‘And here are some more tracks moving eastwards,’ called another rifleman.
Corporal Kulbahadur had already seen tracks moving northeast. ‘They have split, the crafty fellows, maybe in more than three groups. Pointless our doing anything more now.’ He looked at his map and noted the grid reference. ‘We must go back fast before the light fails. At least it’s stopped raining.’
They got back at dusk and, by the light of a fire, arranged their poncho capes for the night while the signaller, having been given the grid reference of where the tracks split, tried to contact Battalion HQ. He was unsuccessful as the normal nightly interference made transmission impossible.
‘Leave it to tomorrow morning and let’s eat,’ said the Platoon Commander.
After their meal, he detailed the sentry roster and the others went to sleep.
The RMO had a delicate task with the CO’s face. Washing off the caked blood from the body was easy but making the face look peaceful enough for his widow’s sake was a problem as most of the nose had been shot away. Mending it would be an all-night job. He ordered one of his staff to get a clean jungle green shirt, with medal ribbons, badges of rank, parachute wings and 12 GR shoulder titles already fixed, from the CO’s batman, to be brought discreetly from his bungalow– that turned out easy as Fiona and the children had gone to Jane and Henry’s place for the night – but the nose was a problem as it had to be rebuilt to look normal. Almost impossible, I fear, the doctor fretted. As he shaved the dead man’s face he saw how he could minimize the shock the wife would have.
14 August 1954, central Malaya: During the night the doctor laboriously re-built the nose with a solution of plaster of Paris and gauze then covered his handwork with homely sticking plaster. The body, dressed and patched, was put inside a coffin with the shroud draped over it. The lid was temporarily put on it and shortly before dawn the medical staff wearily stumbled off to bed, hoping their efforts would be appreciated.
Gathered in their jungle base, Tan Fook Leong congratulated his men on their ambush tactics and, as a reward for good soldiering, allotted the three captured rifles accordingly. They held a group meeting to discuss what tactics should be adopted now that a hornets’ nest had been so violently stirred. Politburo orders were that operations against civilian targets should cease and that guerrillas should move to deep jungle and make ‘gardens’ for self-sufficiency. ‘We will move east then northeast by platoons.’ He took a map out of a notecase. ‘Look, the imperialists are so behind the times that much of this map sheet,’ he held it up for the others to see, ‘has yet to be surveyed. It is only coloured white. What I propose is that two platoons move to north of the Bahau area and the third, the smallest, moves to a location suitable for making a garden in the blank map sheet. On our way around Bahau, where people are friendly to us, we will acquire as many mattocks and axes as are available, otherwise we won’t be able to manage.’
He took his small portable radio out of his pack and turned it on. Even with a new battery it only hissed. He looked at it in dismay. ‘I know it’s old but I thought it would last longer than this,’ he muttered, forgetting he had had it in his possession for eight years since his visit to London and it was an old model then. He looked around and saw Goh Ah Wah and Kwek Leng Ming, two comrades whom he fully trusted. He called them over. ‘Comrades, I want you two to do a couple of things for me. One is to go to the garden where those two disgraced comrades, Yap Kheng and Sim Ting Hok, are working and tell them to come here. The other is to take this radio,’ he handed it over, ‘and get it repaired or buy a new one. Use your civilian ID cards, wear plain clothes and pretend to be innocent civilians. I’m sure you can manage.’ He tore a page from his notebook and wrote something. ‘Try and make contact with my wife, Chen Yok Lan, and son, Tan Wing Bun, in Penang. I’ve written the phone number down.’
‘Comrade Tang, that will be our pleasure. It may take a bit of time but I’m sure you’ll understand if it does.’
‘Yes. After you have collected it, rather than look for me to hand it over, take it to my cave hideaway and stay there till I come.’
14 August 1954, Betong, south Thailand: The Central Committee of the MCP, with the ridiculously young Secretary General, universally known as Chin Peng, a placid-looking person without any stamp of leadership on his face, was carefully hidden in thick jungle in south Thailand, north Malaya having become too unhealthy for it. It had its strict routine, one aspect of which was listening to the early morning news broadcast of Radio Malaya on its Chinese-language channel. All were taken aback by the announcement of the death by a guerrilla ambush of the CO and two Gurkha soldiers of 1/12 GR in the hilly country north of Seremban as they were returning to camp. It sent a frisson of excitement through them as they listened. It was not often these days that such noble and daring deeds were so successfully accomplished.
At the end of the bulletin the Head of Central Propaganda Department, Lee An Tung, a man with a worried look on his face and a perpetual frown, said to his Deputy, Chien Tiang, a squat man who looked at everyone suspiciously, ‘That’ll be Comrade Tan Fook Leong. He’s a canny operator, one of our best. I was with him in London in 1946 for the Victory Parade and I know him well.’
‘Yes, so do I,’ said Chin Peng. ‘He’s done us proud. The High Commissioner killed in a similar ambush last year and now a CO. Despite our having to change our tactics from an aggressive mode to being less hard on the civil population, acts such as this happily, for us at least, keep us in the headlines and our morale high.’
Heads nodded but no one offered any riposte. The truth was that a General Briggs had devised a plan to re-settle in ‘new villages’ the Chinese ‘squatter’ population that lived on the fringe of the jungle without any land title deeds and who were instrumental in supplying the guerrillas with food, shelter and information about the Security Forces. It had been a painful but necessary decision to uproot so many people and painful, too, for the guerrillas to be deprived of such basic necessities so essential for survival. It had resulted in their having to operate from bases deeper in the jungle than before and grow their own crops in ‘gardens’. This was a time-consuming task and originally many were spotted from the air: this, in turn, led to the guerrillas planting their various crops haphazardly under the jungle canopy. The Central Committee had been on short commons until their move over the Malay-Thai border. Once there, local authority’s ‘blind eye’ and the MCP’s taking no part other than self defence – and growing their over vegetables – kept life quiet for them.
One of the listeners to the radio was a man named Ah Fat, a non-voting Politburo member. He was well built and solid but his movements were fluid. His eyes were always alert, never missing a trick, even though his peripheral gaze was not easy to follow. He looked a tad glum, was round of face, with high cheek bones. He stood about five and a half feet high. He had a habit of rubbing the palms of his hands together when thinking. His ears, close to his head, had, in some circles, given him the nickname of P’ing Yee, Flat Ears. Normally taciturn, he could turn on the charm when needed. He was well educated and spoke excellent English. However, for safety’s sake, he kept that skill a closely guarded secret lest his ‘other’ role be jeopardised. Whenever he did speak English in front of other Chinese it was only of middle-school standard. When asked how he managed to separate his two lives he answered ‘my life is grasped in my hand, not by heaven,’ which he said was claimed by the 4th-century alchemist, Ko Hung, ‘but I keep that to myself as “they” wouldn’t accept it as Marx didn’t write it.’
He was an only child, born and bred in Kuala Lumpur where his father had worked with the British intelligence representative, Jason Rance’s father, and from an early age the two boys became as close as brothers. Ah Fat knew Jason as Shandung P’aau, the Shandong Cannon, the Shandong people being known for their sturdiness and Jason being a sturdy lad. The two boys always playing together was the main reason for Jason’s Chinese being word perfect. During the Japanese occupation Ah Fat had become a guerrilla but, with his intelligence roots, he was, in fact, now a ‘mole’ working for the British. In 1952 he and Jason had become intimately involved in the elimination of a British officer of 1/12 GR who had wanted to join the MCP. Although the two men had become involved separately, their joint venture was still an unknown in the Politburo. The operation had been christened Operation Janus.
Ah Fat knew that his friend Jason was an exceptional jungle operator. Pre-war they had played in the jungle, tracking each other, playing hide-and-seek, until they were almost animal-like in their ability. How had Jason described the jungle? He thought back: ‘it was a close-horizoned, all-pervading, never-ending green of trees, vines, creepers and undergrowth. Trees grew, trunk by trunk and stem by stem, each one crowding upon and striving to overtop the other, and tied and netted together with the snake arms of creepers into a closely woven web. Aerial roots and liana-nooses hung from high above. Leaves laid themselves out in vast terraces, fantastic umbels descended in cascades and creepers united in stout, tightly-wound, spiral columns. Vegetation teemed in the steamy twilight; great fronds broken under their own weight, ropes which had neither end nor beginning, plants with fat, sticky leaves or with hairy or scaly stems, or stems that opened out like buttresses and some with large, luxuriant flowers, exuding a strange and deathly scent.’ It was a good description, the Chinese mole thought. We practised enough, didn’t we! And he grinned as he recalled ‘those days’. They knew that animals were not normally a hazard but the Malayan buffalo, a pink brute, was aggressive towards Europeans – something to do with their body odour which has a different smell from normal rice-eating Malays – and the wild bison hostile towards everybody. Animals are normally more afraid of men than men are of them, yet they have to be treated with respect. Malayan tigers will only become savage when their cubs are threatened.
He remembered the animals they had come across. One time they were startled when they heard a noise neither of them recognised. They crept forward and saw it was a pig scratching its back on a log. It squealed in fright when it saw them and ran away; and once the noise of sticks hitting the upper branches of a tree to their front when they had thought they were alone. They crept ahead and, to their surprise, they saw it was made by a monkey. They had laughed at it but it had taken no notice. … and that time when we were sitting on the bank of a river some fifty yards wide, flowing in a wide curve. We suddenly heard a mewing noise and, borne towards us by the current from the far bank, we saw a long, thin, black snake with curious little lumps equidistant along its entire length, each bump mewing. We could not fathom what kind of snake it was, but it did seem as if had swallowed a number of piglets whole and the wretched things, still alive, were vainly trying to escape. The current carried this creature past us towards the near bank where it hit a rock. It split in two, the tail end gaily swimming on but the front part disintegrated, each bump growing four legs and moving independently. We were spellbound and it was only when each moribund ‘piglet’ scampered away did we realise that we had seen a family of monkeys crossing the river, too wide to jump across from tree to tree, holding on to one another’s tail being carried over by the current. We could not decide whether the mewing was from the fear or the fun of it … I must stop day-dreaming!
At the end of Janus some guerrillas had surrendered and become a ‘Q’ Team, whose leader was Wang Ming, a short, squat man, known as Hung Lo, the Bear. He had been so impressed by Rance’s methods that he said he always wanted to work with Jason where possible. He was in charge of Ah Fat’s bodyguard, living near the central camp.
On hearing the news of the death of the CO of 1/12 GR, Ah Fat sat on one side, saying nothing, rubbing the palms of his hands together as he thought: I wonder how heavily Shandung P’aau is involved in this. I must try and find a way of making contact with him. He brooded. I wonder if he has heard that the Politburo is making secret arrangements for peace talks now that the British have said that Malaya can have self rule and that, surely, can give him and me an opportunity to meet. There is talk in the Politburo about asking for an amnesty and being recognised as an official political party. It is all desperately secret. I must try and alert my English friend, but how?
Same day, Seremban: After a stressful night, Fiona Ridings, hardly able to bear the thought of a future without her husband, asked Henry Gibson if she could see her husband’s body and where he would be buried. ‘Can I take his corpse to England and bury him in our village graveyard?’ she asked.
‘The complications are many and varied for that to happen,’ he answered carefully. ‘There are proper military cemeteries here in Malaya. The nearest one is not far down the road from here and official policy is for fatalities to be buried in them. It is therefore incumbent to bury him here with an official regimental funeral and after the Emergency is over consider if disinterring him and taking him back to England is still what you want.’ The RAF only took corpses from Singapore; he did not dare tell her that Singapore Customs would only allow a corpse to enter Singapore from across the Johor Causeway if it were declared as ‘dead meat’. Unacceptable! ‘I’ll give the doctor a bell and see how matters stand.’
When the widow saw her dead husband’s plastered nose she nearly burst into tears with anger. She, not knowing that the nose had been shattered, fought them back and petulantly scolded the doctor for making a mess of her husband’s face.
The doctor, bleary-eyed, fought back the answer that immediately came to him and merely said, placatingly, ‘Forgive me, Mrs Ridings, my hand slipped when I was shaving him. Please accept my apologies.’
She upbraided him with vigour for his careless ineptitude. ‘What do you mean by damaging his nose? That’s terrible. I object most strongly. You should be ashamed of yourself,’ and, biting her lower lip to stop herself from crying, was quietly led away by Jane Gibson before she could say anything more, in no way appreciating the amount of work and care needed for her husband’s renovated appearance.
After she had gone the doctor sighed heavily, shook his head and told his staff to put the lid on the coffin and nail it down. It was later taken to the civilian hospital for refrigeration until arrangements could be made for the funeral.
Jason’s fiancée knew that her husband-to-be was heavily involved in chasing the guerrillas and she did not want to become a widow before getting married so, in a state of panic, she left a note for Jason in her bedroom, called a taxi and, unseen by anyone, took the night train to Singapore. Her absence was not noticed for more than a day.
14-16 August 1954, Jelebu pass area: Captain Rance brought his other two platoons to the ambush site by 0900 hours as ordered. He had a look around while his CQMS distributed the five days’ rations then asked 3 Platoon Commander to brief him on what had been found. The Platoon Commander told Corporal Kulbahadur Limbu to give the details.
Rance listened intently then gave his orders. ‘We will go to where the daku split and one platoon each will follow one of those three lots of tracks. If we find a fourth I’ll take the CSM and Chakrabahadur Rai, my batman, leaving the remainder of Company HQ behind. Sections will leave their LMGs behind as this is only a recce.’
Led by Corporal Kulbahadur Limbu the company went off to where the tracks split. ‘Take your big packs with you and try to follow any tracks you find. If they are more than your platoon can manage, call me and I’ll make a plan,’ Jason briefed his platoon commanders. ‘Any questions?’
‘Where will you be, Saheb?’ one of them asked.
‘I’ll look around with my small group and if we see any other track we’ll follow it. Whatever else, we’ll be back before last light.’
The platoon commanders saluted and went away to get on with their job.
‘Saheb,’ said the 2-inch Mortarman, Jasbahadur Gurung. ‘Let me take the Signaller’s pistol and come with you if you find another track to follow.’
‘Jasé, just this once,’ said Jason, smiling.
Casting around, a fourth track was found, faintly etched in the damp ground heading southeast. ‘Major Ba,’ Jason addressed his CSM, ‘we four will follow this.’
About midday Jason’s small group stopped for a breather. Chakrabahadur Rai said, ‘Saheb, I hear an axe on wood. Do you?’
Yes, they all did. Then voices were heard. ‘Daku, not far in front of us,’ said the CSM.
The jungle in front of them was lighter than normal and they realised they had come up to a daku ‘garden’ and that men were working in it.
