The Point Team (8 page)

“And the others?” Campbell asked.

“All four have heard from the IRS yesterday or today. Also, Nicholls heard from his parole officer, although he’s not on parole
anymore.”

Campbell knew that Harper was giving him this information deliberately over a line they both knew must be tapped. Harper had
realized that his own involvement was finished, as was that of the four men he had contacted. All he could do now was provide
Campbell with the opportunity to realistically cancel everything.

Campbell said, “Abort the mission.”

He hung up quickly and hoped that whoever listened to the tape in Washington would believe him.

“I’d swear these things have been moved around,” Tina said when they got back to the trailer from having dinner with friends
forty miles west of there.

Mike opened a drawer. His .38 Smith & Wesson revolver was still there. He checked the shells in the chambers and tucked it
in the front of his belt. The rifles and shotgun were still locked in the gun rack on the wall. Then he checked the secret
compartment in the floor of the trailer. The seals he had made with solder were broken. He unscrewed the cover. Inside, intact,
were his submachine gun, ammo, Ml6, and pistols. Nothing had been taken. But the compartment had been discovered and opened.
Whoever did it knew what they were doing. Yet not even they could escape Tina’s sharp eyes.

“They’ve been through everything,” she said, “from recipes and electricity bills to cups and saucers.”

“Stay here,” he told her. “I’m going to take a look around outside.”

He slammed the door after him and walked up the lighted pathway past three other trailers before he cut between them, away
from the lighted center of the park, out into the pitch-black, scrubby desert that surrounded them on all sides. He stood
motionless out in the open land until his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and what had once been blackness now assumed different
shades of gray and black in the starlight.

Campbell moved slowly and gently, carefully placing
each foot as he made his way back to the rear of his trailer. Out here, only twenty yards from the tattered lawns and light
bulbs of civilization, it was a different world. Things slithered along the ground at his feet, and small dark shapes ran
swiftly and noiselessly in his peripheral vision. Every time his legs pressed against plants in his way, their thorns pierced
his skin and sank into his flesh. There were no daisies or lambs out here, only lean spare creatures and plants that could
defend themselves.

He had eased his way almost directly behind his trailer before he noticed something unfamiliar, almost like the column of
a cactus, quite near him. Campbell knew there was no cactus in that place. Then his brain sorted the information his eyes
fed it. It was a human figure, standing rigid, pointing something at his trailer.

Although he knew he should creep away to check the area further before acting, sudden anger overwhelmed Mike. He covered the
ground between them in a few giant springs and leapt into the air so he hit the dark figure in the right shoulder with both
his feet, flexing his legs to deliver a powerful double kick.

In spite of the darkness, Campbell’s timing was good. He felt the tremor as his frame absorbed the shock of his jackhammer
double kick, and he felt the sudden release as the man’s body lost its resistance and footing. It hit the ground with a dull
thud, and before it could make a move, Campbell had thrown himself knees first onto the back of the prone figure, squeezing
the remaining air out of the lungs in a long wheeze. Mike grabbed the man’s hair, hauled his face out of the dirt, and gave
him a chance to breathe.

“Who are you?”

“Kelleher, FBI, Phoenix office,” the man gasped.

Campbell did not budge. “What were you doing?”

“I was holding a directional microphone toward your trailer.”

“You know who I am?”

“Campbell, get off my back, you big lug.”

Campbell got to his feet, pulled his Smith & Wesson .38 from his belt, and let the man feel its muzzle against his forehead.
“Your ID,” he demanded.

He had to reach inside the man’s jacket himself to get the ID, and noted warily the revolver in the right hip holster on the
man’s belt, the position favored by FBI men. The ID checked out, so far as he could see by the light of a trailer window.

“Where’s your backup?” Mike asked.

“Other side of the trailer camp. Asleep. I was going to wake him and go after you’d gone asleep.”

“You wanted to hear whether we’d spotted your break-in, eh?”

The FBI man said nothing. Mike picked up his listening gear and handed it to him. Kelleher left without a word. Which was
sporting of him, Mike figured, since he could have trumped up all sorts of charges. But then he’d have his own illegal break-in
to answer for. No, Kelleher went quietly because he was under orders to go quietly.

Campbell walked around the trailer and climbed the steps to its door. He found himself looking into the unwinking big eye
of a shotgun barrel inside the door. Tina was at the other end of the gun.

She took the weapon from her shoulder, dropped the hammer on her thumbnail, and set about unloading the gun. “Thought I heard
something out back.”

“It was me.”

One of Campbell’s unbreakable rules was for him not to involve Tina in anything. No matter what he got himself into, he wanted
her to be innocent of it. She’d spot the FBI men soon enough herself if they kept hanging around—and since she knew nothing,
she had no reason to be careful of what she said over the phone or elsewhere.

He fetched himself a bottle of Dos Equis from the refrigerator and sat down to think. Tina found something on TV so that he
could sit there staring at the screen and let his mind concentrate on the decisions he had to make.
Harper, his old sergeant, was out, along with the four men he had contacted. There were others from the unit, and some he
had met later as a merc. All good men. Little to choose between any of them. But all known to Washington as soldiers of fortune,
and known to be associated with him.

Campbell knew what the attitude of the Washington bureaucrats would be. A lot of the top politicians there would privately
be supportive of Vanderhoven’s mission to get the kid out, but the desk-bound know-it-alls of the State Department would lay
the law down.
They
were taking care of everything through diplomatic channels—which was bullshit—and all anyone else could do was make them
look bad if they succeeded or “embarrass” the American government if they failed. So far as Mike was concerned, so much crap
had gone on in Washington in recent years, he doubted very much if he could come up with anything new to embarrass anyone.

The only idea Mike had come up with since receiving Harper’s phone call had been to recruit total unknowns in unexpected places.
A classified ad in local newspapers would be one way to go. He’d have a lot of traveling to do to check the applicants, but
expenses were no problem, and it would take him no more than a minute or so to decide whether he wanted a man along. It was
a cumbersome way of doing the job, yet probably the most effective. Chances were better than good the FBI wouldn’t spot it
if he kept the newspapers he used widely scattered and in fairly densely populated areas.

He’d have to be careful of the wording. “Combat-hardened veterans …” He liked that, and it almost certainly meant service
in Vietnam without mentioning the name. He’d put it under the first word
veterans,
then “combat-hardened only, big-money enterprise.” That was as near as he could get to making it sound legit and fast money
at the same time. Then a box number. He would probably get some law-enforcement officers answering to check him
out. He figured he could spot them fast, or at least not recruit anyone he had the least doubt about. He’d drive into Phoenix
tomorrow and find the names and addresses of newspapers in the library.

J
OE
Nolan was in Youngstown, Ohio, and out of work. Not only had they closed the steel plants, they were even knocking some of
them down. Takes an optimistic man to believe a plant will open again after it has been demolished. Some of his friends had
taken off for Texas and other places. Others just hung out. All this was no great calamity to Joe. He always did wander from
job to job, woman to woman, drink to drink … It was a guy in a bar who showed him the ad in the paper.

“Joe, you was in the Green Berets?”

“Mmmmm.”

“Says here big money for combat-hardened veterans.”

Joe looked up from his glass of beer. He was thin as a rail, with a long face, hollow cheeks, light brown hair, and long yellow
teeth like a horse. He often got mad when people said he looked a real hillbilly, though sometimes he thought it funny, and
his very bright blue eyes would dart about unpredictably. These eyes now lit at the words about big money his friend had just
read.

“Shit, that sounds right for me,” Joe said.

“Naw,” the barman grinned. “It says combat-hardened, Joe. Man told me you was a cook over there. And all those
little scars on your neck and arms that you say was shrapnel, those were caused by pieces of eggshell in hot grease.”

The barman poured Joe another draft beer while he said this and gave it to him on the house.

“You know, if I’d been a cook in Nam, I’d a learned something,” Joe said, acknowledging the beer. “Way I came back, unless
you want to knock off some guy who’s buggin’ you, I ain’t good to you for no other job. Not for long, anyhow. Can’t put up
with just standing in a place doing something stupid I never wanted to do in the first place.”

“You find yourself a nice girl, Joe, and settle down,” a wizened man down the bar offered. “She’ll take all you can give and
knock the stuffin’ out of you. You’ll quiet down real fast.”

“What I need is to make some good money,” Joe muttered.

“Right now Youngstown is a great place for that,” another man at the bar remarked sardonically.

“There’s folks here who’ve lots of bread,” Joe told him.

“Yeah? I wish you’d bring ’em round here some time.”

“They ain’t my friends. But I know who some of them are,” Joe said. “They ain’t hurting for money.”

“Everyone I know in this town is as piss-poor as I am. Point out your rich friends to me some time, Joe.”

“Maybe I will,” Joe said cryptically. He finished his beer and left.

He drove his battered Chevy a ways before pulling over onto a waste lot. He left the engine running while he took a pair of
Pennsylvania registration plates out of the trunk and fitted them over his Ohio plates. He pressed down on the tops of the
plates so that the clips he had welded to the back of these plates fitted tightly. A minute’s work. He had taken the second
pair of plates from a wrecked Toyota that had been hit by a truck out on 76 near Petersburg. A
whole family had been wiped out, he’d heard. Pennsylvania people. It was dark enough for him to switch on his lights as he
drove along Canfield Road on the southwestern edge of the city. There was still some snow in patches.

He pulled off Canfield Road to the meeting place and looked at his watch by the street light. Ten minutes early. You could
always depend on a working stiff being ten minutes early, no matter where you asked him to be. There ready for the whistle
to blow. His father had been the same way. A girl had once told him he had a factory mentality or something of that kind.
That wasn’t because he always got places early that time, but because lying in bed in the morning made him nervous and restless.
She had said guilty. Maybe she was right. Making love in the morning was OK with him. It was just lying in bed and doing nothing
that got to him. There had not been a day in his mother’s life, weekdays or Sundays, when she had not already washed the breakfast
things and mopped the kitchen floor by the time the eight o’clock news came on the radio. His father and older brothers would
be starting their day’s work in the steel mill. He had to leave for high school in ten minutes—to get there fifteen minutes
early, of course. He dropped out soon after. He was one of the ones who had not been surprised or upset by the rigors and
regimented way of life in boot camp …

Joe’s mind zeroed in on the car that appeared from the other end of the street, slowed, and parked opposite him. Indiana plates.
A battleship-gray Trans Am with a red eagle stenciled on the hood. A tall dude with a seersucker suit and a preppy look got
out. He carried an airline bag and gestured to the trunk of Nolan’s car as he approached.

This was the third time in three months that Joe Nolan had met with this guy, who called himself Charles. Not Charlie or Chuck.
Strictly Charles. He wasn’t a fag. More an Ivy League sort with a high IQ and an arrogant manner, but not dumb enough to pull
shit with Nolan—Joe could see that this Charles was real aware and careful about that
sort of thing. He’d had a different car each time, two different Porsches before the Trans Am, all with Indiana plates.

Charles put the airline bag in the trunk of Nolan’s Chevy, and they drove back east along Canfield Road into Youngstown.

“I got three sales,” Charles said. “Around the State University.”

Nolan grunted.

He followed 62 across the Mahoning River. Near the university, Charles pointed out the way. Joe knew Charles had been around
earlier in the morning or afternoon, making contacts and sales arrangements. Charles liked to be in and out of town in a single
day, before he got noticeable to anyone as a stranger.

“How was it in Miami?” Joe asked.

“Raining.”

“I may go down with you next time if you let me know.”

“Sure, Joe.” Charles glanced at him with interest. “You want to get more involved?”

“You pay me a thousand bucks for one evening’s work. I got no complaint about that. But it’s only once a month. Maybe I could
drive for you in some other local cities—like Cleveland, Akron—or even Columbus. Wherever.”

Charles looked at him sharply. “Who says I go to those places? Anyhow, when I sell in a place, I use a local man as a driver
and bodyguard. You’re my man in Youngstown.”