Touch the Devil

JACK HIGGINS

Vietnam 1968

PROLOGUE

The Medevac helicopter drifted across the delta at a thousand feet, her escort a Huey Cobra gunship keeping station to the left. Rain threatened, the clouds over the jungle in the far distance heavy with it, and thunder rumbled on the distant horizon.

Inside the Medevac, Anne-Marie Audin sat in a corner, eyes closed, her back supported by a case of medical supplies. She was a small, olive-skinned girl with black hair razor-cut close to the skull, a concession to the living conditions of the Vietnam war front. She wore a camouflage jump jacket, unzipped at the front, a khaki bush shirt and pants tucked into French paratroopers’ boots. The most interesting features were the cameras, two Nikons strung around her neck by leather straps; the pouches of the jump jacket contained, not ammunition, but a variety of lenses and dozens of packets of 35 millimetre film.

The young medic squatting beside the negro Crew Chief gazed at her in frank admiration. The first two buttons of the khaki bush shirt were undone, giving a hint, no more, of the firm breasts rising and falling gently as she slept.

‘A long time since I saw anything like that,’ he said. ‘A real lady.’

‘And then some, boy.’ The Crew Chief passed him a cigarette. ‘There’s nowhere that girl hasn’t been. She even jumped with the 503rd Paras at Katum last year. You name it, she’s done it. Life magazine did an article on her six or seven months back. She’s from Paris, would you believe that? And from the kind of family that owns a large slice of the Bank of France.’

The boy’s eyes widened in amazement. ‘Then what in the hell is she doing here?’

The Crew Chief grinned. ‘Don’t ask me, kid. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’

‘Have you a cigarette? I seem to have run out,’ Anne-Marie said.

Her eyes were greener than anything he had ever seen, the Crew Chief realised that as he tossed a pack across to her. ‘Keep them.’

She shook one out and lit it with an old brass lighter fashioned from a bullet, then closed her eyes again, the cigarette lax in her fingers. The boy had been right, of course. What was she doing here, the girl who had everything? A grandfather who doted on her, one of the richest and most powerful industrialists in France. A father who had survived Indo-China only to die in Algeria, an infantry colonel, five times decorated, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. An authentic hero and just as dead.

Her mother had never recovered from the shock, had died in a car crash near Nice two years later. The thought often crossed Anne-Marie’s mind that perhaps it had been a deliberate turn of the wheel which had taken the Porsche over the edge of that mountain road that night.

Poor little rich girl. Her mouth twisted in a derisory smile, her eyes still closed. The houses, the villas, the servants, the good English schools, and then the Sorbonne; a year of that stifling academic atmosphere had been enough. Not forgetting the affairs, of course, and the brief flirtation with drugs.

It was the camera which had saved her. From her first Kodak at the age of eight, she had had an instinctive genius for photography, which had developed over the years into what her grandfather described as Anne-Marie’s little hobby.

After the Sorbonne, she had made it more than that. Had apprenticed herself to one of the finest fashion photographers in Paris for six months, had then joined Paris-Match as a staff photographer. Her reputation had soared astonishingly within one short year, but it was not enough – not nearly enough – and when she asked to be assigned to Vietnam, they had laughed at her.

So, she had resigned, turned freelance and in a final confrontation with her grandfather, had forced from him a promise to use all his formidable political power to obtain for her the necessary credentials from the Department of Defense. It was a new Anne-Marie he had seen that day: a girl filled with a single-minded ruthlessness which had surprised him. And yet had also filled him with reluctant admiration. Six months, he had said. Six months only, and she had promised, knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that she would break that promise.

Which she did, for when her time was up, it was too late to turn back. She was famous, her material used by every major magazine in Europe and America. Time, Paris-Match, Life, had all clamoured for the exclusive services of this mad French girl who had jumped with the paratroopers at Katum. The girl for whom no assignment was too rough or too dangerous.

Whatever it was she was looking for, she discovered what war was about, at least in Vietnam. No set-piece battles. No trumpets in the wind, no distant drum to stir the heart. It was savage street fighting in Saigon during the Tet offensive. It was the swamps of the Mekong Delta, the jungles of the central highlands. The leg ulcers that ate their way through the bone like acid, leaving scars which would never go away.

Which brought her to today. A morning spent waiting in the rain at Pleikic trying to arrange transportation to Din To until she’d managed to thumb a lift in the Medevac. God, but she was tired – more tired than she had ever been in her life. It occurred to her, that perhaps she’d reached the end of something. She frowned slightly. And then the Crew Chief called out sharply.

He was hanging in the open doorway, pointing to where a flame had soared into the sky a few hundred yards to the east. The Medevac swung towards it and started to go down, followed by the Huey Cobra gunship.

Anne-Marie was on her feet and standing beside the Crew Chief, peering out. There was the burnt-out wreck of a helicopter in a corner of a paddy field, several bodies sprawled beside it. The man who waved frantically from the dyke was in American uniform.

The Medevac went on down, her escort circling warily, and Anne-Marie locked a lens into place on one of her Nikons and started to take pictures one after the other, braced against the Crew Chief’s shoulder.

He turned his head to smile at her once and then, when they were no more than thirty feet up, she realised, with a strange kind of detachment, that the face she was focusing on below was Vietnamese, not American. A couple of heavy machine guns opened up from the jungle fifty yards away and at that range they couldn’t miss.

The Crew Chief didn’t stand a chance, standing in the open door. Bullets hammered into him, punching him back against Anne-Marie who was hurled against the medical supplies. She pushed him to one side and got to one knee. The young medic was huddled in the corner, clutching a bloody arm and as another solid burst of machine gun fire raked the cockpit, she heard the pilot cry out.

She lurched forward, grabbing at a strut for support; at the same moment the aircraft lifted violently and she was thrown out through the open door to fall into the mud and water of the paddy field. The Medevac bucked twenty or thirty feet up in the air, veered sharply to the left and exploded in a great ball of fire, burning fuel and debris scattering like shrapnel.

Anne-Marie managed to stand, plastered with mud, and found herself facing the man on the dyke in American uniform who, she could see now, was very definitely Vietnamese. The rifle he pointed at her was a Russian AK47. Further along the dyke, half a dozen Vietcong in straw hats and black pyjamas climbed from the ditch and moved towards her.

The Huey Cobra swept in, its heavy machine guns kicking dirt along the dyke, driving the Vietcong backwards into the ditch. Anne-Marie glanced up and the gunship hovered; then forty or fifty North Vietnamese regular troops in khaki uniforms appeared from the jungle on the far side of the paddy field and started to fire at the gunship with everything they had. The gunship moved towards them, loosing off its rocket pods, and the Vietnamese beat a hasty retreat back into the jungle. The gunship turned and flew away to the south for perhaps a quarter of a mile, then proceeded to fly around the entire area in a slow circle.

Anne-Marie crouched against the dyke, trying to catch her breath, then stood up slowly. It was very quiet and she looked about her at the carnage, the burnt-out helicopter, the bodies partially covered by mud and water. There was nothing, only desolation on every hand, a great bank of reeds thirty or forty yards away. She was alone at a point of maximum danger in her life, could be saved only by the reinforcements the Huey Cobra would undoubtedly have radioed for. Until then, there was really only one thing she could do.

The Nikons around her neck were plastered with mud. She took another lens from one of the pouches in her jump jacket, and opened a fresh pack of film. She started taking pictures, moving knee-deep through the water, bodies swirling around her, feeling cold, dispassionate, totally detached. And then she turned and found three Vietcong standing fifteen or twenty yards away.

There was a moment of perfect stillness, the grave, oriental faces totally without expression. The one in the centre, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, raised his AK47 and took aim carefully and just as carefully, Anne-Marie raised her Nikon. Death, she thought. The last picture of all. A beautiful boy in black pyjamas. Above their heads, the sky rumbled its thunder, rain falling in a great solid downpour, and there was a cry, high through the rain, strangely familiar. The cry of the Samurai, unafraid and facing fearful odds.

The Vietcong started to turn. Behind them a man erupted from the tall reeds, plunging towards them in a kind of slow motion. Khaki sweatband around his head, camouflage jump jacket festooned with grenades, the M16 rifle in his hands already firing, mouth wide in that savage cry.

She swung the camera in a reflex, kept on filming as he fired from the hip, knocking out one, then two, the M16 emptying as he reached the boy who still fired stubbornly, wide to one side. The butt of the M16 swung in a bone-crushing arc, the boy went down. Her rescuer didn’t even bother to reload, simply grabbed her hand, turned and started to plough back towards the reeds, churning water.

There were voices behind them on the dyke now and more shooting. It was as if she were kicked in the left leg, no more than that, and she went down again. He turned, ramming a clip into the M16, raking the dyke with fire, and he was laughing, that was the terrible thing as she tried to stand and looked up at him. When he reached down and pulled her up, she was aware of an energy, an elemental force such as she had never known. And then she was on her feet and they were into the safety of the reeds.

He had her up on a small mudbank out of the water as he sliced open her khaki pants with a knife and checked the wound.

‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘Straight through. M1 from the look of it. An AK would have fragmented the bone.’

He expertly strapped a field dressing around the wound, broke open a morphine ampoule and jabbed it into her. ‘You’re going to need that. A gunshot wound never hurts at first. Too much shock. The pain comes later.’

‘First-hand experience?’

He smiled wryly. ‘You could say that. I’d give you a cigarette, but I’ve lost my lighter.’

‘I’ve got one.’

He opened a tin of cigarettes, put two in his mouth and closed the tin carefully. She handed him the brass lighter. He lit the cigarettes, placed one between her lips and examined the lighter closely.

‘7.62mm Russian. Now that is interesting.’

‘My father’s. In August, ’44 he saved a German paratroop colonel who was about to be shot by partisans. The colonel gave him the lighter as a memento. He was killed in Algiers,’ she said. ‘My father. After surviving this place.’

‘There’s irony for you.’ He handed the lighter back to her. She shook her head and for some reason she couldn’t possibly explain, said, ‘No, keep it.’

‘As my memento?’

‘Memento mori,’ she said. ‘We’ll never get out of this place alive.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. That Cobra’s still on station. I’d say the cavalry should arrive within the next twenty minutes, just like Stage Six at MGM. In the nick of time. I’d better let them know they’re not wasting it.’

He took a flare pistol from a side pouch and fired a red flare high into the sky.

‘Couldn’t that be the Vietcong playing games again?’

‘Not really.’ He fired another red flare, then a green. ‘Colours of the day.’

Her leg was just starting to hurt. She said, ‘So now they know where we are, the Vietcong, I mean.’

‘They already did.’

‘And will they come?’

‘I should imagine so.’

He wiped the M16 clean with a rag and she raised the Nikon and focused it. As she discovered later, he was twenty-three and just under six feet in height with good shoulders, the dark hair held back by the sweatband giving him the look of some sixteenth century bravo. The skin was stretched tightly over Celtic cheekbones and a stubble of beard covered the hollow cheeks and strongly pointed chin. But it was the eyes which were the most remarkable feature, grey, like water over a stone, calm, expressionless, holding their own secrets.

‘What are you?’ she said.

‘Airborne Rangers. Sergeant Martin Brosnan.’

‘What happened here?’

‘A bad foul-up is what happened. Those clever little peasants, half our size, who we were supposed to walk all over, caught us very much as they caught you. We were on our way to Din To after being picked up from a routine patrol. Fourteen of us plus the crew. Now there’s only me for certain. Maybe a few out there still alive.’

She took several more pictures and he frowned. ‘You can’t stop, can you, just like the guy said in the article he wrote about you in Life last year. It’s obsessional. Christ, you were actually going to take a picture of that kid as he was about to shoot you.’

She lowered the Nikon. ‘You know who I am?’

He smiled. ‘How many women photographers have made the cover of Time magazine?’

He lit another cigarette and passed it to her. There was something about the voice which puzzled her.

‘Brosnan,’ she said. ‘I’m not familiar with that name.’

‘Irish,’ he said. ‘Well, County Kerry to be exact. You’ll seldom find it anywhere else in Ireland.’

‘Frankly, I thought you sounded English.’

He looked at her in mock horror, ‘My father would turn in his grave and my mother, God bless her, would forget she was a lady and spit in your eye. Good Irish-American, Boston variety. The Brosnans came over during the famine a long time ago, all Protestants, would you believe? My mother was born in Dublin herself. A good Catholic and could never forgive my father for not raising me the same.’

He was talking to keep her mind off the situation, she knew that and liked him for it. ‘And the accent?’ she said.

‘Oh, that’s part acquired by way of the right prep school, Andover in my case, and the right university, of course.’

‘Let me guess. Yale?’

‘My family have always gone there, but I decided to give Princeton a chance. It was good enough for Scott Fitzgerald and I’d pretensions to being a writer myself. Majored in English last year.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘What’s a spoiled preppy brat doing in Vietnam, serving in the ranks in the toughest outfit in the Army?’

‘I often ask myself that,’ Brosnan said. ‘I was going to carry straight on and do my doctorate and then I found Harry, our gardener, crying in the conservatory one day. When I asked him what was wrong, he apologised and said he’d just heard his son, Joe, had been killed in Nam.’ Brosnan wasn’t smiling now. ‘But the real trouble was that there’d been another son called Elie, killed in the Delta the year before.’

There was a heavy silence, the rain flooded down. ‘Then what?’

‘My mother had him in and gave him a thousand dollars. I remember it well because the cashmere and silk jacket I was wearing at the time had cost me eight hundred in Savile Row on a London trip the year before. And he was so damn grateful.’

He shook his head and Anne-Marie said softly, ‘So, you made the big gesture.’

‘He made me feel ashamed, and when I feel, I act. I’m a very existentialist person.’

He smiled again and she said, ‘And how have you found it?’

‘Nam?’ He shrugged. ‘Hell without a map.’

‘But you’ve enjoyed it? You have an aptitude for killing, I think.’ He had stopped smiling, the grey eyes watchful. She carried on, ‘You must excuse me, my friend, but faces you see, are my business.’

‘I’m not so sure about liking it,’ he said. ‘I’m damned good at it, I know that. Out here you have to be if the fellow coming at you has a gun in his hand and you want to get home for Christmas.’

There was silence, a long silence, and then he added, ‘I. know one thing, I’ve had enough. My time’s up in January and that can’t come soon enough for me. Remember what Eliot said about the passage we didn’t take towards the door we never opened into the rose garden? Well, from now on, I’m going to open every door in sight.’

The morphine was really working now. The pain had gone, but also her senses had lost their sharpness. ‘Then what?’ she said. ‘Back to Princeton for that doctorate?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. I’ve changed too much for that. I’m going to go to Dublin, Trinity College. Peace, tranquillity. Look up my roots. I speak a fair amount of Irish, something my mother drummed into me as a kid.’

‘And before that?’ she said. ‘No girl waiting back home?’

‘No more than eighteen or twenty, but I’d rather be sitting at one of those pavement cafes on the Champs Elysée sipping Pernod and you in one of those Paris frocks.’

‘And rain, my friend.’ Anne-Marie closed her eyes drowsily. ‘An absolute necessity. So that we may smell the damp chestnut trees,’ she explained. ‘An indispensable part of the Paris experience.’

‘If you say so,’ he said, and his hands tightened on the M16 as there was a stirring in the reeds close by.

‘Oh, but I do, Martin Brosnan.’ Her voice was very sleepy now. ‘It would give me infinite pleasure to show you.’

‘That’s a date then,’ he said softly and came up on one knee crouching, firing into the reeds.

There was a cry of anguish and then a long burst in reply and something punched Brosnan high in the left side of the chest and he went over backwards across the girl.

She stirred feebly and he came up, firing one-handed at the man who charged through the reeds, that smile on his face again, and as the M16 emptied, he hurled it into the face of the last man, drawing his combat knife, probing for the heart up under the ribs as they went down together.

He lay in the mud for quite some time, holding the Vietcong against him, waiting for him to die and suddenly, two Skyraiders swooped overhead and half a dozen gunships moved in out of the rain, line astern.

Brosnan got up awkwardly and lifted Anne-Marie in his arms, grimacing against the pain. He started to wade through the reeds towards the open paddy field.

‘I told you the cavalry would arrive.’

She opened her eyes. ‘In the nick of time? And then what?’

He grinned. ‘One thing’s for sure. After this, it can only get better.’