Torrance- Escape From Singapore

by Onbekend

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked the sultan. He nodded, though he looked dazed. He still had the pistol in his hand, so she took it from him and managed to get the door open on her side in time to see the laundry van bearing down on them. Bracing her gun hand with her left hand supporting her right wrist – just the way a former boyfriend had taught her to shoot – she squeezed off four aimed shots at the driver of the van. She did not see if she got him, but she saw stars shatter the windscreen. The van skidded out of control on the wet tarmac, bouncing clean over the monsoon drain a few yards from where the Wizard had crashed, plunging through a fence and careening over one of the fairways on the Keppel Golf Course before coming to rest bonnet-down in a bunker.

  Tucking the pistol in her pocket, Kitty climbed up until she could swing her legs out of the car, dropped down to the tarmac, then turned to help the sultan climb out after her. Japanese soldiers were emerging from the back of the van. Grabbing the sultan’s good hand, she led him up the drive of a mock-Tudor villa. The front door was locked. She made her way down the side of the house. The side door to the garage was unlocked, but it was empty. There was a door to the kitchen, but that was locked too. Everything had an empty, abandoned feel to it. Kitty was about to try breaking in when a bullet snapped down the alley between house and garage. Grabbing the sultan’s hand once again, she dragged him into the garden. They hurried across a lawn scattered with children’s playthings – a Wendy house, a see-saw, a swing hanging from the bough of a tree – and followed a gravel path where the garden sloped down into a thickly wooded valley at the back. Dropping down through the trees, they found a boathouse on the bank of a caramel-coloured stream. Peering through a window blotched with algae, Kitty saw a teak-hulled motorboat moored within. The door was locked. She threw her shoulder against it a couple of times. The wood of the frame was rotten and the door burst open after a couple of attempts, allowing her to stagger through.

  The sultan followed her. ‘Do you think it runs?’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’ Kitty helped him into the passenger seat before casting off the painter and sliding behind the wheel. She pulled out the choke and pressed the starter button and the engine purred into life. As she motored the boat slowly out into the stream, rifles cracked. She glanced over her shoulder to see Yashiro descending through the trees with half a dozen Japanese soldiers on his heels. Opening the throttle, she followed the stream beneath a tunnel of natural foliage. Yashiro and his men sent bullets whistling after them until the boat had curved around a bend a hundred yards further along. The colour of the stream changed to brown and then green, and they emerged from the tunnel into a wide bay. Kitty recognised the outline of the tree-covered island of Pulau Blakang Mati up ahead and realised the open water to her left was Keppel Harbour.

  ‘I’m sorry about Irina,’ she told the sultan.

  ‘There’s no fool like an old fool, eh?’ He grimaced. ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That she was a spy for the Japanese.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you must have suspected.’

  ‘Honestly? It never occurred to me.’

  A Mitsubishi Zero screamed out of the sky at them, machine guns blazing, bullets stitching two lines of spurts of water across the surface of the sea. For a moment Kitty wondered if Yashiro had arranged for it to be waiting for them, then saw another air raid was taking place over Chinatown and the Zero was one of a squadron of fighters on escort duty. The pilot must have seen the motorboat and decided the target of opportunity was too good to resist.

  As the Zero made another pass, Kitty opened up the throttle and threw the motorboat into a series of tight curves to throw the pilot’s aim off, passing out through the Dragon’s Teeth Gate.

  ‘Isn’t the entrance to the harbour protected by a minefield?’ asked the sultan.

  ‘Marine mines are usually moored four feet or so beneath the surface so they won’t be seen,’ Kitty explained. ‘Too deep to pose any risk to a shallow-draughted boat like this. But keep your eyes open for any mines that have broken free of their moorings and floated to the surface.’

  She curved the motorboat around to the east, following the coast of Pulau Blakang Mati and hoping the crews of the ack-ack guns that protected the naval batteries there were not asleep.

  They were not. Before the motorboat had passed halfway along the island’s length, little puffs of white smoke blossomed all around the Zero as it swooped in for another pass. It peeled away, evidently deciding the motorboat was proving to be more trouble than it was worth.

  The sultan clapped his hands with delight. ‘A most exhilarating adventure! You are a remarkable woman, Kitty.’

  ‘My ancestors would be proud of me.’

  ‘You say that as if it is something to be ashamed of?’

  ‘It is. Back in the days of good Queen Bess they were pirates.’

  ‘In those days, so were mine. I don’t suppose we could sail all the way to Batavia in this boat, could we?’

  She glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle was dropping at a rate which suggested the tank had been holed. ‘At the rate we’re losing fuel, I think we’ll be lucky to make it back to Keppel Harbour.’

  Seeing an island with a tree-covered hillock crowned with an octagonal building – probably a Chinese temple judging from the curved sweep of its roof – she steered around the north-eastern cape, scanning the beaches and rocky headlands in search of a jetty. She spotted one on the western shore. The motorboat was sputtering on fumes by the time its hull bumped against the jetty. Jumping for the ladder, Kitty made the painter fast and helped the sultan up before her. Fat raindrops started to speckle the boards of the jetty, and the two of them dashed up the steps leading to the temple. At the top of the stairs, the statues of two stylised Chinese lions guarded the entrance. Decorated with ceramic figures of dragons, the temple’s green roof tiles were supported on bright red pillars and beams. An elderly Taoist priest in embroidered robes was lighting joss sticks and setting them in the sand contained in a massive bronze incense burner.

  Bowing, the priest said something in a Chinese dialect Kitty did not understand. ‘Do you speak Mandarin?’ she asked in that language.

  He nodded. ‘Welcome to Pulau Berdayung. You wish to make an offering to Tzu Ku Shen?’ He gestured to an idol of a gaudily dressed young woman whose torso seemed to rise from an amorphous white shape that, after a few seconds, Kitty realised was supposed to represent clouds.

  ‘I’ll make a hundred offerings, if there’s a telephone on the island,’ said Kitty.

  ‘So sorry, no telephone.’

  ‘You live here alone?’

  ‘A Taoist is never alone. Every rock, every tree, every stone carries a spirit within it.’

  She turned to the sultan, who spoke no Chinese and looked correspondingly lost. ‘There’s no telephone,’ she explained.

  ‘What about Irina’s wireless?’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s powerful enough to reach the main island.’

  There was a sort of cupboard – painted bright red, with golden dragons adorning the drawers – for pilgrims to array their offerings upon. At one end there was a table stacked with dishes. ‘May I set up a wireless here?’ she asked the priest. He nodded. She took the wireless out and began to fiddle with it. It took her the best part of ten minutes to work out that the coffee grinder was actually a generator for the wireless, but once she had connected that to the unit, the rest came naturally to an officer trained in wireless equipment. With the sultan turning the handle on the generator with his uninjured left arm, she started sending out a message in Morse code.

  * * *

  In one of the administrative offices of the Alexandra Hospital where he had set up his headquarters while he rallied his forces, Yashiro was wondering whether he should bother trying to make excuses to Baron Uchida about how he had lost Killigrew before he committed seppuku when Sergeant Shimura came to him. ‘Excuse me, Captain-sama, but Corporal Waka
bayashi has intercepted a strange signal on one of the English frequencies. The same four sentences being transmitted over and over again.’

  ‘Let me see.’ Yashiro took the signal flimsy from Shimura and cast an eye over it.

  Sea Devil, Sea Devil, this is Golden Dragon calling. I alight where the faithful fairy met a big ape. Lady de Coverly’s father is with me. Colbert’s leg is bared. Out.

  ‘Are you sure this is correct?’ asked Yashiro.

  Shimura laughed. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s from the Killigrew woman.’ Yashiro could not say why he was so sure, only that he was.

  Shimura looked dubious. ‘If it is, she must have banged her head very badly when her car crashed, for her to transmit such nonsense.’

  ‘It only looks like nonsense. It’s some kind of code. Perhaps a personal one between Killigrew and Hamilton.’ He looked up at Shimura. ‘Can we locate the source of the transmission?’

  ‘Maybe. Wakabayashi can get a pretty good bearing. He’s pally with some of the wireless operators in the Imperial Guard, they’re over on the eastern end of the island. If he can persuade one of them to search for the same signal and get a bearing, we should be able to pin it down to within a mile or two.’

  ‘Then why are you still standing here, when the transmission could end at any moment?’

  Shimura grinned. ‘Because I thought you’d want us to get a fix on the source of the transmission, so I already told Wakabayashi to do it. Of course, even if she’s somewhere we can reach, there’s no guarantee she’ll still be there when we arrive.’

  ‘There are never any guarantees in life, Shimura. But something tells me she’ll be there. I think this message is some kind of Mayday: she’s trying to tell Colonel Hamilton where she is, asking him to come and pick her up. My gut tells me she’s stranded on one of the islands off the south coast of Singapore.’

  ‘Perhaps. But which one?’

  ‘It is to be hoped that is a question Corporal Wakabayashi can answer.’

  As if on cue, the corporal appeared in the doorway with a rolled-up map under one arm, bowing to Yashiro before glancing at Shimura, who nodded and motioned him to proceed. ‘I think I have located the source of the transmission, Yashiro-sama.’

  ‘Show us.’

  Wakabayashi spread the map on the desk in front of Yashiro. One cross marked the location of the Alexandra Hospital; a line had been ruled heading south by south-east from there, crossing a second line running south by south-west from a second cross in the village of Geylang, to the west of Singapore Town. The two lines crossed on Pulau Berdayung, about three miles south of Singapore. ‘Here, sir.’

  ‘Good work. Send a signal to Admiral Ozawa. I want a vessel to take a squad of men from Pasir Panjang to this island. And have a truck brought round to take us to the jetty.’

  Eighteen

  Saturday 1700 – Sunday 1700

  Hamilton found Percival in his office at the headquarters of the British Strategic Command. The general looked as though he had aged six years in as many days. ‘Thought you’d be in the Battle Box by now,’ said Hamilton, trying to get the meeting off to a jovial start.

  ‘Have you been there?’ asked Percival, uncharacteristically tetchy. ‘Beastly place. The generators don’t work which means the ventilation system doesn’t work which means that with over five hundred officers and men working in two dozen rooms in the tropical heat, it gets very hot and sweaty very quickly. And the latrines don’t work, which would be bad enough even if the ventilation did work.’

  ‘Point taken,’ said Hamilton.

  ‘Why aren’t you in Colombo?’

  ‘That’s what I came to speak to you about. I’m not sure, but I think the Japs have captured Third Officer Killigrew.’

  ‘Dear God!’ Percival buried his face in his hands for a moment, then looked up at Hamilton. ‘What do you mean, you’re not sure?’

  ‘We were at the Alexandra Hospital when the Japanese attacked it this afternoon. I went to arrange transport, the next thing I knew there were Japanese soldiers everywhere. I’m not sure, but I thought I saw Killigrew drive past in a car with the sultan in the passenger seat, pursued by a laundry van full of Japs.’

  Percival stared at him. ‘A laundry van?’

  ‘Presumably the only vehicle they could commandeer at such short notice. I’ve had no communication from her since, so we have to assume the worst. Anyway, there’s not much I can tell the Japanese they won’t be able to learn from Killigrew, so taking up a berth that could be used by a civilian woman would seem to be rather selfish of me.’

  ‘Noble sacrifice?’

  ‘Guilty conscience. Is there no hope of holding Singapore, sir?’

  ‘None whatsoever. Now it’s just a matter of time. Churchill wants us to fight to the last man.’

  ‘How very noble of him.’

  ‘It does seem pretty pointless at this stage of the game, I must say. If I thought there was any tactical or strategic advantage to be gained by holding out I could understand it, but this seems to be more about sparing Whitehall’s blushes: impregnable Fortress Singapore, nothing more than what the Chinese call a paper tiger.’

  ‘How did it come to this?’

  ‘Hubris, Hamilton. Nothing more or less than damnable hubris. We were all so convinced the British Empire would last forever. Whoever thought it could be brought down, and by Tojo’s gangsters of all people? When in truth the whole damned system was rotten from within, a house of cards just waiting to collapse.’

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Hamilton. ‘And of course we underestimated the Japanese. Told ourselves that one of our chaps was worth ten of theirs. Damnable tommyrot, of course, as the Japanese have proved on land, at sea and in the air.’

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Come in?’ called Percival.

  An orderly entered. ‘Message from Fort Siloso for you, sir.’

  ‘Put it there.’ Percival indicated a place on his desk.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Not you. Colonel Hamilton, I mean.’

  ‘But I don’t have anything to do with Fort Siloso!’ protested Hamilton.

  ‘They’re just forwarding the message, sir. It’s from Golden Dragon.’

  ‘Golden Dragon? By Jove! That’s Killigrew’s code name!’ Hamilton took the message from the orderly, who retreated from the room.

  ‘So she’s not a prisoner of the Japanese?’ asked Percival.

  ‘Apparently not. Let’s see now… ha!’ Hamilton snapped his fingers. ‘Clever girl! In the absence of a cipher machines, she’s composed some crossword clues. How the devil did she know I like crosswords? “I alight where the faithful fairy met a big ape…” “The faithful fairy…”’

  The telephone on Percival’s desk rang and he picked it up. ‘Yes…? No, not yet… that all depends on what the RAF are doing. Is there any reply from Gordon Bennett’s HQ to that signal I sent earlier…?’

  ‘“I alight” – that means she’s on an island, obviously… How in the world did she get on an island?’

  Percival put a hand over the mouthpiece of his telephone. ‘Colonel?’

  ‘Hmph?’

  ‘Would you mind…?’ Percival gestured to the door.

  ‘Oh! I do beg your pardon, old boy. I’ll let you know what’s going on just as soon as I’ve got this solved…’

  Still poring over the signal flimsy, Hamilton hurried out of the office.

  * * *

  The horn on Ollie’s car had got stuck and was drawing a crowd of onlookers, some angry, some amused. Stan got out and opened the bonnet to try to shut the horn off. A cop watching from the sidewalk glared at him. Stan took a hammer from the back seat and showed it to the cop. The cop did not look impressed. Stan tapped the hammer against something under the bonnet, and the entire engine block fell out of the bottom of the car with a crash.

  Two-thirds of the audience roared with laughter. It consisted of Torrance, Rossi, Quinn and Shapiro in the middle of the auditorium, their feet on the backs of the seats in fr
ont of them, munching popcorn. The other third was an Australian squaddie with one hand inside a Chinese woman’s cheongsam, each of them too preoccupied with the other to pay much attention to what was happening on the screen.

  The frames slowed and disappeared altogether, leaving only a blank white screen. Even as Torrance, Rossi, Quinn and Shapiro shouted up at the projectionist in protest, the house lights came up and twelve military policemen marched in, six down one aisle and half a dozen down the other, effectively surrounding Torrance and his comrades.

  ‘Pay-books, lads, let’s have ’em,’ growled a burly sergeant major.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Torrance. ‘With the barbarians hammering at the gates, haven’t you lot got anything better to do?’

  ‘I might well ask you the same question.’ The sergeant major tapped his swagger stick lightly against Torrance’s breastbone. ‘Pay-book, laddie,’ he insisted gently but firmly.

  Torrance took out his pay-book and handed it over.

  ‘Torrance, Charles Michael.’ The sergeant major turned to another redcap, who had helped himself to the others’ pay-books.

  ‘Rossi, Giaocchino; Quinn, James; and Shapiro, Solomon.’ The other redcap handed back each pay-book as he read the name.