The Point Team (12 page)

“Mr. Vanderhoven thinks it’s to goad him,” Katie said. “He thinks that the Hanoi government wants American money—so-called
reparations they claim Nixon promised them—before they’ll release any prisoners they still may have and most of these American
children. They release small numbers of children every now and then as bait, or
allow some information on MIAs to leak out to keep interest warm. Eric Vanderhoven has become just another pawn in their
game.”

After they left the Four Seasons, they stopped off at P.J. Clark’s on Third Avenue for a nightcap.

“I live just around the corner on Second Avenue,” Katie said. “Why not come around and see the view from my window? I’m very
proud to be living on the thirty-second floor up among the clouds and skyscrapers—which is quite something for a girl from
a place as flat as Nebraska.”

Mike found she had not exaggerated the view from the giant plate glass windows of her apartment. This night, long streaks
of low-lying clouds trailed in front of the floodlit spire of the Empire State Building like overdone stage effects. Katie
joined him at the window and leaned her long supple body against his. Nothing needed to be said.

Campbell felt her warm, firm thighs against his. The food, wine, view, and comfort of her luxury apartment made for a big
change from his usual simple life in the trailer in Arizona. Tina would be mad as hell if she saw him now. Yet he would not
exchange her and his trailer for this big-city aerie and sexy TV lady. Not that he was going to turn down Katie, either …

He ran his hands gently over her body and kissed her full on the mouth, darting his tongue between her eager lips. He felt
her body relax into his, and he ran his lips over the smooth skin of her neck. His manhood was stiff with urgency, and her
lower belly tremored in response to the pressure of his giant probe.

They looked deep in each other’s eyes. Again, nothing needed to be said. Afterward they would have love play, fondling, and
dalliance—right now their animal longing was too strong, had to be eased. They walked quickly hand in hand to her bedroom,
peeled off their clothes, and gazed avidly at each other in naked, open lust.

Campbell touched her, and she drew a sharp breath. They lay beside one another on top of the bed and embraced. Then she slid
beneath him, parted her legs, and raised her knees in submission to his throbbing member.

He thrust his full length into her warm, moist, welcoming depths.

They could not be sure in the gathering dusk which village it was. Lt. Tranh Duc Pho and his fifteen-man unit had been on
patrol since shortly after dawn, except for a three-hour break in the hottest part of the day. The lieutenant liked to keep
the morale of his men up by frequent stays in mountain and foothill villages. Army rations and no women were bad for the nerves.
They had been lucky to find this village. And he had the means to celebrate. They had taken three bottles of Japanese Suntory
whisky from a smuggler that morning. One bottle for him, two for the men. They would sleep it off tomorrow.

“Montagnard?” he asked one of his men.

“Can’t tell in this light.”

“We’re down off the mountains far enough so they could be Vietnamese,” another said in a cautionary tone.

“Yes,” the lieutenant said sarcastically, “but what kind of Vietnamese?”

All the men listening knew what he was referring to. With a Montagnard or other hill tribe village, they could behave almost
as they pleased. The Montagnards were regarded as confederates of the Americans, antiprogressive in the Leninist sense and
plain damn hard to control in the everyday administration of the new peasants’ and workers’ paradise. The hill tribesmen could
not complain about the behavior of loyal communist forces. There was no one to listen to them. A Vietnamese village was different.
They would have party cadres, and a complaint from them would go straight to the highest military command. Soldiers behaved
like angels when party cadres were about.

But there were Vietnamese and Vietnamese. The lieu
tenant suspected that these villagers might be dispossessed peasants from another area or translocated city people who had
moved up into the foothills for pernicious independence and seclusion from party influence. The existence of such backward
communities was well-known if not often discussed openly, and soldiers in such a place need not be on their best behavior.

Lt. Tranh Duc Pho pointed. “Let’s go in.”

The men spread out, with at least five yards between each man, their AK47s hanging casually on shoulder straps. They strolled
into the village in a familiar nonthreatening way, although their weapons were switched to full automatic and ready to fire.

“They’re Vietnamese,” the word came back.

The lieutenant knew there would be courtesies to be observed. He would visit the house of the village leader and pass verbal
pleasantries with the elders while his men found out if there were any party cadres present, how the village earned its livelihood,
if there were pretty women. His unit knew the routine.

In the village leader’s house, seven elders were gathered. Lt. Tranh Duc Pho occupied the place of honor and insisted that
they taste some of his Japanese whisky. He poured some in a bowl and they passed it from hand to hand after careful sips.
The lieutenant almost smiled at the deep politeness to a stranger which prevented them from screwing up their faces and spitting
the fiery liquor out.

“No, get me my American glasses.” The lieutenant was very proud of the two clear, heavy bar tumblers he had been given by
a superior officer. “Those pottery bowls hold bacteria and spread disease,” he lectured the elders.

They were too polite to ask him what bacteria were.

Tranh Duc Pho set about drinking the whisky, filling up half a tumbler at a time and adding a little water from a second tumbler.
The elders glanced nervously at him and at one another as the effects of his huge swallows of alcohol became obvious.

Two of his men entered the house. One spoke. “These people are smugglers. Parasites. The women are preparing us food.”

The elders were silent, waiting for the officer’s reaction.

“Get me a woman,” he said in a slightly slurred voice. “I’ll be along after I’ve eaten.”

“No! No! No!” a chorus of the elders shouted.

The soldiers ignored them. The one who spoke before addressed the lieutenant. “What about us?”

Tranh Duc Pho leered at him. “Hold the prettiest one for me, untouched. Then help yourselves.”

“No! No! No!” the elders kept shouting.

One not quite as decrepit as the others leapt to his feet. “We won’t allow you!”

The lieutenant gestured to him to be seated, and when the man had squatted down, the officer spoke in an undertone to one
of the men. The soldier left the house, but was back in a couple of minutes with a military-green canvas sack. The soldier
untied and loosened the rope strung through the top of the bag and handed it to the officer. Tranh Duc Pho reached in and
scooped out a handful of what looked like dried peach halves. He dumped them on the table before him and scooped handful after
handful out of the bag so that they ran off the pile on the table and lay scattered around the floor.

The village elders looked impassively at the dried human ears.

The lieutenant held up one for their inspection. “They’re like pebbles from a riverbed. They look better when wet.”

He dropped the ear into the tumbler of water. True enough, it immediately looked fresh and newly severed.

The officer looked about him and asked in a drunkenly sentimental voice, “Do you think that if they could, the owners of these
ears would listen to me now?”

None of the elders made a reply.

The lieutenant held out the whisky bottle and poured a little into one ear lying at his feet. He shouted at it, “Can
you hear me now?” He pointed to another ear, this one facing downward on the floor. “He’s still not listening.”

Tranh Duc Pho ordered the two soldiers. “Food. Women.”

They left grinning.

The elders made no sound.

A
T
fifty-four, Andre Verdoux was over the hill. Mike Campbell wasn’t serious about hiring him for the mission when he arranged
anonymously to meet Verdoux in response to the latter’s reply to his ad. But he did give the Frenchman a clue. He arranged
to meet him for lunch at Lutece.

“I knew it had to be you, Mike,” Verdoux greeted him in the little front room of the Manhattan restaurant, “when you arranged
to meet me here.”

“What the hell are you doing reading small-town Maine newspapers?” Campbell said, shaking his hand. “I thought you never left
the city except aboard the Concorde for Paris.”

“I’m looking for an old trawler to convert. I thought I might see one for sale in local New England papers. You know how your
eye drifts out of curiosity. I saw your ad.”

“I hope nobody who shouldn’t got too curious,” Campbell said. “I’ve got some replies I don’t like the look of, so I’m not
contacting them.”

Verdoux ordered a kir and raised his glass to Campbell. “Your health. So it’s a genuine mission?”

“Forget it, Andre, you’re not coming. This meeting’s just for old time’s sake.”

“Of course. By that you mean you need to discuss it with me—what do you say, pick my brains? Yes? Well, let’s discuss it and
perhaps I can help. Maybe you won’t be able to manage without me.”

Mike shook his head. “Andre, you’re past doing this one. I think our table is ready.”

They were led to the garden section of the restaurant, a glass-roofed area with pink stucco walls covered with white latticework.
There were paving stones beneath their feet, wicker chairs about the tables and big plants in brass pots. Verdoux immediately
got into a heavy conversation in French with their captain, and Mike indicated to him that he should order for both of them.

Verdoux tested the bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet and nodded to the sommelier. He said to Campbell, “Ah, you think I’m past my
prime, don’t you? I’ve never enjoyed women, cognac, and haute cuisine more in all my life—why not soldiering, too? Young men
don’t know how to appreciate what’s given them. You have to wait till my stage in life to really know how to live!”

Mike told him everything that had happened so far on the project.

“I don’t like this ad in the newspapers,” Verdoux commented. “You will collect all kinds of questionable types—including myself,
of course!”

“There was nothing else I could do. I’ve seen eighteen applicants so far and have hired only two. The first was Joe Nolan,
an ex-Green Beret now in Youngstown, Ohio. He’s really still a kid—a bit of a floater, never settled down after the war. Yet
he knows what he’s doing as a fighting man, although he’ll always need someone with common sense to keep an eye on him. The
other was an ex-Marine in Flemington, New Jersey. His name is Harvey Waller. Strange individual—bit of a fanatic, I suppose—
but I can handle him. I’d certainly rely on him in a fire fight, but he may not be too tightly wrapped headwise.”

“You always were good at figuring a man out,” Verdoux said. “Did you tell them where you were going and why?”

“No,” Campbell replied. “I let everyone infer it was Southeast Asia, of course—I had to—but beyond that I allowed them to
believe we might be after MIAs.”

“Good. This is a touchy subject now, particularly since Washington is making no progress on these issues. You have to assume
that at least one of the men you spoke to is an informant.”

“Sure. I just hope it’s neither of the two I hired.”

“It’s strange to know I’ll be going back there again,” Verdoux mused.

“Andre, you won’t.”

“When I first went to Vietnam,” Verdoux continued as if he had not heard Campbell, “I had hoped to get into the plantation
business there as an agent or something after I got out of the French army. The reality of what I found there was a little
different from what I had been led to believe at home in France. Our glorious colonies were growing tired of us. Then our
defeat by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. We could not believe what was happening to us. I stayed in the army. For the debacle
in Algeria.” He shook his head sorrowfully and sipped his wine, but his sad expression instantly evaporated when they were
served their appetizers of snails in butter and herbs, each in its own little porcelain dish. Andre talked about snails for
a while and the pros and cons of serving them with or without their shells and gradually veered off into his days as a mere
in the Congo.

“Another disaster!” he summed it up for Mike. “Is this why you don’t want me along with you? Because I’m unlucky?”

“Certainly, Andre. I blame you personally for all France’s losses in Indochina and Africa.”

Verdoux’s crab stew with a pastry top arrived, along with Campbell’s Basque-style roast chicken. More talk from the Frenchman
about the quality of the food. Then Angola. Mike and Andre had served alongside each other in that part of Africa as mercs
on Holden Roberto’s—the losing—side. Taking advantage of America’s paralysis after its disaster in Vietnam, Russia sent Cuban
troops into the newly independent Portuguese colony to side with the left wing in a civil war. The CIA gave some halfhearted
aid to Roberto’s side, but the Cubans proved to be the deciding factor in the war.

“Remember Turner?” Andre asked, tasting the first glass of a new bottle of wine.

Mike knew he was meant to be softened up by all these reminiscences of their being comrades-in-arms, softened up enough to
agree to take Andre along on his mission to Vietnam. At first he had regarded it as being simply out of the question—the man
was fifty-four—and he was along only for the pleasure of Andre’s company. Then Mike found he badly needed to discuss his project
with a mature, seasoned soldier, which Andre certainly was. Mike now discovered with wry amusement that perhaps his mind was
not
completely
closed to taking Andre along. It was still highly unlikely. But not out of the question.