by Shaun Clarke
The first hour was easy, a casual stroll in single file through the forest, kicking up loose leaves, feeling grateful for the shade. However, when they reached the edge of the swamp, the trees closed in upon them, forming an almost impenetrable wall that had to be hacked away with the parangs. The ground became more marshy, squelching underfoot, making walking more laborious and exhausting. After they had been only thirty minutes in the swamp, the normal forest disappeared, the sky was blocked out, and the air became suffocatingly humid. Even worse, it was filled with whining flies, mosquitoes, midges, flying beetles, the occasional hornet and other equally ravenous insects that attacked noisily, viciously and constantly, further distracting the men from what they were doing. Unlike the jungle, the swamp offered a constant chorus of croaking, squawking, clicking, drumming and sudden, startling rustling in the undergrowth. This in particular made the troopers jumpy, even causing them to raise their weapons suddenly, preparing to fire.
Gradually the wet ground became even more marsh-like, turning to mud, slopping over their boots, soaking their trouser legs, and giving every impression of turning into dangerous quicksands. Walking became even more difficult and soon rendered most of them breathless. Within an hour, the mud had turned to rust-brown water that became deeper with every step they took. Three hours later, when every man in the squadron was soaked with sweat, he was also wading hip-deep in water and forced to hold his personal weapon either across his chest or above his head. Both positions placed tremendous strain on the arms, causing sharp pains to dart along them, from shoulder to wrist.
Already the trek was leading them along river banks and through more muddy water, the depth of which varied from shin to neck height. Those parts of the body that were submerged were the prey of fat swamp leeches which, as Marty knew, could consume as much as half a pint of blood before being detected. Also, when the men came to high ground that brought them out of the water, they became the target for the malarial mosquito and similar insects. Before long, even Marty, who prided himself on being tough, was beginning to think that he was, as Kearney had forewarned them all, in hell on earth.
Their trials were made no easier by the fact that they were not allowed to speak on the march for fear that lurking guerrillas might overhear them or that their voices might hide the sounds of an approaching enemy. Using only sign language, they were forced in upon themselves, thus distracted even more by the sounds all around them, particularly the sudden, sharp rustling that indicated movement in the undergrowth, caused by snakes, swamp pigs, monkeys and rats as big as squirrels.
By mid-afternoon, the humidity was appalling, making the men pour more sweat and feel suffocated or nauseous, less capable of coherent thought and quick reactions. This only made many of them more anxious about the unseen CTs and suspicious of every unfamiliar sound in the teeming undergrowth.
Before last light they looked for somewhere to lay up, but even where there wasn’t waist-deep, muddy water, the ground was too marshy to be used. So they were compelled to lie in hammocks slung from the trees, mere centimetres above the water, kept awake by the swamp’s nocturnal racket, by the countless insects that buzzed and whined about them all night, and by the fear that snakes, venomous spiders or other creepy-crawlies would fall onto them from the dense foliage above.
When, at first light, Marty rolled off his hammock to commence the new day, he felt even more exhausted and bruised than he had been before resting.
‘I feel a hundred years old,’ he told Tone. ‘You’re not alone,’ Tone said. The deeper into the swamp they went, the worse it became. Each day, from the steamy mists of dawn to the damp, chilling dusk, they had to force their way through stinking mud, rotting vegetation, and thorny branches, sometimes wading neck-deep in the marsh channels, other times practically swimming across open water, under drooping coils of vine, rattan and giant, razor-sharp leaves that cut arms and faces, driving the insects into a frenzy and giving the growing number of fat leeches even more blood to feed upon.
Within a couple of days, Marty could smell the swamp on himself, his rotting clothes adding to the general stench and hanging ever more loosely on his shrinking physique. Tone looked the same. In fact, everyone was losing weight – not only because of the heat and humidity, the relentless grind of hacking away the foliage and wading through debris-filled, mud-thickened swamp water, but also because they were unable to use their portable stoves to cook decent food and instead had to rely on high-calorie rations, which were cold, dry and tasteless.
Adding to their increasing frustration was the continuing lack of contact with the enemy. Frequently they came across jungle hides recently vacated by the CT, but the guerrillas themselves were not to be seen. Finally, realizing that the guerrillas knew they were being followed and were keeping well ahead by continuing on across the swamp, Lieutenant Kearney decided to block their escape by asking for another SAS squadron, backed up with SF soldiers, to be dropped north of the swamp, where they could form a cordon and then move in on the CT as B Squadron advanced from the south.
‘We’ll box them in,’ he explained. Contacting HQ Jahore, he was informed that, while his plan was approved, the required SAS and SF forces were presently on patrol in the jungles around Jahore, so would not be available for another couple of days. In the meantime, B Squadron was to continue its pursuit of the CT as best it could.
Satisfied that the blocking party would be forthcoming, Kearney ordered the march to continue. This time, the route brought them to a river where Marty, now an expert tracker trained by the Sakai, noticed small piles of broken branches and loose leaves sprinkled over human footsteps, indicating that some men in bare feet had hiked north, trying to cover their tracks as they retreated towards the centre of the swamp.
Immensely frustrated by this endless marching, some of the men wanted to follow the CT’s footprints. However, pointing out that it would soon be last light and that this was a relatively dry area, Kearney suggested that it would be safer to basha down for the night. While they were doing so, a three-man patrol consisting of troopers especially skilled in jungle tracking would follow the camouflaged footprints to check if the CT were still in the vicinity.
‘That means me and Trooper Butler,’ Bulldog said, pleasing Marty. ‘And I think we should take Taff along– him and his crossbow. That weapon could come in handy.’
‘Right,’ Kearney said. ‘Three it is.’ Pleased to have something more challenging to do than the endless hiking, Marty held his SLR at the ready and followed the other two into the swamp’s forest, bringing up the rear as Tail-end Charlie, with Bulldog out front on point. Leaving the relative space and dry ground near the riverbank, they ran almost immediately into a stretch of belukar where the thickets of thorn, bracken and bamboo, almost impenetrable in themselves, were covered with the leathery mengkuang. The pointed blades of the dense undergrowth slashed Marty’s face and hands, drawing blood and attracting even more insects. About half an hour later, just as the blood was congealing, he sank, chest deep, into muddy water and felt the leeches sticking to his legs and hands.
Continuing to wade through the water, holding his SLR above his head, he temporarily froze when a geometrically patterned snake, the venomous Malay pit viper, emerged from the vegetation by his right elbow, slithered across the branch floating directly in front of him, then disappeared into the thick foliage to his left. He was seriously relieved when, after continuing to wade through the swamp, behind the other two, the ground started sloping upward, letting him rise gradually out of the water.
Back on marshy ground, he followed the others deeper into the forested swamp, tormented by the many leeches still feeding on his blood. With no time to stop and remove them, he just kept advancing, checking every leaf and branch, detouring only when faced with something threatening in the undergrowth: another snake, a venomous spider, sleeping vampire bats, giant centipedes, and nests of hornets whose sting, when not actually fatal, could be horribly painful.
Unexpectedly
, he saw a silent hand signal from Taff up front, who in turn had received it from Bulldog out on point, indicating that they should stop advancing and go down on one knee. When Marty did so, he saw Taff signalling that he should advance silently at the half-crouch. Even as he was signalling Marty, Taff was doing the same: making his way up to the kneeling Bulldog and then dropping beside him. When Marty also reached them, going down on one knee, he saw the back of a man kneeling at the far side of a short stretch of swamp water, examining the ground around his bare feet. Though dressed like a Chinese coolie, but with a military cap on his head, he was holding a British M1 rifle – a sure sign that he was one of the guerrillas.
Not wanting to fire his shotgun, which would have alerted the other CT in the area, Bulldog indicated with a nod of his head that Taff should despatch the guerrilla with his crossbow. Smiling dreamily, Taff removed the weapon as quietly as possible from where it was strapped across his Bergen. Still kneeling, he cocked the weapon, inserted a lightweight alloy bolt and arrow, then prepared to fire.
At that moment, a large spider, about the size of a human hand, materialized eerily from under the leaves and climbed onto Taff’s boot. Though Marty felt his skin crawling with helpless revulsion and dread, Taff merely glanced down and watched with academic interest as the giant spider crossed over the toe of his boot, moved up the laces and onto his leg, to just above the ankle, then changed its mind and turned back down to scurry off the other side of the boot and disappear under the carpet of leaves.
Marty let his breath out while Taff, still looking unconcerned, quietly raised the crossbow. The guerrilla was still kneeling, studying the ground around him. Taff took aim along the sights of the crossbow, then pressed the trigger, sending the alloy bolt and arrow racing through the air and straight into the back of the guerrilla’s neck.
The man quivered violently as if whipped, then stood up and turned around to face the river, looking very surprised. He gripped the bolt with his right hand, tried to tug it out, winced and stopped, then shuddered and sank unsteadily to his knees, where he convulsed and fell face down in the mud. For a few seconds, he shook like an epileptic, then he was still.
Marty heard a rustling noise in the undergrowth behind him. Looking back over his shoulder, he was relieved to see a mournful Roy Weatherby emerging from the ulu, along the overgrown trail that Marty and the others had avoided. Assuming that Weatherby had been sent out to give the team a message, Marty was just about to wave him down when, to his horror, he saw that an enormous log, impregnated with long nails and sharpened hardwood spikes, had been suspended above the trail on a rope that formed a trip-wire.
Unable to call a warning, knowing it was too late anyway, Marty and the others could only look on in horror as Weatherby tripped over the rope. He stumbled as the rest of the rope rapidly unravelled and the heavy, spiked log fell upon him, instantly crushing him, giving him multiple stab wounds, and pinning his mangled body to the ground. He hadn’t even had time to scream.
‘Shit!’ Marty whispered, then advanced at the half - crouch, his heart racing and his throat dry, now checking his surroundings even more carefully, until he reached Weatherby. The unfortunate trooper had been flattened under the spiked log and pressed deeply into the mud. Blood was squirting out of his numerous stab wounds and soaking him thoroughly.
Marty didn’t have to check that Weatherby was dead, but as Bulldog and Taff approached he looked for the dead man’s weapon, failed to find it, and assumed that it must have been buried under him.
Even Bulldog winced when he saw Weatherby’s crushed body and multiple stab wounds, but Taff, gazing down with unblinking curiosity, merely said, ‘That was pretty stupid of him. He should have been more careful.’
‘So should that poor fucker who’s just had your steel bolt and arrow through his neck,’ Bulldog responded. ‘Now get over there and check the surrounding area, then report back to me.’
Smiling dreamily, Taff waded through the short stretch of swamp. He frisked the dead guerrilla, withdrew some papers from inside his smock, then disappeared into the ulu to reconnoitre the surrounding area.
‘The Chinese Chopper,’ Bulldog explained to Marty, describing the booby trap, deliberately keeping his voice neutral to disguise his revulsion.
‘Can we roll it off him?’ Marty asked, still feeling shocked and unwilling to look back down at that awful sight.
‘I doubt it,’ Bulldog said, ‘but we can certainly try.’
They tried, but failed – the spiked log was just too heavy– so instead they simply checked out both sides of the track, then waited for Taff to return. By the time he did so, a mass of black flies and other insects were already buzzing and whining frenziedly over Weatherby’s bloody head. Red ants were crawling in and out of his open mouth, up his nose, into his eyes and ears.
‘Well?’ Bulldog asked of Taff. ‘Anything out there?’
Taff shook his head from side to side. ‘Nope.’ He glanced down at the insects swarming all over Weatherby, but registered only mild curiosity. Looking up again, he smiled and handed Bulldog the personal papers he had found on the dead guerrilla.
‘Not a single CT. I guess the others moved on.’
‘Then let’s head back to the hide. There’s nothing we can do here for Weatherby, so we might as well leave him. The uluwill bury him soon enough.’
‘What’s left of him,’ Taff said.
Treading carefully around the dreadful mess on the forest floor, they made their way back to the hide by the river. There, they found most of the men asleep in a wide variety of jungle bashas, with Lieutenant Kearney resting on a bamboo raft that was floating in the middle of the river and tied to a tree on the bank. While Bulldog waded out into the river to give his report to Kearney, Marty and Taff each made themselves a triangular shelter with ground sheets and stick supports, fixing the ends of the sheets with string and short wooden stakes. Then, absolutely exhausted and, at least in Marty’s case, shocked, they lay down and slept.
Chapter Twelve
Moving out the next morning, the men of the patrol had to make their way across the hellish swamp to where the dead Roy Weatherby was still pinned beneath the spiked log, his crushed body now rendered even more repulsive by being covered in congealed blood, bloated flies and red ants, his face already half eaten away by the latter. No one really wanted to touch him, but some of the men, at Lieutenant Kearney’s insistence, rolled the log off him and buried him in a shallow grave, forced to beat the flies away as they did so.
Once the body was covered up, the patrol moved on across the short stretch of swamp to where the CT guerilla was still lying face down in the mud with Taff’s alloy bolt and arrow through his neck, protruding front and rear, the congealed blood around it also attracting swarms of flies and an army of red ants. Even more revolting was the fact that some animal from the ulu had fed off the corpse, tearing an arm from the shoulder joint and carrying it off to its lair. The bloody stump of the arm had become a virtual ants’ nest, but was being attacked by many different kinds of insect. As no one volunteered to bury him, he was left there to rot.
‘What’s left of him will disappear soon enough,’ Bulldog rationalized to those within earshot, possibly because he felt guilty. ‘There won’t even be bones left.’
‘More efficient than cremation,’ Pat O’Connor retorted, his dark eyes flashing with grim mirth.
‘Very funny,’ Tone said.
After that they were silent, marching deeper into the swamp, leaving the dead men well behind and keeping their eyes peeled for other booby traps. In the event, they had only hiked another hour when Bulldog, still on point, saw another Chinese Chopper across the trail. Stepping aside, he let Pat O’Connor put it out of action by shooting the rope to shreds with a couple of sustained bursts from his submachine gun, enabling the viciously spiked log to crash to the ground, crushing only leaves and red ants.
‘That could have been you, Sarge,’ Rob Roy said with a wide, cheeky grin.
Not long after, they came across a thatch-and-palm lean-to once used by some guerrillas, as could be seen from a pile of ant-covered chicken bones, turtle shells covered in swarms of flies, decaying vegetables, and a couple of line drawings showing various routes through the swamp. Excited, Corporal Len Dexter bent down to pick up the maps.
‘Don’t touch them!’ Bulldog bellowed, then threw himself out of the lean-to as a hidden fragmentation grenade, unpinned by a trip wire fixed to the phony maps, exploded with a deafening roar, hurling Dexter backwards in a fountain of loose soil, his flesh shredded by razor-sharp, red-hot shrapnel that set fire to the few parts of the lean-to not blown apart.
The scorched, shredded Dexter was stretched out on his back, shuddering spasmodically and screaming like an animal as Bulldog picked himself up and wiped soil from his face.
‘Damn!’ he exclaimed, then turned to the other men. ‘Don’t ever touch anything!’ he bawled. ‘Check everything first!’ He went down on one knee beside the screaming Dexter, studied the scorched, shredded flesh, and was clearly wondering what to do about him when he coughed up a mess of blood and phlegm, then shuddered one last time and died, evacuating his bowels with his final breath.
‘Jesus!’ Rob Roy whispered, licking his lips, glancing down at the dead man and turning as white as a sheet. ‘Jesus Christ! What kind of war is this?’
‘The kind that’ll become more commonplace in the future,’ Kearney wearily told him.
After burying Dexter in a shallow scrape, the patrol moved on. Forced to follow the river, they encountered a lot of snakes where they were sheltering in the relative cool of the muddy banks. As it was now clear that the CT knew the British were here, the men were no longer concerned with maintaining silence and either despatched the aggressive snakes with short bursts from their semi-automatic weapons or sliced through them with the parangs.