The Point Team (16 page)

The others laughed at the accuracy of this observation. There were two rice harvests a year, and although work was continuous
throughout the seasons, it was especially heavy during planting and harvesting. During these periods, no one was released
from the camp, no matter how reeducated they had become.

Eric went on, “They don’t care if we run off into the jungle. If the snakes or animals don’t get us, if we don’t die of fever,
if the hill tribesmen don’t cut us in pieces, if
we don’t lose our way … hey, you know at least one of those things is going to happen to us. If we could get a few rifles
and ammunition, it would be different. We could steal enough rice here to see us through and cook it before we left.”

Eric was unaware that he had started out putting down this escape route and had ended up kind of half-planning to use it.

Each of the youths was assigned a bundle of sprouted rice plants.

Eric commented in Vietnamese to the man who handed them out. “We shouldn’t have to bother with this. The Americans have discovered
you can plant the rice directly in the fields and it grows like any other grain crop. That’s the way they do it in the States.”

The man handing over the seedlings gave him a frightened smile and said nothing, but another adult spoke angrily. “The Americans
are wasteful. They spatter rice seed all over and then have to thin the plants because they are growing too thickly. Vietnamese
make every grain of rice count. That is our way.”

Eric did not know what to reply to this, so he scowled and walked away.

The Vietnamese sentenced to the reeducation camp avoided the Amerasian youths in off-work hours for different reasons according
to their backgrounds. The Viets disliked them because they were not pure Viets, just like they disliked the hill tribesmen
and those of Chinese ethnic background. The ethnic Chinese, who had thrived as merchants under the various regimes prior to
communism, had a double suspicion to live under—their bourgeois tendencies and possible sympathies with Vietnam’s new enemy,
communist China. The last thing they wished for was association with an outcast group like Amerasians.

On top of these conflicts lay the mutual dislike for each other of city and country people thrown together in the camp. City
people sent to labor in the countryside looked
down on their tasks as demeaning to them and fit only for brutal, stupid peasants. The peasants sent to the camp were familiar
with the work, hardened to it, easily made their quotas, and looked down on the smart-talking city people who did not know
even the most basic rules of survival and self-sufficiency—they often joked that people from the cities thought rice grew
on trees. Further, they identified communism and its communal farms, land seizures, forced labor and compulsory moves away
from traditional villages and their ancestors’ graves as being the work of city people. Amerasian youths were one of the few
groups upon which they could vent their frustration and anger.

However, at work no one could be an outcast since that would affect the work production of all, and their food and treatment
depended on their production in the fields. They had all heard stories of times when there had been trouble and soldiers were
brought in. Some of the dissidents were killed, all were beaten continually even after they had stopped their protests, and
many claimed that after having been supposedly released from the camp, they all disappeared. Although no one knew how true
these stories were, no one wanted to test them.

The workers waded into the brown waters dammed in the rice fields.

“Hell, we got the lower fields to work today,” Eric grumbled. “I bet we get assigned to plant in a whirlpool.”

He was not far wrong. The upper fields were easier to work in because the depth of the water was rarely above the boys’ knees.
The water levels were deeper in the lower fields, and to reduce the level to permit work, water was released through sluice
gates. The country people moved rapidly in to take the best positions in the fields—places with the easiest working conditions.
The twelve youths were ordered to plant their rice seedlings where the muddy water was deepest and a current tugged at their
legs as the water swept toward the sluices. The water came up to the chests of two of the youths who were pint-sized, and
they
had to struggle to maintain their footing on the slippery mud bottom.

“We’ll have to wait for the water to go down,” Eric yelled to them. “Come over here till it gets shallow enough.”

They waded back from their assigned area.

“At least we can’t get flukes when we have to work in these damn currents,” Eric cheered up the others.

Two of the boys had been attacked by flukes, tiny invisible creatures that swam in the still water and entered the human bloodstream
through the skin. The flukes caused abscesses and burst vessels in the gut, where they laid their eggs. All the boys had been
already infected by malaria from mosquito bites, but none had a very serious infection, and the pills they were given kept
them able to work. One boy had died in their first month at the camp. The party medical worker had not been able to figure
out what was wrong with him, and no doctor was available.

The youths followed Eric out of the deeper, fast-moving water whose currents became swifter as more sluice gates were opened
to speed up the lowering of the water level.

“Where’s Harry?” one boy asked.

Harry was one of the smallest of the youths. He spoke not a word of English and had only a Vietnamese name when Eric arrived.
Now Harry was Harry, because that was what Eric and therefore all the others called him.

They turned around to look, and at that instant saw Harry come to the surface where the brown water was swirling toward a
sluice gate. Eric dropped his seedlings and splashed across a shallow area toward the deeper channel. He dived in, swam about
trying to locate Harry, who had disappeared again beneath the surface. One of the boys pointed, and Eric saw a glimpse of
Harry’s shirt ten feet away in the murky water.

Eric half-ran with the current, half-swam under water, till he bumped into Harry and clutched at his clothes. He felt Harry’s
hands grasp and cling to him, and he turned
and made his way against the flow of water back to the shallows as the panic-stricken smaller boy held onto him with the
crazed energy of a giant wood tick.

Eric threw Harry face down on a mud embankment and knelt hard with both knees on the small of his back. A couple of quarts
of water were forced out of Harry’s mouth. When Eric released him, he began to vomit, taking huge, gasping intakes of air
between convulsive spewings-up of water.

“Who’s got my seedlings?” Eric asked.

No one had.

They spotted them floating half-submerged a little distance away, and three of the boys ran to fetch them. One of the peasants
who functioned as a kind of overseer brought a huge double armful of rice shoots and dumped them on the embankment beside
Harry. He left without a word. This extra work was punishment for what had happened—the seedlings had to be planted along
with their regular allotments. Eric said nothing, because the peasant was respected by the other workers since he had proved
he was not an informer. This did not mean he liked big-city Amerasians.

A bony, wizened old man joined the youths and helped them plant their extra seedlings, after motioning to Harry to stay where
he was resting on the embankment. The old man reminded Eric of the gaunt monks he used to see begging outside the temples
before the communists took over. He thought this man might be a monk and, not knowing what else to say to him, he asked him
if he was.

The old man laughed and did not pause in his work as he answered, “Have you ever seen a monk plant rice? You think I learned
to work like this in a monastery?”

Eric could see that this man by himself could plant more rice seedlings per hour than all twelve of them put together, so
he shut up.

The old man continued, “You know, people weren’t always so bad here in Vietnam as they are now. Today they
have seen so many terrible things, they have become hardened. Before the Second World War, I remember, it was the French
who were our masters, then the Japanese, back came the French again, then the Diem family in Saigon, and when they were gone
Marshal Ky, the Viet Cong, and the Americans. Now it is the communists. We country people do not care who is in power if only
they would leave us alone. But they never do. The worst of all are the communists. I am a wise old man. I do not shout my
opinions for all to hear. I smile and say, yes, comrade. Until they moved me from my ancestral land. That I will not take
…” He suddenly straightened up from his work, and his eyes blazed in his wrinkled face. “No. They cannot do that to me. When
I leave this place, I will go back there again, even though they have forbidden it.”

“Is that why you are here in this camp?” Eric asked.

“Yes. For being on my own land. Next time, they will have to spill my blood on the soil where my ancestors are buried before
they can move me.”

He stooped again at his work, and Eric worked alongside him, aware that his movements were slow and clumsy in comparison to
the old man’s. After a while, the old man showed him a certain way to hold the shoot and move his hands which involved less
effort on his part. The man watched Eric for a while as he got the hang of it.

“That’s good,” the old man said, and looked about at the efforts of the other eleven boys. He smiled. “You must teach them
what I have shown you.”

“I will,” Eric promised.

“I am sixty-eight,” the man said. “I’ve had my life, and I am ready now to accept death. I’ve seen a lot of things—amazingly
good and very evil. I don’t think I want to stay around here much longer. It’s you young people I feel sorry for.”

“Don’t,” Eric told him. “We won’t be staying here much longer, either.”

The old man gave him a penetrating look and then returned to planting rice shoots in the mud beneath the water.

L
ARRY
Richards was thin, small, fast. His hair lay short and lifeless on his small head, and his face had a sort of yearning look
that women much larger than him found irresistible. Men were more apt to notice the weasel expression in his face. Larry had
been called a little rat more than once. He didn’t mind.

Hannigan’s Bar was across the street. Larry Richards sat behind the wheel of his car and waited patiently. This place was
a gold mine for Provos. As soon as the Paddies came to this side of the pond, they lost all caution. As well they might, Richards
thought to himself. Most Americans, even when they abhorred the violence, were on the side of the glorious rebels. British
intelligence, on friendly territory with Washington when dealing with most other issues, was only now for the first time getting
back against the IRA gunrunners and fund-raisers. However, problems still persisted on the individual level. FBI agents with
Irish names—and also many without—could not be trusted to make a reasonable effort or even to cooperate as fully as they might
on something else. The city police in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago were worse.

Richards, a Londoner, was a freelance agent. He went
where pay was highest. Theoretically. Because in real life you worked for one power center, and if you stepped out of line,
they fucked you good and proper. All of which brought Peregrine Addendale to his mind. Addendale, the one at the British consulate
who dealt with Richards, was something out of a John LeCarré novel. He was elegant, understated, Stonyhurst and Oxford. Richards’
background was the drab northern London suburb of Finsbury Park and the fairly new Sussex University.

Peregrine Addendale had style. He had insisted that Larry do this job with the gun issued to him, an Enfield revolver No.
2 Mk 1. This was a variation of the gun issued to the British army in 1932! Larry supposed he was fortunate Addendale hadn’t
insisted he drive a vintage car. And he was to leave the gun on the scene … This old British Empire revolver was to be a signature
to tell the Provos they were not safe on this side of the Atlantic, either. As far as Larry was concerned, this was Oxford
amateur theatricals.

The Provisional IRA did not use Hannigan’s Bar as a meeting place, as far as Larry Richards could tell. The neighborhood bar
in Woodside, Queens, was just a casual waterhole for any of the lads who happened to be in this New York City borough. The
subway here was elevated on steel girders, and trains clattered almost directly above where his car was parked. It was less
than half an hour’s run into Manhattan.

Richards once again riffled through the wad of photos, front and side shots of hard-faced men and a few women. He stopped
when he came to Don Morgan’s mug shot and stared with hatred at the calm visage which looked out at him from the photo. Morgan
had been sentenced
in absentia
to fifty-five years in jail in a Belfast court for the killing of one British parachute regiment soldier and the wounding
of three others. Morgan had placed a radio-controlled bomb at the side of a narrow country road and detonated it from his
hiding place as the patrol of four soldiers passed
the bomb in their Land Rover. From what Richards had heard, two of the three soldiers who survived were so mutilated it would
have been a greater mercy had they been killed outright. Morgan had been arrested and confessed to the crime under interrogation.
While on his way to a court hearing, his prison wagon was struck by a heavy truck and Morgan was rescued at gunpoint.

Morgan had dropped out of sight for more than two years when Larry Richards saw him one afternoon leaving a bar on Third Avenue
and traced him to an address in Kearney, New Jersey. At first Peregrine Addendale, then new at his job, had refused to believe
Morgan had reappeared on this side of the Atlantic and further insisted that everything had to be done in a lawful manner
to apprehend him. Richards placed Morgan in the Jersey location and asked Addendale to call in the Feds. As Addendale somewhat
shamefacedly put it later, the FBI, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms all turned down his
request because the British had never listed Morgan in their computers. After four hours on the stakeout with no action, Richards
phoned Addendale to ask what was happening. They agreed to call the New Jersey State Police or Kearney police only as a last
resort, and, on Richards’ suggestion, Addendale tried Immigration first. Two inspectors came and left empty-handed. Morgan
himself left the place ten minutes after they had gone. Addendale started to learn at that point he was no longer in Buckinghamshire.
That had been five months ago.