the dirt road, and another sat next to him cradling
his rifle. They drove with both cab doors partly open, so they could abandon the vehicle fast when next attacked. They knew
they would be. On orders from Campbell, all the canvas covering had been stripped from the truck to give the occupants the
360-degree view of the sky they needed to fend against chopper attacks. They could no longer afford the luxury of concealment.
Also, they had gained a fast exit over the wooden sides when it came time to abandon ship. No one had any illusions about
what a beautiful target they made aboard the truck.

The road had been climbing steadily, and the mountains and hills were higher, the country wilder. The Hmong seemed vague about
where exactly they were, and Mike began to worry about coming up to the border crossing unexpectedly. It could not be far
away. Perhaps only a couple of kilometers, at most twelve to fifteen. They descended into a broad river valley and could see
the road snaking up into the mountains on the other side. The valley bottom was divided into rice fields, with no cover except
for an occasional solitary palm. Although the sun was close to setting, people still stooped in the knee-deep water setting
rice seedlings in the earth. They looked up as the truck passed them, more to ease the monotony and straighten their backs
than out of genuine curiosity.

“Choppers at three o’clock!” Nolan yelled.

Campbell hammered on the roof of the driver’s cab and the truck slowed. Three helicopters could now be seen
plainly, flying a triangle formation over the road, with the lead helicopter covering the road itself and the two others
the land on each side. Campbell and his men leaped from the truck. Their only cover was a mud embankment holding back water
in a rice field.

The three choppers disappeared behind a fold in the valley. The men had just about enough time to crouch behind the embankment
and raise their weapons before the machines popped out of the horizon and came on them faster than an inexperienced man would
have expected.

“Never seen this model before,” Nolan muttered.

“Must be a new Russian design,” Murphy agreed. “Faster than a bat out of hell, too.”

“Hold your fire and lie still!” Campbell yelled as the choppers came nearer, like three monster hornets. “They might not see
us!”

The lead machine zapped two rockets at the stationary truck, a left and a right from pods attached amidship. For an instant,
the two deadly darts were visible in the air in every detail from their rounded nose back to their stabilizing fins.

The truck disappeared in a huge ball of orange light. The ground shook beneath them from the impact, and the brown water slopped
back and forth in the rice field like the wake of a distant boat in a muddy inlet.

The noise and wind of the blast masked those of the choppers passing overhead. Then they could hear the flames lapping the
wreckage.

“Hold still!” Campbell commanded. “Keep your head down!”

They could tell by the noise of the engines that the choppers were swinging around for another fly-by.

Verdoux roared Campbell’s orders at the Hmong, who obeyed.

Mike eased his eyes above the embankment to gain some idea of the pilots’ intentions. He was fairly sure they had not been
seen, but he didn’t want to be responsible for
making his men sitting ducks. A half-kilometer to the west, the three machines hovered, marked by uncertainty. In the rice
fields all about, men, women, and children ran in panic, splashing through the water like flightless ducks. The choppers’
engines roared, and they picked up speed as they came in on another pass.

“Stay put!” Campbell yelled.

Verdoux repeated the command in Hmong.

This time the choppers zoomed over the fields and machine-gunned the fleeing peasants. The running workers were tumbled like
ninepins and sprawled face down, arms outstretched, floating on the water.

One of the pilots must have come to his senses, realized what they were doing and called off the others, because suddenly
they all headed back the way they had come, over the far side of the wide valley.

The panic-stricken peasants were still running in all directions. They avoided the area where they could see the truck burning
and thus missed discovering Campbell’s force.

“We need to move in a bit from the road.” Mike pointed to a bank of tall reeds sixty meters away. “We’ll take cover there
till dark. Follow me and keep your heads down. Our only chance of not being seen is while they are still panicking.”

As they moved, for the first time the others saw the bodies of the men, women, and children randomly scattered about the fields.

“Jesus, it’s great to be back again,” Nolan said bitterly.

They established themselves in the cover of tall reeds. Campbell ordered the men to eat, whether they felt hungry or not.

“Fucking picnic in a bog with dead kids floating about,” Murphy growled, which Campbell noted as the Australian’s first complaint.

“We move out at dark,” Mike explained, “and keep moving till we’re clear of Laos.”

The sun began to set, and its pink, gold, and orange bars spread rapidly across the sky in the short equatorial dusk. For
a moment Mike thought he heard coyotes, but the howls were even more eerie. The sounds made Campbell’s hair stand on end as
they came closer and seemed to spread about the fields, encircling them. Mike peered out of the reeds into the gathering darkness.

The peasants had returned to collect their dead, and the eerie, nocturnal cries were caused by the grief of women as they
recognized the dead faces of loved ones and hugged the wet corpses tightly in their arms.

T
HE
Hmong had argued quietly but volubly among themselves in the reeds, with much pointing to the various peaks on the far side
of the valley. At last some consensus was reached.

“I don’t know what they’re saying,” Verdoux told Campbell. “They’ve switched dialects on me and they’re talking too fast,
but it seems like they may remember the mountains ahead.”

This turned out to be the case. One of the Hmong spoke to Verdoux and explained that the border checkpoint was five kilometers
down the road, at the river crossing. The officially recognized border was the tips of the mountain range, but the Vietnamese
had expanded westward into Laos for convenience. The three helicopters that attacked were Vietnamese, not Laotian, according
to the Hmong. Viets killed Lao people like that when they could get away with it.

The Hmong said he would lead everyone alongside the road for about a kilometer. Then he would branch out to the northeast
from it on one of the many paths across the rice fields. They would have to traverse the area of cultivated fields in total
darkness, he said, cross the river
and climb through rice fields again on the other side. When they reached rough country at the highest upland extent of the
fields, they would wait for the moon. The first quarter would be out for a few hours later in the night. They would travel
into the mountains by moonlight.

This sounded like a grueling journey to Mike, but he saw no way to avoid it. Shuffling along on narrow paths in almost total
darkness, they constantly whispered to each other in order to maintain contact—like birds make sounds for each other while
migrating in the night skies. The river at the bottom of the valley was only ankle deep, and there were fewer rice fields
to be negotiated on the far side of the valley. All of them, including the Hmong, were exhausted and high-strung when they
settled in rough ground to await the rising of the moon.

Mike ordered them to eat again, to keep their spirits and energy up. Again, this order was greeted with no enthusiasm. They
were getting tired of the cold canned goods that made up their C rations and the blandness of the packaged foods that constituted
the K rations.

“When we get into the mountains, we’ll have a hot meal,” Mike promised.

“How about roast Vietnamese commie?” Harvey Waller asked.

“Don’t get weird on us, Harvey,” Joe Nolan said to him.

They trekked up through a maze of mountain paths in the faint moonlight. Two of the paths were sealed by several strands of
barbed wire, and the Hmong turned back.

“Do not climb under when you see this,” they told Verdoux. “The wire is to warn their own soldiers of a mine field beyond.”

Once, the Hmong became lost and had to retrace then-steps downhill past several turnings before they found one that led in
the correct direction. They rested for an hour in the darkness between the setting of the quarter moon and
the gray breath of dawn. As soon as trunks, rocks, roots and other obstacles became distinguishable in the half-light, they
pushed on.

Campbell reckoned that some of the peaks were four thousand feet above sea level and that the pass they were taking through
them was close to two thousand feet in altitude. The air was crisp and sharp, smelling of pines and other evergreens that
blanketed the slopes.

Verdoux told Mike, “The Hmong say there are lower, easier passes that are too dangerous to take. Except for occasional aerial
reconnaissance, we don’t have to worry from this point on until we’re halfway down the slope on the other side. The Viets
prefer to lie in wait down there for smugglers rather than leap about up here like mountain goats.”

“Sounds to me like a reasonable decision,” Mike commented. “Do we descend the slope? I thought the Montagnard village was
high in the mountains.”

“Not this ridge, I’m afraid. The village is in the next ridge parallel to this one, so we have to descend this one and climb
that.”

They reached the highest point of the pass and, all of a sudden, the rugged panorama of Vietnam stretched before their eyes.
They all cheered.

Nolan added wryly, “We gotta be crazy—cheering because we’re back in Nam. Where the fuck we going anyway, Mike? I’m hardly
going to sell the story to
Time
or
Newsweek
from out here.”

Ideally, Campbell would have preferred to keep the goal of the mission secret until they had reached their destination in
case any of the team were captured. However, he saw that it was unreasonable for him to demand that grown men go farther with
him than they had already gone without knowing the true purpose of the mission.

Campbell said there was no need for the Hmong to know, and then told them in detail about their planned rescue of Eric Vanderhoven.

Joe Nolan was aghast. “All this for one shitty rich kid? I don’t believe it. More than fifty people dead already. You drag
our asses halfway round the world and put our lives on the line for some freak, half-gook kid whose grandpa is a crap-filled
billionaire? To hell with this, Mike. It’s enough to make anyone a communist. What do you take me for?”