“She’s had it, for a start,” he said, turning to Cazalet, and then his eyes widened. “Behind you.”

In the same moment, a bullet took Harvey in the heart, lifting him onto his back. Cazalet swung, firing from the hip at the two who had emerged on the causeway behind him. He caught one and the other slipped back into the reeds. Now there was only silence.

There were five people left alive in the bus, three Vietnamese women, an old man traveling to the next village, and a dark-haired, pretty young woman 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 flames erupted.

“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.