3

There were five people left alive in the bus, three Vietnamese women, an old man traviling to the next village, and a dark-haired, pretty young women who looked badly frightened. She wore a khaki shirt and pants and the shirt was stained with blood, someone else’s, not hers.

She’d been speaking in French to the old man earlier, and now he turned to her as a single bullet hit the fuel tank of the bus and flame erupted.

'Not good to stay here, we must hide in the reeds.' He repeated the same message in Vietnamese to the women.

They shouted something back at 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 further along the causeway, saw her go.

The forced her way through the water and mud, pushing the reeds aside, ploughing straight out into a dark pool to find two Viet Cong confronting her on the other side, AKs at the ready. Barely fifteen yards away, she could see every feature of the 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 both soldiers into the water.

Voices called nearby and he said, 'No talking.' He stepped back into the reeds(tall grass) and she followed.

They seemed to move several hundred yards before 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(in french),' she said.

'Jake Cazalet, and I wish I could say it was a pleasure to meet you,' he replied in French.

'That’s good,' 'You didn’t learn that at school.'

'No, a year in Paris when I was sixteen. My dad was.' He grinned. ‘ I learned all my languages that way. He moved around a lot.'

Her 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 it was 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 has gone to calm the cavalry. If we keep our heads down, the 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.'

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