Suddenly at Singapore (11 page)

The car hit something and tilted up. The bullets stung against metal like great driven insects. The fat man was a weight against my legs, pushing them down. He groaned and then I knew he was dead. The firing went on, but past us, rattling down the road. There were shouts, anger, fragments of orders. And then these ceased.

There was a silence without even echoes for a moment or two, like something lowered. Then I heard a crackling of feet and voices and a shout of laughter. I thought that when they saw I was alive they wouldn’t wait to ask questions, but deal with that, too. And so I lay in pain half under a dead man and very still.

They didn’t come to the car I was in first. I was lucky, the moment of elation, of unreasoning triumph was over when the door at my head was wrenched open. I saw a face peering down at me, under a peaked cap, eyes astonished. I got my hands free and held them up, showing the manacles.

“I’m one of you,” I said, over and over, not knowing quite what I meant. “I’m one of you.”

In a moment there were a lot of men by that tilted car, and others coming running. They looked like men who had been in the jungle for a time, with the wispy beards of the Oriental. They got me out and they saw my feet and my legs.

I was carried to a grass bank. They cut the ropes on my feet but couldn’t do anything then about the handcuffs. Someone brought a car seat and propped me up against it.

I began to talk, fast, not very coherently in Malay and they closed in to listen. I went on until a kind of choking stopped me. Someone gave me a drink from a British service water bottle in its khaki container.

They began to understand who I was and why I had been a captive in that car. They were rebels, connected with the ones I had been supplying. Later they told me they had been responsible for wrecking the plane that had brought me in, digging out a hole in the landing strip and filling it with soft mud. I knew that my luck was still holding.

There wasn’t time to waste and one of the rebels gave an order. The crowd about me thinned. I could see down the line of wrecked cars, with bodies spilled out of them.

The car in front of mine had a man lying beside it, a body crumpled like a stuffed toy, eyes still staring. It was General Sorumbai.

In every war so far, big and little, a major factor has been the neutrals out to carry on at least a semblance of normal life while the roaring goes on about them. A week after the ambush I sailed before moonrise from the coast of Sumatra in a neutral ship, an old junk in the rice trade to Kra in South Thailand.

All the way across the island I had been looked after, positively cosseted by Oriental standards, with someone else doing the arranging the whole time. I was helped up into old estate lorries and sent roaring down night roads, then carried through stretches of jungle on a litter by four sweating men who didn’t seem to mind, as though I was something highly valuable to them, as perhaps I was. On the junk, though, I was on my own again, very conscious of being surrounded by the suspicious neutrals.

The skipper was a half Chinese called Soo Fin who must have been paid a hefty price for my passage to Malaya but who still wondered if it was worth the risk. I was put in a kennel made of straw matting up on the high poop and left while we creaked out from amongst mangrove swamp into the channel.

It was years since I had travelled on anything as slow as this old junk and the night winds were dismally light. For a long time we were moved more by the current than anything else and once or twice I heard the big, ribbed sails flapping. The helmsman up behind me kept muttering away to himself in Cantonese. There was no engine they could switch on and that hulk seemed caught up in the deep apathy of ancient gods long since gone into retirement.

I was still in considerable pain and after a week of a sort of V.I.P. treatment found it hard to take over initiative for myself again. Though I knew I was going to have to. If trouble came the crew of this old tub were quite likely to give me a bonk on the head and serve me gently to the sharks. I didn’t have the feel of a first-class passenger at all.

And I knew what the trouble was likely to be. All this coast was patrolled by fast little boats made in Britain, and Italy and Hamburg, water beetles that scudded back and forth looking for one thing … gun runners. Soo Fin’s cargo was innocent enough, but his deck passenger wasn’t.

My kennel had fleas in the straw and I wanted to roll out of it on to the relatively clean deck, but felt it better to keep invisible and not put any emphasis on my presence. Almost certainly the crew weren’t sharing in the price of my passage and the sight of me might just be the reminder of a grievance. What I did do was roll up some of the side matting so that I had a view of the moon coming up, an increasing white glitter on the water which made our presence out there even more conspicuous.

The junk’s course seemed to be north-west along the coast of Sumatra, no attempt made to get out into mid-channel at all. Junk skippers, the ones with nothing on their conscience, tend to do this in these waters, sticking by land as long as possible, and then making a straight dash over to their objective on the other side. Under the circumstances, however, it would have been wiser to get out of what was technically Indonesian jurisdiction and if Soo Fin had been around I would have suggested this. But he was below, probably having a pipe to calm his nerves.

I could have done with something to calm mine. This progress was like something in a dream, where you see your objective clearly in front of you, but are held back from it inexorably. Over there, beyond the glitter, was Malaya, but unattainable, screened off by a barrier of unpleasant possibilities. I couldn’t get away from the feeling that I’d had more than my quota of luck for this excursion, in fact heavily overdrawn it, with no further advances likely.

I had a packet of those cigarettes made largely from cowpats, which are one of the contributing causes to the widespread Indonesian unrest, and though the first puff produces a kind of nausea, I smoked them, sucking down the fumes of this uncertain sedation into my chest. It didn’t do much good. I went on being obsessed with the conviction that I was a damn’ fool to have tried to get home like this, I should have waited with the rebels on the coast of Sumatra until a message could be got through to one of my own junk captains. The trouble was I couldn’t be sure I had any junks left or any captains out of jail. There was very little I could be sure of.

There’s a theory that if you expect the worst sharply enough it doesn’t happen. I was expecting to look up at any moment and see a speeding patrol boat coming up at us, with a gun on its prow, a terrific bow wave silvered by moonlight. I looked up, through the naked, muscled legs of the helmsman, and saw the boat astern. Just for a moment I didn’t allow myself to believe it. I had taken out a kind of insurance against this by the sharpest of visions in my mind.

Then came the jolt of panic. I was half crocked, with huge ulcers on my legs that were raw and getting deeper. I could move around, but it was an agony, every step. For a week I had been an object of concern and attention, which was rough, but real. I looked at that boat, which seemed lethal and very fast under the glittering moon. I could feel the throb of its diesels now through the wooden planking of the junk.

That was what made the helmsman turn. He gave a cry that was like something from sharp pain and then pushed over the huge tiller under his hands. Chains clanked beneath us. The man screamed again. We were suddenly almost broadside on to the patrol boat which was driving straight at us without any slackening of speed. I had one last little flutter of hope that when it altered course against our silly manœuvre I’d see the Red Ensign fluttering from the stern.

But it wasn’t there. With our diminishing influence in this area only about one patrol boat in twenty seems to carry these heartening colours nowadays. I recognised the flag when I saw it. It did nothing to improve my chances.

There was great activity on the junk. The Chinese face disaster with as much noise as possible and most of that crew had relations in Canton. They screamed. I couldn’t make out any sound in that din which seemed like orders.

At any moment, even with the moon, the patrol boat might switch on a searchlight and my kennel was horribly conspicuous up there on the poop. I rolled out of it and began to crawl towards the ladder down to the well deck. I had almost reached the thing when Soo Fin’s face came up from below, suddenly practically flush with mine.

It wasn’t a pleasant face, round, pocked, tiny-eyed, and marked now by the man’s sharp fear for his own economic security. I was quite certain that he had been coming up to put his emergency plan for me into operation. I couldn’t see his hands, whether he carried anything.

“I’m coming down,” I said. “Get off the ladder!”

He was surprised. It gave me an advantage, but I didn’t expect it to be long lasting.

On the well deck we faced each other, sheltered for the moment from that patrol boat. Soo Fin had been carrying a gun and it made a nasty lump in the pocket of his tight pants. It was a moment which demanded a quick understanding between us. I was glad that he had put the gun away, uneasy enough to do that.

“If anything happens to me, Soo Fin, you may get out of this little mess. But my men are in Malaya and Sumatra. They’ll find you. They’ll take yours ears first.”

That message was received. You could see it in tiny eyes.

“Have you a false bottom in one of the holds? A decent hiding place?”

He shook his head. He said something which was meant to imply that he was an honest business man, but he wasn’t too convincing.

“They’re going to come alongside and board,” I said “And search very carefully. I mustn’t be found.”

“It’s impossible!”

I remembered the creaking of those chains going down to a great rudder sticking out like a ribbed fan from under the overhang of the poop. If I could get down there, into the water, and hold on, it would be very difficult to see me from above. The rudder itself would be a kind of screen, and we weren’t making much way in the light wind, practically none at all since our half tack.

The patrol boat was fitted with a siren like an American police car. It was the first time I had heard that out over water and it made a very nasty sound. It put Soo Fin into the kind of terror which weakened his resistance to my ideas. He was afraid of the patrol but he was also afraid of losing his ears, and other things, through me.

“Quieten your men down a bit,” I suggested.

He did that, bellowing in a way that must have reached the other boat. Just as I expected that searchlight came on, oddly warm in moonlight, splashing us with yellow. I backed away from that probing, against the deckhouse, glad to lean against it, for it wasn’t too easy to stand. Soo Fin watched me, as though he hadn’t yet made up his mind. I smiled at him and he gave his head an odd little shake.

“Warn your men to say nothing about me,” I said. “That’s important.”

The crew were all standing about watching the patrol boat, the noise over. They were suddenly quite motionless, oddly like ancient mariners about to drop down dead because of a curse from that old bird. I don’t think anyone except Soo Fin saw me go over the side, the side away from the patrol boat, which was now closing in, its light very yellow and very near, and the siren making that weird continuous screaming.

A junk’s superstructure offers some excellent toe and hand holds almost to the water line, and though my legs weren’t much good my arms were all right. I didn’t think about sharks going down, only about little men with guns out looking for an Imperialist agent. The desire not to meet up with these representatives of a kind of law and order was strong enough to over-ride all those sharp messages of pain that reached my brain.

Salt water in my ulcers made me want to make a Chinese noise. For just a moment I let go, and a little eddy from the junk’s faint movement carried me away, and then back in again. I clawed at planks with my nails, feeling that sucking at my body. Then I got hold of the rusty chain to the rudder, hanging on, only my head and arms out, in a little pocket of shadow from the moon.

It wasn’t easy hanging on. Above me there was a lot of noise, shouting, but all of it removed and oddly remote. My fear was that the patrol would put on a boarding party and then perhaps drift behind, still flashing that searchlight about and picking me up in it. I thought, too, of sharks, but maybe ulcers aren’t appetising. There wasn’t a fin in sight, though in these waters you often saw whole cotillions of them, sharks almost as merry seeming as dolphins, though more purposeful. They even come into the shallows and take off a man’s leg when he is fishing only waist deep, hungry sharks feeling the pressure of their own problem of over-population.

I must have been in the water for forty minutes, while the junk above me was ransacked, and the pain in my legs didn’t tone down any. Once or twice I was near the point of wanting to let go, the gentle, moonlit sea offering an almost soporific invitation to the easiest kind of oblivion. I went on clinging to that chain, hearing about me the soft, plopping noises of water slapping up against old planking.

Then there was something else, the throbbing of diesels starting up, sending an increasing pulsing against my body. I was lucky that the patrol skipper was an exhibitionist, surging away from the junk in a great, slow arc forward which gave Soo Fin plenty of time to throw me a line and haul me in like a limp fish which has given up all struggle.

When I finally reached the deck I found him taking full credit with his crew for the little trick which had saved me. I let him, only wanting to lie down again in my kennel. But I did manage to say:

“Get away from this coast. Do you hear? Get away from it!”

About midnight there was a sudden squall and black cloud and the old junk creaked strangely under the effort of real movement through the water.

I
LANDED
on Penang island just after dawn, rowed in from the junk by one man in a little boat they kept stowed on the well deck. We moved in over a glassy calm which mirrored the first light of morning. I looked like a refugee from something, perhaps a war long over, in an antique pair of Japanese army trousers, an aged green shirt and a peaked cap. I felt the cold on the water and couldn’t stop shivering. My teeth chattered.