Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo

by Shaun Clarke

  Sanderson squeezed the sergeant on the shoulder, then, reluctantly, started crawling up the hill, dragging his wounded leg. As he did so, Hunt opened fire with his Armalite, still on automatic, laying down a sustained burst that would ensure the enemy kept their heads down for a short while. Sanderson used that brief lull in their fire to get up the hill as quickly as possible, though his numbed leg did not make it easy for him. He did, however, manage to clear the breast of the hill just as Hunt stopped firing to reload and the Indonesians let rip again.

  Glancing back over his shoulder, Sanderson saw the ground around Hunt turned into a nightmarish convulsion of spitting dust and exploding foliage. Then Sanderson crawled away, down the other side. The sudden silence from the other side of the hill convinced him that Hunt had been killed in that final fusillade. Shocked, but determined to survive, Sanderson crawled on.

  It was not an easy journey. Unable to stand, he had to crawl most of the way, stopping at intervals to loosen the tourniquet and let the blood flow a little, thus diminishing the chances of gangrene. Then he tightened it and moved on again.

  Just as he had to keep stopping to loosen and tighten the tourniquet, so he had to stop to give himself repeated injections of morphine, which eased the excruciating pain when the crawling made the pieces of the shattered femur grind together. He could even hear them grinding, which made the pain seem worse, and he also knew that the sharp-edged, broken bones could, when grinding together, sever more arteries and kill him that way.

  Nevertheless, he kept crawling back towards the RV, through mud, over felled logs, between tangled clumps of thorny bushes, stopping only to attend to the wound, then starting forward again.

  By nightfall, he had managed to crawl only 500 yards, though each yard had seemed like a mile. Finding a pig hole beneath a fallen tree, he crawled into it, deep into the pools of mud, and took another shot of morphine before falling asleep.

  Sergeant Hunt had not been killed by the Indonesians. In fact, after that final fusillade, they gave up, assuming the enemy was gone, and retreated back across the empty camp, then into the jungle. They did not reappear.

  Seeing that they were gone, Hunt pulled himself into the cover of a clump of bamboo, injected himself with more morphine to combat the pain, checked that the bandages in his enormous wound were still stemming the blood, then passed out.

  He was unconscious most of the night. Just before first light, after breakfasting on chocolate from his escape belt, he injected himself yet again, then began to crawl up the hill, determined to follow Sanderson to the RV. So bad was his leg that he could only do this by using his elbows: digging them into the soft earth and pulling himself forward, inch by inch. This he did until, by late afternoon, he had managed to drag himself to the top of the ridge, which was only 400 yards from the scene of the fire-fight. Exhausted, he lay there face-down for a couple of hours, then rolled over and studied the afternoon sky. Seeing no friendly choppers up there, he rolled back onto his stomach and recommenced his dreadful journey.

  This time he was forced to elbow his way through a stretch of belukar, which was filled with thorny undergrowth that cut him all over, depriving him of more blood. As secondary jungle is the haunt of wild pigs, Hunt soon found himself crawling through a maze of runs where the pigs had rooted in the soil for food. These runs were filled with mud containing many leeches, which were attracted by the smell of his thorn wounds and attached themselves to him to drink the blood. Too weak to fend them off, Hunt soon found himself covered in mounds of writhing leeches and knew that he was losing more blood than he could reasonably afford, given what he was also losing from the gruesome bullet wound.

  Still he crawled on until, like Sanderson, he found a pig hole into which he could crawl for the night. There, while he tried to sleep, swarms of fat, shiny bluebottles clustered on his wound and laid eggs that turned into grubs to make the wound fester. If he did not get the wound tended to soon, he would be in serious trouble.

  Using his elbows for leverage, though the skin there was rubbed raw and giving him more agony, the next morning he managed to crawl another 1000 yards. What kept him going was the knowledge that the rest of the patrol would have gone to find the infantry – the 1st Battalion of the 6th Gurkha Rifles – and bring them back to find him, and perhaps Sanderson too.

  In fact, he thought that he might come across Sanderson at any moment, which was another incentive to keep going. In the event, neither Sanderson nor the Gurkhas materialized.

  That night, now even more exhausted, as well as being in agony, Hunt injected himself with another shot of morphine and fell into the sleep of the dead. He was not dead, however, and next morning awakened to the distinct smell of coffee. Not realizing at first where he was, and imagining that he was awakening in his own basha in the spider at Kuching, he turned his head and saw an Indonesian soldier climbing a nearby durian tree.

  Freezing cold where he was lying, suddenly remembering where he was and that he was seriously wounded, he watched as the Indonesian soldier, having gained his desired position, stretched out along the branch of a tree and picked off some of its spiky fruit, the flesh of which was edible. Lowering his gaze, he saw a whole group of enemy soldiers squatting at the base of a nearby tree, around a communal pot of rice or tapioca. Looking up again, he saw the first soldier staring straight at him from the tree.

  Hunt froze. He had to force himself to remember that although he was looking up into the eyes of the man in the tree, that man could not necessarily see him where he was lying in a hollow in the ground, caked as he was with mud and covered with foliage. And yet he could not be sure of that, so his heart started racing.

  At that moment a British Army Air Corps Sikorsky S-55 Whirlwind helicopter appeared in the sky, flying in low over the jungle, obviously searching for the two missing SAS men. Seeing it, Hunt was flooded with relief and reached automatically for the SARBE rescue beacon on his webbed belt. As he was doing so, the Indonesian in the tree and his friends on the ground all glanced up at the helicopter. Some of them pointed at it, chattering excitedly, then bent over to pick up their weapons.

  Suddenly realizing that the Whirlwind would be in danger if he fired his SARBE beacon and encouraged it lower, Hunt removed his hand from his belt and decided to take his chances.

  When the Whirlwind passed overhead without coming within firing range, the Indonesians put down their weapons and returned to their breakfast. Eventually, the soldier in the tree, who clearly had not seen the SAS man, clambered back down to the ground, where he passed out the durian fruit to his friends.

  Hunt lay there and watched them, gritting his teeth against the pain of his wounded leg, but not daring to risk the movement required to inject more morphine. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, but was in fact an hour later, the Indonesians completed their breakfast, picked up their weapons and marched away, quickly melting back into the ulu.

  Sighing with relief, Hunt injected himself with more morphine, cleaned his wound of pus and maggots, finished off the last of his chocolate, then began crawling forward again, using his bloody elbows as leverage. By noon he had managed a few hundred yards more, but was stopped by exhaustion. Falling asleep, or perhaps rendered unconscious by the return of the pain, he woke in the late afternoon, feeling weaker and more disorientated.

  Though now convinced that he was fading fast, he had enough strength of mind to inject himself with more morphine and start another exhausting forward crawl. Convinced as he was that he could not survive another night without aid, he was not encouraged by the fact that the jungle here was belukar, so dense with tree stumps, felled logs, saplings, thorns and general undergrowth that a helicopter would not have been able to land.

  Nevertheless, he kept going and, two hours later, as the sun was beginning to set and the nocturnal chorus of the insects was building, he came out of the belukar, into more accessible terrain. There, however, beyond the darkening mountain, black rain clouds were spreading across the sky,
threatening a tropical storm. No helicopter could fly through such weather.

  Hunt was silently praying that the storm would not begin when he heard distant thunder. No, it was not that. It was another, more constant sound. He glanced up as the sound grew louder, becoming a rhythmic throbbing, then an actual roaring. Something blotted out the sinking sun and cast its shadow over him as a violent wind tore leaves off the trees and whipped the leaves off the ground. It was the same chopper, coming back to find him.

  Knowing that the Indonesians were nowhere near this territory, he undipped the SARBE beacon from his belt and sent up a rescue signal. Hearing the SARBE’s bleep, the pilot descended vertically, wobbling from side to side, but could find no space clear enough for a landing.

  Like a blood-splattered crab, Hunt crawled out on bent elbows to where he could be seen, then raised his right hand to wave frantically.

  The pilot dropped until he was almost touching the trees, with the rotor blades actually chopping leaves off. While the chopper hovered there, in danger of crashing, a crewman threw the rescue strop out on its lengthy cables. It plunged to just above the ground, jerked back up, then bobbed in mid-air, just above the wounded man.

  Still unable to move his legs, Hunt had an agonizing time with the strop, which kept swinging to and fro just above his outstretched fingers; but eventually he managed to grab it and twist himself around until he could fit it under his armpits. Still holding his Armalite in one hand, he signalled with the other for the crewman to winch him up. The helicopter ascended as he was being winched up and soon he found himself swinging in the sky above the vast, darkening jungle.

  Up there he was as free as a bird.

  As Sergeant Hunt was being flown to the Gurkhas’ jungle post at Sain, from where he would be casualty-evacuated to Kuching Hospital, 45 miles away, Corporal Sanderson was sleeping in another pig hole not far from where his friend had been rescued.

  Dangerously weak from loss of blood, pain and the exhaustion of having to crawl for miles on his belly, Sanderson had a very troubled sleep and woke at dawn feeling dreadful. Nevertheless, he kept going. He was only 5000 yards from the Gurkha camp at Sain, but it might as well have been that number of miles. After another 200 yards, he was in a state of almost total exhaustion, bordering on hallucination, and felt even more unreal when he came across the bergens that the team had left behind to make the ‘shoot-and-scoot’ operation easier. By now the bergens were rotted by damp and fungus, with what little food remained after the ransacking of pigs and honey-bears as rotted as the rucksacks themselves.

  Sanderson did, however, find a water bottle filled with drinkable water and used this to quench his raging thirst. Then, forgetting in his rising delirium that the most likely place the choppers would look for him would be where the bergens had been left, he crawled on, determined to find the RV.

  By last light he had covered 1000 yards, a mere fifth of the distance he had to go. Not knowing where he was, and increasingly delirious, he did not even bother trying to find a pig hole for the night, but just crawled to a moss-covered tree and propped himself upright, surrounded by thick liana, under a great umbrella of razor-sharp palm leaves. There he finished off the last of his chocolate, washed it down with the last of his water, then closed his eyes and tried to sleep, reconciling himself to death and crazily amused at the thought of his corpse being eaten by wild pigs or other jungle animals.

  Better than compo food, he thought as the darkness descended. I can take pride from that.

  Either dreaming or hallucinating, he was jerked back to reality by a faint thrashing sound not far away. Opening his eyes, he saw only the gloomy ulu, but then he heard the thrashing sound again. It was not very loud – it was almost stealthy – but it was coming towards him.

  Instinctively trying to move, Sanderson was whiplashed by the pain in his wounded leg and had to stop himself from crying aloud. Nevertheless, the sudden, stabbing pain, accompanied by a spurt of leaking blood where he had loosened the tourniquet, had the virtue of making him more alert. Still sitting upright against the trunk of the tree, he pulled the Armalite off his shoulder, rested it on his knees, then held it up with the stock pressed against his right hip.

  Glancing down, he saw that his sudden movement had loosened the tourniquet more and now blood was pumping out at a dangerous rate. Glancing to where the thrashing sound was growing louder, he saw branches being parted in a way that suggested he was not faced with an advancing animal, but an army patrol.

  Sanderson set the Armalite to automatic, then cocked the weapon.

  The foliage just ahead parted and the first of the soldiers emerged – small, brown-faced men, carrying Armalites and SLRs, all with familiar yellow flashes on their soft jungle caps. It was the Gurkhas from Sain.

  Sanderson smiled and lowered his Armalite, letting it rest in the grass beside him, though still under his hand. His other hand was covered in his own blood, but he raised it in welcome.

  ‘Hi, there!’ he said.

  He passed out when they picked him up, placed him on a stretcher and carried him the remaining 4000 yards back to the base camp at Sain.

  9

  ‘You have to return to the River Koemba northwest of Poeri,’ Major Callaghan insisted, sitting behind his desk in his office in the Haunted House in Kuching, smoking a cigarette, blowing smoke rings and watching them disappear. ‘It’s there that the Indonesians are believed to have one of their main staging posts for men and supplies going eastward to Seluas, a good-sized trading settlement where the Indonesian Division has its base. That longboat you shot up on your way back was probably heading for there.’

  ‘Why us?’ Dead-eye asked, unwrapping some chewing gum and popping it into his mouth.

  ‘What’s the matter, Sergeant Parker? Don’t you want this lovely job?’

  ‘I’ll do any job you give me,’ Dead-eye replied. ‘I just wondered if we were picked for a specific reason when we’ve just got back from there.’

  ‘Not quite the same area, but close enough.’ Callaghan pursed his lips and blew another smoke ring. Even in the afternoon, with the sun blazing outside, he had the shutters down to keep the sunlight out. It made the office pretty dark, Dead-eye thought. Like a haunted house, in fact. ‘Six other patrols attempted to reach specific points on the river near Poeri, but failed because the river marshes were too deep. You lot actually made it. So I’d like you to go back there, but this time to find that staging post at Seluas and put a stop to it. You can choose your own spot for setting up a river watch and causing a little mayhem near the town. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.’

  Dead-eye grinned slightly, then glanced at the maps spread out on Callaghan’s desk. ‘Can I see those?’

  ‘Of course!’ Callaghan dropped his feet off the desk and turned the maps around to enable Dead-eye to study them. This Dead-eye could do because he had been briefed at West Brigade’s HQ, where, as a trained reader of aerial photographs, he had been able to spot the spur that had enabled the recent patrols to recce the unexplored territory known as the Gap. Now, studying the aerial pictures laid out before him, he was soon able to find another spur of the low border hills. It pointed towards a broad bend in the river.

  ‘There,’ he said, putting his finger on the spot as Callaghan stood up and walked around the desk to peer over his shoulder. ‘This finger of dry ground here. It appears to peter out three quarters of a mile short of the river, but it might actually reach it. Usually, when it’s this close on the map, there’s a dry strip somewhere. I’ll opt for that route.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Callaghan said. ‘You usually are.’ He went back around his desk and sat down again. ‘So who do you plan to take? Sergeant Hunt and Corporal Sanderson are obviously out of the picture – both back in Blighty, badly hurt, up for commendations and/or medals – so you’ll have to be the man in charge and pick your own team.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Dead-eye said. He was not too concerned about the loss of Sanderson and Hunt
, since both of them actually came from A Squadron and he had never got to know them all that well. He had, however, respected them and visited them at the Kuching Hospital when he was there for a couple of days of so-called recuperation leave. While in reasonably good spirits, both men had been in a bad way physically, with Sanderson likely to lose a good inch or so off his wounded leg and neither man likely to continue to serve with the SAS in their original capacity. More likely they would be given some kind of desk job in the ‘Kremlin’ in Hereford, which was not the kind of thing that would satisfy them. Still, they had been stoical about it and Dead-eye admired them both.

  ‘I want the same men,’ he told Callaghan. ‘Welsh as demolition expert and number two; Laughton as medical specialist and photographer; young Malkin as signaller and for general back-up.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want someone so inexperienced for this job.’

  ‘He’s not inexperienced any more. He’s been through a lot.’

  ‘No problems?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘I thought at first he was showing signs of instability – particularly regarding the ulu.’

  ‘He was, but he got over it and has certainly proved himself since then. Not just once – a lot more than that – so he’s shown some consistency. He’s earned his winged dagger, boss.’

  Callaghan smiled. ‘Anything you say, Dead-eye. If you want him, you’ve got him.’ He stubbed his cigarette out, clasped his hands behind his head, placed his feet back on the desk and gazed reflectively at the large wooden-bladed fan turning above them. ‘God!’ he exclaimed softly. ‘Remember Welsh and Laughton in Malaya? A right pair of wide boys, troublemakers, always right on the edge there. Neither I nor Sergeant Lorrimer – God rest his soul – thought they’d last another year with the regiment. In fact, both of us were preparing to RTU them, but that didn’t happen.’

  ‘The Telok Anson swamp,’ Dead-eye said, recalling its singular horrors and how it had matured Welsh and Laughton, instead of destroying them. All bad things had their good side.