Torrance- Escape From Singapore

by Onbekend

  Rossi grinned. ‘I think the Japs must’ve heard ye.’

  ‘Bastards!’ Torrance shook his fist in the direction the shelling seemed to be coming from.

  * * *

  There was not much resistance by the time Shimura and his men made their final assault, advancing from one still-smoking crater to the next while Kurosaki and his men provided covering fire. Bursts of machine-gun fire still came from one of the pillboxes, but it was sporadic now, and Shimura had the feeling they were firing blind.

  At last he and Toriyama were in position on the flank of the left-hand pillbox, in the one place where the right-hand pillbox could give no covering fire because the other was in the way. There was a little cupola in the roof with viewing slits all around its base. Toriyama ran up to the side of the pillbox and stood with his back to the concrete. Shimura clambered up to stand on his shoulders. Taking a grenade from his belt, he primed it by striking it against the concrete, scrambled up onto the roof of the pillbox long enough to thrust it through one of the viewing slits, then jumped down to crouch next to Toriyama at the side of the structure. There came a loud crack, and grey smoke billowed out of the embrasures in the front of the pillbox. On the far side of the road, a section from Sergeant Kurosaki’s platoon assaulted the other pillbox.

  Shimura would have liked to enter the pillbox to make sure the men inside were all dead, but the explosion of the grenade did not even dent the steel door, so he had to be content with lobbing two more grenades through one of the embrasures at the front, before emptying an entire magazine from his Thompson through the slit. Across the road, Kurosaki’s men dragged a wounded Malay officer out of a slit trench. They tied him to a tree and used him for bayonet practice in revenge for all the comrades who had died trying to break through this part of the British lines.

  ‘I don’t see many Malay dead,’ grumbled Kurosaki.

  ‘Looks like they pulled out before the final assault, leaving only a few men to maintain a token resistance.’ Toriyama gazed about and saw the Pasir Panjang ridge to the south. ‘Over that ridge towards the coast, I expect.’

  ‘We took the position,’ said Shimura. ‘That’s all that matters. We’re in the business of taking enemy positions, not making corpses.’

  ‘Any enemy troops we don’t kill today we’ll only have to fight again tomorrow,’ said Kurosaki.

  Yashiro strode out of the smoke. ‘Good work, Sergeant.’

  Shimura nodded to where a large three-storey building rose above a cluster of smaller buildings three hundred yards down the road. ‘Is that the hospital?’

  Yashiro nodded and started walking down the unguarded road. ‘Bring your men, Sergeant.’

  ‘Are you sure about this, Yashiro-sama? That’s a hospital… doctors, nurses, sick and injured—’

  ‘Then we shouldn’t meet much resistance, should we?’

  * * *

  ‘How’s His Majesty this afternoon?’ There was no mistaking Hamilton’s ironic tone when he referred to al-Jawziyya by his disputed honorific, though Kitty knew better than to infer any genuine lack of concern about the sultan’s well-being.

  ‘Much better.’ She had just come from discussing the case with al-Jawziyya’s doctor. ‘He’s regained consciousness and is sitting up in bed talking. The bullet that pierced his arm missed the bone. He’s lost a lot of blood and, given his age, it will take him weeks if not months to make a full recovery, but the doctor said he can do that better at home than here. In fact, given the present shortage of beds, I rather got the impression that their feeling is the sooner we get him out of here, the better. Oh, I know we can’t take him home, but…’

  ‘A chum of mine in Dutch military intelligence has a lovely villa lined up for him outside a place called Lembang in Java,’ said Hamilton. ‘Apparently that’s where the Dutch officials in Batavia go when they’re in need of rest and recuperation.’

  ‘Any thoughts as to how we get him to Java now the evacuation has been suspended?’

  ‘We’ll find a way. Sampan, if needs be. Apparently there’s an island about forty miles south of here where they’re caching charts, supplies and so forth for anyone trying to get out of Singapore by small boat.’

  ‘The challenge will be getting to that island. Don’t let the uniform fool you – I’m no sailor – but I know enough to know that over a distance of forty miles, an error of just a few degrees in the heading will put us… well, trigonometry was never my strong point, but you get the idea. And there are things like winds, tide and currents to take into account: basically, unless you know the local waters, you can forget about dead reckoning.’

  ‘Then I’ll see if I can get a local boatman to go with the sampan. It’s that or we wait here to be picked up by the Japs, and you know that with the information you and I have in our heads, there’s too much at stake for us to risk that…’

  The two of them stood on the second-floor veranda. There were wounded men lying on the floor here too, the orderlies picking their way over them with demijohns of water. At the far end of the veranda, flies buzzed over a pile of soiled bed linen and bloodstained clothing.

  Kitty had spent so much of the past week worrying about how she was going to get Irina and the sultan safely away from Istana Mimpi that she had not had time until now to consider the wider picture. Having spent much of her childhood in Japan, she had more than an inkling of what the British Empire looked like through Asian eyes, and if there was a way to dismantle it peacefully that bettered the lot of its subjects, she would gladly have lent a hand. But she also knew enough about how men like General Tojo viewed the world to understand that replacing the British Empire with a Japanese one was going to make things far worse for most people.

  It was her understanding of Japanese culture that had got her seconded to the Centre for Operational Intelligence and Signals as an intelligence analyst. They had given her Magic clearance. When the intelligence passing across her desk included decrypted Japanese wireless signals, it had been pointless not to. Nevertheless, it had come as something of a shock to her when she had met Hamilton on Sunday and he had explained that the officer she reported to reported to him, and that the COIS was a cover name for an organisation called the Far East Combined Bureau.

  ‘This FECB,’ she asked Hamilton now. ‘Is it part of MI6?’

  ‘MI6?’ the colonel responded with a mischievous gleam in his eye. ‘No such thing… officially.’

  ‘And unofficially?’

  ‘The government likes to keep these arrangements fast and loose. Keeps us flexible. Keeps the enemy confused. Keeps me confused, come to think of it.’

  Two hollow-eyed orderlies were taking a cigarette break at the balustrade. One pointed to something on the road behind the hospital. ‘Are those our boys?’

  ‘They’re not,’ said the other. ‘Those are bloody Japs!’

  Kitty glanced over the balustrade. Figures in olive drab uniforms with domed steel helmets were advancing up the Ayer Rajah Road towards the back of the hospital. ‘We’d better get Mr al-Jawziyya out of here,’ she murmured to Hamilton.

  He nodded. ‘You bring him down to the main entrance, I’ll get some transport.’ Picking his way over the wounded men on the floor, he headed for the stairs.

  Kitty entered the recovery room. The sultan was sitting up in bed, talking to his fiancée. ‘There are Japanese soldiers approaching the back of the hospital,’ Kitty told him. ‘We need to get you out of here. Do you feel strong enough to walk downstairs?’

  ‘Surely even the Japanese would not attack a hospital?’ asked the sultan.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Kitty said dubiously. ‘Even so, we can’t risk you getting caught behind enemy lines a second time.’

  The sultan climbed out of bed and put a dressing gown on over his pyjamas. Once he had got a pair of slippers on his feet, Kitty turned to find Irina blocking the way to the door. The pearl-handled magazine pistol in her fist was pointed at Kitty’s heart, which at once began to beat rapidly, not in a good way
.

  ‘That’s a dinky little popgun,’ she said, trying to sound offhand.

  ‘Don’t let the small calibre fool you,’ said Irina. ‘Large-calibre bullets pass through a body like grain through a goose. Small-calibre ones rattle around inside a ribcage like an angry hornet trying to find its way out of lobster pot. Often much more fatal.’

  ‘More fatal!’ Kitty glanced towards the door behind Irina, then fixed her eyes on Irina’s face. ‘I wouldn’t want to be the victim of a shooting that was more fatal than the average fatal shooting.’

  Irina glanced over her shoulder to see what it was Kitty was trying not to draw her attention to. There was nothing there, but Irina had to take her eyes off Kitty for a fraction of a second to confirm that. A fraction of a second was all Kitty needed to move in close and force Irina’s gun hand aside while at the same time throwing a karate punch at her throat.

  Struggling to breathe through a crushed windpipe, Irina sank to her knees and Kitty prised the pistol from her hand. Then she snatched Irina’s handbag to check there were no other weapons in it, and was astonished at how heavy it was. She opened it up to find out why, but all she could see was an unusually large box of tampons and a coffee grinder. She lifted the box out of the bag and realised it was what was so heavy, far too heavy to be what it purported to be. Five seconds later she had opened the top panel to reveal the wireless concealed beneath.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said the sultan. ‘She’s a spy?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Alex.’ Thinking a wireless would be useful evidence at Irina’s trial for espionage, Kitty put it back in the handbag, then slung the handbag from her shoulder.

  The sultan gazed to where Irina struggled for breath on the floor. ‘Will she be all right?’

  ‘Frankly, Your Majesty, I don’t give a damn.’ Hustling him out of the recovery room, Kitty helped him pick his way over the injured men lying on the floor. Reaching the lift, she pressed the button. The indicators showed both lifts were on the ground floor.

  Shots rang out somewhere below them. ‘That sounded as if it came from within the hospital!’ exclaimed the sultan.

  Kitty nodded. ‘Come on!’ She led him through a door and down the stairs. They were one flight down when she heard a door burst open on the ground floor below, boots clattering on the steps. Glancing over the banister, she saw domed steel helmets covered in camouflage netting, some with bits of foliage still entwined in them. A face lifted towards her, revealing Asiatic features twisted in bloodlust. She pushed the sultan through the double doors leading onto the first-floor veranda and then through the first door on her right, which led only into a laundry room.

  There was a small, round window set in the door. Peering through it, she saw a squad of Japanese soldiers burst into the veranda with bayonets fixed to their rifles, trampling heedlessly on the wounded men on the floor. A white doctor advanced to intercept him, waving his arms above his head. ‘This is a hospital!’ he bellowed in English. ‘You no come in here!’

  ‘Die, round-eyed devil!’ a Japanese NCO screamed at him in Japanese, driving his bayonet into the doctor’s midriff. Kitty saw the tip of the blade distend the back of the doctor’s coat, spurting blood staining the white cotton. Feeling sick, her heart thudding like a trip hammer, she hurriedly crouched down beside the door, where she could only pray no one peering through the window could see her, and motioned for the sultan to do the same. Sunlight shining through the window cast an oval on the floor: the shadow of a helmeted head appeared in it, the shape distorted by the angle of the beam, but unmistakably twisting this way and that as the owner checked the laundry room was empty with a cursory glance. Then the head was gone. Outside, someone shrieked in agony. More shots rang out. ‘If anyone tries to resist, kill them all!’ she heard an NCO bark.

  A momentary silence descended over the veranda. Kitty could still hear shots and screams, but they seemed to be coming from the more distant parts of the hospital. Raising her head cautiously, she peered through the window. There were no Japanese soldiers in sight. She felt no great urge to go out there with Japanese soldiers on the rampage, but she knew it was only a matter of time before they returned to carry out a more thorough search. Helping the sultan to his feet, she led him across the veranda to the back stairs. On the ground floor she narrowly avoided emerging from the stairwell to run into another group of Japanese soldiers bayoneting the wounded men lying on the floor. Retreating back into the stairwell, she led the sultan down another flight to a basement-level service corridor. A door at the far end looked out over a car park. A laundry van was parked there, a dead delivery man sprawled behind the open rear doors in a pool of his own blood, another corpse slumped over the steering wheel. Beyond, cars were parked in an orderly row. There were no Japanese soldiers in sight.

  ‘Come on!’ She led the way across the tarmac to where a Hillman Wizard was parked. She opened the door on the passenger side for the sultan, made sure his arms and legs were all inside before closing the door on him, then moved around the bonnet to slide behind the steering wheel. She pulled out the choke, pushed the accelerator halfway down and cranked the engine. It began to turn over, but from the rough noise it made it was clear it was cold and would need to turn over for a few minutes before it ran more smoothly.

  Something went ‘click’ beside Kitty’s right ear. She turned to find Yashiro standing over her with a Taisho magazine pistol thrust through the open window at her head.

  ‘Out,’ he told her.

  ‘I’ll come with you willingly, if you let the girl go,’ said the sultan.

  Yashiro ducked his head to gaze past her to where the sultan sat. ‘A chivalrous offer, but you’re in no position to negotiate. Did you think I wouldn’t check up on Third Officer Killigrew here? The liaison officer between the Royal Navy’s wireless station at Kranji and the FECB? I bet she can tell me all kinds of invaluable information about how successful the FECB have been at cracking our codes.’

  Kitty smiled disarmingly at him, then grabbed him by the wrist and slammed his hand against the leading edge of the window. He squeezed the trigger a moment too late, the bullet starring the windscreen. Bracing herself to pin his hand against the window frame as he struggled to pull it free, she reached across herself with her left hand and turned the handle to raise the window pane until Yashiro’s wrist was caught in it. Still he refused to relinquish his grip on the Taisho, but while he gripped it, his fist was too big to withdraw through the narrow gap at the top of the window. He started to thump his other fist against the glass, but Hillman made their windows of sterner stuff than that. Kitty pushed the choke in, put the Wizard in gear and reversed out of the parking space. To avoid being dragged, Yashiro had to jump on the running board. He grabbed the door handle with his left hand, but could not open it because his own body was in the way. Throwing the car into a 180-degree handbrake turn, she changed gears smoothly as the bonnet came around, then side-swiped the door on her side against the laundry van’s fender. Yashiro’s Taisho fell into her lap, and when she glanced in the rear-view mirror she saw the kenpei rolling on the tarmac in the Wizard’s wake. As she followed the road around the north side of the hospital, a couple of Japanese soldiers stood in her path, struggling to unsling their rifles. Aiming the bonnet right at them, she put her foot down. The Japanese flung themselves aside at the last moment.

  Ambulances parked under the portico at the front of the hospital blocked any hope of escape along the loop road. Kitty bounced the Wizard over the pavement, crashing through some rhododendron bushes into the public garden in front of the hospital, swerving to avoid the sandbag emplacement of the Bofors gun on the other side, before plunging headlong down a grassy bank, tearing through a flower bed and jouncing over another pavement to join the Alexandra Road, headed south.

  ‘Where did you learn to drive like that?’ asked the sultan.

  ‘Roedean.’ The engine was still running rough, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe, but after the beating Kitty h
ad just given it she considered it a miracle it was running at all. She drove at no more than twenty miles an hour to give it a chance to warm up.

  ‘Was that true what he said?’ asked the sultan. ‘About you knowing the Japanese codes?’

  ‘Let’s just say the less you know, the better.’

  ‘Bismillah! Why did you not get out of Singapore when you had the chance?’

  ‘I had one foot on the gangplank of the ship that was going to take me to Ceylon when one of Colonel Hamilton’s minions intercepted me and took me to meet with him and Sir Shenton at the Tanglin Club. They knew the Japs were looking to set you up as the puppet ruler of Malaya and they thought given our friendship I’d be willing to play on that, to persuade you to leave the country. I didn’t much care for it myself, but I knew you were in trouble, even if you didn’t, and I didn’t want to leave Singapore if I had a chance to get you out of it. We knew the Japs were probably about to land, we just assumed they’d do it at the other end of the island—’

  Something slammed into them from behind, whipping Kitty’s head back. The wheel bucked in her hands and she struggled to avoid going into a skid. When she had them going straight again, she glanced in the rear-view mirror to see a laundry van looming behind them, a Japanese NCO at the wheel, Yashiro in the passenger seat. They were closing again. She put her foot down, not fast enough to avoid a second impact, but enough to take some of the bite out of it. She changed up into third gear, then took the wheel with her left hand so she could retrieve the Taisho from the floor beneath her feet.

  ‘Know how to use one of these?’ she asked, handing the pistol to the sultan.

  ‘I’ve seen Humphrey Bogart use one in the movies.’

  ‘Pretend you’re him, then.’

  Twisting in his seat, the sultan fired through the rear window, shattering the glass. She glanced up in the rear-view mirror to see what Yashiro and his men were doing now. The laundry van was dropping back. Kitty switched her gaze back to the road ahead and saw they were hurtling towards the junction with Telok Blangah Road, which was partly flooded by another broken water main. A Quad tractor came speeding from her right. Her reactions were fast enough to take evasive action, at least until she saw a little Malay girl running to avoid the tractor. Kitty wrestled to avoid the girl too, the Wizard’s wheels aquaplaning on the wet tarmac. The car spun out of control, ending up with both wheels on the left-hand side in a monsoon drain, the car tilted over at nearly forty degrees, Kitty’s head feeling as though it had damned near been wrenched off her shoulders.