“Not good staying here, we must hide in the reeds.” He repeated what was presumably the same message in Vietnamese to the women.
They shouted something back to him and he shrugged and said to the young woman, “They are afraid. You come with me now.”
She responded instantly to the urgency in his voice, sliding out of the door after him, crouching, then starting to move. A bullet took him in the back and she ran for her life down the side of the causeway and plunged into the great banks of reeds. Cazalet, who was in their shelter a little farther along the causeway, saw her go.
She forced her way through the water and mud, pushing the reeds aside, ploughing straight out into a dark pool to find two Vietcong confronting her on the other side, AKs at the ready. Fifteen yards away, no more, so that she could see every feature of these young faces, mere boys, not much more.
They raised their weapons, she braced herself for death, and then there was a terrible cry and Cazalet erupted from the reeds on her left, firing from the hip, blasting them both back into the water.
Voices called nearby and he said, “No talking.” He stepped back into the reeds and she followed.
They seemed to move several hundred yards until he said, “This will do.” They were on the edge of the paddy fields protected by a final curtain of reeds. A small knoll rose above the water. He pulled her down beside him. “That’s a lot of blood. Where are you hit?”
“It’s not mine. I was trying to help the woman sitting next to me.”
“You’re French.”
“That’s right. Jacqueline de Brissac,” she said.
“Jake Cazalet, and I wish I could say it was a pleasure to meet you,” he replied in French.
“That’s good,” she said. “You didn’t learn that at school.”
“No, a year in Paris when I was sixteen. My dad was at the Embassy.” He grinned. “I learned all my languages that way. He moved around a lot.”
Her face was spotted with mud, hair tangled as she tried to straighten it. “I must look a mess,” she said and smiled.
Jake Cazalet fell instantly and gloriously in love. What was it the French called it, the thunderclap? It was everything he’d ever heard. What the poets wrote about.
“Have we had it?” she said, aware of voices calling nearby.
“No, the Medevac helicopter I was going to Katum in cleared off to call up the cavalry. If we keep our heads down, we stand a good chance.”
“But that’s strange. I’ve just been to Katum,” she said.
“Good God, what for? That really is the war zone.”
She was silent for a moment. “I was searching for my husband.”
Cazalet was aware of an unbelievably hollow feeling. He swallowed. “Your husband?”
“Yes. Captain Jean de Brissac of the French Foreign Legion. He was in the Katum area with a United Nations fact-finding mission three months ago. There were twenty of them.”
What a strange sensation. Sorrow, sympathy. . . was that almost relief? “I remember hearing that,” he said slowly. “Weren’t they all . . . ?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Caught in an attack. The Vietcong used hand grenades. The bodies were not recognizable, but I found my husband’s bloodstained field jacket, and his papers. There’s no doubt.”
“So why are you here?”
“A pilgrimage, if you like. And I had to be sure.”
“I’m surprised they let you come.”
She gave a small smile. “Oh, my family has a great deal of political influence. My husband was Comte de Brissac, a very old military family. Lots of connections in Washington. Lots of connections everywhere.”
“So you’re a countess?”
“I’m afraid so.”
He smiled. “Well, I don’t mind if you don’t.”
She was about to say something when they heard voices nearby, shouting to each other, and Cazalet called out in Vietnamese.
She was alarmed. “Why did you do that?”
“They’re beating through the reeds. I told them there was no sign of us over here.”
“Very clever.”
“Don’t thank me, thank my dad for a year at the Embassy in Saigon.”