The Point Team (9 page)

“So what could I do?”

“Do the run from here in the Middle West down to Florida and back. It’s a helluva drive to do very often. You take care of
that end. I take care of this end of the business.”

Joe thought about this. “What would be in it for me?”

“Twenty-five hundred a kilo.”

“If I bring five kilos from Miami to Youngstown, I make $12,500?”

“Right,” Charles said. “Why not? I got to trust you with almost a quarter-million dollars to buy five keys. You got to be
sharp enough not to get ripped off for the bread at that end. You won’t have trouble with our suppliers—we’re chicken-feed
to them, and they’re not going to mess up their reputations for us. It’s just that a lot of guys can’t stay cool with a quarter-million
in a brown paper bag. They don’t have the nerve for it. You do.”

Joe pulled the Chevy over where Charles indicated. “You’d trust me?” he asked.

“Me? Sure. But it wouldn’t be just me. It’d be me and a lot of mean dudes with networks all over the world. If you tried to
take off with the money, they’d probably flush you by cutting up your family here. One by one. These people aren’t macho mob
guys. They come after the women and kids, too.”

Joe Nolan was silent.

He knocked out the lights and switched off the engine. They sat in the dark, waiting.

“Think about it,” Charles said after a while.

As if Joe wasn’t.

A car pulled up behind them. Its lights were extinguished. Charles got out, opened a rear door, got in the back seat and closed
the door after him. The fellow from the car got in beside Joe and handed back an envelope to Charles. Joe listened to Charles
flick through the money in the back seat.

“Give him one of the green bags,” Charles told Joe.

Joe got out and opened the trunk. He unzipped the airline bag. There were two smaller plastic green bags and one larger yellow
bag inside. One green bag. He hefted it in his hand. Half a kilo.

Another place down the road the second sale, of the other half-kilo, went smoothly too.

They had the kilo left to sell. For fifty or fifty-five thousand. At least someone in Youngstown had money. Of course, the
buyer would cut the coke and sell it for a
hundred dollars a gram and more than double his money. Joe Nolan didn’t know anyone in Youngstown who could even afford to
pay a hundred bucks for a gram. He knew no one. Except unemployed steel workers and their families. That was his trouble,
Joe decided—no contacts.

The third buy was to go down on the other side of the State University. Charles remained in the back seat while they waited.

They weren’t kept long. A guy in a brand-new Camero pulled over, got out and climbed in beside Joe. He looked Joe over and
said hi.

Joe said nothing.

“You got the stuff?” he said to Charles in the back.

“You got the money?” Charles responded.

The guy pulled out a manila envelope from his coat pocket and held it up.

“We got the stuff,” Charles said and took the envelope.

If the guy thought Joe Nolan was not watching him, was dumb and just staring ahead out the windshield, the guy was making
a mistake. Joe spotted the gun in his right hand even as he was pulling it out of the shoulder holster. As it cleared the
lapels of the man’s coat, Joe could see it was a revolver—not an automatic. As Charles in the back seat was peering into the
envelope, holding wads of newspaper cut into the size of dollar bills, saying, “This isn’t …” Joe’s right hand was whipping
across, and his fingers were closing around the gun.

“This is a bust—”

That’s all the guy had a chance to say before he had to squeeze the trigger as Joe’s hand tried to pull it from his grasp.
Nothing happened. He squeezed on the trigger again, hard. This time too, nothing. Joe’s fingers were tightly around the chambers
so that they could not revolve, thus blocking the action of the gun. He twisted the weapon upward against the Y formed by
the man’s thumb and forefinger and broke his grip on the gun handle. Instead of
trying to point the gun, Joe slapped him over the forehead with the heavy metal.

With his left hand, he switched on the ignition and pushed the gear into drive.

“Drug Enforcement Agency,” the half-stunned man beside him shouted. “You’re under arrest.”

Then he realized the car was in motion and jumped Joe before it could gather speed.

Nolan now held the revolver, a .357 Magnum, by its handle and brought the barrel down in a savage chop across the man’s face.
The guy kept coming at him, and Joe pistol-whipped him to a daze as he steered with his left hand and picked up speed on the
dark empty street.

Two pairs of headlights blinked on behind him almost simultaneously, and moments later he heard their sirens. Joe drove without
lights and pressed the accelerator hard to the floor.

The agent, holding his bleeding face in his hands, was thrown back against the door as the car hung a sharp turn into a small
street on the left. Joe kept up his speed and wove in and out of the almost-deserted streets. He pulled up to the curb and
listened. The two sirens were far away and growing fainter.

Joe leaned across and opened the front door against which the agent was leaning. The man fell out on the sidewalk and crawled
away.

After a few blocks, Joe pulled up again and removed the Pennsylvania plates clipped over his Ohio ones. Then he turned on
his headlights and drove slowly and legally across town to Canfield Road, turned into the street where Charles’ Trans Am was
parked, and got paid his thousand bucks in tens and twenties.

Joe clutched the notes in his hand. “If we’d been busted, how many years would they have sent us up for?”

“Hard to say,” Charles answered. “They’re not consistent. We could have got anything from five to twenty-five.”

“I risked five years for a thousand dollars? That’s two hundred dollars a year. I hope you do better than that.”

“Sure I do. But I take bigger risks than I’ve ever asked you to. So far. You want the bread, you got to take chances.”

“OK.”

“We’ll talk,” Charles said.

“Sure.”

Joe threw the .357 Magnum and the Pennsylvania plates in the Mahoning River, then headed back to the neighborhood bar. His
friend had gone but had left the newspaper folded at one end of the counter. The “employment offered” column of the classified
ads was short, and he soon found the ad his friend had mentioned. Big money for combat-hardened vets. A box number. It couldn’t
be any worse than what he was thinking about now.

H
ARVEY
Waller’s friends said he was never the same again after being with the Marines in Vietnam. Even the ones who had sat next
to him in class in high school and played basketball in the yard with him hour after hour claimed he came back real different—they
maybe couldn’t spell it out for you in what way he was different, but
different
. Some even said that now he was
strange
. What none of them knew was that Harvey Waller was a great deal stranger and more different than anyone who knew him in Flemington,
New Jersey, could imagine.

Harvey had gotten the freeze-out treatment when he got home from Nam, just like all the other veterans who had to add to the
disillusionment they picked up in Asia the further disillusionment that awaited them at home. Baby-killer. Genocide. Fascist.
People said these things who couldn’t find their way from a diner to a post office anywhere but in their hometown of Flemington—people
who’d never been anywhere in their lives and hardly knew what was happening in front of their noses, let alone the real facts
of what happened in Vietnam.

The real facts were clear in Harvey’s mind, but he found
it hard—impossible—to explain them to people who had never experienced that reality. People laughed at him when he claimed
that the Russians controlled the American press and TV—he didn’t mean controlled, he meant manipulated. But they were already
laughing too loud. He didn’t believe Rather and Jennings were secret communists, Russian moles put there to subvert American
opinion. He
did
believe that Rather and Jennings were unsuspecting victims of Russian propaganda and subtle machinations. He saw Vietnam
not as an American military defeat but as a Soviet victory in psychological warfare. The U.S. Marines had not been defeated
by the Cong and North Vietnamese—it was the American public at home who had been defeated by being duped by the Russians into
believing they were participating in something wrong.

Most people were tired of the whole damn thing. They wanted to forget about it. Get on with the “me” generation and jogging
and giving up cigarettes. The last thing they wanted to do was analyze the experiences of someone they regarded as a killer
of women and children, even if they had gone to high school and played basketball with him.

It was everywhere. Penetrating every level of society. Espionage. Soviet agents buying secrets on how to make computers, Xerox
machines, Coca-Cola, bombs … Americans being conned wholesale as they tried to abide by their principles and behave “decently”
with a foe who was implacable and unscrupulous. The Soviets believed that anything which advanced their cause was acceptable—they
claimed that a lie which helped communism thus became the truth. Most Americans could not really believe such people existed
and intended to wipe them out. But some Americans did …

Harvey Waller met the first of them at a picnic on the Jersey Shore near Cape May. He had made some statements about his beliefs
during the afternoon, casual comments, and was invited to a meeting the following week by
the boyfriend of a Flemington girl who was along on the picnic. Harvey was amazed. Here were people who thought like he did,
knew more than he did, and were prepared to do something about it. The possibility of doing something instead of only complaining
had not really occurred to Harvey before. It took time for him to gain their trust and confidence, but when he did, he found
his whole life changed. Money was no problem anymore. Some members of the group were very well-heeled and contributed generously
to what were called the “active members.” This was not a spectator sport. No one sat on the sidelines. Every member had his
own special skills and responsibilities. Some were information gatherers, others were financial backers. Still others were
known as producers—they made all arrangements and smoothed the way for operatives. And finally the operatives performed the
effective action decided upon in an open discussion. The group deliberately had no name, no leaders and no written policies.
They referred to themselves only as patriotic and concerned citizens.

Harvey’s skills were those of a Marine with heavy combat experience in Vietnam. When he was accepted by the group as being
fully trustworthy, he was put on PAD—preventive action detail. He was paid three hundred a week in cash, tax free, to be ready
to move out at any time. A second phone was put in his mother’s house in Flemington, and he was given a new Buick Regal. The
members of the group were the only ones who had his special phone number, and the phone had an answering machine so that he
could call home from elsewhere and hear any messages left for him. All went well for more than two years.

“Goddammit, Harvey, we got the FBI and the NSA, not to mention the New Jersey State Police, all on our case and you won’t
ease off!”

Waller looked at the man with the contempt he always
felt for those who showed fear in the absence of physical danger. He himself had been scared shitless a number of times,
but there was always a gook at the business end of a mortar or some other helluva good reason visible to all for a man to
be frightened. This little creep was worrying about his reputation or his vice-presidency at the bank or whatever if it ever
came out he was associated with a far-right paramilitary group—and the description paramilitary was a joke here, since only
Harvey and one or two others were worth anything. The others couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. Including this little
nothing who was whining at him now to take it easy.

“Ease off, you say?” Harvey bellowed at him. “You’re one of the biggest alarm-raisers about the Soviets and how we gotta stop
’em. Now you’re worried in case someone pisses on your front lawn.”

“Harvey, hear me out. The original concept of our activities in the field was to collect incontrovertible evidence and present
it to the FBI in order to force them into action. Somewhere along the line, something went wrong, and now we end up with the
FBI trying to find out who we are. We were supposed to be working together!”

“We tried,” Harvey said. “They wouldn’t take action. They promised to involve this agency and that person and take things
to the highest levels, but they did damn all. Since Hoover died, the FBI has lost its go. I think they may be penetrated.”

“I’ve no doubt of that, Harvey! Every branch of government is rotten with fellow travelers and Soviet informers. Why should
the FBI be an exception? But the point of the matter now is that they’re hot on our trail, and we all agreed to ease up our
operations until the heat dies down. All except you, Harvey. You’re going to get us all crucified because you’re too damn
stupid and stubborn to lie low till they call the hunt off.”

“And you’re just trying to protect your ass,” Waller shot back. “Which is a real come-down for a superpatriot
who one day is willing to die for his country and the next is willing to let the fucking Russians take over rather than risk
his job or something. Remember what you used to say? Better dead than Red! Seems to me like you and the others have gone back
on what you used to say. You guys were all big talk and flag-waving till you had your bluff called. Then your chicken-shit
knees began to knock together.”

“Harvey, I got into this to help our government, not to form a vigilante group.”

“You got into this because you saw communists manipulating our society on every level. You backed me when I took action where
no one else would. You were one of my big supporters.”