Passage of Arms

by Eric Ambler

  One day, in the streets of Benares, he had seen a new bus that he thought he recognised as a modification of one of those listed in the catalogue. It had been just starting away and he had run for almost half a mile before he had caught up with it at a stopping place. Breathlessly he had searched for the body manufacturer’s name-plate. The bus had been moving off again before he had found it; but it had been the right plate and a wave of excitement had swept over him. From that moment, he had known exactly what he wanted to do in the world. He would operate a bus service.

  His first letter to the body manufacturer had been written from Singapore on his uncle’s business stationery. He had been aware for some time that the original catalogue from London, precious though it was and always would be, was now very much out of date. Nevertheless, the decision to send for the latest edition had not been easily taken. For some reason that he had been unable to account for, it had seemed almost like an act of treachery.

  However, the arrival of the new catalogue had given him other things to worry about. The catalogue itself had been magnificent. Unfortunately, it had been accompanied by a courteous latter from the sales manager, informing him that the company’s Far Eastern representative, Mr. W. W. Beiden, would shortly be visiting Singapore and would take that opportunity of meeting Mr. Krishnan and discussing his fleet requirements with him personally. For weeks Girija had gone in fear of W. W. Belden’s arrival at his uncle’s office and the humiliating scenes that would ensue when the truth was known. But Mr. Beiden had never come, and eventually Girija had drawn the correct conclusion. Mr. Beiden had investigated the financial status of this new prospective customer and decided not to waste his time.

  His prudence had been understandable. The cheapest twenty-four seater now cost over three thousand pounds ; almost double the price of the cheapest bus in the nineteen-thirty-six catalogue. But one thing in the new edition had caught Girija’s eye; a quotation from a trade journal devoted to the interests and activities of road transport operators. Girija had found that this journal could be obtained in Singapore, and had bought a subscription. From the articles it published he began to learn about the economics of public transportation. By the time he went to work for Mr. Wright, he had acquired a reasonably realistic view of his chances of achieving his life’s ambition. Unless he could find a working capital of at least twenty thousand dollars (Straits) his chances of starting even the most modest country bus service were non-existent.

  III

  Girija had a one-room atap house in the estate compound, and an arrangement with one of the servants at the Wrights’ bungalow to keep it clean. There were Indian families of his own caste living in a village six miles away, and on Saturdays he would cycle over there for tiffin. One of the families had an attractive daughter named Sumitra, whom he thought he would one day marry. However, during the week, the curfew kept him at home, and there he always cooked his own food. Sometimes, he would go back to the office after he had eaten his evening meal and do some more work before going to bed; at others, he would listen to Radio Malaya and read and dream.

  On the evening of the day of the ambush, he stayed late in the office trying to make up for the time he had lost by going with the burial party. The following morning he would have to drive in with Mr. Wright to the bank at Bukit Amphu to cash the weekly wages cheque, and he had not yet completed the time sheets.

  The work required care and concentration and he was glad of it; for it postponed the moment when he would have to entertain once more the dangerous thoughts which had come to him in the morning.

  The things he had observed at the scene of the ambush, and learned from the two tappers, had made it possible for him to reconstruct the recent history of the dead men with reasonable certainty.

  They had only recently arrived from the north and were relatively inexperienced. Of that he was sure. Their use of the easy route offered by the gully showed that. True, they had had a lot to carry, but that did not excuse carelessness. In an area where British patrols were being supplied by the R.A.F., a fact which they could scarcely help knowing, they had not even troubled to send scouts on ahead to feel the way, but had blundered straight into the ambush in a body.

  The Lieutenant’s opinion was that they had been on their way to mine the main road. Girija did not agree with that. The quantity of ammunition they had been carrying was out of all proportion to the needs of such an operation. And how was the lack of cooking utensils and food supplies to be explained if they were going so far from their base ? To Girija there seemed only one possible explanation. What the Lieutenant’s patrol had ambushed was a supply column on its way to deliver mines and ammunition to another gang operating farther south.

  It had been at this point in his argument with himself that Girija’s heart had begun to beat faster, and that an unpleasant sensation had come to his stomach. If his reasoning were correct it could mean only one thing. The base camp near Awang was a guerrilla arms dump.

  He finished his work, locked up the office and walked slowly back across the courtyard to his house. It was a warm, humid night. He took off his shirt and khaki drill shorts, washed himself carefully all over and then put on a dhoti. There was some lentil soup in an iron saucepan. He lit the oil burner under it and sat down to wait.

  What had disconcerted him had been not so much the nature of his thoughts, as the way in which they had presented themselves. He did not regard himself as being fundamentally honest or dishonest, idealistic or corrupt, law-abiding or delinquent. He did not think of himself as definable in such terms. His dilemmas had always been capable of resolution into simple questions of choice. Choice A would be wise (advantageous). Choice B would be stupid (disadvantageous). The discovery that his mind could explore enthusiastically the possibility of his committing a major crime, with only a belated and distasteful glance at the path of rectitude, had been disturbing.

  And a major crime it undoubtedly would be.

  He had heard about these dumps and caches. It was known that the arms were brought in by professional smugglers operating from beyond the Thai border and employing different routes from those used by the guerrillas. A number of consignments had been intercepted; but it was generally believed that a far greater number always got through. Terrorists captured far to the south in the Kuala Lumpur area had been found to be in possession of substantial quantities of weapons, ammunition and explosives of the same pattern as those intercepted in the north. It was said that there were not enough troops in the whole of Malaya to patrol the border with Thailand effectively.

  Just before the burial party had finished its work that morning the Malay sergeant and four more soldiers had arrived with packing crates strung on bamboo poles. When the ammunition and grenades had been loaded into the crates, they were taken off to the compound. While the machine pistols were being gathered up, Girija had asked the sergeant a question.

  The sergeant had looked down at the machine pistol in his hands and shrugged. “How should I know what they cost?”

  “But don’t you know how much your own cost, Sergeant? Supposing a man lost one.”

  “He would be court-martialled.”

  “But surely he would have stoppages of pay, too?”

  “Oh yes. Two hundred dollars perhaps.”

  “So much?”

  “They do not grow on trees.”

  The sergeant had gone. Girija had turned and looked at the row of graves. Each man had had a machine pistol; and ammunition was costly stuff. It was more than likely that what the ten men had been carrying between them was worth anything up to three thousand dollars. It would be interesting to know how much more there was where that had come from.

  The soup began to bubble. He poured it into a bowl and, when it had cooled a little, began to eat.

  The penalty for being found in the illegal possession of arms was death. Whether or not knowledge of the whereabouts of smuggled arms would constitute possession, and whether concealment of such knowledge carried the same
penalty he did not know. One thing was clear. The illegal selling of smuggled arms would certainly be a hanging matter; at least while the emergency regulations remained in force. The best thing he could do was to go to Mr. Wright immediately and make a clean breast of the matter.

  But a clean breast of what matter? He did not really know anything about an arms dump. He only believed one to be there. And where was ‘there’ ? Assuming that his deductions were correct, the dump was concealed in an area of jungle covering at least three square miles. It might prove quite impossible to find. Mr. Wright would not thank him for starring a wild goose chase, and neither would the police. When the time came for him to apply for a local bus service franchise they might remember the trouble he had caused and hold it against him. No. The best thing he could do was nothing.

  He finished his soup and felt better. He was an innocent man again quietly digesting his evening meal. What did he want with smuggled arms? Could he ever have sold them? Of course not. Who would buy? And supposing others knew of the dump, if dump there were. Ten men had been killed; but supposing that other members of the guerrilla band had stayed behind. It might be highly dangerous to start searching in the area for their camp. Besides, there was always a chance that one or two of the men living at Awang already knew where it was. Not a very big chance perhaps; the guerrillas would not have trusted their unwilling hosts to that extent; but someone might have found out by chance. Naturally, no man or woman from the village would dare to go to the police with the information; or not immediately anyway. A decent interval would have to elapse before the dump could be discovered ‘accidentally’. More likely it would just be forgotten. And that perhaps was what he would do; forget about it. After all, he could always remember again later, if he wanted to.

  There was a metal trunk in one corner of the room. In it he kept his catalogues and trade papers, and the schedule of a projected daily bus service linking ten of the principal rubber estates in the district with Bukit Amphu sixteen miles away. He took the schedule out, read it through very carefully, and then began to make one or two long-contemplated modifications.

  IV

  A month went by before Girija made any move to locate the arms dump.

  There had been no reports of any special patrol activity in the district, and guerrilla attacks in the province had been concentrated on areas nearer the coast. He had watched the men from Awang carefully without detecting anything unusual in their demeanour. But such reassurances came mingled with doubt. If no dump had been discovered, it could well be for the simple reason that none existed.

  It was, in fact, the growing conviction that he must have been mistaken that gave him the courage he needed to go on. If there were nothing to find, he argued, there could be nothing incriminating in the search.

  The first part of his plan called for a satisfactory cover for repeated visits to the Awang area. He might avoid going through the village itself, but he would have to use a mile or more of the road leading to it. Encounters with men who knew him, and who might gossip or ask questions, would be inevitable. The difficulty had seemed insurmountable at first; but finally he had had an idea.

  The latex produced by the estate went thirty miles by road down to the port of Kuala Pangkalan and from there was shipped to Singapore. Since the emergency, the trucks from the coast had had to be provided with armoured car escorts, and, consequently, did not make the journey so often. Mr. Wright had been talking for some time, and writing to Singapore, about the need for additional storage sheds. The Singapore office had been reluctant to authorise the expenditure. Girija’s idea was to make the new sheds an excuse for his trips to Awang.

  Near the abandoned mine workings there were a number of derelict corrugated-iron buildings which had been used as offices, stores and repair shops. Girija wrote to the head office of the mining company in Kota Bharu, and asked permission to inspect the property with a possible view to making an offer for the material of the buildings.

  He did not tell Mr. Wright. If Mr. Wright found out no great harm would be done. Indeed, Mr. Wright would probably give him a pat on the back for his zeal and initiative in attempting to solve the problem of the new storage sheds. But Mr. Wright would also tell him something he already knew; that the mining company’s rust-eaten buildings were not worth the cost of dismantling them, and that it would be a waste of time for him to go and inspect them.

  The mining company replied with understandable enthusiasm that Mr. Krishnan had their full permission to inspect the buildings any time he liked. That was all he needed. No one person he might encounter there would know exactly how many visits of inspection he had made, nor how many might be necessary. It would be assumed that he was acting on Mr. Wright’s instructions. If he were ever challenged he could produce the letter.

  The following Sunday he cycled out to Awang. Just short of the village, he turned off the road on to the overgrown track which led to the mining company’s property. He met nobody on the way.

  Ground sluicing had cleared some twenty acres of land in the bend of the river. No topsoil had been left for the jungle to reclaim and the brown scars of the workings were still visible beneath a thin film of scrub and weed. Girija walked along the river bank until he came to the shell of a building that had housed a big rotary pump, and went through the motions of inspecting it and taking notes. This was for the benefit of anyone who might have seen him and was watching from across the river. After a few minutes he moved away, circling out of sight of the river bank until he reached the cover of some trees.

  He had thought long and carefully about the problems of searching the area. The only large-scale map which covered it, and to which he might ordinarily have had access, was an ordnance survey sheet marked with the estate boundary lines. Unfortunately, a strict security regulation governed the distribution and custody of such maps at that time, and it had to be kept by Mr. Wright in his personal safe. Girija was forced to rely on his none too vivid recollection of it.

  The picture in his mind was one of three parallel ridges, rather like steps, with contour lines very close together. That meant, he knew, that the sides of the ridges were steep and that there were deep ravines between them. It was not much to go on ; but it was something. He did not believe that even inexperienced men would choose the floor of a ravine for a base camp, any more than they would choose to perch on the summit of a ridge. To that extent the likely areas of search were limited. And there was another factor to be considered. Even if they had had only small quantities of arms and ammunition to store, they would have tried to find a place for them which gave some protection from the weather. He thought it unlikely that there were caves there; but on the steeper hillsides there would be sizeable hollows made during the monsoons, when the heavier trees fell and tore their roots out of the ground. Such hollows could easily be made into shelters. All in all, it seemed sensible to start the search by working along the upper slopes.

  He attempted to do so; and that first Sunday expedition was very nearly the last. It took him an hour to climb three hundred yards up the side of the first ridge, and almost as long to get down again. He tore his clothes, scratched his arms and legs, and ended by becoming completely exhausted. He also became frightened. If some patrolling policeman were to ask him to account for the tears and scratches, he would be hard put to it to invent a convincing explanation.

  He succeeded in getting back to his house unobserved; but the experience had thoroughly unnerved him and he decided to abandon the whole project. For several days he did succeed in putting it out of his mind. Then, as the scratches on his arms and legs began to heal, he began to think again. None of the ambushed men had had scratches on the arms and legs. That meant that they must have found an easy route to and from their hiding place. The beauty of this deduction restored his confidence.

  The next time he made no attempt to penetrate the jungle. Instead he worked his way round the fringes of it looking for easy ways in. He found several and noted them for future re
ference.

  The following Sunday he began a systematic probe. He had learned well from his initial mistake. When the going became too hard, he made no attempt to force a path through, but went back and tried a different or more circuitous way. He knew by now that he could never hope to cover anything like the whole area; but he had become philosophical about the search ; it was a kind of game now, and although he did not expect to win, he had not yet reached the point of conceding his defeat.

  Eight weeks after he began, he received his first piece of encouragement. He had been following a dry stream bed up a fold in a hillside. On both sides there were cane thickets of a kind he had learned to avoid. It was useless to try and push your way through. You had to go round them; and they often covered wide areas. Then, as the stream bed bore away sharply to the left, he paused. There were a few pieces of dead cane lying on the ground. At first he thought that they had been broken away by some animal grubbing for food among the roots. Then he saw that they had been cut.

  He stood still for a moment, staring. There was no mistaking the marks on the cane. They had been made by a metal cutting-edge. He examined the border of the thicket carefully. For a distance of about two feet the cane was thinner and greener, and near the ground he could see short stumps of older cane in amongst the new growth. At some time in the not too distant past, someone had cleared a path there.

  It was getting late, and he was a mile and a half or more from the tin workings and the shed where he had left his bicycle. He decided to leave further investigation until the following Sunday. During the week, on the pretext of checking an inventory, he went to the tool store, borrowed one of the long chopping knives, called a parang, that the estate workers used for clearing underbrush, and hid it in his room. On Sunday morning he wrapped the parang in newspaper, tied it to the cross-bar of his bicycle and set off early for Awang.