The Gurkha gawped.
***
Saturday 4 October 1952, Soviet Consulate, Alipore Park Road, Calcutta: The Soviets were on friendly terms with the Indians, both with anti-British governments, admittedly for different reasons, and so the array of aerials on the roof of the main building of the consulate, in plain sight for anyone who took any notice of them, was taken by the authorities as normal. What only the MGB ‘Rezident’, a man who called himself Leonid Pavlovich Sobolev and who spoke fluent but guttural English, knew was that it was the centre of a web of contacts consisting of all the Communist parties in southeast Asia, some of which could be contacted directly, others which needed a ‘cut-out’. The situation on the mainland of China was still so confused that he had no contact there but for Hong Kong there was a method of contact, albeit slow and infrequent, that the Rezident relied on: oral messages carried by the pursers on two ships, SS Eastern Queen and SS Princess of the Orient, both operated by the Indo-China Steam Navigation Co. Ltd. to the Tangra cut-out.
Chinese linguists were a rarity in the USSR and Hindi speakers also were few and far between. When the first post-war visit of a Soviet leader to India took place fewer than a dozen Hindi linguists were to be found in the whole of the country. Now the only Chinese contacts easily available to the Rezident were in the Hakka community in Tangra Chinatown. The one Indian that the Rezident trusted and used as a link was a Vikas Bugga.
Sobolev, whose one unusual habit was wiping his nose on any curtain as he passed it, was enjoying an after-lunch brandy when he was contacted by an obsequious underling telling him that a visitor had come to see him.
‘What, now, when I’m relaxing on a Saturday? Without any warning?’ he grumbled. ‘Send him away.’
The messenger said that he had tried to but the man was insistent. ‘“I am only here for a short time. I must see my Big Brother,” was what he said.’
‘Big Brother’ was the secret code used by the Rezident when he made any call, never from his office phone, to an executive. To get a message from Big Brother meant it had to be obeyed without any questions at all.
‘Did he give a name?’
‘Yes, I found it difficult to remember so I asked him to write it down.’ The underling pulled out a slip of paper and read, hesitantly, ‘Vikas Bugga.’
Blast him. He’s about the only Indian I can’t send away. For all their talk of collective humanity, Russians were inborn racists, within and without the Soviet Union.
‘Send him in, now.’
Almost in no time Mr Bugga came bouncing in. ‘I am sorry to come in without warning but I did not know until yesterday that I would be able to have time to come and see you.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ said the Rezident graciously. ‘Sit down and have a glass of brandy and tell me what I can do for you, or better, what you can do for me.’
‘You can do nothing for me except put me to bed if I get drunk as a skunk. But for you, I need to tell you I have had two letters from the Nepali contact who is working on our side making converts in the British Army Gurkhas in Malaya. I knew him before he enlisted when he was in Darjeeling.’
The Rezident held his hand up to stem the flow. He was trying to place just what this garrulous man was talking about. Got it! ‘This is about trying to get the Gurkhas out of Malaya and back to Nepal, isn’t it?’
His visitor nodded.
‘Go ahead.’
‘In his last letter to me he said that he hoped he would have enough people being against the British to make the British authorities in the War Office in London want to disband, if not all of the Gurkhas, at least a battalion before very long.’
‘Now that is good news. Let us toast to it.’
They toasted, then the Rezident asked if there was any timeframe.
‘You mean when do I think that will happen?’
‘Yes, that is what I do mean.’
‘Of course I can’t say but it could be sooner than later.’
After some small talk Vikas Bugga took his leave, promising to keep close contact and, if possible, to give prior warning of his next visit. He gave the Rezident an emergency phone number. ‘Say my eldest son wants to talk to me.’
The Rezident smiled to himself. Business had not been all that successful for a while. A boatload of anti-government, mutinying Gurkhas penetrating Nepal and the Darjeeling area should be good for promotion prospects. In view of possibly being made ambassador somewhere he toasted silently with another brandy.
***
Monday 6 October 1952, on board SS Eastern Queen, Hong Kong: Captain Lam Wai Lim, skipper of the vessel that belonged to the Indo-China Steam Navigation Co. Ltd., was a seasoned mariner who loved the sea as much as he loved his family, which was saying a lot. A squat, affable man with a round, honest-looking face, receding hair and sparkling eyes, he had a happy knack of getting on with people. He had not all that long to wait for his pension to which he was looking forward. He knew his ship intimately, having been five years with her: she was not so big, about 500 feet long, with her beam of 65 feet, a speed of 16 knots and fitting 2192 passengers, including those in cabins. He never had to look at the book to quote all its specifications, so well did he know them.
He had just received notice for the following month about a curious cargo and he called his purser, Law Chu Hoi, to his cabin. ‘Sit down. I have something unusual to tell you.’
The purser, a thin rake of a man, balding with a pock-marked face, sat down, wondering what it was. He was always ‘alert’: he was a dedicated Communist under the strictest disguise, always abusing them if ever asked his opinion of them. If anyone in Hong Kong knew his true job as a courier for the Party, he would be banished to the mainland, instantly, or rather irrevocably, after detailed investigation.
‘Next month we have a boatload of Gurkha troops, the majority to be picked up in Singapore and a few from Penang. We will, in any case, stop for shipping some cargo at Rangoon before disembarking the soldiers and their families in Calcutta and bringing a returning leave party back to Penang and Singapore.’
‘This is unusual. A first timer. Normally the British India Line people take them, don’t they?’
‘So I believe but it’s us this time.’
‘Hm, I wonder why. About how many troops will there be?’
‘All told, single men and families, probably not more than 1400 but you will have to plan for, say, fifty more. Gurkha rations are basically rice and pulse. Some are faddy about our delicious pork and won’t eat it but meat can be goat, sheep or poultry but never beef.’
‘There will be plenty of room for them.’
‘Yes, there will. We will have our normal October run first and be in time for the soldiers.’
The skipper dismissed his purser who wondered if trooping Gurkhas would result in anything unusual.
***
Monday 6 October 1952, Seremban: The operation ordered after re-training had been due to last for three weeks but Higher Authority had found another target. The move out to the operational area had been given for 1000 hours on the Monday. At half past nine an office runner breathlessly went to A Company office and found the men being checked before they moved off. He gave the OC a salute, meticulously returned, and told him that the CO wanted him in the office, at once. Jason sighed. What now? he asked himself, telling his 2 ic to take over and finish off checking the men.
***
By then he had written his report on how he had managed to be successful on Operation Janus. All his jungle knowledge was based on how he and his friend Ah Fat had tracked each other in the jungles near Sepang when they were schoolboys on holiday. His skills were enhanced by learning jungle warfare at the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun prior going to war in Burma where he was made the Recce Platoon commander and outshone any previous commander in what he did and what he taught his men. Now in Malaya it didn’t matter whether the operation was patrolling, ambushing, surrounding an enemy camp or, simply, making an overnight base camp: success depended on movement being as invisible as possible to any enemy. It never occurred to him to say that for success in the jungle a ‘change of mental gear’ was needed as it was, by then, second nature to him.
One point he had made was ‘for the hunter a misplaced footprint merely meant a lost contact; for the hunted death or capture’. He wondered whether to add ‘I know because I have been both’ but decided against it lest he be accused of being flamboyant or merely showing off by exaggerating what he had done in Burma during the war. At the end he added ‘and don’t forget, the best way to escape from an elephant is to run downhill.’
Somewhere in the report was a note that a proper patrol was, virtually, a moving ambush. Not in the report but stressed to his company on briefings was ‘to look where you’re going’, that time when a platoon had been moving up to a river towards the enemy on the other side of the water, who were in greater strength than they were but who had not spotted them. Their old camp on the Gurkhas’ side of the river was now empty and the platoon commander was unsure whether he could cross the river and attack the present enemy camp without taking casualties. Moving into position one man, not looking where he was going, fell up to his knees into a guerrilla latrine. He smelt so badly the other soldiers moved away from him, non-tactically. He went forward to the river to clean up and his companions thought he was going to charge the enemy by himself. They dashed after him, did not see him washing himself behind a rock, crossed the river and routed the guerrillas, killing some of them before the others escaped.
But where was the man who had fallen into the latrine? No one could see him and he was feared missing – captured or killed? Going back across the river they were relieved to see him still getting clean.
‘Look where you’re going. Next time it might be up to the knees, having fallen in head first, so you won’t be so lucky.’
He also included the incident that gave him the most satisfaction: that was when he wanted to overhear a conversation in the guerrilla camp when there was no method of getting near enough without being seen. He had cut an arum leaf where it came out of the mud and, putting it in front of him as a shield, squirmed to the top of a bank, within earshot. He overheard all that was being said, thereby letting him achieve success in preventing the renegade officer from escaping. He was startled when two guerrillas came over to where the leaf was for a piss. They actually aimed at the leaf which gave a humming noise back. Neither realised that the leaf was out of place: no arum leaf was ever found at the top of a bank in the dry.
It was while he was writing his report that he realised why the CO had given him that strange look when he was told to stand up: he had met his wife arranging some flowers in the Mess and had addressed her by her Christian name as was the custom. She had turned angrily upon him and hissed ‘don’t you call me by my enemy’s name’ and turned back on him, mumbling to herself.
Jason had crept away, realising he had used the name of the Second-in-Command’s wife.
***
