The CO was gracious enough to thank Rance who saluted, left the office and took a vehicle down to Police HQ to meet Head of Special Branch, one Ismail Mubarak – a charming Pakistani who bred crocodiles, was missing a finger, ‘crocodile fodder’, he said, and who liked his beer. His deputy was an ebullient Teochew, Tay Wang Teik, who was given the document to study. ‘Once I have read this I must have a long talk with Captain Rance,’ he told his boss, who spoke but did not read Chinese.
When Rance and Tay Wang Teik did meet up, the Chinese was delighted.
Rance told Tay Wang Teik about how he had heard firing and a bugle call so had gone to investigate. ‘To keep in touch, I told my other section I’d make a noise like a cuckoo but apparently there are no cuckoos in Malaya so whoever was at the top of the hill in a hut, knowing that even though they did not recognise the “bird”, ran away.’
A look of glee shone from Tay Wang Teik’s face. ‘I have a hunch. This document was due to go to the man we know as the Killer. You and I’ll go back for three days and lay an ambush around the hut you burnt. I’ll take the cover that the package that was dropped and you can pretend to hand it over to him. That way you’ll be able to capture or kill the Killer or anyone who comes to look for it.’
‘I can’t just go back. It must be an order from the CO.’
Ismail Mubarak, listening in with intense interest, took up the phone. ‘Get me the CO of 1/12 GR,’ he ordered the operator.
‘Rance, I can’t not send you back,’ the CO said, having explained the new plot. ‘How will you tackle this? How can you get your targets to where you plan to go?’
Without putting it into so many words, somehow Jason inwardly realised that a turning point in the way he operated was at hand. For his foray to talk to the Collector, he was, in fact, back to his schoolboy days of adventure, almost on home ground, but augmented by real weapons and a real risk. No need for any new ideas of operating … but his task now was radically different from what he and his men had learnt in Burma: new tactics but no time for new training! I’ll ask for Kamal Rai who knows the ground better than I do.
He came to a decision within seconds: ‘With the fewest men compatible with success, sir. I only need a section with Sergeant Ruwaman Limbu.’ How to get the Chinese to where I want them? Yes, got it! ‘Let me take a bugler and the bugle. I’ll teach him the call that was blown. I think I’ll be able to remember the area from when I roamed around there as a boy but to make sure I’ll ask for Kamal. We will approach the hill where we found the look-out point from the jungle edge, not the squatter area, and blow the bugle. That will, Ismail Mubarak said, so intrigue the Killer he’ll come and investigate even if he does not come to search for the missing package.’
‘That sounds sensible but we are only allowed to fire if fired on first. Try and capture the leader by challenging him. I’ll also get the police to call Detective Ah Wong in and he can go with you,’ said the CO. ‘Take some cord to bind any prisoners.’
Why must we have a commander who knows nothing about tactics?
‘Sir, understood. Please ask the police to drive past the place where they drop us off four times a day from Day 1.’
‘Sounds excessive. Why?’
‘It will be the only way to communicate safely without going into the squatter area, sir. No wirelesses.’
And the plan worked. On Day 2, early in the morning the bugler blew his call at intervals of a quarter of an hour for an hour. The Killer heard it and presumed it was one of Lee Soong’s men wanting to contact him although it did not occur to him that the bugler could be any other than one of Lee Soong’s men. At half past eight he started again and just after a quarter to nine the Gurkha farthest down the slope in the ambush around the burnt-out lookout post, called out, ‘There are three men coming up from the bottom of the hill, followed by another three men who must be their escorts. I see they are armed with pistols.’ The bugler blew once more.
Rance was not to know that the men were the Killer, the Blood Sucker and the Collector and their special bodyguards. Tay Wang Teik recognised them and moved up to near Jason. Kamal stayed in the rear.
‘Ready, all of you? Take up lying positions and try not to be seen. Open fire only if I am fired on. Try to wound, not to kill.’ Rance remembered the strictures about not opening fire initially, nobody had envisioned a situation quite like this, had they?
To his men’s surprise – whoever saw a saheb like ours? – Rance moved behind a tree and waited until the three leading Chinese were passing and, throwing his voice to one side, softly called out, ‘You have brains like pig dung, you eaters of dog meat. Forget your important package? Here it is’ and he threw it to the other side from where his voice had come from.
The three turned round and saw nobody. The obvious leader turned to the man behind him and snarled, murderously ‘curse me?’ as he stooped to reach the package which he gratefully recognised but not comprehending how or why it had landed at his feet.
Simultaneously Jason showed his hat round the edge of the tree and, again with his voice at the feet of the leading man, sniggered. The leader whirled round, saw the hat and fired, the bullet just missing Jason’s hand but hitting the hat.
Jason shouted ‘Fire’ and the forward man, Mandhoj Rai, opened fire first. Other itchy fingers ensured it was over in a trice. Two of the leading Chinese fell wounded, one in the arm and the other in the stomach. The third saw the firer and thought he was the man he had seen when he shone his torch on him a night or so ago before he and the three gunmen ran away.
‘Cease fire,’ shouted Rance. ‘Come and help the casualties but disarm them first.’
The Gurkhas bound the wounds. They carried the man with the stomach injury, the Killer, down the hill while the Blood Sucker, wounded in the arm, bound by a rope to the detective, sullenly walked beside him. They left the seriously wounded Killer at the nearest squatter’s house, Ah Wong telling them that they would return with medical help, but when it came it was too late. The Blood Sucker was handed over to the police and put in hospital under guard before being charged with the capital offence of carrying a firearm. That left the Collector, mouthing obscenities with two imperatives: one to find the man who had shot his friends – if I see him I’ll recognise him – and the other to find out who had cursed – if I hear his voice again I’ll recognise him – and thrown down the package … otherwise I’ll find it hard to tell Comrade Lee Soong who it was who delivered that written message.
Two weeks after that, a Chinese from Boonoon Estate reported to the Sepang police that he had come across a mangled and tortured corpse. A squad of policemen went and there was a dead Ah Wong, butchered. A green dragon had been drawn on his left shoulder and a corresponding piece of skin had been cut off the right shoulder. That was where ‘海山’ had been tattooed but, of course, none of the Malay policemen knew about that – nor would have been the slightest interested had they known.
Many years later the bugle was presented to The Gurkha Museum in Winchester, England. Its accession number is 1994.05.15. ↵
Lee Soong was killed by the Security Forces in Johor in 1954. ↵
3
Spring 1948
The Malayan Communist Party deliberated at length before deciding to move from what the military people then knew as Phase 1, the Passive Phase, of Communist Revolutionary Warfare[1], to Phase 2, the Active Phase[2] ‘strong-arm’ tactics. Some of the methods mooted in Calcutta were accepted, others not, but, in essence this meant a war waged by the Malayan People’s Liberation Army, MRLA, from bases in the jungle.
In mid-June the government, shaken by the intensity of guerrilla action, declared an Emergency rather than war, even though a low-level war it was. That an ‘Emergency’ was declared rather than a war was purely on account of financial concerns for trade insurance. Severe restrictions on the movement of food and civil movement came into force, not all at once, but as the situation engendered them.
Despite the MRLA’s tenacity of purpose, acceptance of dismal conditions and belief in its cause, it lacked any dependable system of communication other than a reliance on couriers and broadcasts on Radio Malaya. For arms and ammunition there were already what they had hidden after the war and what, certainly in the early stages of the campaign, they managed to capture. For information about the Security Forces, apart from any ‘moles’ there already were in the police or administration, and basic necessities, they relied heavily on their civil supporters, known as the Min Yuen, Masses Movement. These people lived, for the most part, in the waste land between the rubber estates the jungle fringes and were known as ‘squatters’. There were, of course, other low level sympathisers who could pick up useful snippets of knowledge for passing on, for instance shop keepers, barbers, and waiters in restaurants and hotels. One particular ready source was in night spots where Chinese ‘taxi’ girls, attractively dressed in their long, tight-fitting, slit-sided cheongsams, earned a pittance of a living. For a fee they would dance with sweaty, red-faced Europeans, chiefly British servicemen and at weekends junior planters who, once back at their tables, were inveigled to buy drinks at inflated prices while the girl they had danced with sipped lemonade and listened, nonchalantly, to the gossip of their temporary ‘hosts’. The servicemen also stood at the bars and gossiped and the barmen, feigning a limited knowledge of English, picked up pieces of tactical information that could be used against the Security Forces, the drunken gossipers unaware they were passing on items of value to their military enemy. Brothels were also good sources for gaining such information.
If the ‘taxi’ girls did not report what they learnt from their garrulous partners to the barmen, they passed it on when they got back home locally or in the ‘squatter’ areas. It was of immense value to the Min Yuen who passed any worthwhile information upwards, either when they went into the jungle with edibles or when patrols from the jungle visited them. It was all local and low-level, each unit of the MRLA relying on its own Min Yuen supporters.
Similar uprisings against their colonial government were also taking place in French Indo-China and Dutch East Indies.
Over and above the MCP was a much larger and better organised system that embraced eastern India and most of colonial Southeast Asia. Many, if not most, operatives in various government Intelligence departments had no knowledge that it existed. Who organised it, where it was based, how it communicated was so secret, it is probably true to say it was never fully found out.
As examples of its octopus-like tentacles, in 1951 a three-week operation by A Company of 1/7 Gurkha Rifles, based in Seremban, took place in the top north-eastern corner of Malaya, the only time in ten years Gurkhas operated in that area. It was quickly reported to the Nepalese government in Kathmandu. Three weeks after the Gurkhas returned to base, over thirteen hundred Gurkhas, some with their families, sailed from Singapore to Calcutta going on leave to Nepal, called in at Rangoon. The Nepalese consulate there received a secret message saying that the Gurkhas were not going on leave but were a whole battalion, stationed in north-east Malaya, that had mutinied for the Communist cause so were being disbanded and sent back for discharge. Orders were that the Gurkhas should be left strictly alone and not visited by the consulate staff. In fact the vice-consul did visit the troops, taking his wife and the consul’s wife with him. They were amazed not to find a load of disillusioned, bolshie people but happy soldiers, some with their family, going on leave.
Simultaneously Calcutta jute-mill coolies were paid 8 annas for half an hour’s anti-British shouting outside the Transit Camp in Barrackpore, Calcutta, when leave men arrived there for documentation for their journey home. They were urged not to return to their units in Malaya. Around the same time, when matters were going against the Communists in Malaya, spurious calls for action by Gurkhas to quell riots in Sarawak were made, even though no such riots ever took place. Few people knew about such background machinations: fewer still ever found out how, whence or where they originated.[3] There was one unexpected and unseemly outcome from the Sepang incident. However successful the troops of 1/12 Gurkha Rifles had been there was an unseemly police quarrel between the Chief Police Officer of Selangor and his opposite number in Negri Sembilan. In the latter’s keenness to get to grips in the Sepang area he had forgotten that the area he had allotted for the troops stretched into another state’s and he either forgot to tell the CPO Selangor or didn’t think of so doing. When the Selangor CPO learnt about the killing, so angry was he that he made a formal decision to charge Captain Rance with murder, sending the charge sheet to his opposite number in Negri Sembilan. Chan Man Yee, a clerk in the KL Police HQ’s Registry, an MCP’s ‘mole’, read, copied and filed the report. Later she sent the copy off to the MCP HQ by courier. There it was handed to a clerk in Ah Fat’s presence. Ah Fat asked the clerk to show it to him. On reading it he saw that his friend Jason Rance was in serious trouble. ‘I’ll give this to the Secretary General myself,’ he told the clerk and, once in his own quarter, burnt it and blew the ashes out of the window. Jason, I hope that prolongs you life, he whispered to himself.
The CPO Negri Sembilan sent the charge sheet letter to the OCPD Seremban who read it before filing it. There ‘sleeper’ Lee Kheng got hold of it and that is how it came into the possession of an elderly, bespectacled, white wispy-bearded, one-time schoolmaster, named Ngai Hiu Ching, an original party member. He lived in ‘plain sight’ in Mantin, about ten miles north of Seremban, one of the villages that had always been a centre for people who wanted to hide from the Law, especially so during the Japanese occupation when it was almost a ‘colony’ of the wartime Chinese fighting against the invaders. He had helped many people evade enemy anger and had acted as a ‘cell’ for information. It was known by Special Branch as a recruiting centre for those who wanted to join the anti-British movement. He had been and was a coordinator for matters that needed retaliatory action by the MCP.
The Collector, whose only known name was Wang, was a harassed man. Without his two friends to consult he had, unusually for him, to work on his own. Comrade Lee Soong had asked him what sort of man the night-time messenger was. I told him I had only a glimpse of him in the moonlight. What was he wearing? Wang thought back. ‘Not uniform. A white shirt.’ ‘That meant he was not a member of the MRLA,’ had been Lee Soong’s cutting reply – why did I not think of that before? Wang angrily asked himself, further recalling that he looked taller than most Chinese so … no that was too much of a puzzle. He was clever enough to keep the dogs off him by throwing them bones: did he think of that himself or was he put up to it? The idea of the man being a member of the army was too far-fetched and laughable to think about. He had not seen which way he had come or gone, he had just vanished. Were there only two of them, the unknown one and the ‘traitor’? He knew Lee Soong wanted an answer and that his patience was not one of his strong points. He also knew he would have to go and report to Lee Soong but so secretly did he manage affairs one never really knew where he was. Nor did he ever take ‘no’ for an answer. He felt it prudent not to mention the bugle being blown at regular quarter-of-an-hour intervals nor about the package.
To try and find out he decided to work back along the line of squatters’ huts till he came to Sepang, asking at each hovel and shop. He came to the shop they had always eaten at. ‘Oh eh, Dow Gai Ngaan Yeh Yeh,’ he called out as he went inside.
The man with fighting-cock eyes came out from the back, face bland as one of his dumpling skins. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
