Part 28 (1/2)

”Lan's been my wife for nearly twenty years!” Paul spoke through his gritted teeth. ”We've got a grown son - or had you forgotten that?”

”No, I hadn't forgotten.” Seeing the Frenchman's expression harden, Joseph drew back in alarm.

”Does Lan love you?”

”She's always stopped short of saying so, out of loyalty to you. But I'm sure she does - I think she did from the start.”

”Then why did she marry me”

”Because her father wished it! He wanted to demonstrate his loyalty to France through her, don't you see? She was just obeying his wishes.”

The moment the words were out, Joseph regretted saying them. Paul started back, glaring at Joseph with a new expression of loathing in his eyes. For a long time neither of them spoke, and outside the bunker the intensity of the firing increased. Without taking his eyes from Joseph's face, Paul dropped his hand to the flap of his revolver holster and lifted it to free the grip of the weapon. ”You wouldn't believe me, Joseph, would you, if I told you that after your last visit I felt your friends.h.i.+p was one of the few worthwhile things left in my life?”

Joseph felt his heart lurch sickeningly inside him, and he took an instinctive pace towards the Frenchman. ”I'm sorry, Paul, I'm deeply sorry. I've been such a G.o.dd.a.m.ned fool ”Keep away from me!” Paul drew the gun and took a pace backwards, pointing its muzzle at Joseph's chest. ”n.o.body's going to ask how a crazy American journalist got himself killed at a time like this.”

Joseph stared transfixed at the gun. ”Paul, let me stay. Let me see it through with you - there's plenty here for me to write about.”

Paul's chest rose and fell erratically, and his voice took on a note of incredulity. ”You still think you can square your conscience even now, don't you? You still think there's a n.o.ble way out.”

The roar of an aircraft pa.s.sing low over the bunker momentarily drowned out the sound of the guns outside, and on hearing it, Paul extended his arm stiffly in front of him. With calm deliberation he leveled the revolver at Joseph's head, and his finger began to whiten inside the trigger-guard. Then the sacking covering the doorway was wrenched aside, and Paul's adjutant burst in; he gazed open- mouthed at his superior for a moment before recovering himself.

”The hospital plane's just landing, sir- if Monsieur Sherman is to take it, we must go now.”

”Monsieur Sherman is refusing to obey my order to board the plane,” snapped Paul, without s.h.i.+fting his gaze from Joseph's face. ”You will escort him to the airstrip and embark him at gunpoint.”

The young lieutenant quickly drew his own pistol and motioned Joseph ahead of him up the sap. Five minutes later, as the Red Cross Dakota, laden with wounded, lifted ponderously off the pitted run. way, Joseph looked back towards the command bunkers; as he watched, the sack covering the entrance to the chief of staff's dugout was moved aside and Paul emerged blinking into the daylight. He was helmetless and although he held himself characteristically upright, the grimy bandage around his head gave him a bedraggled, crestfallen air. His revolver dangled limply in his right hand, and as the Dakota climbed away through a light mortar barrage he gazed blankly up into the leaden sky; a moment later the aircraft was swallowed up in the low cloud hanging over the valley and the last image of Dien Bien Phu that Joseph carried away with him was of the forlorn, diminis.h.i.+ng figure of Paul standing alone in the heart of the doomed fortress.

10.

An hour before midnight on May 6, 1954, Ngo Van Dong pulled his flimsy helmet of plaited bamboo low over his eyes and raised his head cautiously above the edge of one of the forward trenches facing the Elaine group of hills. His mouth was dry, and he hugged his carbine tight against his chest with its bayonet fixed, ready to clamber out of the slimy ditch as soon as the signal to advance was given. Like all the other men of the 59th Regiment of the 3 12th Division of the Vietnamese People's Army, he now wore a gauze mask over the lower half of his face because of the risk of disease in the oozing, mud-filled trenches where they trod constantly on the putrefying bodies of their own and French dead. The dugouts and blockhouses through which the battle had swirled for fifty-five days reeked of excrement and vomit too, and in the heat of the day, flies and maggots infested the bloated corpses.

Beneath the glare of parachute flares dropped by French transports which still flew in relays from Hanoi, Dong could see other Viet Minh units swarming through the outer defenses of the smaller strongpoints in the Elaine group. On their crests dwindling bands of French and Foreign Legion paratroopers were pouring desperate bursts of machine gun and mortar fire into their ranks, but sensing that victory was near, the Asian Soldiers were advancing endlessly now over the corpses of their dead comrades and overwhelming the Europeans by sheer weight of numbers. Elaine Two, the hill in front of Dong's company, was the group's key bastion; it was manned by the remnants of the First Battalion, Parachute Cha.s.seurs who had set up their command post in the house of the former French governor of Dien Bien Phu on its summit, and because the hill was the last major stronghold iii the valley in French hands, Viet Minh sappers had spent several days tunneling deep into the hillside and wiring together thousands of kilos of explosives to make a ma.s.sive underground mine. The blast had been scheduled for 2300 hours that night, and Dong had led his company stealthily into position through the maze of trenches half an hour before.

Few of the troops waiting around him had taken part in the fierce fighting that had gone on all through April; while capturing the cl.u.s.ter of Huguette hills to the west of the French command center, General Giap had seen the strength of his four divisions reduced from fifty thousand to thirty thousand men, and many of the soldiers in Dong's company were sixteen-year old boys who had arrived only a week before. But in daily indoctrination sessions their political commissars were constantly reminding them now that the French garrison of thirteen thousand men had been reduced effectively to less than a third of that number and that the survivors were close to exhaustion. Final victory was at hand, they had been told repeatedly during the last few days, and as they crouched in the trenches around him waiting for the giant mine to be detonated, Dong could sense the fear and tension in them.

But he, too, was unusually keyed up and on edge. The bitter hand-to-hand conflict that had gone on for nearly two months had taken a terrible toll of Dien Bien Phu's attackers as well as its beleaguered defenders, and Dong, like the rest of the Viet Minh forces, was, without fully realizing it, nearing the limits of his endurance; he had subsisted since early February on little more than a few daily handfuls of rice supplemented by a meager issue of a dozen peanuts once a week; he had also lived constantly with the fear that even a minor wound might eventually kill him, since the field medical facilities - half-a-dozen doctors and surgeons working in hastily erected palm-thatch huts in the mountains - were even more rudimentary than the underground hospital on the valley bottom which overflowed daily with the French dead and dying. With the exception of some new sh.e.l.l splinters in his bandaged left shoulder, however, Dong had come through the lighting unscathed, and the knowledge that the climax to the long siege was approaching had helped him forget his weariness. Waiting impatiently for the underground explosion to signal the charge, his thoughts returned involuntarily to the first time he had waited like this in the darkness to attack the French - at Yen Bay. Then, he reflected grimly, his father and little Hoc had been at his side, and as he gazed up the flare-lit hillside, he made a silent promise to his dead family that he would fight bravely and unselfishly that night to help avenge them once and for all.

When at last the ma.s.sive subterranean mine exploded a few minutes after eleven o'clock, it shook the hillside like an earthquake, and Dong saw an enormous fountain of black earth and smoke soar upward; then the night was filled with a delayed roar, and mud and debris began to cascade down over the Viet Minh lines. The moment the deluge ceased, Dong rose up out of the trench yelling, ”Tien buoc! Tien buoc! - forward!” then Hung himself up the bill.

As he ran, he let out a full-throated scream, arid hearing thousands of his countrymen giving simultaneous voice to their hatred of the enemy filled him with a murderous ecstasy. Stumbling and leaping through the smashed trenches, he felt he was being borne irresistibly upwards by an unstoppable wave, and with a wild cry of triumph he bayoneted to death two terrified French paratroopers who had been trapped and wounded by the blast in an abandoned dugout. One by one the remaining machine guns of the defenders either grew too hot to touch and seized up, or fell silent when they ran out of ammunition, and Dong and his men found those few French troops who had survived the ma.s.sive explosion crouching stunned and shocked behind walls of French corpses killed in earlier a.s.saults.

While he was skirting the great black chasm gouged from the hillside by the mine, however, half-a-dozen youths new to his company were caught in a hail of machine-gun fire coming from the old governor's house, and Dong watched helplessly as they toppled, shrieking, into the pit. Looking towards the incongruous European mansion on the hilltop, his anger boiled up afresh; the building seemed suddenly to symbolize all the hatred he felt for France, and without stopping to think whether it was wise, he rushed up through the remaining trenches alone, and crawled swiftly across the open ground around the command post. Drawing a grenade, he plunged down a flight of outside steps towards a lighted cellar window, then stopped and crouched down beneath the sill when he heard the sound of a French radio operator's voice calling a frantic message to command headquarters.

”Tell Colonel Devraux that Elaine Two can't hold out much longer without reinforcements,” yelled the radio operator, repeating the message emphatically over and over again to make himself heard above the din. ”Tell Colonel Devraux we must have reinforcements - now!”

Dong's eyes narrowed as he registered the name; then he sprang to his feet, kicked open the door and fired three shots into the radio transmitter, shattering it beyond repair. When the young French radio operator turned, still wearing his headphones, he found Dong's bayonet tip pressed against his chest.

”Who is this 'Colonel Devraux' you were contacting?' snarled Dong in French. ”Which unit is he commanding?”

When the terrified radio operator didn't reply, Dong jabbed the bayonet harder against his chest. ”If you don't tell me, I'll kill you. What is Devraux's other name? Who is he?”

”He's Colonel Paul Devraux,” whispered the radio man. ”He's chief of staff to Colonel de Castries, I think he knows Vietnam well - he's lived here a long time.”

Dong's eyes glittered suddenly in his grime-streaked face, and with a convulsive movement of his whole body he plunged his bayonet into the Frenchman's chest.

11.

As dawn brightened the lead-colored skies above Dien Bien Phu next morning, Dao Van Eat accompanied the stocky, quick- striding figure of General Vo Nguyen Giap to the parapet of a fortified observation platform high in the mountains. As usual the fastidious Viet Minh commander in chief was determined to double-check all his facts, and Lat waited patiently while Giap swung his powerful field gla.s.ses repeatedly back and forth across the devastated French camp.

Even with the naked eye Eat could see that the ma.s.sive artillery bombardments and infantry attacks, which had continued through the night, had brought the French garrison close to the point of collapse. Disorder was rife and there were signs of destruction everywhere; the pre-dawn monsoon downpour had inundated their broken defense trenches and dugouts to a depth of several feet and half-filled the great crater created by the mine planted in tunnels beneath Elaine Two; on the hill's summit a red Viet Minh flag bearing a gold star fluttered from the ruined walls of the old governor's house, and the French were obviously no longer capable of mounting a counterattack on the crucial strongpoint that overlooked their command post. The shallow Nam Youm River, Eat could see, was choked now with dead bodies from both sides, no vehicles moved along its banks, and although Dakotas from Hanoi were already dropping fresh supply parachutes, none of the exhausted, half-starved troops were venturing from the protection of their muddy holes to retrieve them. Outside the French command headquarters, the last surviving jeep lay burned out in a water-filled crater, and behind the Viet Minh lines, crowds of French prisoners taken during the night were already being marched away towards the forest, their hands tied behind them with jungle creepers.

”We shall be able after all to present our delegates at the Geneva Conference with just the bargaining card they need, won't we, comrade general?” Lat's eyes gleamed with an excitement he could no longer conceal as he gazed down into the valley. ”There's surely no way out for France now!”

Giap lowered his field gla.s.ses and nodded his head. ”Yes, the right moment's arrived. There are obvious signs of confusion in their ranks.”

As he spoke, Giap glanced up again at the scudding clouds through which an occasional French Navy Privateer was diving to bomb the Viet Minh trenches, and Eat guessed he was calculating whether bigger American warplanes might still make some eleventh-hour effort to save the French garrison. Western newspaper reports had revealed several weeks before that France had sought help from the United States, but neither President Eisenhower nor the leaders of Congress in Was.h.i.+ngton had been willing to go ahead with heavy bombing raids from the Philippines without the full support of Britain and her leading Commonwealth allies. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, however, had since declared himself implacably opposed to intervening since such action might spark off a new worldwide conflict, and the foreign ministers of the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia had already begun a meeting in Geneva to discuss peace in Asia. For the past two weeks they had devoted themselves to the topic of Korea, where an armistice had been signed in June 1953, but they had concluded no agreements on that bitterly divided country, and the talks were scheduled to turn to the subject of Indochina the very next day, May 8.

”If the Americans were going to send their fleet of B-29s to bomb our positions, comrade general, I'm sure they would have done so by now,” said tat in a rea.s.suring tone, ”It would make no sense to do it after they've sat down with the Russians and the Chinese in Geneva.”

Giap's austere features broke into a smile to acknowledge that his chief political commissar had accurately read his thoughts; then he lifted the gla.s.ses to his eyes once more. ”Without outside help there'll be no alternative but surrender for most of the garrison,” he said softly, as though speaking his thoughts aloud, ”but the fittest units might still try to break out.” Again he scrutinized the entire valley minutely, his brow furrowed deeply with thought. Then he dropped the gla.s.ses back into their case and turned his back on it abruptly, his mind finally made up. ”My orders will be: Stick closely to the enemy!' Transmit that to all the unit commissars. Tell them that the encirclement must remain impregnable as we close in to finish them off. Not even one soldier must be allowed to escape.”

”It will be a pleasure to convey such a final battle order!” Lat's face lit up with a smile of delight as they turned back towards the commander in chief's headquarters concealed in caves close to a nearby waterfall. ”I've been waiting twenty-four years, comrade general, for this day to dawn - since the terror bombing of Vinh. Whenever I've felt my resolve weaken over the years I've closed my eyes and summoned up those terrible pictures of French bombs falling among our helpless marchers. I'll never forget their faces and the screams of the dying as long as I live.”

Giap stopped and patted Lat on the shoulder. ”At a time like this every man in our entire army is probably dreaming of settling old scores - and reliving old regrets. My wife died in a French jail, remember?”

Lat stared hard at his commander in chief, wondering whether intuitively he'd grasped the deeper, more intimate feelings he hadn't expressed. ”Perhaps terrible sacrifices are unavoidable if a man decides to devote himself to a cause like ours,” said Latin a resigned voice. ”I made a wrong choice as a young man - President Ho was the first one to make me realize that. But all those years of suffering since have become worthwhile here at Dien Bien Phu.”

Giap nodded his approval of Lat's sentiments but offered no comment.

”But in the end even a wrong choice can be useful in helping us reach a better understanding of ourselves and others around us. It taught me the importance of subtlety.” Lat smiled ruefully and held up a paper-wrapped package that he'd been carrying in his hand. ”I have to apologize for commandeering one of our precious bicycles to transport this and a gramophone from Hanoi - but I'm hoping you'll agree it was worth it.”

Giap's face crinkled in an impatient frown. ”What exactly is it, Comrade Lat?”

”It's a recording of the 'Chant des Partisans.' I thought we should play it on the enemy's command wavelength before the final attack begins.”

A slow smile of admiration spread across Giap's face.

”It tells of the b.e.s.t.i.a.l foreign army - the black crows - flying all over the land and calls on the people to rise up and drive them out - do you remember?”