‘So no courts-martial are needed,’ the General added.
Mr Too looked at his watch and fidgeted. ‘Sir, if you’ve nothing more for me I’ve nothing more for you. Have I your permission to leave?
‘Of course, Mr Too. Thank you so much for coming round to talk to me. I’d have been yorked as we cricketers say if you hadn’t.’
After Too had gone, the General said to the Colonel, ‘Can you really credit a CO not allowing any of his men to go out with their own company commander on an operation as potentially hazardous as this?’
‘General, it certainly takes one’s breath away.’ He scratched his chin reflectively as he remembered something else. ‘There is something else that has just come to my mind. I asked Rance who he had told. There is one other to add to the list of those who know, his company 2 ic, the Gurkha Captain.’
‘That was unnecessary of him, surely.’
‘Not to him it wasn’t. He only told him because he wanted him to write to his mother if he did not come back. The CO’s diktat must have upset him.’
‘Yes, and who can blame him,’ said the General, standing up to stretch his legs. The Colonel followed suit. ‘So, between us there really is only one answer, isn’t there, however we dress it up?’
The Colonel nodded in agreement. ‘And we’ll keep our lips as sealed as that man Rance did his.’
During his six months’ leave in England Jason had a letter from a brother officer telling him that ‘Colonel Vaughan has been suddenly posted to the embassy in Germany where his German-language ability was needed.’
Rance was never told that his former CO knew not a word of German.
1961
It was not until five years later that Major Rance, working with the Temiar on Operation ‘Bamboo’ in the area of the Sungei Temenggor and Kerinching’s ladang was met once again by Senagit, as he was carrying a dead boar. Without thinking Jason, now a good speaker of Temiar, took it from him and grunted: Senagit, initially taken by surprise, later remembered the man who had done just the same when he brought back that young pig near the Sungei Perak headwaters.
When Senagit next met his friend Ah Soo Chye he told him, ‘just like that time before.’ This time he was not dressed like you wear clothes but as a soldier with a weapon. Ah Soo Chye, disbelieving Senagit at first, carefully questioned him and came to the conclusion that, indeed, the two men were one and the same. He was flabbergasted, outraged and bewildered. One day revenge will be mine … but it remained an unfulfilled pipe dream as by the time Jason Rance did return to the area he had retired, permanently, to the Betong area of Thailand.
III
1963-1968
6
April 1963
After a decade of fighting guerrillas in the Malayan jungle, 1/12 Gurkha Rifles were posted to Hong Kong for a two-year spell where, apart from obligatory duties – Force Guards, Border Protection, Community Relations activities and Aid to the Civil Power when the police requested it – modern warfare could be practised from section up to brigade level. Classification on the range on the Bren light-machine gun and rifle was also an imperative as were, at long last, games and athletic competitions. It was certainly the first time since 1942 that any of the Gurkha soldiers had permanent accommodation to live in.
Two years later the Battalion left Hong Kong and returned to Malaya, this time going to Suvla Lines in Ipoh. It was then that Major Jason Rance was detailed to undertake a special task: to arrange for the return, by way of Malaya, of two Gurkha ex-prisoners-of-war who were stranded in Thailand. It meant working with Ah Fat, the Bear and the orang asli and Jason became dependent on Senagit. Successful though he only just was in getting the two wartime soldiers away from Thailand, in the guerrilla follow-up the Bear and Ah Fat were captured: the Bear was hideously killed and later Ah Fat died of wounds suffered under torture. Following on from that Jason was sent to Borneo to command a recently raised armed Auxiliary Police Force, the Border Scouts, ‘eyes and ears with a sting’; he nearly lost his life once a month for the year he did the job and was both broadcast as dead by the Indonesian Radio in Pontianak and by the Sarawak Gazette. He was then put in charge of the Gurkha Independent Parachute Company, based in Kluang, with more adventures in Borneo and Brunei before handing over prior to being posted to the Jungle Warfare School, near Kota Tinggi, not far from Johor Bahru – now Malaya no longer but Peninsular Malaysia. That was in July 1968.
There were two people who, during this time seldom if ever forgot Major Jason Rance, by whatever name they called him, polite or impolite. One was Tan Wing Bun, son of Tan Fook Loong, who only recognised his voice, at least to start with; the other was Wang Liang, son of Wang Ming, the Bear.[1] In January 1955 Tan Fook Loong, the commander of 2 Regiment, MRLA, was killed by bombs. The plane carrying them had a gizmo that linked it with a similar one in his portable radio. Jason Rance had been involved in getting some surrendered guerrillas to buy a new radio before Special Branch ‘doctored’ it. Before the bombing decision, which was considered ‘unsporting’ by the Director of Operations, was reached, it was decided to go and talk to him in person in the jungle, Rance masquerading as a surrendered guerrilla. But even before that Jason, who had secretly found out the guerrilla’s home phone number earlier on, had rung his son, Tan Wing Bun, in Penang. The son could never forget the day the phone rang. He answered it and a voice asked: ‘Wei, is that Tan Wing Bun, Tan Fook Loong’s son?’
‘Yes, who are you?’ he answered, not recognizing the voice.
‘Is your mother, Chen Yok Lan there?’
‘What is it to you? Who are you?’
‘Just someone telling you that I’ll be talking to your father and unless you tell me to tell him you and your mother want him back home alive, he’ll be dead within the week.’
To dedicated Communists such as were that family, surrender was anathema. As Tan Wing Bun put the phone down he told himself he’d never forget that voice but whose is it?
The news of his father’s death was a shock to Tan Wing Bun, as was another phone call by the same voice. ‘Wei, is that Tan Wing Bun, Tan Fook Loong’s son?’
‘Yes, who are you?’
‘The same person who rang you before. I went to talk to your father in the jungle. I told him who I was, that I had rung you, that you did not want to talk to me. If you had gone with me your father could be alive today but, no, thanks to you he is dead. During the war, Japanese bullets didn’t kill him and in this guerrilla war government bullets couldn’t either. But his own pride killed him. Feigning to be a pig he vanquishes tigers.’
‘Tell me who are you are,’ the son shouted but the caller had put his phone back on the cradle. Once again the son felt he could always recognise the voice if he heard it again.
Almost all CPM members used aliases and some of their families did also. In this case Tan Wing Bun was an alias: his real name was Tan Wing Hoong and that was the one he now used on his documents. After leaving school he tried to ‘get his own back’ and become a Special Branch officer but his alias was discovered so he was turned down. He became a contractor for supplying the goods that hawkers took round the streets. He opened his business in Penang and it spread as far as Grik. One day he was in Grik in his car outside the Police Station. He was interested to see a British army Land Rover outside, with a Gurkha driver. Instead of getting out of his car he sat and waited and watched. Quite why he did so he never really fathomed but something piqued his curiosity. Then one of those intriguing coincidences happened, nothing spectacular merely that a British officer came out of the Police Station. History can turn on a very small point.
One of the people he supplied, a Chinese itinerant seller of noodles, caught sight of the British officer and eyed him speculatively. He, as had some others like him, had been supplied with a photo of Jason Rance and told that on the odd chance the face in the photo was seen immediately to report it to his local party secretary for onward transmission to MCP HQ in Betong. The photo had been taken by the hotel manager at Sadao when Rance and one of the still stranded Gurkhas had stayed there during Rance’s attachment to the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation in Bangkok in 1959. Rance had written an anti-Communist message on the organisation’s headed notepaper and had secretly reached the MCP camp. There he had left the message on a bush and enticed the sentry to take it to the office in the camp. While he was away the hotel manager had taken the passport, given to him to put in his safe against loss from his room, out of the safe and had taken the photo – ‘they’ would ask for it, ‘they’ always did for any foreign visitor. And ask they had. It was subsequently circulated widely in the hope that the writer could be caught and vengeance taken.[2]
The vendor of noodles said to himself that one looks like the man in that photo. I’ll have to do something about him.
Inspector Wang Liang, peering out of his office window, saw him. He had noticed him on more than one occasion and became suspicious of him. Not again? Leaving the office by a side door, he unobtrusively crossed the road and went behind the large tree in front of which the noodle-seller had parked his barrow. He saw a car had drawn up beside it. He noticed its registration number, P 9678 – remembering registration numbers was now second nature.
Happily unconscious of any unfolding drama Rance, in his faultless Chinese, called out to someone inside the Police Station, ‘I’ll go and have a meal in the camp before I go back to Ipoh. See you next week when I go upstream to meet the Temiar.’ It never occurred to him why but he added, ‘feigning to be a pig he vanquishes tigers’, a phrase that tickled his senses of humour.
Tan Wing Hoong’s heart stopped several beats when he heard that … it can’t be but it must be. It’s that voice and that stupid phrase I’ve never heard anyone else use screeched through his mind, but yet he just knew it had to be the speaker on the phone. I must act now … He called the noodle-seller over and told him what he had to do … and do it quickly … and make a good job of it. The Bear’s son heard and, equally surreptitiously, went back to his office.
After their meal in the camp Jason and his four men left for Ipoh. Jason, sitting in the front, still had his side window shut when, minutes later, as the vehicle slowed down to go round a sharp bend above a stream, a large rock was hurled at the side window of the front-seat traveller. A web of cracks spread though the glass with a few shards splintering into Jason’s face, the rock falling back onto the road. The driver slammed on his brakes and he swerved, his vehicle nearly overturning. The four Gurkhas, as one, were out of it in a flash and gave chase to the rock thrower, a Chinese noodle seller whose barrow was by the side of the road.
He had reached the edge of the stream when the leading Gurkha, eyes reddened in anger, drew his khukri as he caught up with him and wielded it with all his strength. Out of the corner of his eye the Chinese saw what was about to happen and lunged forward. The Gurkha’s khukri managed neatly to slice off the edge of the stone thrower’s left buttock as he fell headlong down the bank into the water.
Jason caught up with the red-eyed Gurkha. ‘Much damage?’
‘No saheb. Hardly anything. Look, there’s more cloth than skin and blood on my khukri.’
The chief doctor in the small hospital in Grik was intensely interested in the type of injury that an almost inarticulate Chinese man, brought in face-down by some unknown person in a car, had suffered. It was a particularly sharp knife wound in the buttock which was messy with cloth that had been hacked into it. The man did not specify what had happened, however hard the doctor and nurses tried to make him speak. A phone call to the Police Station brought a plain-clothes officer in to investigate. It was Wang Liang who of course could identify him. He also noticed a car in the car park and saw the registration number was P 9678. He took a statement from the doctor and said he would put the police onto the case. ‘Can’t have that happening, can we?’ he said as he left.
