Touch the Devil. Jack Higgins
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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