The Point Team (34 page)

They spent a lot of time skirting areas where the rural population was heavy and people streamed along the country roads in
throngs found only in cities in the West. Campbell and Waller felt their large frames to be so out of place here, they were
freaks. Even at a great distance, they knew they could not pass without drawing attention to themselves. Yet Campbell held
ruthlessly to his twenty miles per day minimum, and no one dared question him on how the hell he was measuring it, since it
felt more like forty miles per day to everyone else.

When they were totally exhausted and felt they could go no farther, Campbell would turn and say things like, ‘This is too
good to last. We’re having things too easy. Enjoy it now while you can, there’s rougher times ahead.”

With his rough laugh, he would stride forward energetically, shaming the rest of them into trailing after him as best they
could.

Late in the afternoon of the third day, they heard the drone of a small plane. Then another. Or it might have been the same
one. The plane was flying low, clearly on an aerial reconnaissance of the terrain beneath. That evening, just before dusk,
while they were looking for a secluded place to bivouac not far from a highway, a convoy of eighteen military trucks went
north on the road. No one made direct remarks about this new military presence, but already they were recalling their adventures
with bird-eating spiders and vampire bats in inaccessible jungles with a warm nostalgia. Campbell said very little.

The next dawn he was a different man, checking equipment, lecturing the slow-moving, all the time repeating variations on
the magic phrase, “Tonight we cross the Mekong, at dawn tomorrow you will see the sun rise in the free world.”

After only a limited time in the oppressive communist world, the team members were beginning to see the beauty of this statement.
As for the boys, it electrified them into a frenzy of action. Each time Mike urged them on, they grew wilder. No one could
stop them now! Murphy and Verdoux laughed together at the simple, direct power Campbell held over people as a leader. Yet
in spite of their knowledge of what he was doing and how he did it, they admitted he infected them, too. Waller and Nolan,
less complex individuals, joined with the Amerasian youths in their heightened, fierce determination to cross over into Thailand.

Not long after they set out on what they expected to be the final leg of their journey, a small single-engined recon plane
crossed their path. They froze till it was out of visual range. In the next two hours, seven more of the small planes crossed
the sky.

“Bastards know we’re coming somehow,” Waller ground out.

“All they got to do is follow the dead bodies we leave behind,” Murphy said jokingly.

“We ain’t been so bad recently,” Waller said defensively. He grinned his loony grin. “I can hardly remember when I killed
my last commie, it’s been so long ago.”

Murphy laughed. “Holy shit, Waller, you’re going to miss it when you get out of here.”

“Naw. There’s always work to be done, no matter where a willing fella like me finds himself.”

Waller was not joking now. Murphy let it pass.

They had a break when the country turned to forest with a high canopy, giant trunks and relatively passable vegetation on
ground level. In a large, clear-cut, lumbered area, as they threaded their way among the three-foot stumps, they met a ground-search
unit of Lao troops. Campbell had a big eye-opener about the fighters under his command. While the Lao troops broke for cover,
the kids and the team members never missed a step in their implacable
forward pace. They advanced in an even line and threw lead from the hip as they came. One by one, the Lao troops flopped
down like targets struck at a fairground booth.

They moved on without delay, pausing only to dispatch the wounded with a pistol shot to the head.

“I don’t want anyone talking about who we are at this stage,” Campbell declared. “We can’t afford it. So anyone who sees you—man,
woman or child—kill them. You want to be kind to them, make sure they don’t get to see you.”

Campbell himself saw the effect of his leadership on the kids. He had turned them into monsters! Now even his own men (mercenaries!)
had to strive to compete with these ravening little savages.

Verdoux muttered something wise in French about the hunger or thirst for liberty turning its holder into something else.

“Ah, the frog is thinking about wine and women again,” Murphy said.

“I’m so desperate now, Bob,” Andre said sarcastically, “I’d even settle for Australian wine and an Australian woman.”

Nolan joined the conversation. “You know what they say about Australian girls, frog? They got what it takes down under.” He
indicated the area of the body he meant, in case they didn’t get the joke.

Andre sighed dramatically and moved away.

They wiped out two small armed parties and hid the bodies in the undergrowth. So far they had not received a scratch themselves.
Their frenzy rose with the killing, and all of them began to feel that nothing could stop them now. They were nearing the
Mekong, only hours away. Verdoux claimed he could already
smell
Thailand!

Then things took a different turn. First Campbell realized that he had driven his unit harder than he thought. With three
hours of daylight remaining, they were descending
ahead of schedule into the broad valley of the Mekong. There was no holding back now. They had not been precisely located,
but the military was closing in. Campbell saw their best chance as establishing a position on the bank of the Mekong and holding
out till dark. He had only one objective now—get to the river. When he got there, he would decide what to do.

The next happening that changed their circumstances was a run-in with a Lao unit of forty-eight or more men. The two Lao platoons
exchanged fire with them beyond effective range, and then fled before either side had taken any casualties!

Murphy roared with laughter. “They’re the first ones we’ve met with any sense!”

Campbell was dour. “They’ll radio in our position. Those were probably a bunch of peasant conscripts who didn’t want to tangle
with us. Now they’ll call in hardened troops. I reckon we’re no more than forty minutes from the riverbank. Let’s make an
all-out break for it and try for a quick daylight crossing. That means
run
, you bastards, run, run, run!”

He didn’t give them time to think—kept them on the move. Now they ran across fields in which peasants were working, passed
women carrying pitchers of water from a well, stopped bicycle and ox-cart traffic on a dirt road as they crossed it in a pack,
and ran down among fishermen repairing nets on the muddy bank of the wide river.

Mike picked on two of the fishermen, who looked like father and son. He forced them to stand at gunpoint with their hands
clasped behind their necks.

“Ask them if we can wade across the river here,” he told Andre.

The older man replied to the Frenchman’s question. Andre translated, “He says we can.”

Campbell barked, “Tell him that both of them lead the way and if the water gets above their waists, I’ll gun them down.”

Andre conveyed this information to the two men, listened to their reply and translated, “They say it would be quicker to cross
in their boats. The boats are hidden in the bushes fifty meters down the bank. But they complain it is dangerous for them—”

Mike held up a hand for him to stop. He took a wad of Thai bahts from his shirt pocket and let the two fishermen look at the
bills. They nodded, unclasped their hands from behind their necks with a smile, and set off down the river-bank at a half-run.

What Andre translated as “boats” turned out to be two canoes. Mike didn’t have time to go back and force other fishermen to
cooperate with him. There were other canoes, but he guessed they were better off overloading two craft with experienced boatmen
than trying to handle the temperamental, fragile craft themselves in the fast-flowing river currents.

The canoes sank in the water almost to the gunwales under their weight, and every time anyone moved out of sync with the others,
the craft threatened to tip over. They finally all piled into the canoes in shallow water and stabilized their loads. With
a few expert strokes, the fishermen shot their craft into the currents and maneuvered across the river at a 45-degree angle,
using the swift waters and the calms like a car driver weaving in and out of crowded traffic lanes on an interstate highway.

Even Campbell thought they had it made, with three-fourths of the river covered, when a big chopper swept over the waters
from upstream and touched down on its skids on a gravel bank in a foot of water behind them.

“Go! Go!” Campbell yelled to the boatmen.

They did not need his message to be translated for them. They paddled the canoes into the fastest downstream rushes of water
they could find. The helicopter landing was sloppy. The unloaded troopers could not fire at them because the chopper rotors
whipped up the river water and obscured their vision. They took longer than they should
have to unload a heavy machine gun, keep it out of the water, set up its tripod on the gravel bank and mount it. The chopper
lifted off.

Campbell’s canoe, paddled by the old man, hit the shore. Mike threw the notes to him and, as they jumped out, yelled for him
to head downstream as fast as he could. Another message that needed no translation.

The younger Laotian’s canoe was farther out. Mike gestured to its occupants to abandon it and get to shore. They wasted valuable
time in trying not to upset the craft—which they didn’t—and the first wild burst of heavy machine-gun fire whipped over their
heads as the soldiers adjusted their weapon out on the gravel bank.

Verdoux and Nolan, who had also been in Campbell’s canoe, returned fire but ineffectively. The troops were crouched behind
the machine gun, and their support lay in the water and presented little in the way of a target.

The next foray of the machine gunner was more successful. As they splashed toward shore, the bullets danced off the water
just downstream from them. Murphy yelled for all of them to lie behind a sandy shoal before the gunner zeroed in on them.

Two of Eric’s friends panicked. They saw the shore of Thailand only fifty yards away—freedom!—and they ignored Murphy’s command.
The stream of bullets found them a few seconds later as they splashed toward shore hysterically, cutting them down in the
water … It’s especially pathetic the way an automatic stream of heavy bullets chops up a child’s body, which does not have
the bulk to absorb the impact of the high-velocity slugs.

Their butchered bodies were dragged over the shallows by the blood-stained river waters, carrying the tragic burdens downstream.

Mike raged. His blood boiled. He had to strive to clear his head so he could think. Opening his eyes, he saw the solution
right before him on the riverside highway. A Thai farmer with a truck bearing a transverse 500-gallon tank.
Mike had thought it was agricultural fertilizer till he heard the farmer, who had abandoned the vehicle in a panic as bullets
ricocheted around him.

“Gasoline! Petrol!” he screamed, pointing at the tank.

He only recovered his senses when Mike showed him a wad of dollar bills and the muzzle of his AK47.

“
Deux mille litres
!” the farmer squeaked.

Mike hoped so, and counted out twenty hundred-dollar bills before he seized the ignition keys.

Verdoux nodded and hauled out a spare magazine from his pouch as he ran back to the riverbank.

As Mike drove the truck upriver on the road, he looked out at the machine gunner who had Murphy, Nolan and half the kids pinned
behind the shelter of a gravel shoal fifty yards from the bank.

At a boat landing, he drove the truck out into the river. The late 1960s truck operated well till the water got above the
wheel hubs. Then the engine cut out. And would not restart. Mike figured he was OK where he was and did not fight it.

He did not bother with the fuel hose but released two emergency valves on the tank that sent the fuel spilling onto the river
water. In a minute, a wide slick of gasoline spread over the surface. The currents were bringing the slick in the general
direction he needed, yet it was too early to tell if it would reach its goal.

Verdoux waited till the slick, in its rainbow colors, had reached the machine-gun position before firing his magazine full
of tracer bullets into it. The burning phosphorus on the bullets ignited the gasoline slick in a carpet of blue flame.

Although the water the soldiers were in was only about a foot deep, the sea of flames rose three feet high above it. When
they jumped up to try to escape, only their heads and shoulders were clear of the consuming tongues of flame. Their awful
cries of agony and screams for help to
the people they had been machine-gunning seconds before rang clearly across the water surface.

Murphy, Nolan and the surviving kids who had been marooned behind the shelter of the gravel shoal ran like crazy for the Thai
shore.

The gasoline combustion lasted a few seconds more, then suddenly, the fuel almost spent, the flames on the surface of the
water died down to a shimmering topaz glimmer on the river. Some of the soldiers were still staggering about, burning and
smoldering. Others had fallen into the flaming water and flopped about like dying fish, blinded, half drowned, half burned
to death.

The ancient bus bumped at terrifying speeds along the roads, driven maniacally by the brother of the Thai whose gasoline Campbell
had bought. In the weak yellow headlights, they had glimpses of people jumping out of their way into the darkness, and every
so often they would compete with an approaching pair of undimmed headlights for supremacy on the narrow roadway.

Mike yelled to Andre over the rattles and squeaks, “Tell him to ease up. We haven’t come this far to die in a goddamn traffic
accident.”

Whatever the Frenchman said to him, the Thai thought it was hugely funny and drove all the faster. They made only one stop,
at a roadside eating place, for Campbell to telephone the TV network bureau in Bangkok. He couldn’t have cared less if no
one was there, but it was part of his bargain with Katie Nelson, so he waited nearly fifteen minutes for the call to go through.
He and the others ate a huge dinner of pork slivers barbecued on small wood skewers, served in a thick, hot peanut sauce over
rice.