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…?”