‘Correct, sir. That was at the tail end of Operation Janus. The time certainly flies.’ He introduced Chakrabahdur.
‘You have been asked for because your childhood friend Ah Fat has told me you are the only person who can ensure the success of his plans. More later. First of all, household arrangements: at the back are two spare rooms: I can put Chakrabahadur in with you or with the Bear, whichever you prefer.’
Jason said, ‘We’ll doss down together.’
Too looked at his watch. ‘Go and clean up. Be comfortable, wear what you like. We’ll have a meal in half an hour and then I’ll tell you what our plans are.’
Before they had a chance to settle down and talk, a taxi drove up and stopped outside the house. Doors slammed and in came Wang Ming’s wife and 15-year-old son, Wang Liang, the mirror image of his father. She breathlessly explained that her son had somehow heard that Shandung P’aau was with his father and had begged her to let him come and see him.
Wang Ming said that he had often spoken about how Jason had initially won them over and it would be a great kindness if Shandung P’aau could show his son his tricks. Jason, realising a happy companion on a dangerous mission was always better than an unhappy one, adroitly played up. He held Wang Liang spellbound as he made his hands ‘talk’ to each other, took the top off his thumb and put it back again, wobbled his eyebrows then his knees and by the time he’d put his finger up his nose the lad was in stitches of laughter. Jason had a friend for life. Wang Ming dismissed them with a smile and back home they went.
After their meal Jason was told why he had been inveigled into coming to KL. ‘With no lecture to the recruits makes it much easier for us. As I hinted earlier, your childhood friend Ah Fat is helping us from the “inside”, very bravely, and you, on the “outside”, are a vital link in his efforts to get us secret news from the MCP at the time of any peace talks. He wants to give you and no one else any documents he can secretly get for us here in KL. It has been quite a struggle one way and another to get you here as the change in political leadership has meant that the Director of Operations no longer has the final say in anything of this nature. In the heart of his heart he would dearly like to speak to you, as would Colonel Mason. Both have had you in mind for quite a time. I managed to get Ah Fat to meet him and that was when he phoned you.’ He looked at Jason conspiratorially.
‘Yes, it was a great shock to hear him call me and I was sorry we could not talk for longer.’
‘So delicate is your being involved, especially now the Malays not the British are “calling the shots” that the top military brass do not want to know you are involved. You are therefore unattributable. Ah Fat cannot get far from where he is, even going over the border into Malaya is a risk. Were it known that you suddenly left your battalion for no apparent reason, it would be “embarrassment squared”. A lecture to the recruits would have been cover from any unusual activity on your part so that followed by some local leave was planned to get you from Rompin to the north with no suspicion.’ He looked at Jason with a glint of devilment in his eyes. ‘In the event I don’t think there’ll be any damage done but, what do you British say? “Belt and braces”?’
‘Correct,’ said Jason, grinning, and told Chakré what had been said so far. ‘So that’s why we have pistols, saheb,’ he answered.
‘From now on you three will be together,’ continued C C Too. ‘For your journey north you will go in one of my unmarked vehicles, an old one that no one will remember, which the police use for odd purposes. The driver happens to be one of those you first met when the Bear and others decided you were a better bet than the MCP.
‘Ah Fat and the Bear have already arranged their RV, the Gunong Lang area from east of Kampong Lalang. You have to pass through a Malay population not a Chinese one to reach it. You’ll be remembered if only by your height, which we don’t want.’
Jason contemplated his best way to manage. ‘I could be a reputable European were I a herbicide officer or a bee keeper but I could sustain neither role were I to be asked any pertinent question, so I think a disguise is the best answer. At the start of the Emergency there was a mad scheme to make me look like an Indian before going to recce a village. It never happened but I was stripped down to my underpants and a make-up artist, a woman, wearing gloves, dabbed on a layer of paint from a bottle marked mid-coconut. Why she only didn’t pain my face I don’t know. ”That’s the bottom layer,” she said. While it was drying she did my face. I can remember her saying “Shut your eyes and raise your eyebrows. If your eyelids are left unvarnished, they’ll give you away” and very carefully she painted my skin with a small brush. That quickly dried. She then covered me for the second coating, waterproof, same colour. “It will last for several months,” she told me.’
Jason shook his head. ‘Then she said “Sorry about that but there’s nothing quicker and we dare not have you fall into a river or rained on so look like an out-of-season zebra. I will give you a bottle of remover to take with you. It may be indispensible. You will be able to clean up there and then if you have to. It stings a bit when applied.”’
C C Too said, ‘You have a wonderful memory for detail. I can arrange for something like that tomorrow.’ The local filming company’s ‘shooting’ team was in his debt. ‘Tell your Gurkha what you have told us.’
‘Saheb, let me try and paint you if the Chinese saheb can get the stuff,’ Chakré said after Jason had told him the outlines of how to put it on. ‘You could have got someone else to do it here but going to Sungei Patani like that you’d be taken as the Dashera joker,’ and he roared with laughter.
Jason repeated the joke and everybody laughed.
‘I expect my arms and face will be all that I need to paint,’ said Jason ‘but we must have the stuff that gets it off before we get back to the battalion.’
‘What clothes have you besides your uniform and what you’re wearing now?’ C C Too asked.
‘None,’ Jason replied.
‘Oh! They won’t do.’ He looked at the two men as if measuring their sizes for clothes. ‘That Indian tailor who sells second-hand clothes. You know him, don’t you?’ he asked Miss Wong. ‘Take my car and go and buy two sets, sizes of Jason and his man, of Malay peasant’s clothing and two conical hats to keep out the rain.’ He felt in his pocket and produced some money. ‘This should be enough,’ he told her.
‘I’ve something else for you,’ said C C Too, getting up and leaving the room. He came back with a small attaché case. ‘Take this with you. It has a false bottom. Put the papers Ah Fat gives you into it.’
Jason looked at it. ‘Yes, it’s small enough to carry in our kit otherwise it will seem strange to be seen walking with it.’
It was midnight before they were finished.
18 December 1955, south Thailand: Ah Fat was worried. There was nothing he could put his finger on as such but there was a ‘something’ unusual in the air. When he met members of the Politburo they were not quite as open with him as they had been. He wondered if news of Chan Man Yee’s defection to China had somehow leaked back. Hardly likely. He had not gone to the Police HQ: was I seen with C C Too leaving or going to HQ Malaya Command? Could have been but it’s too late to worry about it now.
He worked out how best to rob the main secret box in the Secretary General’s office. He had seen the place where its key was hidden. He had always felt that Chin Peng’s unmilitary mind lacked any type of trade craft: so certain was he of absolute and fervent dedication to the Party, he merely kept it on a piece of cord hanging on a nail at the back of the box. For sure, the box was almost flush with the wall but, even so …!
It was planned for the delegation to the peace talks at Baling would leave the MCP camp to get to the jungle edge before being escorted onwards on the Tuesday, the 20th. The three-man team would go with their plans all worked out – hadn’t they been rehearsing for days now? – and take no paperwork with them. Once he had seen them leave and as soon as it was dark, he’d go to the office, open the safe and clear it out. As a cover plan he would have the paperwork C C Too had given him, and which he had kept sedulously hidden among his clothes in his room, not having a small attaché case with a false bottom in it – far too sophisticated! – to put in the secret box were he interrupted and he’d say he’d forgotten to hand them over before. He’d have one of his own men with him, one of those who had surrendered to Jason that time in 1952, who would be glad to be doing something positive.
20 December 1955, south Thailand: Shortly before dusk Ah Fat, with his man discreetly placed watching him, briskly walked over to the main office. In his hands he carried his ‘bait’ paperwork. Move purposely as though you had something to do. People don’t bother with a busy man. Don’t saunter, it looks suspicious. There was no one about. He tried the main door but it was locked. He rattled it and, from the back, came the Duty Watchman. ‘Comrade, open the door. I have some paperwork to deliver.’
The duty watchman took the key out of his pocket and opened the door. He noticed Ah Fat’s bodyguard nonchalantly shuffling his feet in the middle distance and asked what that comrade was doing. ‘He’s my bodyguard.’
‘Comrade Ah Fat, may I ask why you need a bodyguard, especially one with a haversack? You don’t normally have one.’
‘Comrade Duty Watchman. You know that the Comrade Secretary General and two others are due to go to Baling. Just suppose the gwai lo try some trickery while they are away. What does a man like me do without a bodyguard?’ He made no comment about the haversack.
‘Comrade Ah Fat also knows that this place is out of bounds after work. The comrade knows it is a golden rule.’
‘When you are a non-voting member of the Politburo like I am, you can talk about golden rules if you want. Understand?’
Miffed by being censured, the Duty Watchman said nothing but, not unmindful of how the full members of the Politburo had been behaving towards this comrade for the past few days, he became more suspicious.
Ah Fat moved into the inner office, switched on the light, groped around for the key and opened the secret box. He’d planned to give his bodyguard the stuff he took out and until then he’d hide the papers under his shirt. He put the ‘bait’ documents on a table beside him.
Inside the safe he recognised the paperwork that was prepared after the Chinese courier’s visit and removed it, stuffing it inside his shirt. It could be chilly in the evening so he had put on a pullover as well as a cape because it had started to rain when he left his quarter. As he pulled down his shirt and arranged the cape, he heard the Duty Watchman call out, ‘Comrade Lee An Tung, come here will you?’
Ah Fat cursed. Lee An Tung was bad news. Hearing footsteps outside he picked up the ‘bait’ papers from the table and turned to meet Comrade Lee as he came into the room, the look on whose face boded no good. ‘Comrade, I’m surprised to see you here. Lost anything?’ he asked with malicious innocence.
‘Comrade Lee An Tung. No, I have found something,’ Ah Fat answered, lying with the plausibility of a skilled politician and the inflated optimism of a house agent. ‘But I have to admit that I do have a guilty conscious. I am getting absent minded. Look at these papers,’ and he showed him what was in his hands. ‘Take them and read them and I’ll explain them when you have done so.’
Almost greedily the Head of the Central Propaganda Department took them under the light and scanned them. ‘Where did you get these from and why only now are you putting them in the secret box?’ Ah Fat noticed his tone was less distrustful.
‘I managed to get them from Chan Man Yee when the Comrade Secretary General sent me down to meet her, when was it now?’ and he put his hand on his forehead as though trying to think when, not realising that he had used the so-far secret name of the agent.
‘I don’t know who you mean by Chan Man Yee and I won’t ask but why so long after you’ve come back are you only now putting them in the secret box in a most shifty manner? Can you explain yourself?’
Ah Fat, ever the consummate actor, groaned melodramatically. ‘Believe it or not, on my way back I put them in such a secret place, a new suitcase I’d bought with a secret compartment that I was not used to,’ adlibbing furiously and dangerously, ‘that it entirely slipped my mind. It suddenly came to me that I had still got them and, so ashamed was I of myself, I thought I’d slip them into the secret box before anyone knew I’d forgotten them.’ Will be buy it?
Lee An Tung laughed. ‘Yes, comrade, it happens. A pity you remembered after our delegate departed but, no worry. So put them in and close the secret box and that’ll be all about it.’
They parted amicably yet the worm of suspicion in Lee An Tung’s gut was not fully stilled. Could be true but it is unusual for that Ah Fat to be so forgetful. How to make sure?
Ah Fat and his bodyguard met up between the office and the wire surrounding the camp. ‘All ready?’ Ah Fat asked him quietly, looking round as he did.
‘Follow me to where I have loosened the perimeter wire. Once we have crawled through it I’ll tighten it so it won’t look as if we’ve left camp.’
‘Good thinking, indeed,’ said Ah Fat, ‘let’s get going.’ Once over a small mound that shielded them from the camp, the bodyguard switched on a torch, found the track which they walked along for four hours until it was time for a long rest.
I’ll call onAh Fat after I’ve had a meal on the excuse that I’d like to hear more of what Chan Man Yeehas done for our cause.I may pick up something either to allay my distrust or … and the Head of the Central Propaganda Department shuddered at any alternative. After his supper he went to Ah Fat’s quarter which was, surprisingly, empty. He called out, wondering if his quest was in the bathroom. No answer. He went inside and knew, just knew, that his quarry had gone somewhere. An idea struck him. I’ll search for his suitcase with a secret compartment. He searched diligently but did not find one.
He went over to the quarters of the Security Section and ordered a search of the camp for comrade Ah Fat, ‘and especially look and see if the wire has been cut.’ There were fewer men available than normal as many had gone with the Secretary General’s team. Lee An Tung was not popular and, after a hard day’s work, the men were not anxious to go prowling about the camp at this late hour, especially as it was raining, so they were unusually slow in answering, as if they showed resentment at the order. Lee An Tung was ‘jumpy’ and, in no uncertain terms, rebuked them harshly. The men made a cursory walk round the camp, cursing at getting wet, saw nothing untoward, and liking Ah Fat more than Lee An Tung, the senior man told him a bare-faced lie about his still being in camp when he made his report. Not often you can give these people a taste of their own medicine he thought vindictively.
22-23 December 1955, Gunong Lang area, north Malaya: A shabby vehicle had left Miss Wong’s house late on the 20th and driven the three men up the main highway, stopping after six hours. There was nowhere else to sleep but in the vehicle. They moved off at dawn, having had a bite to eat at a roadside place and branched off east along Route 67, towards Baling. After about twenty miles they turned north along a minor road and at the first junction they doubled back south to slightly north of Kampong Lalang, ten miles to the north of Baling, early in the afternoon. From there they could see east to Gunong Lang rising to a height of 3756 feet. The map distance to their destination was not quite ten miles, on foot it would be considerably farther.
