Touch the Devil

JACK HIGGINS

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 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.