by Nick Elliott
I’d learned that the island of Tung Ping Chau where we were headed, had a chequered history. Guns and opium had been smuggled from here since way back. Then in the war it had been used as a staging post to smuggle a one-legged Nationalist Chinese admiral out of Hong Kong along with a dozen or so British soldiers and sailors. Later, in the seventies and eighties, the route across the channel to the island was one that illegal immigrants used in their bid for freedom and a better life in Hong Kong. Swimming, many died from shark attacks or drowned from exhaustion. Others paid snakeheads to take them across by speedboat only to be picked up by the Hong Kong Marine Police and returned to the mainland. My father would certainly have been involved in the early days of those operations.
The route was still used for smuggling but tonight the waters seemed quiet between Zau Zai Tau and Tung Ping Chau, which I could make out as a black silhouette a mile away across the channel.
Mr Au cast us off from the jetty and we accelerated away with an ear-splitting roar, leaving a bright opalescent wake behind us. I found a seat and clung on. After a few moments I looked back to the shore. Mr Au was waving. I couldn’t tell whether it was a farewell or a warning. I waved back. Then I saw what he was waving at. Coming round the headland to our north was another craft, bigger than ours, much bigger. She was a sleek, modern-looking cutter, white-hulled with the distinctive blue-red-blue diagonal hull stripes of the China Coast Guard.
The cutter wasn’t making anything like the speed we were, but despite that she had an advantage. The distance from the headland, round which she had appeared, to Tung Ping Chau was only half our own distance to the island. They could intercept us before we were halfway across the channel unless we outmanoeuvred them.
Iron Maiden opened the throttle further and the boat surged forward. The Coast Guard cutter was no more than half a mile from us now and, so long as we held our present course, would close on us. We altered course towards the south, still heading for the island, and as we did so a cacophony of high-pitched Cantonese reached us above the noise of our engines. Ignoring what I assumed was a warning to stop, Iron Maiden turned back and gestured for me to get down. The gap between our two vessels was still narrowing and unless we overshot the island altogether, we were going to continue closing. I guessed we were already well within range of their guns.
Then Iron Maiden did what I’d been hoping he’d do. He turned away from the island altogether and headed south into the open waters of Mirs Bay. We were tearing along now on a straight course for the Sai Kung Peninsula.
The threat of interception was gone and we were gaining ground away from the cutter, but as it seemed we were getting clear they started firing. At first their machine gun was well off target but as they found the range rounds began spitting into the water all around us. I lay in the bottom of the boat but it afforded little protection. It was only a matter of time before they scored a hit, and when they did it took out one of the outboards which stopped with an ominous grinding sound.
Iron Maiden was not deterred. He was weaving the boat, zig-zagging through the darkness but still keeping an even distance from the cutter.
I risked a look ahead and could make out lights on Sai Kung Peninsula. We were heading for more islands now but still taking fire. Once past these little islands they would provide cover. Our boat was quick and manoeuvrable and Iron Maiden handled it with confident skill. We dodged behind the first of the islands in what I knew to be the entrance to Tolo Harbour. The cutter’s gunfire stopped and as I looked I saw her turning back.
Despite the one country-two systems relationship with China, Hong Kong’s territorial waters still prevailed and extended for three nautical miles from its coastline. The Chinese Coast Guard cutter had almost certainly violated the law, technically at least, and the skipper wouldn’t have wanted to create any more of an incident.
Iron Maiden put me ashore at some steps alongside a busy road under a row of high-rise tower blocks. I handed him a thousand Hong Kong dollars as a bonus. He seemed happy with that. Whoever employed him would take care of the ruined outboard I hoped.
So much for the nice quiet entry I’d been promised I thought as I watched him pull away. I couldn’t have made more of a commotion if I’d landed in Statue Square under a Union Jack parachute trailing red smoke flares behind me.
At least I was back in Hong Kong, but Ronnie Eastfield had arranged for me to be picked up on Tung Ping Chau. Now I was in Sai Kung. I found a small park with trees and a children’s playground. It was one o’clock in the morning and the place was deserted. I sat down on a bench and opened the bag to get at my phone. Inside Mr Au had placed a Glock pistol and a box containing a thousand nine millimetre rounds. No wonder it had seemed heavy. I wondered where he’d got this little arsenal from and whether he thought I was planning to start a war. Had this been Claire’s doing?
I called Ronnie and explained what had happened. He had already heard from his gofer who’d witnessed the incident from where he’d been waiting for me on the island we’d just overshot.
‘No problem,’ he said, his voice slurred either by sleep or alcohol. ‘I’ll come and get you.’
He collected me an hour later in his dilapidated army Land Rover that he’d picked up cheap when the British garrison had left town twenty years before. It was open to the elements with a fold-down windscreen and a spare wheel screwed onto the bonnet. It belched black exhaust fumes and sounded like a Spitfire taking off. That was Ronnie: his whole persona would allay the doubts of even the most suspicious adversary but this was not a contrived façade, just the way he was.
We drove back to his place and sat on his balcony with our beers looking across Hebe Haven as we had a few weeks earlier. Ronnie had been told of Zoe’s abduction and I filled in the detail before moving on to my father’s notebooks, and my meetings with the Firth Bank and Tim Younger.
I placed the little Buddha statue on the table between the San Miguel bottles. He picked it up. ‘I remember this,’ he said, turning it in his hand. ‘Your dad kept it on his desk in his office.’
‘Where did he get it from?’
‘Buggered if I know, but there’s someone you’ll be meeting tomorrow who might.’
Ronnie had been vetted by the IMTF and we were going to be working closely together, but I needed to be setting the priorities.
‘Right, Ronnie, our first task is to find Zoe. Is the Toyama Maru still around?’ I’d told him that I believed that would be the most likely place they’d have taken her.
‘Vanished,’ he said. ‘And before you ask, her AIS is switched off so there’s no easy way of tracing her unless the IMTF can spot her via satellite.’
‘I’ll ask Claire about that. So who are we seeing tomorrow that’s so important?’
‘A man with a very distressing story to tell. Oh, and Susanna Buchan will be there.’
Chapter 20
Leaning forward he pointed a crooked finger at me. His hand shook. In fact his whole body trembled.
‘James Brodie, 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots.’ The Royal Scots had been the oldest regiment in the British Army raised over four hundred years ago. But they’d been merged with the other Scottish infantry regiments some years earlier. I didn’t tell him this.
We were sitting in Brodie’s private room at a nursing home in the New Territories. Seated beside me was a middle-aged Catholic nurse called Sister Alice, and on the other side of Brodie’s bed were Ronnie Eastfield and Susanna Buchan. Brodie himself was slumped in a wheelchair beside his bed. He wore striped pyjamas and a red dressing gown. Perched on his head was his regiment’s black woollen Glengarry cap with badge and a red and white band round it.
Ronnie had tracked down the only survivor of the Japanese prison camp at Sham Shui Po still living in Hong Kong. Not only that, Brodie had survived the sinking of the Lady Monteith. He was ninety-four years old and his memory, at least his long-term memory, seemed to be intact.
We spent an hour and a half with him. At times I worried
I was pressing him too hard but he didn't seem to mind, despite the appalling memories he was dredging up. I was reluctant to dwell on the brutality of his time in the camp, the atrocious conditions or the horrors of those final hours trapped under deck with hundreds of other POWs who had been herded onto the ship and down into the hold. But Brodie didn't shy away from any of it. It was almost as if he had to relive it.
‘Sham Shui Po was bad enough. Conditions were dreadful there. The rice we were fed was sweepings off the warehouse floor - had all sorts of rubbish in with it including weevils and worms. There was diphtheria. I can still hear them coughing. They sounded like dogs barking. Then it would paralyse them. We lost a lot from that.’
He started coughing himself, as if in sympathy with his fellow inmates.
‘The reprisals were wicked, if anyone escaped or tried to. Don’t want to talk about that. Savage, it was. I signed the no-escape chit, you ken. Was like a promise not to try and escape. I knew what would happen if I didn’t sign. I saw what the Japs did to some of the poor bastards. Beatings, and much worse.’ He pulled off his Glengarry and put it on his lap. ‘Quite a few of our lot refused to sign the no-escape. Hard men. And they were the first to be shipped off to Japan to work in the mines. We thought they might get better fed ‘cause they’d be working so they’d need to be kept fit. Turned out to be wrong. They were worked to death.’
‘How long were you in Sham Shui Po?’ I asked.
‘We surrendered on Christmas Day ’41. I was there until end of ’43. Best part of two years. But they weren’t all bad bastards. I remember we’d go foraging in the brush around the camp, mainly grasshoppers we’d get to boil with the rice. I was out there one day when I see this Jap officer on the other side of the fence. “What do you want?” he says. I thought he was challenging me, then he asked again and I just said, “Bread.” First thing I thought of. I’m out there the next day and there he is. It was winter and he’s wearing his long coat. He looks about then pulls a couple of loaves out and tosses them over the wire. I’d keep an eye out for him after that. He used to give us bread once or twice a week. Then he stopped. Never knew what happened to him.
‘But if we thought the camp was bad that ship was worse. Herded like cattle. Some of us were almost dead on our feet. Not me, ken,’ he said looking at me, proud that he’d retained his spirit if not his health.
‘The Lady Monteith: the very name of that boat gives me the shivers. She looked alright as ships go. But we were put into the hold. Crammed in like sardines; herded like cattle.’ He cackled then began coughing again. Sister Agnes bent over him wiping his mouth with a tissue. He brushed aside her fussing. I used the interruption to steer him onto the question of the ship’s cargo.
‘When you were being herded aboard, Jim, did you notice anything about the cargo? Or hear anything about it?’
‘Aye, we did.’ His old eyes lit up for a moment. ‘See, the ship’s crew were Japs but they weren’t like the soldiers. It was the soldiers were the worst, brutal bastards. But the ship’s crew were more reasonable. A few of our boys had picked up some Japanese lingo in the camp, believe it or not. I was with some of my pals. One of them, Archie, asks this Jap crewman for a cigarette. Secretly, ken? He gives us a packet of ciggies. Archie gets talking with him. Asks what the crates are on the hatches. We’d seen them when we boarded. We’re in a hold just for us POWs but she was a big ship, ken? And on one of the hatches they’d lashed a big crate, really big. So Archie had seen it and asks what’s in it. And the Jap goes all cagey like. Then he says there’s all sorts loaded in the hold. And on deck is a gold statue. At least, that’s what they reckoned. Said it’d been made to look like stone, but why ship stone statues back to Japan?’
‘What was the statue then?’
‘Didnae ken at the time but later we heard it were a Buddha from some temple. It’d been loaded before the ship came to pick us lot up.’
Brodie was tiring now, I could see. His breath was rasping and Sister Alice was casting warning looks in my direction. But he hadn’t finished.
‘The whole lot went down with the ship, and us lot trapped in that hold. We were only an hour out of Hong Kong. Sailed straight into that American sub’s line of fire. They had no way of knowing POWs were on board. They were supposed to paint the ship white with a red cross on the side but the Japs weren’t interested in the Geneva Convention were they. But that same Jap sailor who’d given us the ciggies pulls back the canvas in one corner of the hatch, then he opens up the hatch cover. There’s a ladder and we all start scrambling for it. Then one of our officers gets us organised. The ship’s listing heavily by this time but lucky for us, once we get up on deck we could just jump for it over the ship’s rail.
‘We just swim for it to get away from the ship before she comes down on us. I cannae remember how long we were in the water but eventually I was picked up by a Chinese fishing boat and taken to one of the islands. I found out later that only sixty-one out of over three hundred of us POWs survived the sinking. The Jap sailors and soldiers? I dinnae ken.’ His head sagged. He was done in and I didn’t want to push him any further.
Brodie had ended up back where he’d started – in Sham Shi Po POW camp. It had all happened late in 1943. Within a few weeks he was shipped off to Japan ending the war half-starved in a POW camp there. He and the other prisoners were rescued by the Americans and began their long journey home. Eventually he’d returned to Hong Kong, joined the Royal Hong Kong Police and married a Chinese girl. I wondered if my father had known of his story.
Before we left I crouched down beside him and held his frail old hands. ‘Thanks, Jim,’ I said. ‘You’re some man right enough.’
Chapter 21
Susanna Buchan hadn’t spoken much while we were with Jim Brodie. ‘Can we talk?’ she asked now as we left the nursing home.
‘Sure. What about Ronnie here?’
‘No just you and me, if that’s okay?’ she added turning to Ronnie.
Ronnie didn’t look too concerned and I said I’d be in touch.
‘You know you can kip down at my place, any time,’ he said and with that he rattled off down the road in his Land Rover as we climbed into the back of a large black Mercedes and glided off, cocooned in leather and soft Oriental music.
‘Do you recognise this music?’ she asked. ‘It’s from Vietnam, where I come from.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’ll tell you over dinner, if you’re free?’
‘I’m free.’
We went to the Beas River Country Club, set amongst rolling hills in the northern part of the New Territories. Susanna was greeted at the door in much the same way I’d seen her and her stepfather welcomed at the Hong Kong Club.
‘Drinks first,’ she said leading the way to the bar. She ordered a Margarita for herself and a Martini for me. I sensed an over-eagerness from the barman. He wasn’t being obsequious, he was just entranced by her. It wasn’t so much her beauty as much as her easy-going manner: cool but friendly. There were a dozen or so others in there, a mix of Chinese, Europeans and Americans and she greeted those she knew without stopping to talk.
‘I thought I’d better tell you a little bit about myself,’ she began. ‘It will help explain things, to do with the Lady Monteith I mean.’ We’d sat in a quiet corner waiting for our drinks to be brought over. When they were she took a sip of her Margarita before starting.
‘I was rescued from the South China Sea when I was two. Of course I only know what I’ve been told. I was on a boat full of people fleeing Vietnam for a better life. Apparently the boat was overcrowded – over eighty of us on board. The food and water had run out. Conditions were dreadful, no sanitation. And that night when the ship found us, it was stormy and the boat was taking in water.
‘I was passed to one of the ship’s crew who was standing at the bottom of the gangway. Our boat was slamming against the ship’s side. It sank within minutes before anyone else could be taken off. I lost my family that night: my parents a
nd two brothers.’ She spoke without emotion.
‘The ship that rescued me, and a few others who’d managed to get off, was the Lady Maree, one of Sinclair Buchan’s. When we arrived in Hong Kong Monty came aboard. I was the only child who had been rescued. The others were adults and were taken to a resettlement camp, at Sham Shi Po, on the site of the Japanese POW camp ironically. They were resettled in England eventually.’
‘And you?’
‘You can guess. I was adopted by Monty and his wife. She was Chinese, my stepmother. She couldn’t have children of her own so I was special to her. And I loved her so much.’ Her voice trembled for a moment. ‘I was lucky. I grew up in a privileged environment. I received the best education here, then in England and the States.’
‘And after that?’
‘I worked for a New York sale and purchase broker for a couple of years after I graduated. Then Monty brought me into the company here. So you could say the sea really does flow in my veins.’
‘Quite a story,’ I said thinking of the one we’d heard earlier from Jim Brodie. ‘Have you ever been back to Vietnam?
‘I’ve visited. The people suffered so much. Really, for twenty-five years there was war. Indo-China became a buttress against Communism. The French and the Americans were trying to keep the Soviets out of the region. The Americans backed the south against the north and lost. The Communists took over the whole country and killed so many or sent them to re-education camps where thousands more died. It was illegal to leave the country so many fled by boat thinking they could start a new life somewhere else. The fishing boats were not built for the open sea. Escaping in this way was highly dangerous. They think a million and a half people took this route and hundreds of thousands are believed to have died, mostly by drowning, though many were attacked by pirates and murdered or sold into slavery and prostitution. Some countries in the region turned the boat people away even if they did manage to land. And some shipowners instructed their captains to follow a more easterly route up the South China Sea to avoid the boat people. But Sinclair Buchan was not one of them.’