The Point Team (19 page)

Colquitt poured out generous measures for both of them. Campbell guessed that somehow this was neither the first nor even
the second drink Cuthbert had had this morning. He was just bursting out all over in good-ol’-boy joviality.

“You have any problem with Thailand?” Mike asked after they had exchanged some pleasantries.

“Hell no, boy, them Thais is just like cousins to me. I do business in Bangkok easy as I do in Montgomery, Alabama. A little
easier, in fact.”

“Great. So we’ll need six M16s—”

“Mike, if you’re going where I think you might be going, you’ll have to carry all your ammo with you. You can’t pick up those
5.56-mm shells anymore like you could in the old days when you needed fresh ammunition.”

“I thought a lot of the communist militias still use captured Ml6s and stuff we left behind.”

“Up until a couple of years ago,” Colquitt said, “but not so much anymore. They’ve replaced most of the old weapons with new
Kalashnikovs, and as you know, the Russians make those bullets 7.62- by 39-mm so they don’t fit no Western guns.”

“So we should carry AK47s?” Campbell asked.

“Sure. I can get you six of the latest model, the AKM—though folks still call it the AK47. It’s a lightened and slightly modified
version with a stamped-steel receiver, a ribbed receiver cover and a cyclic rate reducer that is incorporated into the trigger
mechanism. The bayonet is different—it won’t fit on the old AK47. It’s the sort you can use as a wirecutter against its scabbard.”

“This new model still have the cleaning rod mounted beneath the barrel?” Campbell asked.

“Sure thing. Just like a damn old musket.”

“Handy thing, though,” Mike said. “Give me six of the AKMs. With night scopes.”

“You got ’em, boy. How about some nice Uzis as well?”

“The Uzi is a nice gun, Cuthbert, and we need a submachine gun. But you’re talking about almost eight pounds in weight for
each gun, and we’re on foot—not touring the scenery in a personnel carrier. What about an Ingram?”

“The M10 model is a bit over six pounds, and I can give it to you in .45- or 9-mm parabellum. The M11 weighs only three and
a half pounds and takes 9-mm shorts in a 16- or 32-round box magazine. You can’t beat the M11 for lightness and reliability.
Only thing is, you’re giving away a lot in effective range when you compare it to a Uzi.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mike said. “The Uzi is about two hundred meters, while the M11 is only fifty.”

“The Ingram M10 is seventy-five meters.”

“No, I’ll take the M11. Give me six of them, with sound and flash suppressors.”

Cuthbert whistled appreciatively. “I can just see all them dead commies lying all over the place already.”

Mike guessed that Cuthbert Colquitt had never in his life shot at anything bigger than a jackrabbit, but when it came to accurately
describing the capabilities of weapons, he knew no one better at it than this Southerner. They continued to discuss in detail
all Mike’s requirements, comparing weapons and equipment. He could see Cuthbert was impressed that so far Mike had never asked
the price of anything. Mike intended to bargain only after he had got a satisfactory array of hardware together. When they
had covered all his conventional needs, Cuthbert heaved himself out of his chair.

“Come on, Mike. I want you to see some things I got in my warehouse.”

Campbell feigned reluctance, developing a resistance to Colquitt’s steamroller salesmanship. “I don’t know, Cuthbert. I’ve
seen very good stuff in Sweden and Belgium recently. I don’t think you could match it.”

Colquitt looked hurt. “Foreign junk! These here goods I’m going to show you is fabulous made-in-USA stuff, all-American. Come
on, Mike, bring your bourbon and take a look. Maybe you want to stop off on the way and attack China with the shit I got in
my showroom. You’d win.”

The Gulfstream Commander Jetprop took the team to the airport outside Charleston, where a limo picked them up and conveyed
them to a seventy-foot yacht top-heavy with a flying bridge, two decks, sun canopies, a ton of chrome, glistening clear varnish,
and dazzling white paint. The “captain” of this elegant craft saluted them as they came aboard. He had a lot of gold braid
on his peaked hat and starched white shirt.

“He looks more like an out-of-work actor than a seafaring man,” Bob Murphy muttered to Mike Campbell.

“We don’t have to go to sea with him, just in among the islands.”

Two immaculately uniformed stewards stowed their baggage, seated them at café tables on the aft deck and adjusted umbrellas
to keep the sun off their faces. They were served drinks.

“Looks like this is going to be a real mean bitch of a mission,” Murphy said happily, relaxing back in his deck chair and
rattling the ice cubes in his glass as a signal to the steward to refill it.

Mike noticed that Joe Nolan from Youngstown, Ohio, and Harvey Waller from Flemington, New Jersey, were much more ill at ease
in all this ostentatious luxury. Both glowered at the captain and the stewards. Nolan went out of his way to stamp out his
cigarette ends on the gleaming deck boards. And neither of them did anything to hide their antagonism toward what Waller called
“the foreigners” on the team, the Australian, Englishman and Frenchman. They were careful, however, not to cross swords with
Campbell.

Andre Verdoux, in his turn, was behaving in a somewhat superior manner to his four teammates. No one could doubt his attitude
was meant to suggest that this mission was Mike’s and his, and that the rest were merely porters and water bearers.

Murphy seemed unaware of all these alliances and animosities, chattering on in a loud voice above the ship’s engines as they
made their way across the water. Richards said very little to anyone.

The splendid vessel, with the captain clutching its walnut wheel as if he were rounding the Horn in a gale, made its placid
way over the calm waters along the Intracoastal Waterway between James Island and the mainland. Farther north, they passed
inside the shelter of Sullivans Island, the Isle of Palms, Dewees Island … At last they came to a
small island, perhaps a mile long and half that in width, that seemed little more than a glorified sandbar. A wooden dock
stretched out from the landward side of the island, which was salt marsh near the water and covered with bushes and low trees
in the middle. Beyond the trees, high dunes hid the ocean from view. They could hear the waves breaking on the beach.

“Mr. Vanderhoven’s cottage is this way, sir,” the driver of the first dune buggy come to meet them told Campbell and Murphy.

The others, except for Verdoux who stayed to supervise the baggage, piled into the second dune buggy. Vanderhoven’s “cottage”
turned out to be a huge, two-story stone house built in imitation of some old European style and sheltered in a hollow with
dunes to one side and pine trees around the others. Because a big meal had been prepared for them, Campbell had not the heart
to refuse it.

He warned his men as they sat at the dining table, “We’ve come here to lose flab, not gain twenty pounds. After this meal,
this house is out of bounds. We have six mattresses in the attic above what were once stables. That’s where we’ll live. So,
gentlemen, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we train.”

“I want you bastards to run, run, run,” Campbell bellowed at them as he kept up the pace on the hard sand along the ocean’s
edge. “You may be able to shoot, fuck and sing, but you goddamn cripples can’t run worth a shit.”

As long as Campbell himself did whatever he demanded of the others, none were in a position to complain without admitting
that they couldn’t take it. They muttered among themselves for the first few days and began referring to Campbell as Mad Mike
with emphasis on the first word, but no one dared rebel. They ran and ran and ran. Up and down the wet hard sand of the beach.
Through the soft deep sand farther back that drained a man’s energy and
burned the bottoms of his bare feet. They ran up the sides of giant dunes where the sand gave way beneath their feet almost
as fast as they could climb, with the result it was almost like running in place. From dawn to dusk, with breaks of an hour
at a time, they ran around the island, up and down it, across it …

“Solely as a matter of intellectual curiosity, Mike,” Andre Verdoux asked on the third day, “why are you doing this to us?
We are all reasonably fit, and we hope to fight our way to and from our mission goal, not run like hell. Why?”

“You see the way everyone, including yourself, Andre, was giving everyone else the business on the way here on the plane and
in the boat?” Mike asked. “I said to myself, to hell with this, I got a bunch of civilians here, this is not a fighting team.
What I need is soldiers—guys with disciplined minds as well as physically fit bodies. After a couple more days of this, everyone
will have forgotten all their petty little bitcheries from the civilian world. Or some of them anyway.”

“It’s hard, Mike. Damn hard.”

“I told you that you were too old, Andre.”

The Frenchman scowled and never questioned Mike’s running program again.

Apart from heaving smooth rocks approximately the same shape and weight as hand grenades into a circle marked on the beach,
they fired some rusty old rifles retrieved from the house at Driftwood. Mike had thought Vanderhoven’s rifles would be in
better condition and had brought along two target practice nose-marker versions of the high-explosive antitank (HEAT) 75N
Energa rifle grenade. They fired these inert practice grenades with ballistite rounds. The grenade had a reusable marker which
left a colored chalk mark on the target after each shot. However, the rifles were in such bad condition, they never could
get down to some serious competitive shooting among themselves.

On the fourth morning, two South Carolina State Police helicopters landed on the beach, one in front of and one behind the
six running men. A voice over a loudspeaker commanded them to surrender, as heavily armed state policemen in riot helmets
jumped from the choppers onto the beach. They surrounded the six barefoot men dressed only in boxer’s shorts.

“We got this here search warrant.” The sergeant waved it in Mike’s face. “We heard from Washington you’re training a private
army down here.”

“You’re looking at them.”

“We kinda expected at least forty or fifty men,” the sergeant said. “Aside from Mr. Vanderhoven’s staff, there’s no one else
on the island?”

“Except for you people.”

Mike heard him radio from the chopper, apparently sending back two boatloads of reinforcements.

“We’re gonna take a look around,” the sergeant said menacingly to Campbell.

In a while they came back with the two HEAT rifle grenades. Campbell took them apart to show that they were duds, but the
sergeant took them anyway—“as evidence,” he said.

Mike commented to Verdoux as they left, “You notice they didn’t touch a damn thing of Vanderhoven’s?”

“You were expecting them, Mike?” Andre asked and answered himself, “Which is why we had no proper weapons.”

Campbell said shortly, “If we let Washington stop us, they will. If we don’t, they won’t.”

T
HEY
interrupted the long plane ride from New York to Bangkok with a day in Tokyo and six hours in Hong Kong. The oppressive heat
and incredible traffic jams on the way to their Bangkok hotel from the airport, combined with their exhaustion, rendered them
semicomatose. However, the memories of R&Rs spent in this Thai city during the Vietnam war were awakened at the sight of particular
things—ornate Buddhist temples, neon signs for go-go bars, crowded streets and, most of all, the graceful ivory-skinned women
of extraordinary beauty.

“You giving us some time here to get acclimatized?” Bop Murphy asked Campbell in the hotel lobby.

“Is that what you call what you were doing in Tokyo and Hong Kong?” Mike countered.

“Come on, Mike,” Bob said. “Larry Richards has never been here before. I want to show him the sights.”

“We have a couple of days,” Mike admitted with a grin. “You better pack whatever you can in, because we’ve all got some lean
times ahead.”

Campbell was surprised at how well Verdoux spoke Thai. Although many of the people here spoke some form of rudimentary English,
particularly the ones who had
something for sale, the ability to speak their language opened up a different world for the Frenchman. The Thais were flattered
that a Westerner had learned their difficult tongue, curious about him—which was not so welcome—and anxious to please.

“What do you think has changed most since you were last here?” Andre asked Mike.

“It’s almost ten years. I guess the place seems even more crowded than it was before.”

“Would you believe that since then the population has doubled to more than five million?” Andre went on. “I heard one American
describe the city as ‘downtown Thailand.’”

That evening Mike and Andre wandered over to Patpong Road, the honky-tonk section. The area was crawling with Japanese, American,
and European tourists, with relatively few American servicemen to be seen.

“They run sex tours from Tokyo these days—a few days away from the wife and kids,” Andre said.

Mike indicated a flashing neon sign ahead. “I remember this place from the old days.”

An American flag hung below the neon sign which flashed
ranch
in the dusk.

“We used to call it the Raunch,” Mike said. “You want a beer?”

In the dark interior a dozen bar girls, unusually modestly dressed, were serving heaping bowls of vegetables, rice, and fruit
to four monks in saffron robes with shaved eyebrows and heads.

The madam approached them quickly and spoke in English, “You boys come back in a while, yes? We get blessing now for fifteen
years open today.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The girls take off their clothes and we put up naughty
pictures on wall again. OK? We were afraid maybe monks change their minds and stop being monks. You come back in a little
while,” she repeated as she expertly pushed them back into the street.