Murray sighed. ‘Never mind. Come on, shift your arses, unless you want to get left behind for the Japs.’
The three of them ran back to where MacLeod crouched in his slit trench, and gestured for Grant and Baird to join them. Then all six were hurrying through the trees. At the edge of the plantation, they squirmed through a fringe of sago bushes into the gloomy jungle beyond. Gnarly, moss-covered strangler figs made monstrous, seemingly unnatural shapes in the shadows, the trees they had grown up around and choked to death long since rotted away.
The ground became so steep they had to clamber up using their hands as well as their feet, pulling themselves up by gripping creepers. Torrance paused to gaze at the slope above him. The thick vegetation prevented him from seeing more than a couple of dozen yards.
A shot came from somewhere to his left, whip-cracking past his head. He ducked behind a stout tree trunk, breathing hard, then peered around the other side. Between the leaves of a sago bush casting stripy shadows on the jungle floor where a rare shaft of sunlight penetrated the canopy, he glimpsed a couple of figures wearing havelocks flitting between trees perhaps twenty yards away. Another rifle sang out, a bullet severing a liana climbing up the trunk he hid behind. He hastily withdrew his head.
‘Shit!’ He was amazed the Japanese had outflanked them so quickly. After the slaughter on the estate road, in any other army the men coming up behind would have pulled back, waited at least an hour or two for orders to push patrols forward. These Japs did not let up for five minutes!
He caught sight of a movement out of the corner of his eye: Murray gesturing from behind a tree higher up the slope. The sergeant waved for Torrance to come and join him. Too petrified to move, Torrance shook his head.
A rifle cracked, sending a bullet tearing through the sago bushes. Murray fired a couple of bursts from his Thompson. Torrance broke cover, hoping the shots would keep the Japanese’s heads down for a few seconds at least. Then another rifle cracked, and Murray dropped the Thompson with a cry, falling on his back. There was a hole in his knee from which blood began to run. He clutched at it as Torrance climbed past him.
‘Slugger!’ cried Murray. ‘Don’t leave me!’
Torrance hesitated, then ran back to where the sergeant sprawled.
‘Thanks, Slugger! I knew you were no’ the man to abandon a comrade. Help me back on my feet.’
Ignoring him, Torrance took Murray’s Thompson and fired a burst at the Japanese soldiers climbing up the slope below them. One of them fell with a scream, blood jetting from a wound in his neck, and the others dived for cover. Torrance slung the Thompson across his back. Going through Murray’s pockets, he found the sergeant’s grenades. He transferred one to one of his own pockets, pulled the pin from the other and lobbed it amongst the Japanese creeping towards them. It exploded with a flat crack, and dirt and smoke fountained up beneath the forest canopy, shredded leaves winking in a shaft of sunlight as they fluttered down.
Torrance went through the sergeant’s utility pouches, taking out his spare magazines and stuffing them into the pouches on his own webbing.
‘Never mind that!’ said Murray. ‘Help me up…’
‘Sorry, sar’nt. You’re going nowhere on that leg. Never mind, though, eh? You’ll get to spend the rest of the war in a POW hospital, with pretty Jap nurses to tend to your every need. See you after the war.’ He resumed climbing.
‘Slugger!’ screamed Murray. ‘Don’t leave me! Come back, you bastard!’
With Murray’s curses ringing in his ears, Torrance squeezed through a strand of thorny palms and emerged on to another plantation where three open-topped Bren gun carriers were parked. Strictly speaking universal carriers – they were as likely to be armed with Vickers heavy machine guns or Boys anti-tank rifles as Brens – the carriers were essentially little more than outsized biscuit tins with caterpillar tracks on the sides, not much longer or lower than a family saloon, albeit half as wide again, heavily armoured in front, pitifully armoured everywhere else.
Even as Torrance sprinted across to where they were parked, two of them gunned their engines and set off up an estate road with a throaty growl of their Ford V8 engines. Baird waved to him from the back of the third, motioning him to get a move on, as if he was not going full pelt already. He heard the crack of rifles behind him, bullets whip-cracking past his head to ricochet off the back of the carrier. Reaching it, Torrance hooked his hands over the coaming and scrabbled the soles of his boots against the back.
‘Pour on the coal, Lefty!’ Baird shouted over his shoulder as he helped Torrance into the back. In the driving seat, Rossi already had the engine ticking over, and now he put his foot down and the carrier lurched forward. More rifles cracked, the bullets pattering against its armour. The back of the carrier was divided into two cramped compartments by the engine housing: Baird sprawled in one and Torrance crouched in the stowage space on the other side, firing the Thompson at the Japanese emerging from the jungle behind them through the cloud of dust raised by the tracks.
Within half an hour they were back on the tarmac Trunk Road that ran all the way to Singapore, two hundred and fifty miles to the south. Manning a roadblock with two more men from Twelve Platoon, Company Sergeant Major Fraser flagged them down.
‘You’d better park up on the far side of the kampong.’ A spry, raw-boned man with bushy eyebrows, a wide mouth and a square jaw that lent him a startling resemblance to one of the statues on Easter Island, Fraser spoke with a soft Highland brogue. He wore a gas cape against the torrential rain now drumming on the leaves of the surrounding jungle. He gestured at a cluster of a dozen atap-thatched dwellings with walls of plaited bamboo strips, huddled beneath coco palms, mangoes, and betel-nut trees. Each house stood on stilts about five feet off the ground, as protection against venomous creepy-crawlies, floods, and the various other delights of the Malayan jungle.
They had parked the carriers and were climbing out when Corporal Campbell approached them. Like Fraser, he wore his gas cape against the rain. ‘You lot are billeted in this house here. Get inside and get out of those wet things. The lorries bringing your dinner will park there –’ he pointed – ‘at nineteen hundred hours, so send an orderly with a dixie. Kit inspection at oh-eight hundred hours tomorrow, so use your time well.’ He frowned. ‘Where’s Sar’nt Murray?’
‘He didn’t make it,’ said Torrance.
‘Dead?’
‘No, but he won’t be playing for Rangers next season.’
Campbell glared at him. ‘And you left him for the Japs?’
‘What else could I do? I barely got away from them myself!’
‘You gutless, selfish Sassenach bastard!’ said Campbell. ‘D’you no’ know, you never leave a man behind?’
‘Well, what the hell was I supposed to do? Pick him up and carry him on my shoulders? Who d’you think I am? Bleedin’ Superman? The Japs will take care of him. They’ve got to – it says so in the Geneva Convention.’
‘You bloody idiot! What makes you so sure the Japs are even signatories to the Geneva Convention?’
‘Well, what d’you think they’ll do to him? It’s not as if they’re total barbarians. You remember that Mr Shinoda who used to own the barber shop on Tanglin Road… he was a decent enough sort of bloke.’
‘Oh, aye, that’s the Japs for you,’ said Campbell. ‘Smiling to your face, bowing and scraping, and plotting to drive bamboo splinters up your fingernails the minute your back’s turned! What, d’you think they’re gaunae lay him on soft sheets and send Geisha girls to mop the sweat frae his brow? The poor bastard! They’re probably amusing theirsels torturing him to death even as we speak.’
Torrance felt sick at the thought. The nausea quickly gave way to anger. ‘Well, I don’t see what difference that makes. There was nothing I could’ve done, except stay and get captured with him. What would’ve been the sense in that?’
Campbell seized Torrance by the webbing straps and shoved him back against the side of one of the Bren gun carriers.
‘I wish it had been you, you selfish bastard! Next time I hope it’s you that’s wounded, that’s all I can say. I hope it’s you, and I get the chance to leave you the way you left Rab.’ He slammed Torrance back against the side of the carrier a second time, then let him go and turned on his heel, stalking off through the rain.
Torrance stood there trembling with shock and anger. Realising the others were watching him, he straightened his rain-soaked khaki shirt with as much dignity as he could muster. ‘Lucky for him he let go of me when he did. I’d’ve had him, otherwise. Hey, that was assault, wasn’t it? You lads all saw what he did?’
‘We didna see anything,’ said Baird. ‘Is that no’ right, lads?’
There was a murmur of agreement from the others.
‘What are you on about?’ protested Torrance. ‘He slammed me back against the side of this Bren gun carrier! How could you not have seen?’
‘Aye, well, mebbe we happen to agree wi’ Soupy,’ said Grant. ‘Rab Murray was a good bloke. You shouldna have left him for the Japs.’
They all turned their backs on Torrance then and headed for the bamboo house Campbell had pointed out.
‘Bloody sod the lot of you, then!’ Torrance called after them. ‘I don’t need any of you! You can all go to hell!’
Two
Lieutenant Ishikawa stood with his head cocked on one side, listening. Only a few hours earlier the rumble of artillery had filled the air like distant thunder. Now the sun was sinking towards the horizon, all he could hear was the cicadas in the jungle fringing the private airfield at Jendarata, nine miles south-west of Telok Anson. Either the battle had ended, or moved so far to the south he could no longer hear it.
But now there was a new sound, faint but growing louder: the drone of aero-engines. Ishikawa spotted the aeroplane circling around to the north of the airfield: a twin-engined Nakajima Ki-34 transport. Making its final approach, it came in low over the palm trees, the undercarriage touching the greensward, bouncing slightly, then settling down as the pilot throttled back, the tailplane descending until the third wheel touched down. He taxied the Nakajima across to where Ishikawa waited by the 30 cwt Humber truck parked on the apron.
Sergeant Ogata eased himself out of the cab and made his way around the bonnet to stand next to Ishikawa. A victim of an abnormality of the pituitary gland, Ogata was the exception that proved false the rule that all Japanese were small. He stood nearly seven feet tall, with a gnarled brow beneath the peak of his field cap, an abnormally long, square jaw, broad shoulders, and fists like sledge hammers.
A door opened in the Nakajima’s fuselage and a member of the flight crew lowered a ladder to the ground before withdrawing to make way for the transport’s sole passenger, an officer not much older than Ishikawa himself with an attaché case in one hand. Like Ishikawa, he wore a peaked cap, and a Sam-Browne belt over an olive-drab tunic that matched the jodhpurs tucked into riding boots of undressed black leather. The only discordant note in his uniform was the paisley cravat he wore at his throat. He wore a white brassard on one arm, but while the brassards worn by Ishikawa and Ogata were printed with the two kanji for ‘law’ and ‘soldier’ – the emblem of the Kenpeitai – the newcomer’s brassard had a Latin ‘U’ character inscribed in black inside a hexagon.
Ishikawa and Ogata both bowed low before saluting.
The newcomer returned their salutes. ‘Lieutenant Ishikawa?’
‘Yes, Captain-sama.’
The newcomer turned to Ogata with a smile of recognition. ‘Sergeant Ogata.’
‘Mitsumoto-sama,’ said the burly sergeant.
The crew of the Nakajima had already closed the door in the fuselage and were taxi-ing back to the far end of the runway. Captain Mitsumoto indicated the truck. ‘What’s this?’
‘I was ordered to indent for a wireless truck, Captain-sama,’ said Ishikawa. ‘There was not enough space in the transports with Admiral Ozawa’s fleet for vehicles other than tanks, so we’ve had to commandeer vehicles left behind by the retreating British. Fortunately, their retreat has been so precipitous, this has not presented us with any difficulty.’ Ishikawa essayed a smile. ‘The men are calling them “Churchill supplies”.’
‘“Churchill supplies”.’ Mitsumoto returned the lieutnant’s smile, and indicated the aerial sticking up from the canvas awning over the back of the truck. ‘There is a wireless in the back?’
‘Of course, Captain-sama! A British Mark Eighteen set. We’ve put Japanese labels over the English labels, so anyone with basic training in wireless operation should be able to use it.’
‘Excellent! You have done well, Lieutenant-san.’
Ishikawa bowed again. ‘Thank you, Captain-sama.’
Mitsumoto placed the attaché case on the Humber’s bonnet and took out a couple of white brassards matching his own. ‘Put those on in place of your Kenpeitai brassards,’ he ordered, handing one each to Ishikawa and Ogata. ‘You’re now members of Uchida Kikan.’
There was no single, permanent department in the Imperial Japanese Army responsible for military intelligence. Instead, the Secret Section of the Second Bureau of the Imperial General Staff set up special service agencies called tokumu kikan to carry out specific tasks on an ad hoc basis. Commanded by Baron Uchida, and named after him, Uchida Kikan – U-Kikan for short – was one such unit, with responsibility for gathering intelligence about the mineral resources of the various countries Japan was set on invading. Indeed, Japan would not now be embarking on this war if U-Kikan had not provided the raw intelligence behind the projections that Japan would become entirely self-sufficient if it achieved all its war aims.
Mitsumoto took a couple of pennants bearing the same symbol from the attaché case and handed them to Ogata. ‘Fix those to the mudguards.’
While the sergeant was putting the pennants in place, Mitsumoto took a map of central Malaya from the case and unfolded it, spreading it on the bonnet. ‘Show me where the British front line is.’
‘The situation is fluid,’ said Ishikawa. ‘But yesterday we drove the British out of Kampar.’ He indicated the village on the map.
‘Good,’ said Mitsumoto. ‘Take me there. You drive. Get in the back, Ogata.’
Mitsumoto folded away the map and climbed in the cab next to Ishikawa. A moment later a double-thump from the back indicated Ogata had clambered over the tailgate and was sitting securely in the back. Ishikawa started the engine and put the truck in gear.
‘Is it permitted to know our objective, Captain-sama?’ he asked Mitsumoto.
‘You are familiar with the Burroughs and Salter Survey?’
‘Of course. But it was lost. When our agent tried to smuggle it out of Singapore, the British authorities contacted the pilot by wireless and ordered him to turn the aeroplane around. From listening in to the wireless transmissions, as far as we can tell, there was an exchange of shots and the aeroplane crashed in the jungle somewhere on the western slopes of the Titiwangsa Mountains.’
‘I have read Captain Fujita’s final report.’ The emphasis Mitsumoto placed on the word ‘final’ left Ishikawa in no doubt the captain was aware Fujita had committed seppuku immediately after submitting his report to atone for his failure. ‘But what was lost can be found. Another of our agents behind enemy lines is searching for it now.’
‘He’ll have his work cut out for him to find an aeroplane that went down in those jungles, Captain-sama.’
‘Be that as it may…my orders are to get that survey at all costs.’
Ishikawa turned the Humber south on to the Trunk Road. After a few miles, they had to slow down to navigate their way past the charred, still-smouldering hulks of a couple of Chi-Ha tanks. The drainage ditches on either side were choked with the corpses of turbaned sepoys. Here Mitsumoto and Ishikawa could see European prisoners-of-war being marched back north by guards who prodded them with bayonets and beat them with their rifle butts.
‘Oni,’ said Mitsumoto. The word was Japanese for ‘ogre’. With their big, u
nnaturally-hued and glaring eyes, their large noses and their ruddy complexions, Europeans looked a lot like Japanese ogres.
Catching Ishikawa giving him a sidelong glance, Mitsumoto flushed and grinned ruefully. ‘In Oga we have a tradition on New Year’s Day…men dress up as namahage, with straw capes and oni masks, and go from door to door with big carving knives in one hand and wooden pails in the other. “Are there any unruly children here?” they ask. “A child that does not obey its parents is the child of an oni!” Of course, when I grew up I realised it was just three of our neighbours wearing costumes, but the first year it happened, I was so scared I cried myself to sleep.’
There was something in Mitsumoto’s accent that had been bothering Ishikawa. Now he placed it: just the faintest hint of the Tohoku dialect. People from the northern end of Honshu were often perceived to be lazy, rural bumpkins, so Ishikawa did not blame Mitsumoto for trying to hide it with good Tokyo Japanese.
Mitsumoto screwed a cigarette in an amber holder, before proffering his cigarette case to Ishikawa, who took one. ‘Thank you, Captain-sama.’
‘When I was sixteen, my father took me with him on one of his business trips to Tokyo.’ Mitsumoto paused to light his cigarette with a gold-plated Dunhill. ‘That was the first time I saw a gaijin. You know what he was doing? Arguing…with a police officer! Can you imagine it? Here was a police officer, trying to lay down the law, and this stupid, disrespectful gaijin was arguing with him! When we’re children, our parents tell us there are no such things as oni, but there are.’ He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Time to contact our agent.’ He indicated where a gravel bridlepath forked off the Trunk Road. ‘Pull in here.’
Ishikawa parked the Humber and he and Mitsumoto got out and made their way to the tailgate. ‘See if you can get White Tiger on the radio,’ Mitsumoto ordered Ogata. ‘Frequency thirty-eight-point-four megahertz.’
‘Yes, Captain-sama.’ Ogata squeezed his ungainly bulk into the chair by the table bearing the wireless set, holding one of the earphones to the side of his head before pressing the ‘transmit’ button to talk into the microphone. ‘Azure Dragon calling White Tiger, Azure Dragon calling White Tiger, are you receiving? Come in, White Tiger.’ Releasing the button, he listened for a few moments before sending the same transmission out a second time. He had to send the signal a third time before he got a response. ‘White Tiger, Mitsumoto-sama!’ he said over his shoulder, before pressing the button again. ‘Have you located the Vermilion Bird yet…? Stand by.’ Taking his finger off the button, Ogata turned to Mitsumoto. ‘He says he’s made contact with a Sakai tribesman who knows the location of the crashed aeroplane. He hopes to have the survey in his hands within twenty-four hours.’
The Name of Valour Page 2