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.
