‘Three tanks…’ MacLeod gazed despondently to where the tanks guarded the Slim River Bridge. ‘Just sittin’ there… surely there must be summat we can do?’
‘Sure there is,’ said Torrance. ‘Primsie can distract them by doing the dance of the seven veils while Titch here sneaks around behind them and lobs grenades in through their hatches.’
‘I’m not doing that!’ said Kerr. Something in his tone suggested he was more upset by the impropriety of the suggestion than the impracticality of the plan.
‘Jesus bloody Christ, Primsie!’ said Campbell. ‘If you’d only learn to tell when Slugger’s trying to get a rise out o’ you…!’
‘Mebbe we’d better head back up the Trunk Road to Twenty-Eighth Brigade,’ said Rossi.
‘What good will that do?’ asked Kerr. ‘We’ll still be on the wrong side of the river.’
‘Aye, but there’s a railway bridge there, is there no’?’
‘How would you know?’
‘Stands to reason. The Slim River flows frae east to west; the railway line goes frae north to south. There must be a bridge.’
‘If our sappers ain’t blown it yet,’ Torrance agreed.
‘Well, the longer we stand here arguing about it, the greater the chance Twenty-Eighth Brigade will pull back across the river and blow the bridge behind them before we get there,’ said Campbell.
They headed back the way they had come, passing the abandoned battery. A few hundred yards beyond that, they came to where the tents of a field ambulance stood in a clearing a short distance from the road. Judging from the bullet holes stitching the canvas, the Japanese were no respecters of the Red Cross symbol. And yet there were medical orderlies here, moving amongst rows and rows of stretcher cases: sepoys and Gurkhas with legs in splints, bandaged heads and faces riddled with shrapnel or hideously burned. Inevitably, given the holes in the canvas, a fair number of the wounded were RAMC orderlies.
Campbell asked one of them who was in command, and was pointed in the direction of a hospital tent. Ordering the others to wait outside with Ziegler, he entered the tent.
‘You should ask them to take a look at your arm while we’re here,’ Torrance told MacLeod.
The youth gazed at a man lying on the ground nearby with one leg severed at the knee, a bloody bandage wrapped over the stump. He must have been off his head on morphine, for he grinned and gave MacLeod the thumbs-up.
‘I widnae want to put them to any trouble,’ MacLeod demurred.
Campbell re-emerged from the tent.
‘That was quick,’ said Kerr.
‘There wisnae much to say. The CO here says they’re staying put till they’ve dealt with all the wounded they’ve got.’
‘Looks like they’ve got their hands full.’
‘Aye.’
Retreating into the cover of the rubber trees, the seven Argylls and their prisoner followed a course parallel to the road, heading west now.
‘Keep moving,’ Grant told Ziegler, who limped along at the rear of the file.
‘I am going as fast as I can! I twisted my knee yesterday. It hurts.’
‘It’ll hurt more if I put a bullet through it – which I will do, if you don’t shift your arse!’
‘If you wish me to go faster, I fail to see how crippling me is going to help.’
Grant fired a three-bullet burst into the ground at Ziegler’s feet. He leaped as if stung, and quickened his pace.
Torrance chuckled. ‘Well now, will you look at that? A miracle cure! With a healing touch like yours, Titch, you should be a bleedin’ medico.’
Grant grinned.
‘Corporal! May I remind you I am a Swiss civilian? If you permit the men under your command to persist in treating me in this intolerable manner, you shall leave me no choice but to lodge a formal complaint with the Swiss ambassador.’
‘You’ve got me pishin’ in my Bombay bloomers!’ said Campbell. ‘Every minute we waste increases the chances that railway bridge’ll be blown before we get there, and your heel-draggin’ isnae helping. But then, mebbe that’s the idea, eh?’
‘That is foolishness! If I were truly a spy, surely I would have more important matters to concern myself with than the fate of seven British soldiers?’
‘Listen, pal, your biggest concern right now should be whether we take you to our i-wallah, or Titch there gets fed up wi’ you putting the hems on us and kills you. If he does, I’ll no’ blame him.’
Seeing something up ahead, Campbell signalled the others to stay back, and dropped to one knee at the foot of a rubber tree. He brought the butt of his Thompson up to his shoulder. Following his line of fire, Torrance saw another figure perhaps fifty yards on, seated with his back to the bole of a tree. The man wore a Gurkha’s slouch hat on his lolling head. Torrance instinctively found himself gazing at the surrounding trees, wondering if the lone figure they could see was only bait in a trap designed to draw them out. But the rows of evenly spaced rubber trees left few hiding places.
Campbell lowered his Thompson without firing and dashed forward, stopping a couple of dozen yards short of the solitary figure to approach more cautiously again. He knelt beside the man, gesturing the others to join him.
As Torrance hurried forward, he became aware of a massed droning of insects, as if he was walking perilously close to a bees’ nest. Glancing to his right, he saw the body of a Gurkha sprawled beneath the trees, a row of three in its back, flies settling on the puddled blood drying amongst the leaves below. Then he saw another dead Gurkha, and another and another, dozens in all. There was something odd about the bodies, though it took Torrance a moment to realise what it was. They had all been shot in the back and most had fallen forward on their stomachs, feet towards the road as if they had been fleeing something there when a machine gun raked through the trees. He glanced at the trunks to his left and sure enough there were bullet scars in the bark, highlighted in many places where they had bled white latex.
He reached the place where Campbell knelt by the man seated at the foot of a tree. The man was another Gurkha, still alive, though his bronze complexion had an ashy pallor to it, and his skin was beaded with sweat. Torrance had plenty of experience of serving alongside Gurkhas, but he could not recollect seeing one sweat before. This man had both his hands pressed over his stomach, with dark blood running out between his fingers. Looking more closely, Torrance saw the front of his tunic was soaked with blood. There was still a little breath left in the Gurkha, but with an effort, Torrance was able to peel his hands away to reveal the wound beneath. There was no use talking to him: even if he understood English, he was probably too far gone with agony to take in anything, much less respond coherently. He was probably scarcely even aware of the presence of the seven Argylls and their prisoner.
The death rattle sounded in his throat, and his head lolled one last time, a dribble of blood and spittle running from his lips into his lap. Campbell felt his neck for a pulse, and then pushed himself to his feet with a sigh. ‘Awreet, let’s keep moving—’
‘What’s that?’ MacLeod was staring towards the Trunk Road; moving to where the Gurkha sat had brought them within a hundred yards of it, and following MacLeod’s gaze Torrance saw there was something not right about the surface of the road. He could not say what it was, just that it did not look like tarmac. Without a word of explanation, he found himself moving closer to get a better look, picking his way through the corpses sprawled beneath the trees. As he drew nearer, he started to understand what he was looking at. His stomach lurched and he felt himself break out in a cold sweat, but he had no power to stay back now. Drawn on as if no longer in control of his own feet, he pushed on doggedly until he was standing beneath the trees at the edge of the road, heedless of the danger if any tanks should pass by at that moment.
The others followed. ‘Aw, Jeez!’ said Kerr.
The sides of the road were littered with the corpses of Gurkhas. Evidently they had been marching back towards the bridge in two parallel lines, one on either side of the road so there was less chance of them being spotted by any aeroplanes passing overhead. The tactic had not saved them, however, from the tanks which had come up the road behind them. They must have heard the roar of the engines and thought they were British vehicles, not dreaming there could be Japanese tanks this far behind what they thought was the front line. For the man operating the lead tank’s hull machine gun, it had been like shooting fish in a barrel, if the fish stood in convenient rows so that each bullet tore through at least three of them. Hundreds of flies buzzed over the corpses, and the bottom of the ditch by the side of the road was puddled with blood. This was the massacre the dead men beneath the trees had been fleeing: when there had been no one left standing in the road, the tanks must have turned their machine guns on the trees to gun down any Gurkhas who had fled into them in search of cover.
MacLeod turned away and leaned against a rubber tree, gagging. Torrance did not blame him. Over the course of the past three weeks, his relationship with violent death had gone from nodding acquaintance to something approaching intimacy, but the scale of the slaughter on the road made even his stomach turn.
‘Poor sods never stood a chance,’ said Rossi. ‘“Asia for the Asiatics”, my arse! Bloody Jap bastards!’
‘Come on, let’s keep moving,’ said Campbell. ‘There’s nothing we can do here.’
As the others moved off, Torrance noticed the corpse of a white officer of Gurkhas lying nearby. Crouching over the body, he helped himself to the officer’s field glasses and map case. The way things were shaping up, they might yet have need for such things. Draping the field glasses around his neck and attaching the map case to his belt – as if he was not already festooned with more than enough gear – he noticed a dead NCO lying nearby with a Thompson. Torrance swapped it for his Lee-Enfield, stuffing his utility pouches with box magazines before hurrying after Campbell and the others.
The sun was sinking behind the trees to the west and the cicadas had begun their evensong by the time Campbell and his squad came to where the road turned north towards Trolak. They crouched behind the verge of lalang grass and sago bushes. A parade of half a dozen Chinese shops stood on the opposite side of the road: two-storey brick-and-plaster buildings, with stone slabs opposite the door of each shop bridging the drainage ditch between the road and the covered way in front, the projecting upper storey supported by pillars to form a sort of colonnade. Two bullet-riddled army lorries were parked by the roadside, one of them still in flames. Flies buzzed over a couple of dead sepoys lying nearby.
After looking both ways to make sure the coast was clear, Campbell and Kerr dashed across the tarmac, taking cover behind one of the pillars supporting the covered way. Torrance, Rossi and MacLeod were about to follow when Kerr motioned them to stay put, gesturing up the road to their right. Glancing that way, Torrance saw three tanks approaching in the distance. He retreated further into the trees with Grant, MacLeod, Rossi and Ziegler, and waited.
An aeon seemed to pass before the tanks went by, the clank and squeak just getting louder and louder. The pattern of green, brown and yellow camouflage paint on one was charred and blackened. Torrance wondered if it was one of the tanks that had punched through their roadblock a few hours earlier.
‘Slugger!’ hissed Grant. ‘See’s your bay’net.’
Torrance did not need to ask what Grant wanted it for. He drew it from its sheath and threw it across. Grant caught it deftly by the handle and pressed the tip of the blade to Ziegler’s lower back. ‘One word frae you – just one – and I’ll put this through one of your kidneys. D’you know what happens when a feller’s stabbed in a kidney? It disnae kill him – no’ at first – but it hurts so bad, it literally paralyses him. He canna even cry out, much less move.’
They watched the tanks disappear around the bend about a furlong to their left, where the Trunk Road turned east to follow the Slim River upstream. Grant handed the bayonet back to Torrance, who slotted it into its scabbard again before dashing across the road with Baird, MacLeod and Rossi. Grant followed with Ziegler. They joined Campbell and Kerr under the colonnade.
Beyond the shops, a gravel track led through the trees to the railway station, little more than a whistle stop on the main line between Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur. A quaint little station house stood on the single platform – a typical example of Victorian municipal architecture dropped in the midst of the plantations and jungles of Malaya – the brickwork now pockmarked with bullet holes. The seven Argylls took cover behind the charred wreck of a three-tonne lorry parked in front. Campbell and Torrance crawled between the wheels and gazed across at the station. Sandbags were arranged outside the door as if for a weapons pit, but there was no sign of anyone.
‘What d’you think?’ the corporal asked Torrance.
‘Looks quiet enough.’
The two of them shuffled back to where the others crouched behind the lorry. ‘The station looks deserted, but it could be a Jap trap,’ said Campbell. ‘Slugger an’ me will take a shufti. Titch, you keep us covered. Primsie, wait here wi’ the others till Slugger or me signals you.’
While Torrance cocked his Thompson, Grant crawled under the lorry with the Bren.
‘Ready, Slugger?’
His guts squirming with fear, Torrance nodded. ‘As I’ll ever be.’
Campbell dashed out from behind the lorry and across to the front of the station. Torrance followed him, expecting a hail of bullets at any moment. He managed to catch up with Campbell and the two of them reached the door without anyone taking a shot at them. They pressed themselves up against the bricks on either side. Campbell indicated the door with a jerk of his head.
‘After you, mate,’ said Torrance.
Scowling, Campbell went through the door and Torrance followed.
The booking hall was deserted. Campbell crossed to the ticket window and thrust the muzzle of his Thompson through. Torrance sauntered to the doorway opening out on to the platform and peered out cautiously. Campbell joined him. Craning his head to peer along the tracks, Torrance could see the ground sloped away to the south, while a railway embankment led to a bridge about five hundred yards off. It looked as though it was still intact. On the other side of the tracks was a patch of derelict ground overgrown with weeds, and beyond that more rubber. On the hill above, Torrance saw a trim, white bungalow nestled amongst the trees.
‘See yon bungalow?’ asked Campbell. ‘That’s brigade HQ. I’ll go up, see if there’s any of our lads still there. Keep me covered till I reach the trees, then signal the others to join you here. If I’m no’ back within fifteen minutes, get the lads across the bridge and tell the sappers to blow it behind you.’
‘You’re going up there alone? When did you get so heroical all of a sudden?’
‘See you, Slugger, we’re no’ all gutless bastards like you.’
‘What if that bungalow’s crawling with Japs?’
‘Then I’ll come straight back and we’ll all go across yon bridge together. Ready?’
Torrance glanced at his watch. ‘Fifteen minutes, right? If you ain’t back by seven, we’re going without you.’
‘Just make sure you don’t go before seven!’ Campbell took a deep breath, then plunged out of the doors, dashing across the platform and dropping on to the tracks. He crossed the rails, scrambled over the chain-link fence and waded through the chest-high weeds beyond. Torrance kept watch with his Thompson braced against his shoulder, eyeing the trees. Campbell reached the shadows below the canopy and disappeared from sight.
Torrance waited another minute or so, then crossed back to the door overlooking the car park. He waved at the burned-out lorry. Kerr appeared around the cab and waved back. Torrance signalled for him to come, then crossed back to the door overlooking the platform. A few seconds later, he heard the others bustle in behind him. ‘Where’s Campbell?’ asked Kerr.
‘Gone up to the bungalow.’ Torrance pointed it out. ‘He says if he’s not back by seven, we’re to cross the bridge and tell the sappers to blow it behind us.’
Kerr glanced at his watch. ‘Titch, Lefty, you two get the Bren set up on the platform, somewhere where you’ve got a good field of fire up the railway tracks. If the Japs are coming, that’s where they’ll come from. Jimmy, you keep watch over the front. Dicky… where’s Dicky?’
Torrance turned away from the door overlooking the platform. Everyone was exchanging glances: there was no sign of Baird in the booking hall. Someone else was missing, too. ‘Where’s Funf?’
‘Jimmy?’ asked Kerr.
Flushing, MacLeod shrugged. ‘Dicky was watching Funf. I thought they were right behind me.’
‘Shit!’ Torrance burst out of the front of the railway station and sprinted across to the lorry. When he rounded the cab, there was no sign of Ziegler. Baird was still there, however. He lay face down on the gravel, a large bloodstain surrounding a puncture wound in his lower back. He had been stabbed just where Grant had threatened to stab Ziegler. Torrance felt for a pulse in his throat, and found one too, though it was weak and fluttery. Grabbing him by the shoulder, he rolled him on to his back. Baird’s eyes, wide with terror, darted this way and that. His jaw flapped weakly, but no sound came out.
Bile rose to Torrance’s throat. If what they had been taught in training was true, no power on earth could save Baird now. It would take him minutes to die, minutes in which he would be in terrible agony. Torrance drew his flick knife and pressed the stud so the blade jumped into view. Baird’s eyes looked up at him pleadingly, though whether he was pleading to be spared or put out of his misery, Torrance could not say.
‘I’m sorry, Dicky.’ He pulled aside one of Baird’s webbing straps to feel for his third and fourth ribs through the thin fabric of his shirt. There was no point in hesitating: that was only prolonging Baird’s agony. If Torrance had learned one thing in Waziristan, it was that acts of violence were like ripping off a sticking plaster: if they had to be done, it was better to do them swiftly, without half-measures. He plunged the blade home. Baird’s body gave a final tremor, the death rattle sounded in his throat, and his eyes became still. Torrance felt for his pulse again, and wiped the blade of the knife on Baird’s shirt before closing it and returning it to his pocket. He took off Baird’s pack, which he knew contained the spare magazines for the Bren, took one of his identity discs, and drew his eyelids down. Then he realised Baird’s Lee-Enfield was missing. Which meant Ziegler had taken it. Torrance snatched up his Thompson again, levelling it towards the nearby trees. He had been a sitting duck while he attended to Baird; fortunately Ziegler had more pressing matters to attend to, and was probably halfway back up the Trunk Road by now.
Carrying Baird’s pack, Torrance backed across the car park to the station. He was only halfway there when a burst of machine-gun fire sounded nearby, the toc-toc-toc-toc-toc of the Japanese light machine gun he and his comrades had nicknamed ‘the woodpecker’. He turned and ran into the station house. He could hear Grant’s Bren firing in response from the platform.
Torrance pushed past Kerr, shoving Baird’s identity disc into the breast pocket of his shirt. He blamed Kerr for Baird’s death almost as much as he did Ziegler: in Campbell’s absence, it had been Kerr’s responsibility to make sure the prisoner was securely guarded.
He dashed up the platform to where Grant and Rossi lay down behind a luggage trolley. Even as Torrance approached, Grant fired another burst up the railway line. In the gathering gloom of dusk, Torrance saw shadowy figures approaching down the tracks. He handed Rossi Baird’s pack.
‘What’s this?’ asked Rossi.
‘Dicky’s pack. It’s got the spare ammo for the Bren.’
‘Can he no carry it himself?’
‘Not any more,’ Torrance said grimly.
Kerr had followed him out on to the platform. ‘Is it Japs?’ he asked, ashen-faced.
‘It ain’t the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!’ Torrance glanced at his watch. Incredibly, it was still only ten to seven. If Campbell kept them waiting another ten minutes before returning from the bungalow, they were all liable to be dead by the time he got here. But the corporal must have heard the shooting. He would know what it signified, and be on his way back by now. If he was still alive. Torrance was tempted to head for the bridge, but he had promised he would wait until seven. He pressed his watch to his ear to make sure it was still ticking.
‘Is that Corporal Campbell?’ asked MacLeod.
Oh, thank Christ! Torrance gazed across the waste ground towards the trees and saw no sign of movement. ‘Where?’
MacLeod pointed down the railway tracks. About two hundred yards away, Torrance saw a stocky figure scrambling over the chain-link fence. Dropping down on the other side, the figure ran along the top of the embankment leading to the bridge. Whoever it was, it certainly moved like Campbell.
Next time I hope it’s you that’s wounded, that’s all I can say. Campbell’s malediction of a few days earlier came back to Torrance. I hope it’s you, and I get the chance to leave you the way you left Rab.
‘The sodding bastard!’ Torrance went out on to the platform. Leaving the others to hold the Japanese off, he hurled himself down the tracks after Campbell, sprinting across the sleepers between the gleaming rails. The iron trellises of the bridge were less than two hundred yards away. Twenty yards wide, the river below was in full spate.
He had almost reached the bridge. He could see Campbell on the far bank, talking to someone in a tin hat, someone who appeared to be pulling a cork out of a bottle. Was it a bottle? At that distance, Torrance could not quite make it out in the gloom. No, it was a box… a box with a plunger sticking out of the top.
‘Don’t blow the bridge!’ Still running, Torrance waved his hands above his head and yelled at the top of his lungs. ‘Wait for me!’
A dazzling flash like sheet lightning blinded him. A deafening roar hammered his ears and great clouds of smoke erupted from under the bridge. The central span plunged into the river below, sending up huge curtains of water on either side. A wall of hot air slammed into Torrance, knocking him on his backside.
He sat there, dazed, gaping up at the vast cloud of smoke and dust which now enveloped the bridge like a genie released from its bottle, then twisted away with his arms folded over his head as bits of debris rained down all around him. Every time he thought there were no more pieces left to fall, and was about to remove his arms and look up, another would crash to the ground close enough to make him flinch. He knew what would happen, he had seen it too many times in Laurel and Hardy films: convinced there were no more bricks left to fall on his head, Ollie would look up, and in that moment a final brick would hit him right on the nose.
When thirty seconds passed without any more debris thumping down, Torrance moved his arms just enough to peep out from under them, still not entirely convinced that God did not share Hal Roach’s sadistic sense of humour. No bricks landed on his nose. The cloud of smoke and dust dispersed to reveal the bridge, or at least what was left of it. Picking himself up, he staggered across to where the iron rails now projected into space, their ends charred and twisted.
‘Oh, bollocks!’