Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo

by Shaun Clarke

  This constant watchfulness was more stressful than expected, though their arduous SAS training had prepared them for it. Though less burdened with kit than the others, Dead-eye had the most demanding job, being far ahead of the main group and therefore dangerously isolated. He needed to be constantly vigilant, and could not relax for a second as he watched and listened for likely ambush positions or signs of enemy movements up ahead. As he also had to check the jungle floor and the lower branches of the trees for mines or booby-traps, he was always under great stress, though he handled this better than most, in his deadly calm, cold-blooded way.

  Pete had a dual role. His first function was to give the point man cover should the enemy attack. The second was to glance back over his shoulder every few minutes to ensure that the signaller, carrying the all-important radio, was still in sight and unharmed. In conducting this visual check, he constantly alternated from left to right, and so also managed to scan the ulu on both sides of the track. This ceaseless vigilance – to the front, to both sides, and to the rear – was also more demanding, both physically and mentally, than it would have appeared to an inexperienced onlooker.

  Terry’s primary function was to transmit messages, check constantly whether there were any incoming ones, and to protect the radio with his life. But he, too, had to keep his eyes on the men ahead, on the ulu on both sides of the track, and on the Tail-end Charlie, a good distance behind him, to ensure that he had not been picked off quietly by a silenced rifle, a knife, a garrotte, or even a booby-trap.

  Bringing up the rear, Alf’s primary duty was to check every few minutes that no Indonesians were stalking the patrol. This he did by turning his back on the patrol and walking backwards at regular intervals, scanning the ulu on both sides as well as directly behind him. As it is with the scout on point, so the most stressful part of the Tail-end Charlie’s job is being relatively isolated from the main group, always wondering if someone is sneaking up from the rear to dispatch you with a bullet in the spine or slit your throat with a dagger. The Tail-end Charlie also has to keep a keen eye on the signaller directly ahead of him, and ensure that even if he is killed, the radio is saved.

  By noon of the second day, which was the first full day of hiking, they had crossed the border north of Achan and started to circle around it, heading, through a combination of primary jungle and belukar, for the swamps that lay between it and the River Koemba. The primary jungle was tolerable, if not exactly an easy hike, but the belukar, having been cleared and grown again, more dense than ever, required backbreaking work with the parangs and great patience.

  Once they had to scatter to avoid the charge of a wild pig. Another time they had to move off the only track they had found for hours and circle around it, through even worse belukar, because a giant king cobra was coiled in the middle of the track and rose up hissing, preparing to attack, each time they tried to approach it. This simple detour cost them another hour, though it certainly saved lives.

  That evening, when they lay up in their latest LUP, their poncho tents close together to discourage animal intrusions, Pete and Alf discussed the snake at great length, comparing it with similar reptiles they had seen in Malaya, and grossly exaggerating their recollections for the sake of young Terry.

  ‘Snakes 20 feet long they had there,’ Pete said with relish. ‘They sting their victims, paralysing them but leaving them fully conscious, then swallow the poor fuckers whole.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Terry said.

  ‘It’s true,’ Alf told him. ‘Cross my heart, hope to die. A snake 30 feet long swallowed one of our mates and we could see the poor sod struggling inside its body, kicking and punching frantically, before that bastard finally digested him.’

  ‘I can’t see how a snake could digest a fully grown man,’ Terry said rationally, determined not to be sent up, ‘when he’s kicking and punching its insides. That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘They say it’s got acids in its stomach that just melt you down,’ Pete explained. ‘A dreadful way to die, that.’

  ‘You two should have been novelists,’ Dead-eye said quietly. ‘You both invent such wonderful stories.’

  ‘Right,’ Terry said. ‘It’s all bullshit.’

  ‘You be cynical, then,’ Alf said. ‘Just choose to ignore us. But if one of them king cobras gets near you, you’ll soon know different, kid.’

  ‘You’ll be swallowed whole, paralysed, fully conscious,’ Pete solemnly informed him, ‘then dissolved in its stomach juices. You won’t sneer at us then!’

  But Terry had rolled over in his sleeping bag and was pretending to sleep. When eventually he did fall asleep, he had very bad dreams.

  Luckily for Terry, given the horror of his dreams, he had to rise with the others at dawn and begin another day’s march. An hour after setting off they stopped for breakfast. It was cold and unsatisfying. Four hours later they stopped for a late lunch that was not much better. To frustrate them even more, no one could ‘honk’, because now that they were deep in enemy territory, they were only allowed to speak – and then only in whispers – at night, in their isolated, hidden LUPs, while they were forcing down their awful grub. So after finishing this dismal cold lunch, they marched on again.

  They had hiked for no more than an hour, through dense primary jungle, when Dead-eye heard the sound of axe blows up ahead. Signalling silently with his hand, he stopped the three men marching behind him. When they had all dropped to one knee with their weapons at the ready, Dead-eye listened intently. He heard the sound of axes on wood, then the faint murmur of distant voices speaking Malay. Indicating with another hand signal that the rest of the group should remain where they were, he slipped out of his bergen, uncocked his SLR and advanced at the crouch, weaving as quietly as possible from tree to tree, stopping when he could see exactly where the noises were coming from.

  About 20 yards away, visible in a fragmented way through irregular windows in the undergrowth, a few Indonesian soldiers were at work, chopping down saplings and smaller trees. Out of sight, though heard distinctly, were many more men, maybe a whole platoon, clearly busy making jungle shelters.

  Instinctively, Dead-eye started raising his rifle to the firing position, then realized what he was doing and lowered it again. His mission was to get to Seluas and attack Indonesian supply boats, not to engage the enemy in the jungle, let alone tackle a much larger force, which could be suicidal. Reminding himself of this, he turned around and headed back where he had come from.

  The other men were still kneeling where he had left them, watching him intently. Using hand signals – one to say ‘Enemy ahead’, the other ‘Follow me’ – Dead-eye led them in a wide detour, avoiding the clearer passages through primary jungle, edging as quietly as humanly possible into an area of chest-high tropical ferns and an undergrowth filled with large, sharp-edged palm leaves and thorny bushes. As they went, they all took particular care lest signs of their passing – awkwardly bent fern stems, upside-down leaves, or even threads from their uniforms – should be noticed by any patrol from the enemy platoon. Thus it took the rest of that day to cover a mere three miles towards their objective.

  By noon the next day they had reached a broad track running north-west from Poeri and almost certainly used regularly by soldiers going to Achan. Checking the actual track against his much-folded map, Dead-eye recognized it on the map from the faint blurs with which he had marked it and which he alone could see. In line with SAS thinking, he had not plastered his map with chinograph symbols indicating key points. He had also deliberately folded the map much more than necessary to prevent the enemy, if capturing it, from guessing which section had been used, as this in turn would have indicated to the enemy his main area of interest.

  Satisfied that the track was clear, the men crossed it swiftly and vanished again into the ulu, now heading on a direct line for the swamps that led east to the River Koemba.

  That afternoon they came to a recently cleared track running compass-true paral
lel to the river – so straight, in fact, that it would not only give a cut-off party a quick route to some border ambush, but also provide a devastating line of fire for enemy machine-guns.

  Dead-eye silently indicated that Alf should photograph this particular part of the track from a few different angles. When Alf had done so, then written down the details of the location in his notebook, they crossed the track unnoticed. Even so, they were uncomfortably aware that in such a clearing there was always the possibility that the occupant of some unseen observation post had spotted them and, even worse, radioed in patrols to block their routes of advance and retreat.

  In the event, no patrols appeared – nor were they likely to – for not too far ahead, just beyond some bamboo screens and a tangle of belukar, stretching away as far as the eye could see, was the dreaded swamp.

  12

  Knowing that it would be suicidal to enter the swamp at night, they searched around its edge for a suitable hide. Finding one, they quickly made up their bashas, trying to beat the sinking sun, rolling their sleeping bags out on leaves scattered under ponchos strung to the lower branches of the trees, stretched taut at an angle of 45 degrees, and fixed to the ground with rope and pegs.

  Before supper could be enjoyed, Terry had to transmit Dead-eye’s daily report back to Major Callaghan at SAS HQ, Pete had to check his explosives and Alf had to carefully annotate all the rolls of film he had shot so far. The sun was still sinking when each man quickly checked his rifle, removing the mud, twigs, leaves and even cobwebs that might have got into it; oiling the bolt, trigger mechanism and other moving parts; then rewrapping it in its jungle-coloured camouflage. They had to do all this before the sun sank, leaving them in complete darkness.

  As they ate their cold supper of tinned sardines, biscuits and water, battling every second to keep off the flies, midges and mosquitoes, the sun set as a great ball of crimson-yellow lava behind the mountains west of the River Koemba. The lower it sank, the more it spread out along the alluvial top of the wooded mountains, until it resembled a great urn turned on its side and pouring molten metal which, hitting the mountain top, flooded north and south along its black summit. When the sun finally disappeared, vast clusters of opulent stars appeared over the soft peaks. Within minutes, however, those stars had been blotted out by gathering clouds darker than the sky and pregnant with rain.

  In the event, the storm did not reach the SAS hide, though it created a magnificent son et lumière spectacle of light and sound. Fingers of lightning – accompanied by impressive rolls of thunder – clawed through boiling clouds, illuminating them from within with a magical radiance, and causing the stars to disappear and reappear in the pitch-black sky.

  The storm went on for a long time, as if the jungle was exploding, yet there, near the swamp, from where they were seeing it so clearly, the SAS men felt it only in the form of teasing gusts of wind and a gradual lowering of temperature from the day’s fierce heat to severe cold. Such cold they would have felt in any event with the coming of night.

  The next morning, at dawn, with tendrils of mist hanging over the jungle and clinging like mournful ghosts to the tree trunks, the men broke up the hide, carefully hiding all traces of their presence, then embarked on the usual hour-long, pre-breakfast hike.

  Moving into the swamp from north-east of the river bend, they quickly found themselves knee-deep in slimy, debris-covered water and assailed by madly buzzing insects. Though the bed of the swamp was soft and yielding – a combination of mud and small stones, dangerously cluttered with larger stones, fallen branches and other debris – they were able to push on towards Dead-eye’s spur until, in the early afternoon, the water became too deep to cross and the mud too soft to walk on, particularly when carrying 50lb of bergen and 11lb of loaded SLR.

  In this area gigantic bright-green palm leaves floated on the swamp and lay on small islands of firm ground, covered with seedlings and brown leaves. Surprisingly hard, they split if stepped on, giving off a loud crack that could have drawn attention to the wading men. For this reason, the men tried avoiding them, but even when they were pushed gently aside in the water, they often split with what seemed in the stillness a very loud noise, like a distant pistol shot.

  ‘These leaves will do for us,’ Pete whispered. ‘They’ll have the Indos all over us.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Dead-eye replied. ‘Let’s call a halt for a moment.’

  Leaning against the hard earth of one of the many small dry islands, though still waist-deep in water, the men wiped sweat from their faces, waved the swarms of flies and mosquitoes away, burned the leeches off their skin with cigarettes, and tried to catch their breath and relax in general.

  ‘Dump your bergens on that dry ground behind you,’ Dead-eye told the others. ‘Might as well relax properly.’ He waited until they had done so, then said: ‘I don’t see any point in all of us going on until we know exactly what’s ahead. The maps don’t help us here. There are no markings for the swamp. All I’ve got to go on is the general direction, but that doesn’t tell me where we are now or how far away the river is. This water is getting deeper. The mud is getting thicker. If Terry slips, or simply sinks too deep in water, the radio will get damaged and we’ll lose touch with HQ. Also, if present indications are anything to go by, this swamp will get worse the further south we go and we may find we have to dump the bergens. Without them we’ll be lost, so I suggest that we keep them here, with two of us watching them and the other two advancing into the swamp to try finding that river.’

  ‘Seems sensible,’ Alf said.

  ‘I agree,’ Pete said.

  ‘What about you?’ Dead-eye asked Terry, taking him by surprise, but making him blush with pleasure.

  ‘I agree as well,’ he said. ‘I’m getting worried about the radio. Wading here is like walking on quicksand and it’s getting more dangerous. Your plan sounds good to me.’

  ‘Good,’ Dead-eye said. ‘So you stay behind with the radio. As Alf’s our medical specialist and photographer, he can stay here as well. Pete and I will leave our bergens here with you and go on without them. While we’re gone, I want you to contact HQ every night and give them some kind of report – if only to tell them that we’re still exploring the region. If we’re not back within three days, assume we’re casualties and return to the RV. Any questions?’

  ‘No, boss.’

  ‘Ok, Pete, let’s go.’

  Having already dumped their bergens on the small, dry island, Dead-eye and Pete started wading away from the others. Before disappearing around a screen of bamboo, they glanced back to see Alf and Terry clambering gratefully up onto the island. Practically swimming, but holding their weapons above their heads, they headed south-east, hoping to catch a glimpse of the river and calculate where they were. They waded for a long time and saw nothing but more swamp, and when the sun started sinking they both realized that they could be in danger in more ways than one.

  In fact, they were in a frightening position, for they had only one spare magazine apiece, plus their parangs and escape kit. This would not help them much if they could not find their way back through the tangle of rank vegetation in the late afternoon’s fading light.

  As Dead-eye and Pete waded forward, the latter distanced himself from the former to reduce their chances of being killed by a single burst of gunfire. This could well happen. The water, as Dead-eye noticed, was swishing quietly past them, leaving a tell-tale trail across the surface scum. An enemy soldier could follow that watery trail right to its source and blow their brains out.

  Dead-eye knew the risks and did not give in to fear, instead giving most of his concentration to his compass and the rest to his wading, making sure that each footstep among the submerged tangle of roots was reasonably secure. To break an ankle here would be a disaster, possibly fatal.

  Following Dead-eye, Pete was both fascinated and repelled by the sight of slimy marsh bugs racing on their numerous legs across the weed-covered surface. Magnified, he
realized, they would look horrible. The thought made him shiver.

  Just before darkness fell, they clambered onto a small strip of dry land under a natural umbrella of large palm fronds, where they laid up for the night, first having a basic snack of blocks of dry meat washed down with water. They slept as best they could beneath the overhanging palms, surrounded by the scum-covered swamp, numbed by the cold, tormented by numerous, unseen creepy-crawlies, to wake black and blue from insect bites.

  ‘We’ve been eaten alive,’ Pete whispered grimly, studying the bites and stings on his arms and chest. ‘We’ve probably picked up every disease known to man – and some unique to this swamp. Fuck this for a lark, boss.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ Dead-eye whispered. ‘We still don’t know what’s out there.’

  ‘We don’t even know where we are,’ Pete whispered even softer than before. ‘We’re just wandering blind.’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ Dead-eye told him, checking his compass. ‘The map may be useless, but at least we know the river’s south, and according to this compass that’s where we’re heading, so let’s keep going, Corporal.’

  ‘Anything you say, boss.’

  For the rest of that day they roamed on a southeasterly arc across the swamp, trying to find the River Koemba. Failing, they grew frustrated and discussed heading back to the others. But then, just as they did so, they heard the heavy throb of diesel engines, coming from no more than two or three miles further south.

  ‘That’s it,’ Dead-eye said. ‘That’s the sound of a supply boat. It can only be travelling along the River Koemba. That’s where we have to go.’

  ‘Are you sure, boss?’

  ‘Yes, Pete, I’m sure. And it can’t be too far away.’

  Yet even though they waded south-east for another hour, they saw nothing beyond an almost solid wall of bamboo and tall reeds, thrusting up from water so deep and muddy that it could not be crossed.