The Point Team (29 page)

“I’m not taking him on his terms,” Mike said. “I’m taking him on mine.”

“Eric said he won’t go.”

“We’ll take him against his will if we have to.”

“I really think Eric is right,” she said. “I think you should take the other eleven with you.”

“So now we know what you think,” Mike snapped.

“At first I reacted the same way as you,” Katie said earnestly. “Now I see it would be heartless to leave the others behind.”

“It would be suicide not to. I can’t take a goddamn school tour out of Vietnam across Laos.”

“Talk to Eric.”

“I don’t have time.”

Mike grew increasingly irritated at Katie, promised to meet her at the same place the next morning, and changed places with
Roger.

Eric Vanderhoven and the others worked hard to meet their quota for the day’s planting. It was essential to meet work requirements
now to keep overseers away. None of the youths thought to question why they had been allowed to work together away from all
the other workers and so conveniently located to meet with the American TV crew.

Eric, back in his position as leader, was taking his responsibilities as such with great integrity. He regarded himself as
father-protector of the other eleven now, and his demands on their behalf had allowed him to cast himself in
a role of glory. The others were willing to put up with this if it meant that they, too, could go along with him, as he assured
them they could. He, Eric Vanderhoven, would insist.

As he worked, he watched out for the others—feeling himself to be an old male lion protecting know-nothing cubs. He saw the
two Americans—they could be nothing else!—creep along the ditch near the rice field. He saw them unsling their rifles and
place them on the earthen bank, then whisper urgently together as they looked at the working youths, heads lowered to their
task. He was aware they had selected him, saw them grimace as they slid into the field and their boots filled with muddy water,
was readying himself to bargain with them when he divined their intentions.

“Eric! Eric!” he yelled in warning to Mitch, who straightened and looked at him in a puzzled way.

The two Americans splashed across the rice field and hesitated.

“Run, Vanderhoven, run!” Eric shouted at the stupefied Mitch.

The Americans changed their minds, grabbed Mitch instead of him and led Mitch off struggling and kicking between them.

Barefooted and sure-footed in the familiar mud beneath him, Eric sped past the two sloshing mercs and their captive, climbed
up on the bank, seized a Kalashnikov in each hand and disappeared over the far side of the bank.

M
IKE
Campbell lay hidden along with deadly snakes and vermin among the roots of a great tree that had levered apart the ornamental
carved stones of the abandoned temple as they swelled through decades of rapid tropical growth. The Buddha as usual was greeting
the new day with his calm, impassive stare.

Campbell had decided the previous day, after meeting with Katie Nelson, to make a preventive strike. He knew Katie intended
to film all sorts of sequences of Eric’s rescue. Mike had no intention of allowing himself or any of his men to be caught
on videotape. Now the damn kid was acting up, as if he and his pals were going on some kind of picnic or outing. Campbell
felt sorry for the little turds he had to leave behind. There was no way he could drag a pack of kids through the jungles
all the way back to Thailand. He decided to grab the Vanderhoven kid right away and strike out that night for Thailand, leaving
Katie Nelson and all her demands behind him.

He put Richards and Nolan on the job, had them study drawings of Eric Vanderhoven made by an artist under Katie’s direction.
They unloaded their equipment, except for their Kalashnikovs and magazine pouches. Go in quick
ly, get out quicker and don’t hurt any of the kids—those were Mike’s instructions.

Mike observed the fiasco that followed through binoculars, saw one of the youths steal the AK47s, yet didn’t realize that
Richards and Nolan had bagged the wrong kid till they were much closer to him.

“I’m not Eric Vanderhoven!” Mitch was yelling as they carried him struggling.

“I know,” Mike said and freed him from the grip of his men. “What’s your name?”

“Mitch.”

“Tell Eric I want to talk with him. I’ll meet him at the temple statue at first light tomorrow. Know where it is?”

Mitch nodded.

“Wait a moment.” Mike gave him a bagful of K and C rations. “And here’s a half-dozen spare magazines for those rifles, to
show there’s no hard feelings. OK?”

Mitch disappeared with the food and ammo.

“Why did you give those kids ammo?” Murphy asked.

“I got an idea they may need it,” Mike said.

Campbell had his men waiting to move out on the first streak of gray. He spread them through the heavy growth around the ruined
temple with orders to grab the Vanderhoven kid but not to reveal themselves to any of the others if Eric didn’t show. Campbell
was satisfied that if Eric came, he would be trapped. They would take him and head for Thailand then and there. Too bad about
the others. But he wasn’t the International Red Cross. He had a dangerous job to do. The way Katie Nelson had talked, you
would imagine he was the driver of a school bus.

All the same, Mike was bothered … In the future, he would stay out of this kind of deal, he decided. A merc’s job was to go
in and blow something or waste somebody, not these fucking mercy missions. No more missions like this. Of course, if this
one worked out, he’d have a cool million. He’d never have to go on a mission again. But he knew he would …

He felt bad about the eleven kids who wouldn’t be going. Too bad he couldn’t take them. He knew he couldn’t. The middle of
a mission in enemy territory was no time for the leader to go sentimental. He steeled his mind and made his decision. Eric
went. They stayed.

He heard the bushes part before he saw the figure come toward him. He knew it would not be Eric. Eric would not have gotten
this far without being taken. It was the youth they had grabbed by mistake the previous day. Mitch.

“Where’s Eric?”

“He’s not coming. I’m his messenger.”

“All right, Mitch. What’s the message?”

“We’ve escaped from the reeducation camp. We’re under Eric’s command now. He’s set up a camp in the jungle. We’ll meet up
with you if you want. If not, we’ll make it to Thailand on our own.”

“When did you take off? What time would you have been missed?”

“They left after you kidnapped me. They waited for me. We have guns and food and we sneaked down for water bottles during
the night. We’re ready to go.”

Mike smiled at Mitch’s confidence. He fished out a hand compass from his fatigues and handed it to him. “Know how to use it?”

“Eric does.”

“I want to meet at high noon today.”

Mitch pointed south. “You see that hill? On the far side, there’s a path. We’ll meet about halfway up. Right now they’re searching
for us that way.” He pointed northwest. “They moved close by us before it was even light. The hill should be a safe meeting
place. I’m going now. Mike, don’t have me followed. We’ve got guys watching where I pass. If I have a tail, our meeting is
off. We’ll go it alone.”

Mike nodded, allowing the twelve-year-old to see how impressed he was by his toughness. Fact was, Mike had no intention of
trying to follow these kids while they were
being hunted as escapees. Mike & Co. would be the ones to blow their own cover. The mercs’ great protection was that no one
hostile knew they existed. Once they lost that, things would grow hot mighty fast.

Their two interpreters were icily polite, but uninformative.

“It is necessary that you return to Ho Chi Minh City today,” the senior interpreter repeated as an answer to most of their
questions.

Roger took up a line of attack that had worked against them before—speaking to Katie and Jake in English as if the interpreters
couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. For some reason, this seemed to unnerve the two Vietnamese. This time
it didn’t work.

“It is necessary that you return to Ho Chi Minh City today.”

Katie guessed that Mike had taken Eric and maybe even the others. Without telling her. Deliberately. Her keen sense for news
told her there was nothing more for her here. She was disappointed. Yet she would forgive Mike if he had taken all the boys.
She hoped she had made him feel guilty enough to do so. Katie was surprised to find herself so concerned about something that
did not directly concern her TV career.

On the way to their car, they saw a big helicopter land on level ground not far off. Men in fighting gear poured from it and
set off at a steady run. They seemed to be in a hurry.

Lt. Tranh Duc Pho and his fifteen-man unit had been picked up by chopper at their staging area at 0400 hours. The lieutenant
now knew the objective of the Hmong marauders who had wiped out his mountain pioneers at the Montagnard village, massacred
a militia group in a river valley and passed through his territory unscathed—much to his personal disgrace. To abduct twelve
Amerasian
children! And no doubt attempt to take them back out of the area entrusted to him. Over his dead body …

His orders were clear. Bring his men in fast and get them into the jungle after the Hmong and the children. Return the children
to the reeducation camp if possible. No Hmong prisoners were to be taken—none were to live to tell the story. If the children
could not be brought back alive, dispose of them in the jungle. A party liaison officer had explained to him that the children’s
abduction from the reeducation camp was being kept secret, that such “aberrant behavior on the part of backward pirates” had
no place in the life of a workers’ progressive republic.

The message was plain. Keep quiet and get the job done.

The lieutenant saw that he was being given a chance to change his shame into glory. These Hmong had been disrespectful to
him, had made him look ineffectual as a military man, had besmirched his honor. He could regain face only through their deaths
and the failure of their mission. These hirelings of the American imperialists!

He and his men spent the morning cutting a huge half-circle between the camp and the foothills to the west. They beat the
local peasants and threatened them with torture, so that they desperately recalled every useless incident in their lives for
the past week, yet there was nothing. Troops stationed in the area and the local militias had been searching since dawn without
turning up a sign of anything.

“You see the lay of the land,” Tranh Duc Pho said to his sergeant as the sun climbed high in the sky and the full force of
the equatorial midday heat bore down on them. He and the sergeant stepped into the shade of a tree, while the rest of the
unit rested and drank from their canteens. “Ten to fifteen Hmong tribesmen, heavily armed and ethnically different from eveyone
in this region, accompanied by twelve Amerasian kids from the camp, could not pass up into the mountains in daylight without
being seen by
someone! They couldn’t have traveled up here in darkness, and we got here not long after dawn. You follow what I’m getting
at.”

“We’ve overreached them?” the sergeant queried. ‘‘They’re somewhere between us and the camp?”

“I don’t think so. It stands to reason they’d move out on the double. There’s no reason for them to move more slowly than
us. I think something may be keeping them close to the camp.”

“You think they’re still back there?”

The lieutenant nodded. “There’s no other escape route for them to travel except due west. If they’re not up here, chances
are they are down there.”

“There’s a lot of thick jungle near the camp,” the sergeant confirmed. “We could take our midday rest at the camp and comb
the jungle on the way down.”

The lieutenant smiled his hunter’s smile. He had an instinct he was no longer threshing about in a vacuum. He could almost
feel
them down there somewhere near the camp. There was something going on here he did not understand. From the beginning, he
had noticed peculiarities …

The sergeant spread his thirteen men out, side by side, with fifteen meters between each man, and he and the lieutenant placed
themselves a few paces behind, more or less at the center. Then he ordered the men forward, and the sweep began. As they met
obstacles and impassible patches, the line sometimes stretched out to four hundred meters and at times was condensed to one
hundred and fifty meters—a tiny swathe of the Viet jungle, but not a random one. The lieutenant carefully studied the terrain
ahead and constantly had the sweep cover a small hill to one side, search a hidden valley, investigate a stand of giant hardwoods
…

Verdoux and Murphy heard a shouted order from the sergeant.

“They’re searching for us,” Verdoux translated. “I think they’re coming this way.”

“Damn.”

The two men looked at each other. Mike’s gamble had not paid off. He and Andre had discussed the pros and cons of stashing
their equipment in one place and traveling light for their meeting with Eric. Since the search parties seemed to be off in
the foothills, there was no apparent present danger in stockpiling the equipment and leaving a couple of men to guard it.
Andre agreed with Mike that the less encumbered the men traveled, the less chance of their being detected. Still, it was a
considered risk. As Andre and Bob were now finding out.

The two mercs could hear the Viet unit advancing through the undergrowth now. As usual in a typical sweep operation, they
were making no effort to conceal their presence—depending, in fact, on the noise they were making to flush the enemy early
enough so he could not harm them. Once they had him on the run, he could be methodically hunted down.

“They’re coming this way,” Murphy said grimly.

Verdoux strained his ears to listen for commands.

“We can’t move all this shit.” Murphy gestured at their equipment covered by camouflage tarpaulins. “I’m going to distract
them. You hold out here.”