Breathing hard, Torrance leaned back against the wall beside the open door and checked the magazine of his Thompson. It was empty. He ejected it and took a fresh one from a utility pouch, clipping it into place and pulling the cocking handle back to work a fresh round into the chamber. He glanced at Rossi and MacLeod. ‘Ready?’
Crouching by the window, MacLeod handed a fresh magazine to Rossi, who slapped it into the Bren. ‘Ready.’
Torrance slid down the wall into a crouching position, and peered cautiously around the door jamb. The theory was that if a sniper was watching the door, he would expect a head to appear at head height. If a head appeared at waist height, he had to waste precious fractions of a second lowering his aim.
But this sniper was wise to that trick. Even though Torrance only looked for a second, it was enough time for a bullet to splinter the jamb inches from his nose. He ducked back hurriedly.
‘Did you see?’
Rossi nodded. ‘Three doors frae the left. The house wi’ the blue shutters.’
Torrance had seen it. ‘Ground-floor window. Then give me covering fire.’
Rossi fired a burst, and the glass in the ground-floor window disintegrated into a cascade of shards. Then he switched his aim to the first-floor window the sniper was using. Torrance broke cover, dashing across the street and rolling on the pavement until he pitched up against the foot of the wall of the house opposite.
Rossi continued to fire occasional bursts at the sniper’s window. Torrance crawled on his stomach along the pavement until he was immediately in front of the house with the blue jalousies. He drew a Mills bomb from a pocket, his palm sweaty where it gripped the segmented casing. Drawing the pin, he counted to three – forcing himself to take his time – and lobbed it through the window. Then he threw himself flat on the pavement. The blast was deafening. A few shards of glass rained down on him, and as he rose to his feet, the air flooding out of the open window was hot, and thick with dust and acrid smoke.
Torrance already had the butt of the Thompson at his shoulder. He swept it from side to side, firing into the smoke, making sure no part of the room escaped his attentions. When he had expended another magazine, he replaced it, then kicked the door open, moving quickly to one side again in case someone had a gun lined up on the door from the other side. When no shots came out, he ducked through, moving aside so as not to be silhouetted by the daylight behind him.
The ground-floor room was a charnel house, with blood splashed on the walls. He could not tell how many Japanese had been in there: he counted five left legs. His grenade had probably done for them before he opened up with the tommy gun, which meant he had wasted an entire magazine for nothing, but better safe than sorry.
A floorboard creaked overhead. He levelled the Thompson’s muzzle at the ceiling, his fingertip resting lightly on the trigger. Another floorboard creaked, closer to the stairs now. Torrance fired a long burst. Part of the roof must have been missing, for when his bullets punched through the boards, shafts of sunlight lanced down into the room below, given substance by the haze of smoke and dust. There was a scream, and a loud thud. One of the floorboards cracked. A few drops of blood dripped through one of the bullet holes, becoming lost in the carnage below. Then several floorboards gave way at once, and a Japanese soldier fell through to crash to the floor. His body already mottled with splashes of blood, he raised his head to look up at Torrance with a pleading expression in his eyes. Torrance thought of Major Julius and the other men whose bodies had been mutilated on the road outside Bakri, and finished the Japanese off with a short burst that disintegrated his head.
He edged carefully up the stairs, in case there were any more enemy soldiers up there. Finding the house cleared, he returned to the front door and waved across to Rossi and MacLeod. They dashed across in a low, crouching run, Rossi carrying the Bren, MacLeod following with a pannier full of spare magazines.
The three of them made their way to the other side of the house and peered out. Half a dozen Australians burst from a wooden building on the opposite side of the street, making a dash for the one at the far end. Someone was giving them covering fire from an upper-storey window with another Bren. It did not help: Torrance saw muzzle flashes coming from loopholes cut in the walls of the house at the far end of the street as a couple of ‘woodpeckers’ chattered. The six Australians stumbled and fell. One of them tried to crawl back to the house he had emerged from. A seventh Australian dashed out, grabbed his comrade by the webbing straps, and started dragging him back towards cover. A ‘woodpecker’ blazed again, and the good Samaritan toppled to sprawl over the body of his wounded comrade.
Torrance studied the house at the end of the cul de sac. The Japanese had selected a good strong point: it dominated the whole street, and since it was set back a little from the rows of houses on either side, it had a good field of fire all around, with no possibility of being outflanked.
‘Any suggestions?’ asked Rossi.
‘We could try disguising ourselves as nuns,’ MacLeod said facetiously.
‘Yon’s a stupid idea,’ said Rossi. ‘I mean, where are we gaunae get nuns’ costumes around here?’
‘I’m just the ideas man. It’s up to you to work out the details.’
The three of them made their way back through the houses they had already cleared, back to the west end of Parit Sulong, furthest from the bridge. They could hear shooting coming from both the direction of the bridge and also from where the road led back to the causeway.
‘Hear that?’ asked MacLeod.
Torrance nodded. ‘The Japs must’ve followed us here from Bakri.’
‘So now there’s no gaun forward and no gaun back,’ said Rossi.
The road itself was crowded with the convoy’s vehicles, parked three abreast so as to cram as many of them as possible into the remaining space. The three Argylls had to move quickly to avoid a Bren carrier being backed into the side street where they stood. A major standing on the roof of a Quad tractor directed a lorry driver to back his vehicle into the space vacated by the Bren carrier. It was like one of those sliding-piece puzzles where you had only one blank square, and could only slide one adjoining piece into it at a time. Fiddle around with it for long enough, and you might be able to rearrange the pieces into a pattern which assembled the picture painted on them; or just disarrange them into an even worse jumble.
Once the lorry was in position, a Chevrolet 30-cwt ambulance was pulled forward into the space it had vacated. The driver was a badly wounded subaltern, wearing his peaked cap on the back of a heavily bandaged head, the bloodstained dressings even covering one eye. He wore no shirt, revealing even more bandages swathing his neck and torso. When the ambulance pulled forward, Torrance saw Sheridan in the back, tending to Kerr and perhaps a dozen other wounded men, all tightly packed in. He threaded his way through the vehicles to talk to her. As he reached the tailgate, the sickly-sweet stench of gangrene assailed his nostrils.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Lootenant Austin is going to parley with the Japanese on the bridge. Captain Spofforth thinks there’s a chance the Japanese may be willing to let the ambulances through with our most seriously injured cases on board. Apparently the Japanese respected the Red Cross at Gemas.’
‘Oh, yeah? They didn’t respect it at the Slim River. You’re not going with them, are you?’
‘Captain Spofforth figures it might help if the Japanese see a woman on board as well. And it’s a good way to get me out of the way before… well, you know.’
Torrance could only see it ending in disaster. ‘Don’t,’ he said softly. ‘Please.’
‘I’ve no choice. These men will die if we don’t get them to a hospital soon.’
‘Are you taking Titch?’
She shook her head. ‘He’s in bad shape, but he won’t die if he’s left behind.’
Everyone who gets left behind is going to die, thought Torrance, but he did not tell her that. He marched back to where Rossi and MacLeod leaned against the side of the Bren carrier.
‘We’re buggered, aren’t we?’ asked MacLeod. He said it with a smile, trying to put a brave face on it by making light of the situation, but there was no escaping the truth of his words.
‘If we are, I’m gonna take a few more of the bastards down with me before I go.’ Torrance surveyed the traffic in the road. It would be a good ten minutes before the major had got both ambulances out of the traffic jam so they could be driven to the bridge, which meant it would be ten minutes before anyone was calling for a truce. A lot could happen in ten minutes.
‘Come on.’ Torrance climbed over the side of the Bren carrier, dropping down into the seat on the passenger side, then slid over behind the wheel. Rossi put the Bren in the back and dropped down next to him, inserting a fresh belt of ·303 ammo into the breech of the Vickers machine gun mounted on a gimble, the barrel protruding through a gun-port in the front armour.
MacLeod made to climb in the back of the carrier. ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’ demanded Torrance.
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Like hell. You stay here. We don’t need you.’
MacLeod backed away from the carrier’s side, looking hurt.
Torrance started the engine. Normally it took a few minutes to warm up the Bren’s V8, but this one was still warm from its earlier manoeuvrings and the engine caught at once.
Hearing it, an Indian sepoy came across. ‘What are you doing with my Bren carrier, sahib?’
‘I’m just borrowing it.’ Torrance put the carrier into reverse, backing up the side street until he could pull forward, turning into the street running parallel to the main one leading to the bridge. The carrier rocked on its bogies as it rattled across the tarmac. The sensation was not unlike riding a rocking horse, or so Captain Turner had told him: none of Torrance’s foster carers had ever been able to afford one. It was not something he had a chip on his shoulder about: once he had joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he had been given access to some of the best toys money could buy.
‘A wee bit harsh on the laddie, were you no’?’ Rossi shouted above the roar of the carrier’s engine.
‘I’m just trying to protect him,’ said Torrance.
‘Mebbe he disnae want to be protected.’
When they came to the first corner, Torrance had to wrestle with the wheel to take the bend, applying the brake steer: the left track halting, swinging her around a little, then jerk forward, then left a bit more, then jerk forward again, taking the corner in a series of short, choppy jolts. It was not elegant, but it got the job done. A few dozen yards further on he had to turn to the right, repeating the mirror of the same manoeuvre.
And then the house where the Japanese had made a stronghold was directly ahead, three hundred yards away at the far end of the street.
‘Ready?’ he asked Rossi.
‘Ready.’
Torrance put the Bren carrier back in gear and pushed the pedal to the metal, roaring down the street at the carrier’s top speed of forty miles an hour. Seeing the vehicle bearing down on them, the Japanese machine-gunners opened up at once. Torrance could hear the bullets clanging off the thick armour plating in front. When the carrier was forty yards from the house, he braked hard, bringing it to a standstill a few yards further on; any closer, and Rossi would not have been able to depress the Vickers low enough to get the loopholes at the foot of the front wall. The two ‘woodpeckers’ both blazed away at point-blank range, the bullets rattling off the armour. Rossi pressed the Vickers’ firing button, pouring a stream of lead first through one loophole, then through the other, until both were silenced. A rifle shot sounded from above, the bullet punching through the engine vent with a clang. Torrance levelled his Thompson, firing a burst up at the first-floor window he thought the shot had come from. Then he lobbed a grenade through the nearest loophole, and he and Rossi scrunched down in their seats as a fist of hot air showered them with scraps of debris.
They did not wait for the dust to clear, leaping out of the carrier. Torrance had only to touch the front door for it to fall off its hinges, hitting the floorboards behind with a crash. He stepped through, once again moving aside so as not to be silhouetted in the doorway, before spraying the entire room with a continuous burst from the Thompson until the magazine was empty. The Japanese had torn up the floorboards and dug a slit trench at the foot of the wall so they could fire through the loopholes. The trench had become their grave.
Torrance removed the spent magazine and tossed it aside, clipping a new one in place before moving to the foot of the stairs. A silhouette appeared at the top. Torrance fired another burst, and the man toppled forward, juddering down the steps until he came to rest at Torrance’s feet, unmoving. Torrance put a couple more rounds through his head before edging up the stairs. He sprayed the upper room, but there was only a corpse at the window.
He crossed to the opposite window which looked out across an open expanse of waste ground thick with grass, and beyond that the Simpang Kiri River, perhaps fifty yards wide, placid where it flowed sluggishly between banks overgrown with reeds. It formed a perfect mirror, reflecting the hump-backed concrete road bridge arching over it, just wide enough for two vehicles to pass, silhouetted by a flame-coloured sunset. In the middle of the bridge was a roadblock formed of three barricades, one after another, improvised out of forty-gallon oil drums, timber beams and sandbags.
There were no boats on either bank. On the other side of the river, Torrance saw Japanese troops in slit trenches dug in the waste ground by the water’s edge. And somewhere beyond, the British Army and safety at Yong Peng, twelve miles or so to the east. It might as well have been twelve thousand.
Hearing footfalls on the steps behind him, Torrance whirled, swinging the Thompson’s muzzle around, but it was only Bluey Quinn. ‘Whoa!’ he said, quickly raising his hands.
Torrance lowered the gun.
‘Nice piece of work, by the way,’ Quinn said as Rossi followed him up the stairs, setting the Bren up at the other window. ‘Crazy, but effective.’
‘Where’s Venables?’
‘Bought it. I’m section leader now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rossi.
Quinn shrugged. ‘Yeah, well… it’s war, isn’t it?’ The look of sorrow in his eyes belied his harsh words.
Hearing a lorry moving in low gear, Torrance glanced out of the window again and saw the two ambulances creeping up the humpbacked bridge, following in the wake of a figure carrying a makeshift white flag. The ambulances stopped when they reached the roadblock. A Japanese officer emerged from one of the machine-gun nests at the far end of the bridge, picking his way through the barricades to talk with the man with the flag.
‘What’s going on?’ Quinn asked Torrance.
‘They’re trying to persuade the Japs to let our ambulances through with our most badly injured on board,’ said Torrance.
‘No harm in asking, I suppose.’
The Japanese officer and the man with the flag made their way down the side of the first ambulance, looking in the back. Torrance caught sight of a torch, imagined Sheridan dazzled by the beam as the Japanese officer played it over the men inside, perhaps making sure they really were wounded.
‘Strewth, I think he’s actually gonna go for it!’ said Quinn.
Torrance grunted non-committally. The Japanese officer and the man with the flag made their way to the tailgate of the second ambulance. After examining the interior, they had a prolonged conversation which seemed to involve the Japanese officer shaking his head a lot.
And then the Japanese machine guns opened up: not on the two ambulances, but on the houses on the north bank of the river. Torrance, Rossi and Quinn threw themselves flat on the floor as bullets cracked through the window to smack into the far wall.
Torrance heard mortar shells whistling through the air. One fell on the waste ground between the house and riverbank, throwing up a great cloud of dust which obscured his view of the river. Another burst in the streets nearby.
‘I reckon the truce is over, then!’ shouted Quinn.
When the bullets stopped hitting their house, Rossi edged up cautiously to peer over the windowsill. He sighted along the Bren, and swore. ‘The bastards! The bloody bastards!’
‘What’s up?’ asked Torrance.
‘I canna fire at the machine-gun nests on the bridge! I might hit the ambulances!’
Torrance raised his head to see for himself. While tracer rounds arced across the river and mortar bombs exploded on both banks, the ambulances remained where they were on the bridge, somehow untouched in the midst of this maelstrom of fire and lead. That the Australians were taking care not to hit the ambulances was hardly surprising; what was odd was that the Japanese were being equally punctilious about directing their fire elsewhere.
‘Why the hell don’t they get out of there?’ wondered Quinn.
Torrance supposed he was referring to the ambulances. ‘I ’spect that Jap officer’s told them that if they try to move, he’ll signal his machine-gunners to open up on them.’
‘You mean, he’s holding them hostage?’ asked Quinn. ‘What does he want in return?’
‘Nothing he ain’t already got: those two ambulances are right where he wants them. He can’t take them within his own lines without dismantling the roadblock, but why should he want to? As long as they’re sitting there on the bridge, we can’t rush it for fear of—’
And at that moment a mortar shell hit the house and the roof collapsed in on them.
If it had been a European brick house with a tiled roof, all three of them would have been killed outright. As it was, a roaring filled Torrance’s ears, dust and smoke billowed across the room, there was a loud crash, and then the drumming of a cascade of wooden shingles raining down. Something smacked against his temple, and the next thing he knew he was sitting on the floor with Rossi crouching over him, patting his cheek.
‘Are you still wi’ us, Slugger?’ Behind Rossi, the room was open to the sky in one corner where a section of the ceiling and part of two walls had been demolished. Debris littered the floor.
‘Course I’m still ruddy with you. Where else would I be?’
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ asked Quinn.
‘Two.’ Torrance could feel a pounding in his skull. When he raised a hand to feel for a bump, his fingers came away with blood on them.
‘Aye, you’ve a wee bit of a gash there,’ said Rossi. ‘Let me put a field dressing on it.’ When he broke the ampoule of iodine into the wound, the searing pain almost made Torrance pass out. Rossi quickly clamped the gauze pad in place, and bound the bandage over his head.
As darkness fell over Parit Sulong, the noise of battle diminished to sporadic shooting. Explosions from the west end of town came some time after midnight, but it did not last long, and silence descended once again. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, Torrance must have nodded off at some point during the night. The next thing he knew, Quinn was shaking him awake and the pale light of dawn was flooding through the hole in the wall.
‘Wakey, wakey, rise and shine. The sun’s burning a hole in your blanket.’ Quinn’s stubbled face was black with grime and cordite and dried blood. Rossi did not look any better. Torrance supposed his own face probably needed a wash and a shave, though he could not imagine how he was going to get either, when there was not even enough water to drink. His parched mouth tasted of sawdust. The thirst was probably only making his headache worse. He raised a grimy hand with scabby knuckles to his aching head and ran his fingertips along the dressing.
Quinn had a canteen and an enamelled mug. He poured a couple of mouthfuls into the mug and handed it to Torrance.
‘Ta.’ The water had an earthy taste, and instead of refreshing Torrance, it only made him realise how thirsty he was. Glancing out through the hole in the wall, he saw the ambulances were no longer on the bridge. ‘Where have the ambulances gone?’ he asked Quinn.
‘Soon as it was dark, the drivers released the handbrakes and coasted back down the slope to our lines. By the time the Japs realised what had happened, it was too late for them to do anything about it.’
‘Is Dr Sheridan okay?’
‘Yeah, she’s fine.’
‘You might’ve woken me and let me know.’
‘You and Lefty looked so peaceful, lying there sawing gourds, I didn’t want to disturb you.’
Torrance heard the sound of aero-engines. Oh, Christ, he thought, not another strafing run. Looking up through the hole in the wall and glimpsing the two aeroplanes overhead, he realised this was not a run-of-the-mill strafing run. For one thing, the aeroplanes were two-seater biplanes. The Japanese aircraft he had seen over the past six weeks had come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but so far they had yet to throw anything as antiquated as a biplane at him.
Rossi joined him at the hole in the wall. ‘Those are Tiger Moths! It’s the RAF!’
Somewhere in the town outside, some Australians had reached the same conclusion and cheered.
Torrance and Rossi had to move to one of the windows on the west side of the house to follow the biplanes as they droned low over the rooftops. When they were above the tree canopy on the far side of town, one of the men started throwing boxes out of the cockpit. Parachutes blossomed above the falling crates, slowing their descent. An airdrop! The Norfolks might not be able to fight their way through to Anderson’s beleaguered column, but the RAF could still resupply it from the air. Desperately needed morphine for the wounded, ammunition for those still able to fight, and food for all. The fly boys had come through for them at last!
‘Why are they dropping those boxes over the Japanese positions?’ asked MacLeod, who had caught up with them at some point during the night.
‘What?’ asked Torrance.
‘There was bad fighting at the other end of town during the night: some Jap tanks attacked. One of the Aussie gunners managed to brew up a couple with a twenty-five-pounder and sent the others packing, but afterwards the Japs infiltrated yon woods. Which means those supplies are being parachuted to the Japs.’
‘Sod it!’ said Torrance. ‘Hold on, how do our lads even know we’re here, to send a parachute drop to us?’
‘The Aussie signallers rigged up a wireless from spares. They managed to get a signal through to their Divisional HQ.’
‘Are they gonna try to get anything else through to us? Like a relief column?’
‘Apparently not. They canna spare the men.’
‘So we’re on our own?’
‘Looks that way.’
A havildar of the 5/18th Royal Garhwal Rifles came up the stairs. ‘Colonel Anderson is going to make one more attempt to take the bridge at oh-six-hundred hours,’ he told Torrance, Rossi, MacLeod and Quinn. ‘He wants us to provide as much covering fire as possible.’
Three sepoys followed the havildar into the room, one carrying a Vickers heavy machine gun, another two boxes of ·303 ammunition, and the third the tripod and a one-gallon can for collecting the water which would otherwise have been lost as steam from the cooling jacket. Dressed in khaki drills even more battle-stained than Quinn’s, the three sepoys looked appallingly young and each of them sported some injury on an arm or a leg, though nothing serious enough to get them out of combat. Nevertheless they worked quickly and efficiently as the havildar directed them with crisp orders in Garhwali, positioning the tripod behind the hole in the wall, fixing the machine gun on top of it, running the condenser tube from the cooling jacket to the one-gallon can, setting the sights, and putting the first rounds of a belt of ammunition into the breech.
The havildar leaned against one wall, his dark eyes fixed intently on his watch. He said something in Garhwali, and one sepoy sat behind the Vickers, another lying down beside him ready to feed the ammunition belt into the breech. ‘One minute,’ he added to Torrance, Rossi, MacLeod and Quinn; then, half a minute later, ‘Thirty seconds!’
Rossi checked the magazine in his Bren was fully charged.
Another Vickers machine gun chattered further downstream. The havildar shouted an order to the sepoys, and the one sitting at the handles pressed the firing button, filling the room with the gun’s thudding as he sprayed the machine-gun nests at the far end of the bridge. Torrance, Rossi and MacLeod took their lead from him, opening fire on the men positioned in slit trenches on the far bank.
Torrance heard the roar of a V8 engine, the clatter of tracks on tarmac, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a Bren carrier swaying up the approach to the bridge. It was out of sight of the machine guns at the far end until it had reached the peak of the hump at the centre of the bridge. It roared up the slope, gathering speed until it slammed into the first barricade. It did not so much smash through the oil drums and timbers as push them before it, all the way up to the second barricade, where it came to a halt. The machine guns on the far side opened up. Torrance could hear the bullets rattling against the carrier’s armour, saw the muzzle flash of the carrier’s own Vickers spitting tracer at the machine-gun nests at the far end. Both driver and gunner lobbed grenades, managing to get them as far as the third barricade. They exploded ineffectually. Then the carrier was reversing back the way it had come.
No sooner had the carrier returned to the near end of the bridge than a couple of sections of Australians in Brodie helmets ran past it, pounding up to where the first barricade had been pushed back against the second. They ducked down behind the sandbags and lobbed more grenades over. But the machine guns were too far away: if the Australians were hoping the slope on the other side of the bridge would allow the grenades to roll down to the machine-gunners, they were disappointed; they just skittered into the gutters on either side of the road in that unpredictable way of rolling that grenades had, before exploding. Nothing daunted, the Australians began to clamber over the sandbags.
That was when the Japanese machine guns at the far end of the bridge opened up again, cutting the Australians down before they could even muster a charge. Most of them died sprawled over the barricade.
A third section of Australians charged up the bridge. Again they reached the sandbags, lobbed grenades, clambered over the barrier. Again the machine guns chattered. Three of the Australians reached the third barricade before they fell.
No more men appeared on the bridge. With nothing left to shoot at, the Japanese fire died down. The sepoys in the house with Torrance and his companions had expended an entire belt of ammunition; one of them reached for a fresh belt, but the havildar said something in Garhwali and the loader did not bother. After a few minutes, a man in a Brodie helmet crawled back from the barricade until he was on the slope of the bridge, then picked himself up and limped the rest of the way. One by one, another four dragged themselves to safety. And that was it: five survivors out of two dozen.
The final attempt to take the bridge at Parit Sulong had failed.