The Point Team Read Online Free Page B

friends,” the lieutenant continued in a jeering tone. “The Green Berets left them for you and you kept
     them hidden, even after we had liberated you from the imperialists and their puppets in colonial Saigon. I have only two questions
     for you, and you had betteranswer them if you want to live. I know these weapons are going from one hill clan to another. Who sent them? Who was meant
     to get them?”
    The wounded man remained silent.
    The lieutenant nodded to the soldier guarding the man being questioned. He hit him with his fist on the blood-soaked part
     of his tunic sleeve. The man hardly reacted.
    Tranh Duc Pho scowled. “He’s in shock. He won’t feel a thing. He’s of no use to us.”
    The soldier guarding him drew his bayonet from its scabbard and sank it into his prisoner’s side, a single deep thrust. He
     let the falling man’s weight pull itself off the length of sharp steel. The man lay on his face on the ground, bleeding from
     the side into a great pool of blood, twitching and moaning.
    The soldier wiped the bloody blade on the fallen man’s shoulder, smiled, and said to the lieutenant, “I think he felt that,
     comrade.”
    “You,” Tranh Duc Pho said, pointing to one of the two uninjured Montagnards. “You will feel more than he did. Where were the
     arms going? Who sent them?”
    This man too remained silent.
    The sergeant beckoned to two of his soldiers who had taken a large metal cooking pot from one of the bicycles and filled it
     with river water. The soldiers placed the pot in front of the Montagnard under questioning. They forced the man to kneel before
     the pot and glanced at the lieutenant for approval. He nodded to them. One soldier lightly hit the Montagnard in the solar
     plexus, causing him to expel his breath, and before he could refill his lungs with another breath of air, they forced his
     head into the pot of water.
    They held his head under for a full minute as the man’s arms and legs threshed in desperation. They pulled his head up, and
     he puked water and sucked air into his waterlogged lungs. His eyes were round with terror.
    Keeping his face close to the river water in the cookingpot, they let him partly recover. But he could see what faced him again if he refused to answer questions.
    “Can you talk?” Tranh Duc Pho asked him.
    The man said nothing.
    The lieutenant kicked him with the toe of his boot in the ribs.
    The prisoner yelped in pain. “Yes,” he gasped, “I can talk.”
    “Good. Where were the arms going?”
    Silence. The soldiers slowly lowered his face toward the water. They paused to give him a last chance. The man took a deep
     breath. They forced his head into the pot so that water slopped over its sides.
    This time they kept him down for three minutes and pulled him out half drowned. He wouldn’t speak. They kept repeating this
     until, during one immersion, the man’s arms and legs went limp. They took their hands from his shoulders, letting him lie
     head first in the pot of water, and turned expectantly to the remaining live Montagnard.
    “Will you answer my questions?” the lieutenant asked. “None of your clan will ever know. We will release you and you can say
     you escaped.”
    “I will tell you,” the man said in bad Vietnamese.
    “Where were the arms going to? What clan?”
    The Montagnard named a tribe three days south of them.
    The lieutenant’s face twisted into a mask of rage. “Those are our friends. You taunt me.”
    He struck the Montagnard a sidewise swipe with the heel of his hand above the man’s right cheekbone. The Montagnard’s right
     eye popped out of its orbit and remained hanging there by its optic nerve and six muscle strips. The Montagnard stood at attention
     as if nothing had happened.
    “Who sent the arms?” the lieutenant barked.
    The Montagnard named a tribe friendly to the Vietnamese two days to the north.
    “This one is having fun with us,” Tranh Duc Pho saidthrough clenched teeth to his