Morse. It set up impulses in the brain and got his pencil writing a message from the army platoon to say that their lorry had broken down, and he swore while the last words came through, in the knowledge that such a delay would keep them out longer than necessary. Odgeson gave him a QSL and map reference: “We’ll wait for them there. I hope it won’t be for too long, though.”
“I wish I was on the boat,” he said to Baker, “instead of on this jaunt.”
Baker laughed: “It serves us right for getting mixed up in that Gunong Barat business. I shouldn’t have let you persuade me to go.” His drawn face had lost its inborn English colour and had turned to the first layer of a leathery tan. He’d been on a slow and lonesome booze-up in the NAAFI last night that intensified his usual couldn’t-care-less mood. As the time drew nearer to demob, he drank more and more and took to smoking, while engine manuals and motorbike catalogues lay dusty and forgotten in his locker. “I’d rather be in a brothel,” he said, “than in this four-wheeled oven.”
“You soon will be. Or back in London with your girl. Do you think your motorbike’ll have gone rusty and dropped to bits?”
Being so weary, he took him seriously: “I don’t know, Brian. My brother promised to look after it, so it should be in good enough condition. Not that he’s a very good mechanic, but he keeps his promises.” Odgeson looked up keenly from map to road, his pinkish, oval-shaped face seeming to Brian that it must in some way resemble those of the aircrew they were out to rescue. But the vision of them—college-educated perhaps, certainly skilled to the point of nonchalance and jauntiness—was switched in a second to the foresight of them dead and mangled in the great forks of high, superstrong forest giants. Or maybe wounded, alive and waiting, waiting, being drained of life like a punctured eggtimer.
The lorry was steadier around the curves, with number two only fifty yards behind on the shaded road of the foothills. Brian listened out for other calls from the army, his eyes half-closed at the soporific easygoing purr of the lorry-engine, while Odgeson worked on a time-and-position message for transmission to Kota Libis. They stopped at the occasional roadblock to make a hasty declaration of their mission: “This must be heavy bandit country,” Baker said. “All we need is an ambush at the next turning and the only boat we’ll be on is Noah’s Ark going to heaven.”
Brian called him a pessimist, yet who could be sure, now that Baker had mentioned it? Reports in the Straits Times backed him up; no pitched battle was ever fought, but the Communists picked off isolated police posts, hamlets and estate managers’ bungalows, were marvels at guerilla warfare. Forty miles north of Singapore, he had read, ten of them, wearing jungle-green and armed with Stens, dragged two brothers from a house, shot one dead and left the other so terrified he didn’t get the coppers for a couple of days. Another time at Menkatab, forty attacked a police station, cut the phone wires, and peppered the joint for hours before making off. They really mean business, he thought, and who can blame them?
The sun was well up, the heat a draughtsman drawing islands of sweat on his shirt. Baker mopped himself dry: “Why don’t you put your hat on?” Brian said. “You’ll go down with sunstroke if you aren’t careful.”
“I couldn’t care less,” he retorted. “If I do, maybe they’ll invalid me back to camp, raving my guts off on a shutter—telling them where they can put the tin-pot air force.”
At the next collection of brown huts Odgeson looked at his watch: “We should be there in ten minutes.”
“I wouldn’t need sunstroke to tell ’em that,” Brian said.
“You’d never tell them at all. You wouldn’t know how.”
“Don’t worry: I would.”
“You’re just a sheep like the rest. You’ll go back on the boat, get a job and settle down, and look back on Malaya as the most glorious time of your life.”
“You’ve got me wrong.”
“I’ve seen that album full of photos.”
“So what? I want to show my family what it was like. Anyway, what’s making you so destructive?” Fantastic sugar-lumps of hillocks, sprouting mops of trees with beards of creeper half-covering purple patches of their cliff face, grew back into the hills, reared up two or three hundred feet into a ghostly local and temporary mist that seemed to mask them off as private property. “A hangover,” Baker answered.
“Keep it to yourself then. You can take a turn at these atmospherics in a bit. That’ll get rid of it for you.”
At the next bend of the gravel track, both lorries drew up among the trees. A Malay woman stood in the doorway of a nearby hut and pointed with a smile into the mountainside as they sprang down to flex their legs. Nine rifles were piled by a tree, and the woman came out with a branch of pink bananas that they made up a kitty to buy.
Brian sent a message to Kota Libis saying they had reached the point of rendezvous and were now waiting for the army before lifting themselves into the hills—then handed the set over to Baker. He scouted the shrubbery to amass wood for a tea fire. The flames were obstinate at first, brought smoke from the sap-ends of each stick or drew back from the mossy life of damp pieces, but by absorbed and dexterous application that took him a few minutes away from the worrying reality of his unexpected journey, he succeeded in creating a firm wall of flame. While Odgeson and Knotman were debating how and when to make their next move, he passed around cans of his own black mash.
Looking up, he wondered where the plane lay, for there was no tell-tale indentation, no Siberian meteoric crater or tadpole tail of wreckage to show where it might have stuck its silver snout. A couple of invisible bearings had crossed in the heavy waves of jungle—or were supposed to have, because who could tell how accurate they had been? He was pulled out of his speculations by the sound of an old Ford car—the original, it looked like—put-putting to a halt by the hut. A Malay police officer, dapper and smart in clean khaki, got down and asked Odgeson what he intended to do. Odgeson said his idea was to set off as soon as possible and look for the plane. The police officer smiled brilliantly and replied that, yes, a plane had crashed up there—pointing into the jungle with his rattan—because people in the village had heard it during the night. Of course, he added, no one could guarantee there weren’t bandits in the area. “We won’t be able to hang around much longer, though,” Odgeson said. The police officer agreed that it might not be wise to wait too long, though they should be careful not to take too many risks. With a final smile of approval at the way the world was run, he got into his car and drove off, accompanied by his saried attendant, who toted a machine-gun. The car rattled down the road, shook hands with a corner, and was out of sight.
Brian swilled his can in the stream and stamped on the fire, and the Malay woman stacked his surplus wood by her hut as if sensing they would leave before another round of tea was called for; but Odgeson and Knotman, conferring by the lorries, were a picture of stalemate: no word had come from the army, and they had been waiting more than an hour. Knotman suggested humping it with a couple of others into the mountain, but Odgeson still thought it better to wait till the army came.
“It’s about time somebody went up there, though,” Brian said to Baker as they stood by the radio. “We’ve got rifles, and we’re experienced jungle-bashers. I don’t like to think of them poor bastards snuffing it one by one.” He flipped through his paybook: “Here, I’ve still got your will you gen me at Gunong Barat. You’d better tek it, because if I get up there and want to mash some tea, I might get a fire going with it.” Baker accepted, absent-mindedly set it under the wireless, safe from wind and rain. The others were restless, scuffled with a mess-tin: “I’m Arsenal,” one cried. “I’m Piccadilly Hotspurs,” called another. Baker clicked out the army call sign, but was unanswered, as if no ethereal dots and dashes could penetrate the isolating tree-glutted mountains that ranged three quarters around.
Odgeson decided to act: “Get your rifles. We’ll make two parties, four in each. The drivers can stay with the lorries.” Knotman o
pened the map to discuss routes and times of meeting. “I don’t like the idea of only me and my mate being left here,” a driver said morosely.
“Neither do we like the idea of going up there,” he was told. Baker received a long-awaited message from the army: they’d been ambushed a few miles south and their lorry was out of action. However, they’d split forces and a couple of sections were coming up on foot. So the drivers were satisfied, and the rest didn’t mind going into the jungle with the army so close. A king-sized Dakota flew north-east across the vast sea of sky, then reappeared at a lower height. It circled twice, went into a dip behind the mountains, and roared down over them from the peak, preceded by a wavering belly-shadow. “He’s in on it, too,” Knotman said. “It’ll be a big do by the look of it, though they’d have done better sending an Auster or a helicopter.” Brian was part of Odgeson’s patrol, Baker and Cheshire, a teleprinter operator, making up the four of them.
Both groups took to a track bordered by waving blades of elephant grass, pliable as bayonets, which soon drew them from each other’s sight. Brian shared a walkie-talkie with Baker, also lugging a rifle and fifty rounds, a kukri, food, ground-sheet, and blanket. Odgeson had the privilege of a first-aid kit, for use until any cracked-up flyer could be transported to a better-equipped blood-wagon waiting at the bottom of the hill, for which possibility each party (never to be far apart) packed a collapsible stretcher. “A small but well-organized expedition”—I expect is what they’re saying to themselves back at camp, the CO and Adj flicking their handlebar moustaches and thumping each other pally-like on the shoulder as they stick pins in maps spread on the table to mark the slow progress of my duffed-up and aching legs.
Even so, it’s marvellous how at times my thoughts are as clean as stars on a dark night. Maybe when I get back to England, where there’s clarifying frost and snow, I’ll be able to see things intelligent and stark, read a lot and learn to use big words and know what they mean so that Pauline will say: “Hark at him! Swallowed a dictionary!” whenever I come out with one.
A matter of fifty yards and they swung into the jungle, brushing aside creepers in an initial burst of exuberance at being on the move. It was marvellous, marvellous, and a jolly efficient show, the CO would be saying, yet the time was midday and they had been shaken to life at five, which was seven hours ago. So how little energy can you have when it takes a day’s work to get started? The idea stabbed his resistance at the beginning: they were to shin-up with all speed to the crest or ridge, descend by different routes, lunge up again at another angle until someone caught sight of the plane or any shot-out component of it, making crazy red-pencilled zigzags on the map like wounded flies.
Stumbling over trees in a well-spaced single-file, chopping at creepers that could not be booted down, Brian was already exhausted. Little was visible through the dim shadows of giant trees, and constantly freeing his rifle from some stray creeper, he climbed automatically, peering ahead and to left and right in the hope that some part of the plane would show itself. Blisters began at his heels, sore spots that grew fat on the aqua vitae of his life, that soon from the movement and constriction of his boots burst into the covering of woollen sock, stuck there until he pulled them loose during a pause. Which was unwise, he discovered on setting out again, for the soreness took on a new lease of torment against him—that nevertheless had to be lived with.
At two in the afternoon Odgeson signalled a rest, and they collapsed against trees, to rip open tins of meat, snap at biscuits and bars of chocolate. “What I’d like to know,” Brian called to the others, “is who’s coming up to rescue us?” After a ten-minute smoke they went on, and in another ten minutes it seemed as if they hadn’t rested at all.
If I stopped and lay down, I wouldn’t get up again. Even the thought of those poor wounded bastards can’t make me go quicker. All I want to do is sleep. Why didn’t they crash in swamp or sea? They’d have been back safe now without this godless grind. Maybe we’ll find them soon and zoom off to camp. Christ, though what if we couldn’t even hope for that, if we were flying from the Japs in war with no place to go, or if we were Communists running before the Grenadier Guards? In that case we’d soon be out of it, one way or another. He pulled off his boots: one blister had turned white, puffed out like a growth of dirty flour over his skin, and hurt more now, as if the air were infectious and gathered it more quickly than the wool. A heavy inappropriate plane roared along the level of the hill, then lifted and flew back at a less dangerous height.
They climbed through bushes and between threatening trees, drying up one dark patch of sweat only to have another painted there as if with a wet brush while they weren’t looking. It seemed to Brian after a while that, should he for some reason stop climbing, his legs would go on making the same pedalling ache of ascent, out of control like a puppet with St. Vitus’s Dance. By six they were on the crest, marked on the map as three thousand feet. “We’ve done wonders,” Odgeson said.
“We ought to get the VC for this,” Cheshire grinned.
“They could stuff it,” said Baker.
“Let’s find them bastards,” Brian said, “and get out of it.”
They began the descent, slithering on an altered compassbearing. Since Gunong Barat, they had developed an instinctive feeling for the shape of the earth under its great wadding of ponderous trees, sensed like ants in the gloom of thistle-strewn hillocks the easy climbs or pitfalls of a quick descent long before they were seen or felt by the feet. To Brian the smell, humidity, quality of travail, the intense silence of desperation felt whenever they paused to rest, seemed now like home and second-nature, an acknowledged fight on the earth connected to a lesser-known and felt contest in the jungle deep within himself, a matching that in spite of his exhaustion made the trip seem necessary and even preordained.
At dusk, his eyes lost their sharp vision—as if he needed glasses to make leaves and the hats of the others clear again. They watched the sun setting over Pulau Timur, the length of the distant island settling into the sea like a silent deserted raft. Clouds above were spearheads pointing down the sea, so vividly red that it looked as if, while they stared, a tremendous sausage of blood had just burst over the island’s black hills and rolled a lava of sunset into its concealed valleys.
By seven it was too dark to go on searching, and Baker worked on the radio to make contact with Knotman’s party (the others sitting around as if, in the dark forest, he were trying to get through to some listening God for instructions), until Knotman answered: “That you, Baker? As if I didn’t know. We haven’t seen anything yet, so we’ll bed down for the night. Went up to the north ridge and looked into the next valley. So now we’re halfway to the bottom again. Did you see the sunset over Pulau Timur? It looked like the end of the world from this side. We contacted the army an hour ago, and they’ll stay with us tonight, moving in your direction in the morning. I think we’re about a mile away, but you can’t tell in this.”
Brian spread his ground-sheet and blanket in the undergrowth and drifted along tunnels of weird dreams, emerged into the dazzling half-light and half-dark of a snowstorm, heavy white flakes falling thickly around and chilling him to the bone as he fought against it. When the storm stopped, the fields were white over, the sky a milk blue, low and still threatening. But the snow-covered fields, in spite of his shivering, felt good to be in.
He opened his eyes to wonder where he was, and the warm smell of the jungle told him. Someone else was awake, sitting with hands clasped around his knees nearby. Hoping it was almost dawn, Brian looked at his watch: four-thirty, its luminous hand glowed. He felt for his rifle, and cursed to realize it was the first thing he thought of. I should throw it away. “How long do you guess this search’ll go on?”
“It depends on our luck,” Odgeson said. “We could be kept knocking around for a fortnight.”
Brian lit a cigarette, and threw one over: “It’s a long time to be slogging around in this.”
“We’ll be reli
eved in a few days,” Odgeson guessed. “Somebody else will take over.”
“Not that I couldn’t go on for weeks. It’s funny the way I feel in two minds about it.” Like everything, he added to himself.
“I suppose we all do,” Odgeson said. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness, red flies helicoptering on the warm buoyancy of their thoughts. Odgeson fell asleep but Brian smoked half a tin of cigarettes before it got light.
At six Knotman came through on the radio: the two parties would descend and make contact with the jeeps in a couple of hours. Another jungle-rescue unit had been flown up from Singapore and would join the search. Odgeson acknowledged and they set off.
After a sweet breakfast of canned milk, and the sun’s warm penetration to his rheumatic bones, Brian felt renewed. Yet in the first hour he was plunged to the senile age of ninety. He felt weak and nondescript, was already fed up with the zigzag futility of the trip. Scabs were forming in his armpits, sore from the sweat of continual movement, and now the same mechanical ascendency over the chafing pain had to be won as over the blisters on his feet the previous day. The six days on Gunong Barat seemed by comparison an easygoing romp in which he had held out fine against the rigours of jungle travel, even though he’d lugged twice the weight on his donkey-back. “I can’t see why they didn’t hold us in the village until the planes had spotted something,” he called out at the first rest, as if to make it a subject of general discussion.
“It isn’t always easy to see things in the jungle, as you know,” Odgeson answered, “even from the air. In any case, I imagine the CO knows what he’s doing. We don’t have all his headaches, do we?”
“I suppose the CO and his pals couldn’t wait to start moving pins about on the maps,” Brian said.
Cheshire stood up with mock pride: “It’s the first time I’ve been a pin on a map.”