There was another road-block ahead — Australians this time, big lean men in floppy hats standing with self-repeaters field across their hips. ‘Where yer goin’!’ one of them yelled.
‘Cercle Sportif!’ He had his card out again, breathing fast, and one of them grinned nastily: ‘Yer won’t find much of it left!’ His voice was gone as three ambulances screamed up, headlamps on full beam. Murray slipped through and joined a nervous crowd under the trees. Some were trying to back away, others forcing them forward.
The gateposts of the Cercle had been splintered and inside was a great scrum of uniforms and white shirts and howling faces. Above there were high trees with hanging branches, some of them stripped and clotted and broken. The clubhouse, pale blue and white, had been cracked like an eggshell. The steps up to the swimming pool were crammed with bodies, some of them twitching like the tails of sundered reptiles. A man’s body, naked except for his blue socks, lay across Murray’s path, his suntan a curious brownish-blue against the white strip of his waist. There was part of a girl further on, still wearing her bathing-top, but with no head. Flesh was spattered about like meat among the dust. He was pushed aside by two enormous Negroes carrying a stretcher.
An American voice on a loudhailer was calling: ‘Stand back! Stand back! There may be more bombs! Please stand back, get clear, make way for the ambulances!’
He was shoved against a wall, face-to-face with a dazed American civilian who was gingerly stroking his crewcut. ‘What happened?’ Murray cried.
‘Don’t quite know. Was down in the men’s room and ah just kinda hit mah head.’ He began to grope along the wall, muttering, ‘Bastards set off a second bomb, ah guess, just when the ambulances came. Lucky ah was in the john.’
Murray found a young hard-faced soldier with the shoulder-flash of the Special Forces, the Green Berets. ‘What happened?’ He didn’t show his card this time, and the man said bitterly: ‘Two charges. First under the pool, laid along the roof of the observation bar. Blew the swimmers into the air like a lot o’ goddam fish out of a tank. Second charge laid in a dustbin just inside the gates. Killed a lot o’ the ambulance boys and spectators. Who the hell are you, anyway?’
Murray looked down and saw a shoe lying near them with a foot in it. He groped for his Press card, mumbling: ‘Were there any survivors?’
‘In this mess?’ The Green Beret frowned at the Press card. ‘If I know these VC bastards they may have set a third charge. I should get the hell out o’ here if I was you. There’s nothing to see, unless you like stockyards.’
‘There was someone I was going to meet here. I’m staying.’
Up the steps towards the pool and the bar he had to control himself. He had seen this thing before, many times, but this — perhaps because it was sited in such luxurious, familiar décor — was peculiarly horrible. An American in bathing trunks, his legs wrapped in blood-soaked towels as he was borne down on a stretcher, waved at him: ‘Hey, you a newspaperman? Better get this. Hold it, boys! Name’s Larrymore — Don Macaulay Larrymore — ex-Marine, seen it all, was up there and I saw it all. You can quote me.’ He did not sound sober.
Murray had started up the steps again when the blood met him, in two snake rivulets, their noses glinting with dust as they crept across the clean concrete floor, swelling fresh and rich as they expanded and dropped their heady load on to the step below — and all Murray could do was run, toppling, staggering upwards, thinking that some of that awful blood might belong to a girl he thought he loved. An arm stopped him at the top of the steps. He recognised Colonel Luong of the South Vietnamese Third Corps, otherwise Laughing Larry Lung, so nicknamed on account of his nervous giggle while shooting prisoners. He was giggling now. ‘Hello, Mr Wilde — this is very bad thing!’
‘You were here when it happened?’
‘Oh no, I was across the street in the restaurant. They were trying to kill General Greene.’ He stood there in a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and drainpipe slacks, his rubber-soled sneakers sticky with blood.
‘What happened to Greene?’ said Murray.
Laughing Larry twitched and began flicking his tiny wrist on which dangled a heavy silver identification disc. ‘General Greene not come, I think. He was late.’
‘So was I,’ Murray murmured. ‘Are you sure it was Greene they were after?’
‘He was to come here for lunch. These VC are pigs.’ He giggled again, beginning to sidle away past a naked torso of no definable sex from which a blue bubble of intestine shone dully in the sun. ‘Very bad here,’ Larry said again, smiling, and Murray started down the steps again.
Had she been coming with Greene? he wondered, as another scream of sirens rose from the gates. A motorcade of black sedans with Vietnamese outriders bounced to a halt and American M.P.s sprang from the doors, coming to attention as a knot of officers converged on the shattered gates.
General Virgil Luther Greene was a tall handsome man with grey eyes set deep in an oven-fresh suntan. But the tan was perhaps a shade paler than usual as he walked solemnly towards the steps up to the empty, blasted pool. It was not for nothing
