The Point Team Read Online Free

forward position among the weeds and loaded a new video tape in his camera. “I need an unobstructed
     view of the trucks, but there’s no way for me to get any closer without being seen.”
    “This sound quality is shit, Katie,” Jake complained. “I got to take the mike in closer.”
    “There’s no way you two can do that,” she said. Jake and Roger were six-footers, and very, very conspicuous.
    “I know how to work the camera,” Eric volunteered, his sullenness suddenly evaporated. “Mitch and Red can do the sound if
     you show them how. They won’t spot us. I guarantee it.”
    Roger and Jake’s expressions showed their unwillingness to hand over their equipment.
    “This is too good to miss,” Katie pointed out. “You got to let them.”
    While they were making up their minds, there was a bigoutburst near the trucks as women struggled with the soldiers. Roger and Jake knew they had to cover the news, no matter
     how. They handed over the camera and sound gear. After a brief lesson on what knobs and dials to turn, all four youths crept
     forward through the weeds around the edge of the clearing. The three Americans watched anxiously as the boys maneuvered into
     position and filmed the scene at the trucks.
    Roger said, ‘They seem to be doing OK. But his camera movements are jerky, and he’s zooming in and out too fast.”
    Katie grinned. “You’re both afraid the kids’ stuff will be better than yours.”
    Roger laughed. “So long as the union doesn’t get to hear of this, I don’t care.”
    They saw the boys creep forward, practically out into the open, as the soldiers lost their original patience and pushed, battered,
     and kicked the hysterical women. Some carried a baby, hanging by an arm or a leg, in each hand and tossed it for another soldier
     to catch inside a truck. They might have been loading heads of cabbage, for all the care they showed.
    They saw Eric take the video camera off his shoulder and give it to the boy with him. He came back alone to the three Americans,
     stooping as he ran through the weeds.
    “Bring back my camera!” Roger growled before Eric had a chance to say anything.
    “Tomorrow at seven in the evening. Same place as we met you today.”
    “To hell with that!” Roger snarled and went forward.
    The three boys had already disappeared with the camera and sound equipment.
    “We’ll make you a film that’ll show you how we have to live,” Eric promised with a sneer. “Not some pinko tourist crap like
     you would have shot.”
    He sneered at them once again and disappeared among the weeds.
    * * *
    Green mosquito netting concealed each of the still forms of Lt. Tranh Duc Pho and his fifteen men as they waited in a line
     on the jungle slope above the muddy river, nearly four hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh City and fifteen miles inside Vietnam’s
     border with Laos. They stared down from higher ground at what once had been part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Occasional Montagnard
     tribesmen passed by, then a group of Vietnamese peasants, then seven armed Montagnards with heavy backpacks—the lieutenant
     did not stop these smugglers since he had bigger game in mind. He and his men lay concealed in the jungle for four hours—fighting
     off the fierce tiny wildlife that bit and stung them even under the protection of the netting—before they saw what they had
     been waiting for.
    Two Montagnards with American M16 rifles at the ready walked abreast along the path, scanning the forests to either side of
     them. They didn’t spot the men hidden above them.
    A minute behind them came the first of the bicycle bearers. Each bicycle was laden with goods wrapped in cloth. So much was
     tied to the frame of the machine that each bike looked like a bloated maggot with handlebars and wheels. The lieutenant counted
     thirty bicycles, each steered by a man walking alongside it. Twenty men walked beside the bicycles, unburdened except for
     their M16 or AK47 rifles. He knew