The Name of Valour

  ‘There’s a stiff over here.’

  The others joined him. Gagging, Kerr held a wadded handkerchief over his nose and mouth. ‘Is it a Jap?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Campbell. ‘He looks Burmese to me. Or mebbe Siamese.’

  ‘What the hell’s he doin’ out here?’ asked Baird.

  ‘Decomposing, mostly,’ said Torrance.

  ‘No bullet holes in him,’ Campbell observed.

  ‘Looks like he broke his neck,’ said Torrance.

  ‘How the hell would he break his neck?’

  ‘All right, someone else broke it for him. Either that, or he was climbing a tree and fell.’

  The seven of them raised their eyes and let out a collective gasp when they finally noticed the aeroplane tangled in the lianas just below the canopy, like a fly in a spider’s web, perhaps sixty feet above their heads.

  Gazing up, Torrance and his companions backed away, as if fearing the lianas might snap at any moment and drop the aeroplane on them. Painted in civilian livery, it was a twin-engined biplane with an enclosed cabin, about thirty-five feet from nose to tail, perhaps big enough to seat eight passengers.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Torrance.

  ‘Poor bastards must’ve got shot down by the Japs,’ said Campbell. ‘Awreet, Dicky. You’d better sclim up there.’

  ‘I’m no’ sclimming up there!’ said Baird.

  ‘It’d be easy enough. You just shin up one o’ yon vines.’

  ‘You shin up one o’ yon vines! Who d’you think I am? Johnny Weissmuller?’

  ‘Why should any of us climb up there, anyway?’ asked Kerr. ‘Shouldn’t we be gettin’ on, corp? If we dinna get a move on, we’re liable to end up in the bag.’

  ‘It’ll no’ take two minutes,’ said Campbell. ‘We ought to report it missing.’

  ‘All right, but I dinna see why one of us has to climb up. We can see the registration markings easily enough from here: VH dash HNS. Someone make a note o’ that.’

  ‘There may be more dead bodies up there. People whose loved ones will be wondering what became o’ them.’

  ‘I’ll climb up.’ Torrance put down his rifle and shrugged off his pack. It had just occurred to him that if there were any more corpses up there, while he was going through their wallets in search of identification, he might also find some currency that was legal tender in Singapore.

  ‘Good lad,’ said Campbell.

  Torrance studied the lianas for a moment before beginning his ascent. For all he knew, the aeroplane was hanging by a thread. He did not want it crashing down on him the moment he disturbed the network of tangled vines supporting it. Choosing a liana dangling to one side, but offering easy access to a creeper that would get him close to the door, he began to climb. One of the exercises in basic training had been to shin up ropes dangling from a sort of gibbet; this was no different from that.

  When he reached the same level as the aeroplane, he glanced down. From up here, it looked closer to two hundred feet back to the ground. A cold sweat prickled his skin at once. Reminding himself that a fall of thirty feet was sufficient to kill a man did not help.

  Gazing across at the aeroplane, he saw another corpse on the flight deck. The windshield was spattered with dried blood. Torrance hauled on the liana leading across to the aeroplane, making sure it was secure. If the plane was going to fall out of the trees, he wanted it to do so before he committed his weight to the liana. It seemed secure enough. Grabbing it with both hands, he hung below it and swung his legs up, hooking his ankles over the top. Then he shinned across until he was able to lower his legs to the under-wing on the starboard side. It seemed solid enough, until he started to worm his way between the struts. The whole aeroplane lurched, and he had to grab on to a strut to keep his balance.

  ‘Careful, laddie!’ Campbell called from below.

  ‘Ta very much for that helpful suggestion!’ Torrance yelled down. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me I ought to be careful, but now that you’ve pointed that out to me, Soupy, I’ll be sure to watch my step.’

  He eased himself gingerly over the starboard engine nacelle and made his way to the door in the fuselage. It was not even on the catch. Glancing down, he saw the first corpse immediately below. He supposed the man had survived the initial crash, only to fall trying to climb down. Torrance pulled the door open and stepped into the cabin. The aeroplane rocked gently in its cradle of lianas. He braced his hands against the sides of the door and waited for it to settle down.

  The stench of rotting flesh was almost overpowering, and he gagged. More flies buzzed around another corpse in the cabin. Like the man below, he was an Asian of some kind: Nepalese, Burmese, Siamese, something like that. Judging from the way the body had fallen against the seat in front, he had been killed in the initial crash. And there was a steel attaché case handcuffed to his left wrist.

  Torrance forgot all about the flies and the stench. What was in there that was so valuable it had to be secured with handcuffs? Gemstones? Jewellery? Cash? Bearer bonds? Mucky postcards?

  Leaving that problem to one side for the moment, he stepped past the body and entered the flight deck. Wearing a leather flying jacket and a slouch hat, the pilot had been a Westerner, perhaps in his late forties or early fifties. Beneath the jacket, his khaki shirt was crusted with dried blood. A large, rust-coloured cockroach dropped out of his mouth and landed on its back between his feet. Torrance’s stomach gave a heave. He turned away, and that was when he noticed the hatchet clipped to the bulkhead behind the pilot’s seat.

  Two minutes later, he dropped the attaché case from the aeroplane with a cry of, ‘Cop hold of this!’

  Instead of trying to catch it, the others had sense enough to scatter, leaving one corner of the case to bury itself several inches into the ground. They had reconvened by the time Torrance had shinned down a liana to join them on the ground.

  ‘What’s in yon case?’ asked Campbell.

  ‘We won’t know that till we get it open,’ said Torrance. ‘It was handcuffed to some bloke’s wrist. Doesn’t that make you curious?’

  ‘It makes me curious how you got it off the man,’ said Kerr.

  Torrance took out the bloodstained hatchet he had tucked behind his webbing belt at the back.

  ‘I’m sorry I asked,’ said Kerr. ‘I think I’m goin’ to be sick…’

  ‘Someone’s coming!’ hissed Grant.

  Everyone fell silent, listening. The sound of someone hacking at foliage with a parang was unmistakeable.

  ‘Get out o’ sight, all o’ you, lacas!’ hissed Campbell.

  Torrance grabbed his rifle and pack and carried them across to the foot of a seraya tree. Everyone else had taken up positions behind trees or in bushes. Torrance realised he needed to work a round into the breech of his rifle; but whoever was approaching was so close now, they were sure to hear the double-click of the bolt action.

  The other party appeared through the trees. A Sakai tribesman led the way, carrying a long, slender spear. He seemed to be acting as guide to a white man in a khaki safari jacket and matching jodhpurs tucked into his boots, a pith helmet on his head and an elephant gun slung from his shoulder, accompanied by a Malay wearing a white shirt with a wingless collar loose over a sarong. The rest of the party consisted of Tamil bearers burdened with a variety of trunks, hampers and canvas bales.

  When they were almost directly below the aeroplane, the Sakai pointed it out to the white man.

  ‘Halt!’ the white man ordered the bearers, who lowered their burdens with sighs of relief. Torrance cursed inwardly, wondering how long he and his companions would have to remain hidden before the other party moved on.

  The Malay noticed the attaché case and pointed it out to his companions. ‘That must have fallen out of the plane,’ he said in English.

  ‘It was not there when I passed this way a week ago,’ said the Sakai.

  Torrance cursed himself for not having thought to throw the case into the undergrowth
before hiding.

  The white man gazed at the trees all around. Torrance hastily drew back behind the bole of the seraya tree.

  ‘Aw, Jeez, I’m lyin’ on a red-ant nest!’ Leaping from a clump of sago bushes, Kerr slapped at himself like a deranged Bavarian folk-dancer run amok.

  The white man unslung his elephant gun and pointed it at Kerr. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded in a Germanic accent.

  ‘I’ve got a tommy gun and six rifles aimed at you, so if you want to make a fight of it, you’ll lose.’ Campbell stepped into sight, levelling his Thompson at the white man. ‘Put down the gun and tell Man Friday there to lose his spear.’

  They lowered their weapons to the trail and straightened slowly, raising their hands above their heads.

  Campbell glanced at Kerr, who was still brushing ants off himself, and scowled, shaking his head. He turned his attention back to the white man and his party. ‘Who are you, and what are you doing here, in the middle of the jungle?’

  ‘I am Professor Möritz Ziegler of the University of Zürich.’ He did not match the image in Torrance’s head of what a professor should look like: in his late thirties, he was a tall, muscular man with a square, clean-shaven jaw. ‘I am hunting butterflies.’

  ‘With an elephant gun?’ said Torrance.

  Ziegler laughed. ‘No. With one of these.’ He gestured one of the bearers forward, and pulled a net on the end of a slender bamboo rod out from under two the straps holding a trunk closed. He waved it as if trying to catch a butterfly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ziegler?’ said Campbell. ‘Sounds like a Jerry name to me. You’re no’ a Jerry, are you?’

  ‘I am Swiss.’ Thrusting the butterfly net into the bearer’s hands, Ziegler drew a passport out of the breast pocket of his safari jacket and proffered it to Campbell, who handed it to Torrance.

  ‘Check it.’

  Torrance leafed through the passport’s pages, trying to look as if he had the least idea what he should be looking for. ‘Looks real enough to me, Soupy.’

  ‘If you’re Swiss, let’s hear you yodel,’ said Campbell.

  Ziegler snorted. ‘That is ridiculous! Not all Swiss can yodel, any more than all Englishmen can Morris dance.’

  ‘He’s got you there,’ said Torrance.

  ‘I’m Scottish, no’ English,’ snarled Campbell. ‘D’you no’ know you’re in the middle of a war zone?’

  ‘War zone? What war zone?’

  ‘There’s half the Japanese army coming down yon trail.’ Campbell pointed back the way they had come. ‘All the civilians in Perak have been evacuated south.’

  ‘Has the war moved so far south, then?’ Ziegler doffed his pith helmet, revealing close-cropped blond hair, to dab sweat from his forehead with a wadded handkerchief. ‘I have been in the jungle for the past three weeks. No contact with the outside world.’

  ‘Three weeks!’ Torrance arched a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Spend every Christmas hunting butterflies, do yer?’

  Ziegler shrugged. ‘It is the best time of year to catch the Trogonoptera brookiana… Rajah Brook’s birdwing, yes? Besides, Switzerland is neutral in the war. If the Japanese do capture me, I hardly think they will risk an international incident by harming a Swiss civilian.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ said Rossi. ‘The Japs have just declared war on the British Empire, no’ to mention the Yanks, but I’m sure they’ll think twice before picking a fight wi’ Switzerland.’

  ‘I say we take him back to brigade,’ said Torrance. ‘Let the intelligence-wallah question him.’

  Campbell nodded. ‘You’re coming wi’ us,’ he told Ziegler. ‘The intelligence officer at our brigade HQ can check your boner fydes and decide what to do wi’ you. Titch, you keep the Bren on him. If he looks like he’s so much as even thinking of making trouble, shoot him.’

  Grant grinned. ‘My pleasure!’

  ‘Humph his bundook, Lefty.’ Campbell turned to address the Malay and the porters. ‘Reet, then. You’re gaunae make your way across the Slim River and head south-east for fifteen miles. Don’t go near the Trunk Road till you’re south of Tanjong Malim, savvy?’ He indicated Ziegler. ‘If Funf here disnae turn up in a couple of days, it means we’ve decided he’s a spy and shot him, so you can flog his gear in lieu of payment.’

  While Campbell addressed the porters, Torrance smashed the locks on the attaché case with the hatchet and opened it. Inside he found nothing but a Manila folder. Within the folder were a few dozen pages of typewritten notes interspersed with technical-looking hand-drawn maps. The title page simply said, ‘Geological Survey of Mount Ophir’ and, towards the bottom, the name and address of a firm of surveyors based in Singapore.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Campbell.

  ‘Just a land survey,’ said Torrance.

  ‘After all that? Talk about an anticlimax!’

  ‘Perhaps I could have that?’ asked Ziegler.

  ‘You!’ said Torrance. ‘What do you want it for?’

  Ziegler shrugged. ‘If you know what sort of soil there is, you know what plants are likely to grow in it. If you know what plants are growing, you know what butterflies are likely to feed on them.’

  ‘Sorry, prof. Our need is greater.’

  ‘Your need?’

  ‘Bum fodder.’ Torrance tucked the folder in his pack.

  ‘Awreet, let’s have you,’ said Campbell. ‘We’ve wasted enough time standing here talking as it is.’

  Leaving the Sakai tribesman, the Malay and the Tamil porters to make their way to Tanjong Malim, Torrance and his companions escorted Ziegler through the jungle, clambering down a gully where a shallow stream splashed between mossy rocks at the foot of steep banks luxuriant with ferns. At the bottom, it meandered sluggishly between banks too thickly overgrown for them to follow, but they soon found a tapir track. After another hour of hacking through the jungle, they stumbled into the rows of rubber trees on another plantation. An estate road led them to where a battery of twenty-five-pounders had been abandoned. The Quad tractors were charred and blackened wrecks, and the guns all had their breech blocks removed and their sights smashed so the Japanese could not use them.

  Torrance ran a hand along the barrel of one of the twenty-five-pounders. ‘Where the bloody hell were these when we needed them this morning?’

  ‘These are field guns, no’ anti-tank guns,’ said Campbell.

  ‘So what? Listen, mate, you ram a twenty-five-pound shell down a tank’s throat, that’s game, set and match. Nothing left to do but send for a scrap-metal merchant to pick up the pieces.’

  The estate road joined a tarmac one a little way further on: the Trunk Road. They turned left, and after another twenty minutes came to a place where they could see straight down it for several hundred yards to where three tanks stood on a concrete bridge.

  ‘That’s bleedin’ marvellous, that is,’ said Torrance. ‘Nice going, Soupy. The Japs have only gone and got here ahead of us!’

  Six

  ‘Three tanks…’ MacLeod gazed despondently to where the tanks guarded the Slim River Bridge. ‘Just sittin’ there… surely there must be summat we can do?’

  ‘Sure there is,’ said Torrance. ‘Primsie can distract them by doing the dance of the seven veils while Titch here sneaks around behind them and lobs grenades in through their hatches.’

  ‘I’m not doing that!’ said Kerr. Something in his tone suggested he was more upset by the impropriety of the suggestion than the impracticality of the plan.

  ‘Jesus bloody Christ, Primsie!’ said Campbell. ‘If you’d only learn to tell when Slugger’s trying to get a rise out o’ you…!’

  ‘Mebbe we’d better head back up the Trunk Road to Twenty-Eighth Brigade,’ said Rossi.

  ‘What good will that do?’ asked Kerr. ‘We’ll still be on the wrong side of the river.’

  ‘Aye, but there’s a railway bridge there, is there no’?’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Stands to reason. The Slim River flows frae east to west;
the railway line goes frae north to south. There must be a bridge.’

  ‘If our sappers ain’t blown it yet,’ Torrance agreed.

  ‘Well, the longer we stand here arguing about it, the greater the chance Twenty-Eighth Brigade will pull back across the river and blow the bridge behind them before we get there,’ said Campbell.

  They headed back the way they had come, passing the abandoned battery. A few hundred yards beyond that, they came to where the tents of a field ambulance stood in a clearing a short distance from the road. Judging from the bullet holes stitching the canvas, the Japanese were no respecters of the Red Cross symbol. And yet there were medical orderlies here, moving amongst rows and rows of stretcher cases: sepoys and Gurkhas with legs in splints, bandaged heads and faces riddled with shrapnel or hideously burned. Inevitably, given the holes in the canvas, a fair number of the wounded were RAMC orderlies.

  Campbell asked one of them who was in command, and was pointed in the direction of a hospital tent. Ordering the others to wait outside with Ziegler, he entered the tent.

  ‘You should ask them to take a look at your arm while we’re here,’ Torrance told MacLeod.

  The youth gazed at a man lying on the ground nearby with one leg severed at the knee, a bloody bandage wrapped over the stump. He must have been off his head on morphine, for he grinned and gave MacLeod the thumbs-up.

  ‘I widnae want to put them to any trouble,’ MacLeod demurred.

  Campbell re-emerged from the tent.

  ‘That was quick,’ said Kerr.

  ‘There wisnae much to say. The CO here says they’re staying put till they’ve dealt with all the wounded they’ve got.’

  ‘Looks like they’ve got their hands full.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Retreating into the cover of the rubber trees, the seven Argylls and their prisoner followed a course parallel to the road, heading west now.