Touch the Devil

Touch The Devil

Jack Higgins

*

PROLOGUE:

VIETNAM

1968

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 jum
p j
acket contained not ammunition but a variety of lenses and dozens of rolls of thirty-five millimeter film.

The young medic squatting beside the black 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 ain't been. Last year she jumped with the 503rd Paras at Katum. You name it, she done it. You see that Life magazine story on her six, seven months back? She's from Paris, would you believe that? Her folks own a piece o' the Bank of France."

The boy's eyes widened in amazement. "Then what in 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 realized 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, an infantry colonel, five times decorated, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, who had survived Indochina only to die in Algeria. 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 had often crossed Anne-Marie's mind that perhaps it had been a deliberate turn of the wheel that 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--and 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 that 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. She had apprenticed herself to one of the finest fashion photographers in Paris for six months and had then joined Paris-Match as a staff photographer. Her reputation soared astonishingly within one short year, but it was not enough--not nearly enough--and when she asked to be assigned to Vietnam, they 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 American Department of Defense. It was a new Anne-Marie he had seen that day: a girl filled with a single-minded ruthlessness that 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, all clamored 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 had 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 th
e s
wamps of the Mekong delta, the jungles of the central highlands. The leg ulcers that ate their way through the bone like acid, leaving scars that would never go away.

She had spent this morning 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, and it occurred to her, with a slight frown, that perhaps she'd reached the end of something. 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 toward 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 dike was in American uniform.

The Medevac started down, her escort circling warily. 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 chiefs shoulder. He turned his head to smile at her.

When they were no more than thirty feet up, she realized, 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, standing in the open door, didn't have a chance. 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. 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 padd
y f
ield. 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 dike in American uniform who, she could see now, was very definitely Vietnamese, and the rifle he pointed at her was a Russian AK47. Further along the dike, half a dozen Vietcong in straw hats and black pajamas climbed from the ditch and moved toward her.

The Huey Cobra swept in, its heavy machine guns kicking dirt along the dike, driving the Vietcong backward into the ditch. Anne-Marie looked up and saw the gunship hovering. 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 toward 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 and proceeded to fly around the entire area in a slow circle.

Anne-Marie crouched against the dike, trying to catch her breath, then stood up slowly. It was very quiet as 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 side, and a great bank of reeds thirty or forty yards away. She was alone at the point of maximum danger in her life and 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 from one of the pouches in her jump jacket, another lens, and opened a fresh roll of film. Moving knee-deep through the water, she started taking pictures of the bodies swirling around her. She was 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 face
s t
otally without expression. The one in the center, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, raised his AK47, and took aim very carefully. Just as carefully Anne-Marie raised her Nikon. Death, she thought. The last picture of all. A beautiful boy in black pajamas. 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 a warrior, unafraid and facing fearful odds.

The Vietcong started to turn, and behind them a man erupted from the tall reeds, plunging toward them in a kind of slow motion. Khaki sweatband around his head, camouflage jump jacket festooned with grenades, the M 16 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 M 16 emptying as he reached the boy who still fired stubbornly, wide to one side. The butt of the M 16 swung in a bone-crushing arc, the boy went down. Her rescuer didn't bother to reload. He simply grabbed her hand and started to plow back toward the reeds, churning water.

There were voices behind them on the dike now and more shooting. It was as if she were kicked in the left leg, no more than that, and she fell. He turned, ramming a clip into the M 16, raking the dike 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 sat her up on a small mud bank 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."

"Firsthand 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 pack of cigarettes, put two in his mouth, and put the pack back in his pocket. 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. "Colors 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 M 16 clean with a rag, and she raised the Nikon and focused it. Through the viewfinder she could see the broad-

shouldered six-footer close up, 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, gray, like water over a stone, calm, expressionless, holding their own secrets.

"What are you?" she asked.

"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 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."