Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  “One Viet, asleep in bed. Permanently,” he added.

  “Did you recognise him?” I whispered.

  He shook his head. I went with Vogelmann to the end of the landing and opened a bedroom door.

  We walked in and found ourselves face to face with Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the communist forces, second in the hierarchy of the people’s revolution, after Ho Chi Minh. He was naked, lying on the bed, and next to him was a girl who looked to be no more than twelve years old. She saw his eyes widen, and he whirled around, startled.

  Vogelmann walked over and effortlessly lifted the girl off of the bed, dumping her on the floor. I put my finger to my lips, pointed my MP38 at him, and walked over to the bed.

  “Comrade Giap, if you make any noise, this gentleman will slit your throat so that you never make a noise ever again. Not one word, clear?”

  He nodded, watching me carefully. He looked at Vogelmann, and his eyes darted around the room. Without a doubt, until we either killed him or got him away from here, we were in a very dangerous position. Silent, watchful, and ready to take advantage of the tiniest opportunity to turn the tables, he tried, without success, to hide the face of the Viet Minh military genius behind the archetypal mask of oriental inscrutability.

  “Giap, get your clothes on,” I ordered him. “Remember, dead or alive, it makes no difference. Make a sound, and we’ll leave your body here for your men to cry over.”

  He made no reply, just got slowly off of the bed and began dressing. As soon as he was ready, I tied his hands behind his back and whispered to Vogelmann to go and check the passage outside the door. As his hand was on the doorknob, we heard a shouted command from downstairs, then the beginning of an altercation.

  Obviously someone from the Viet Minh guard knew we were here, and things were about to warm up. Giap was doing his best not to smile, but his face betrayed him; a mixture of fear that he may be killed, combined with pleasure that his captors were probably about to suffer the same fate.

  I wondered how true he was to his cause. Would he practice what he preached, would he be happy to die to see the hated French colonisers destroyed? Or was that a sentiment reserved for other, lesser mortals. I suspected that like most military leaders, the latter would be the case. Brave, certainly, but dying in battle was for others to suffer.

  Vogelmann peered out through the door. As he did so, there was a strangled cry of agony, then silence again. I whispered urgently to him.

  “Karl-Heinz, go and see what’s happening. I’ll cover Giap.”

  He slipped quietly through the door. The racket downstairs was building. Clearly, some of the Viet Minh were alerted to our presence. Giap was doing his best to look inscrutable but couldn’t totally hide the triumph in his eyes, now that he thought we were discovered. Vogelmann came back.

  “Jurgen, we’ve got trouble. About a dozen Viet Minh, some sort of a guard patrol. Four of them came into the house, and we’ve finished them off, but the rest are outside waiting to hit us when we leave.”

  “And they will have called for reinforcements,” I added.

  He nodded. “Within ten minutes, this place will be crawling with the bastards.”

  “Who will be reluctant to shoot at their commander. We have Giap, so we’ll use him to get out of here. Let’s get moving. Comrade Giap, get downstairs.”

  We followed the Viet leader along the passage. Through open bedroom doors I could glimpse bodies lying on bloodied sheets, testifying to the death and terror we’d brought to this remote part of Indochina; an area where the enemy thought it was totally safe. At least we’d changed all of that.

  The men were gathered in the hallway, waiting. Pham was holding a bloodied knife, so obviously some of the victims in the bedrooms had been hers. Helene was bandaging a wound. I afterwards found out that the man went into the kitchen to investigate and got stabbed in the back for his pains.

  Their eyes widened as they recognised Giap, the bogeyman of the French colonialists for the past ten years. I pulled Giap to the front door.

  “Comrade, we’re leaving now. Tell your men to hold their fire, or we’ll put a bullet in your head. You will speak only in French, now do it.”

  I opened the door and pushed him out first onto the veranda. A small group of hostile looking Viets stood nearby, their weapons raised. As they saw Giap walk out of the door, their officer shouted a command, and they lowered their guns. He kept his pistol trained on us, until I shouted at him.

  “Lower your pistol. Your men will not shoot. We have taken Giap prisoner and are keeping him with us until we can escape. When we are clear, we will release him. Men,” I shouted to my troops, “come out now, we are leaving.”

  The men came out of the house, weapons raised, cocked, and ready to fire. The air crackled with tension. I was well aware that the slightest spark would ignite the tinderbox, and the shooting would start. If hate could kill, the compound would be littered with bodies. I could sense both sides itching to start shooting, which would be the end of us all.

  We were deep in the heart of Viet Minh territory, surrounded by tens of thousands of enemy soldiers. Our only hope was to get out of here as quickly as possible before they had time to work out a way to kill us, and without killing Giap.

  There was a sudden cry, and Pham rushed forward, her bloody knife raised. She’d recognised the officer as one who had brutalised her earlier in the day. He was still holding his pistol, and as she reached him, he raised it and shot her in the chest. Her body jerked with the impact of the bullet, but her momentum carried her forward enough to plunge her knife into his groin. He collapsed on the ground, screaming in agony, blood spurting out of him in torrents. Pham fell backwards, dead, her mission of revenge over. Giap snapped out a command, and one of his men went up to the fallen officer, put his rifle to the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The bullet killed him instantly, and silence once again descended on the compound. We were no strangers to killing, but Giap’s casual order to silence the wounded officer, made under the guns of his French captors, was a powerful illustration of the unlimited strength and resolve of this man.

  “Giap, we’re leaving. Tell them to stay back. If we see a single weapon raised, you’ll be shot.”

  “Men,” I called.

  “If one of them points a weapon our way, you will shoot Giap without further orders. Right, let’s go. Helene, stay in the middle of the group.”

  We edged away from the house towards the gate. Vogelmann kept a hand on Giap, the other with his pistol held tight against the communist leader’s head so that they didn’t mistake the message. As we reached the gate, I spoke to Giap.

  “Tell them not to follow or you will be killed.”

  He shouted to the Viets, who stood sullenly watching us leave. We went through the gate and found the path at the rear of the compound.

  “We need to move very fast. There’s no doubt they’ll be following us. Friedrich, cover our rear with Fassbinder, and make sure they don’t get too close. The rest of you, double time, we need to be away from here before they bring up an entire regiment.”

  Bauer and Fassbinder dropped to the rear. I picked up the pace so that we were almost running along the jungle path.

  We kept going for the next hour, dashing along the path, propelling our prisoner with us. We heard shooting in the rear, and I sent Petrov to investigate, but he reported back that it was only the Viets getting too near. Bauer and Fassbinder had fired a burst that hit two of them and convinced the others that we were serious.

  As we ran, I contemplated the options. There was no way we would lose our pursuers. Giap was far too valuable for them to lose sight of him. There was only one option, so I spoke to Petrov and explained the problem. He saw the solution instantly.

  “Certainly, Jurgen, you want me to leave a nice present for our friends.”

  “I do, but there’s no time for anything sophisticated. Can you do something on the run, without stopping to prepare?”

  He tho
ught for a moment.

  “A remote detonation, the communists’ favourite method. I’ll prepare a charge, if you would take the wire and move fifty metres into the jungle while I’m hiding it. Find some cover, and as soon as it’s ready, I’ll join you. When our friends reach the charge, just trigger it. I’ll keep an eye out for a good spot.”

  “Fine, I’ll send Schuster back to let Bauer and Fassbinder know what we’re doing.”

  We kept running, and within half a kilometre, we found the right place; where the track narrowed and would funnel the Viets into a tight group. Petrov had prepared a rough and ready charge. He stopped and began to bury it in a tangle of foliage. I hurtled into the jungle, laying out the cable as I ran. After about fifty metres, I found a fallen tree trunk which made good enough cover. I saw Bauer, Schuster and Fassbinder run past, and then Petrov came scrambling through the undergrowth to join me behind the tree trunk. Within minutes, we heard the sound of the pursuit. The Viets were keeping up the fast pace, and their equipment rattling as they ran gave them away. I saw them come into view, a group of about ten. They were bunched up, not expecting any kind of an ambush. I let them come abreast of the charge, and I pressed the switch on the detonator. There was a blinding flash, the crash of the explosion, and a massive shockwave surged through the jungle, battering everything around us. Leaves and greenery were tossed high into the air, mixing with smoke and dust to obliterate our view of the blast site.

  As the dust began to settle, I heard firing, and the rest of our men came into view, hitting the surviving Viets hard before they had time to recover. They poured a withering fire on the survivors, but it was no contest. In less than half a minute, the Viets were all dead. I noticed Helene standing next to a tree where she’d been sheltering from the gunfire. She came over to look at the bodies, but they were beyond her help. She shook her head despairingly, crossed herself and said a silent prayer.

  “We need to get moving,” I shouted. “We’ve only won ourselves a small lead on the enemy. They’ll know the direction we’re headed in, so if we don’t keep moving, they’ll be back on our tails again soon. Move out.”

  We continued our dash though the jungle, following the track that Pham had shown us when she brought us in. We approached Dong Khe carefully, but there was no sign of any increased activity. We pushed on, skirting the town and continued heading south.

  Every hour, I stopped them for a short break, but time was not on our side. We pushed on late into the night until it was so dark, we couldn’t even follow the track. I ordered a stop, and we made camp.

  Giap had managed to keep up. He was much fitter than I would have imagined most army commanders would be. Perhaps it was his life organising and controlling a guerrilla army that kept him in shape. He spent every day undercover, moving from place to place, in fear of discovery by the French. Now his worst fears were realised. I made sure he was secured for the night, and two troopers were assigned to watch him. His hands were still tied, and in addition I made them link his bound hands to a tree, so that escape was all but impossible.

  During the night, we heard the sound of engines moving down the main track that led from Dong Khe. There was the unmistakable equipment rattle of troops moving, the urgent commands of officers, and the sounds of the beginnings of a huge search operation. The Viets could call on several divisions to scour the countryside. I wondered if one hostage, even one so prominent as Giap, would be enough to keep us alive.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In the morning, we ate a hasty breakfast and prepared to move out. There was no question of using the direct route south as the whole area was crawling with Viet Minh troops searching for Giap. I called the men for a meeting to discuss our options.

  “We are here, about thirty kilometres south of Dong Khe,” I said, pointing to a spot on the map. “Here’s the prison camp we visited on the way in, and here’s the plantation. The main track is obviously out of the question, and as far as I can see, the only alternative is to travel through the swamps.”

  They groaned. The Indochinese swamps were notorious. The hazards were endless, malaria mosquitoes, snakes, poisonous insects and constant flies that made life an unending hell. Then, of course, there were the leeches. Even the locals avoided the swamps, and there were many tales, some probably apocryphal, of groups of people entering the swamps never to be seen again.

  “I know, I know, but we don’t have a choice. It’s the swamps or Giap’s people, and they’ll be a damn sight nastier than the swamps. Let’s get moving.”

  We picked up our packs and weapons and moved east. Would the Viets work out where we were? Certainly they would consider that we’d tried for the swamps, but finding us there would be another matter.

  They could search for us with ten divisions of troops before they got on our trail. Then again, they probably would search for us with ten divisions of troops. It was a sobering thought.

  We travelled for five kilometres before we reached the edge of the swamps. Then the going became really hard, and before long we were wading through waist-deep water. We all kept a look out for snakes and any other nasty creatures that could be a threat, but really there was little we could do, other than hope that the passage of a large group of people would be enough to make them keep well away.

  We kept water out of our gun barrels by using condoms stretched over the end. Petrov carried his pack of explosives on top of his head, careful to keep it well away from the water. As usual, we used a point and rear guard formation. This time Schuster went with Armand to check the route through the damp, green hell. Schuster had found a long sapling, broken out of the ground, which he used to probe in front of him, checking that the water did not unexpectedly become too deep. I estimated we were making barely a kilometre an hour. At this rate, it would be several days before we even managed to escape the main search area and move back onto a jungle track that would enable us to push a faster pace. At one rest stop, I talked to Bauer and Schuster about the supply situation.

  “Jurgen, we have supplies for another day, no more. We can’t hang around here for too long, even assuming that the men don’t begin to fall ill.”

  Schuster had checked every pack and inventoried the supplies of food. We were running dangerously low. We’d planned the mission on the basis of being able to replenish food supplies from local villages. The problem was that there were no villages in the swamps.

  I checked the map.

  “Very well, we need to head slightly north. I know, it’s taking us in the wrong direction, but it will confuse the Viets, and more importantly, take us out of the swamps.”

  We checked out the map thoroughly, but it was the only sensible alternative. Staying in the swamp much longer, and hunger and illness would be certain to hit us, sooner rather than later. I needed to lead a fighting force back to Hanoi, not a troop of the halt and the lame.

  I told the men what we were planning, which cheered them up. The effect of the swamp was depressing, and a constant wait to see what would strike first, snakes, leeches, or the deadly bouts of malarial attack that reduced men to quivering invalids. By the early evening, we were getting to higher ground, and soon we were out of the swamp and able to make camp on dry ground.

  We slumped down exhausted, and I went to check on Giap. His hands were still tied, and I carefully untied them so that he could revive the circulation in his arms. He flexed his muscles with some relief.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said.

  “I don’t think you have anywhere to run, Comrade Giap.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever get me to Hanoi?” he asked.

  I looked him in the eyes, and he stared back.

  “I think we both know that getting you to Hanoi is not much of an option, Giap. There are about ten of your divisions searching for you, so we’ll be lucky to get halfway.

  “So what do you plan to do with me, shoot me? Is that it? I know that you never intended to give me back to my men. That was just a
way for you to escape.”

  I nodded. “Yes, that’s true. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing?”

  “Of course, this is a war. A guerrilla war without rules, like the Chinese fought against Chiang Kai Chek, Lenin’s revolution in Russia, even your French Revolution.”

  “I am not French.”

  “Where do you come from, then?”

  “I am German, what your people might call a Nazi.”

  “German?” He looked at me with new interest. “So you fought in the Great Patriotic War?”

  I smiled. The Russians had given it that name, but we just called it the Eastern Front.

  “Yes, I fought in Russia.”

  “And lost in Russia, Sergeant. You found the Russians more than a match, did you not?”

  “We certainly lost,” I agreed.

  “But no, not because the Russians were better fighters. They were tough, yes, and they often fought on when lesser men would have given up. But man for man, we gave them a hammering. We were beaten by politics, my friend, politics in the shape of a madman who was in charge.”

  “Hitler,” he said. “The greatest war criminal the world has ever known.”

  I laughed. “He was certainly bad, but Comrade Stalin was far worse.”

  “Stalin?” he said abruptly. “Stalin was a hero, a great leader of the people.”

  “He was a butchering war criminal,” I told him. “Ready to butcher his own people, men, women and children, if it might help the war effort. Sometimes just because he felt like it.”