Touch the Devil. Jack Higgins
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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.’
Paris 1979
A cold wind lifted across the Seine and dashed rain against the windows of the all-night cafe by the bridge. It was a small, sad place, half a dozen tables and chairs, no more, usually much frequented by prostitutes. But not on a night like this.
The barman leaned on the zinc-topped counter reading a newspaper. Jack Corder sat at a table by the window, the only customer, a tall, dark-haired man in his early thirties. His jeans, worn leather jacket and cloth cap gave him the look of a night porter at the fish market up the street, which he very definitely was not.
Barry had said eleven-thirty so Corder had arrived at eleven, just to be on the safe side. Now, it was half-past midnight. Not that he was worried. Where Frank Barry was concerned, you never knew where you were, but then, that was all part of the technique.
Corder lit a cigarette and called, ‘Black coffee and another cognac.’
The barman nodded, pushed the newspaper to one side and at that moment the telephone behind the bar started to ring. He answered it at once, then turned enquiringly.
‘Your