The Point Team (13 page)

“Turner was a crazy bastard,” Mike said. “First time I ever rode with him in his Land Rover, we were going into FAPLA territory
and we could have been ambushed at any minute. We spotted this African by the roadside—probably one of their spies on his
way to our territory. I thought Turner would have him executed on the spot. Instead, he asked him if the road was mined from
this point on.

“‘No,’ the African replied, ‘I know for a fact it is not.’

“We grew suspicious of the positive way he answered us. So Turner tied him to the iron grille in front of the Land Rover.

“He told him, ‘If you see a mine in the roadway, raise your right hand.’

“We’d only gone a few hundred yards when the man waved us to a stop at a small bridge. He claimed he couldn’t remember where
exactly the mines were, but we could go no farther than this bridge. Turner shot him in the head with his pistol and turned
back.”

“Turner was a mad dog,” Andre contributed. “He became an animal—and we French do not think much of the English, but we do
not expect an Englishman to become a hyena. Finally, of course, he turned on his own men and killed them when he could not
beat the Cubans and FAPLA. I remember he had a row with one English mere—I forget about what—and he would have shot him were
it not for the mere pulling the safety pin from a fragmentation grenade and holding it out before him. If Turner had shot
him, his hand would have released the pressure trigger and everyone there would have been cut by the metal fragments. Next
day I think Turner had something else to distract him, and he forgot about the incident. He was a maniac.”

They had both heard each other tell these stories before. It was like they were ritually displaying the tokens of their previous
friendship to establish their standing with each other now. They were still friends from way back. But were they still on
an equal footing as fellow mercs? Andre fought to dispel this question from Mike’s mind. He had no doubt he was as good as
he had ever been.

What neither of them mentioned was the incident which had cemented their friendship. Campbell and Verdoux were at the back
of an open Land Rover manning an M60 machine gun as they went from observation post to observation post. An Angolan drove
the vehicle, and three others mounted guard at front and sides with their FN automatic rifles. It was only another routine
patrol. However, day by day these patrols grew more chancy as the FAPLA columns advanced. All that was holding them back now
were the destroyed bridges which had to be rebuilt and mined roads which had to be made passable for
their Russian-built tanks. Once the tanks got through, there could be no holding back the FAPLA leftists with their Cuban
officers.

For a while the Land Rover bounced across open rangelands devoid of livestock and wild game—all shot by troops of both sides
either from hunger or for fun. They reached a narrow asphalt road that had once led to a group of Portuguese farms and that
was free of mines since it had no strategic importance. Long brown grass stood motionless in the afternoon heat on either
side of the road. Campbell adjusted his machine gun and swiveled it on its mount, while Verdoux rechecked the ammunition feed
belts. Both men’s activity revealed their uneasiness in these surroundings, without their being aware of what they were doing.
The Angolans peered into the long grass nervously, and the driver picked up speed.

The Angolan beside the driver saw him first, opened fire with his rifle and missed him. After that, it was too late. He was
a tall, skinny black man, in green fatigues, who had suddenly stood up in the chest-high grass near the edge of the road a
hundred yards ahead of them. Campbell swung the machine gun around to bear on him, but never got a bullet shot. The man already
had the RPG2 launch tube on his right shoulder, his right hand on the forward pistol grip and his finger on the trigger. For
an instant he sighted along the top of the tube at the Land Rover, then released the free-flight missile. The Soviet-made
antitank missile hit the front of the vehicle with a violent thump.

The driver and the man next to him were killed instantly in the fiery impact. The four other occupants of the Land Rover were
thrown onto the road. AK47 rifle fire raked the air above Campbell’s head, and he saw little black spurts of tar knocked out
of the road surface by bullets ricocheting off it. He rolled for cover behind the burning wreck of the Land Rover, which lay
on its side still holding two charred corpses and sending a mournful column of black smoke up into the motionless air of the
blue sky.

Andre Verdoux came rolling in a split second after him, pursued by a hail of gunfire that spattered off the steel of the disabled
vehicle. The two other Angolans were not so lucky. One was almost cut in two by the hail of fire and curled into a twisted
knot by the edge of the road. The second man lay on his back in the middle of the road, either dead or unconscious as a result
of being thrown from the vehicle. Automatic fire ripped into his prone body and bounced it along the road with his arms waving
in a grotesque imitation of life.

Mike stopped Andre from unstrapping his FN rifle from his back. He pointed to the long grass on the western side of the road,
pulled two British L2A1 hand grenades from his belt and handed one to Verdoux. The Frenchman nodded that he was ready. Together,
they pulled the safety pins and, momentarily rising from behind the cover of the burning Land Rover, threw their projectiles
at the enemy and ducked down again. The grenades had a 4.3-second fuse, and the thin sheet steel case of each contained a
coil of notched wire that broke into many lethal fragments on explosion.

As the charges blew almost simultaneously, the two ran and disappeared into the high grass. They stumbled through the growth,
bent almost double for a while. Then the grass showed signs of thinning out the farther they got from the road.

“Let’s lie low and see what happens,” Mike gasped to Verdoux, restraining him by the arm.

They unstrapped their Belgian FN 7.62-mm automatic rifles. They had plenty of spare twenty-round magazines. Mike fitted the
tubular bayonet over the flash suppressor at the tip of the barrel. Sounds of the FAPLA soldiers’ voices drifted toward them.
Campbell and Verdoux did not risk peering over the top of the grass to see what was going on. They could guess. The voices
were quieter now as the men spread out and beat through the grass, searching for them. The Angolans kept in touch with one
another in subdued
Portuguese larded with words from their own African languages. Only one voice was loud, instructing the men to move this
way and that, in Spanish, not Portuguese.

“Goddamn Cubans,” Mike muttered.

“They’ll come at us in a line,” Verdoux whispered. “If we can slip through that line and stay behind them, they’ll never find
us.”

Mike nodded his agreement. He knew the chances of this happening were not good, since it sounded as if they were being searched
for by a full platoon of twenty-four men. What neither had bargained for was that the Cuban officer could not keep the Angolans
in a Northern Hemisphere-style straight search line. These Africans knew more about finding their quarry in their own landscape
than military training could improve on. They ignored the shouts of the Cuban and performed their own private circling motions,
each man working independently of the others. Campbell and Verdoux recognized they were in deep trouble at the approach and
retreat and new approach of searchers crashing through the grass near where they lay.

A man rustled through the grass, and they could tell by the ever closer crunch of his boots on the dry stalks that he was
going to walk right into them. Mike waved Andre back to cover him and knelt in waiting for the soldier. The FAPLA trooper
did not see Mike until he was only a couple of feet away, whereupon Campbell drove the bayonet into his midriff. The Angolan
gasped and crumpled. His AK47 did not go off.

“We’ll stay here,” Mike rasped to Andre, after waiting to make sure none of his fellow troopers had noticed the demise of
the FAPLA soldier.

The searchers were all about them now, calling to one another, laughing loudly to give themselves courage and making plenty
of noise as they advanced in the hope that whatever evil lay hidden in the long grass would flee before them. Mike and Andre
waited.

Soon another soldier stumbled on them. This one was more alert than the previous one and would have returned their fire if
he had not been distracted for a moment by the sight of the corpse of his comrade Mike had bayoneted. The dead man was not
a pretty sight.

Verdoux took the Angolan with a burst of fire. Now that their position was revealed, they ran again, keeping stooped beneath
the top of the high grasses. They could hear the Cuban screaming at the Africans behind them. They hid in a dense stand of
grass and listened as the din of voices quieted and the search got under way again.

Gradually, the FAPLA troops neared them again in their apparently random search through the tall grass. This time, Campbell
did not give the man a chance to discover them. When they heard him coming, they got ready to run. Then Campbell blasted him
through the stalks of grass, and the trooper died without knowing what had hit him.

More panic. Shouting. Maneuvering. The hunt resumed. Campbell and Verdoux lay low in their new hiding place, having agreed
on which direction to run on their discovery. They noticed that the Angolans were now less enthusiastic and, judging by their
voices, moving about in small groups rather than singly. Verdoux smiled with satisfaction at Campbell. This was what they
wanted. Although they were trapped in this area of tall grass, they were far from being taken. The sun was getting lower in
the western sky, and there were no more than two hours of daylight left.

Finally they were approached by a group. From the voices, they reckoned there were six or seven. Verdoux and Campbell could
afford no mistakes. Mike gestured he would sweep from center to right. Verdoux nodded. Both realized they could not leave
anyone standing after they had emptied their twenty-round magazines. A single man could take out both of them while they reloaded.

Again, Mike did not wait till they were in full sight. He cut from center to right with full automatic fire and then cut a
full swathe from right to left. Verdoux performed a
mirror image of Mike’s action. His bullets sawed through the grass and the figures it concealed till he ran out of ammo.
Momentary silence settled, broken by a nearby groan and then the Cuban officer’s shouting in Spanish. Mike and Andre reloaded
as they crept away from the scene of carnage.

The Angolans gathered about their fallen comrades for a time and seemed unwilling to resume the search once again. None of
them wanted the misfortune of being the ones to discover the mercs. They set grass afire along the edge of the road, but it
burned slowly since there was no wind to make the flames travel. Soon the brief equatorial dusk would fall, then the darkness
of night.

Mike and Andre considered attacking them. Before they could decide on tactics, the Angolans and their Cuban officer moved
off down the road on foot. No doubt they had vehicles not far away.

As darkness fell, the two mercs set out for their base camp, about a hundred miles away. A detour to one of the forward observation
posts could end in disaster if the post had been abandoned or overrun. They had a little water each, but no food. After following
the road a little way, they branched off on a dirt trail in the direction they needed to go. It was during this walk that
the friendship between the two men grew. They trudged all night by the light of the huge stars and talked to keep themselves
warm and awake. They had been walking more than seven hours before being picked up before dawn by a market truck in safe territory.
Not long after that, they had another long talk and decided to get the hell out of Angola while they could. They were among
the last white mercenaries on Roberto’s side to escape over the border to Kinshasa in Zaire. Those left behind died in battle,
were executed or still rotted in nameless jails in Angola’s communist state.

The Lutece house specialty of chilled raspberry soufflé was served to them, and they followed it with coffee,
Armagnac and a replete feeling that all was well with the world, or almost.

“I really would have gone into business in Indochina if it hadn’t been for the defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu,”
Andre Verdoux mused. “That’s why I picked up a good working knowledge of Laotian and Cambodian as well as Vietnamese. I can
manage to communicate in a number of the Montagnard languages, too, although these tend to change every few miles you go.
That sort of knowledge could come in handy in your mission, Mike.”

“Possibly,” Campbell grudgingly conceded.

“You know a bit of Vietnamese, I suppose,” the Frenchman said condescendingly. “Special Forces lingo you picked up in the
field?”

“That’s about it, I suppose.”

“A lot of people there speak good French,” Andre went on. “I’d hate to try to make my way with only a little Vietnamese and
a lot of English.”

“We don’t expect we’ll be chatting with that many folks, Andre. You imagine I’ll be stopping people to ask them the way?”

“I know a lot about their customs, too,” Verdoux added.

“I doubt we’ll be attending any folk dance festivals,” Mike said shortly.

“These two you’ve hired, you think they could help on this level?” The Frenchman answered his own question by shaking his
head vigorously. “They’re triggermen. Gun-slingers.”

“You’re pretty fast with a gun yourself, Andre.”

“Oh no, my friend, I am old and slow according to you. This mission would be too much for me.”

Campbell sipped on his coffee and said nothing.

“Where do you go from here?” Verdoux persisted. “To interview more of these lunatics who will answer your stupid newspaper
advertisement?”

“You answered it,” Mike pointed out.

Verdoux raised his hands in a Gallic shrug. “I am stupid lunatic.”