Authors: Martin Booth
‘I’m ready, sir.’
He hadn’t noticed the driver approach him. His mind had been on Bob Bellerby. They had not had another opportunity to be alone together since those two hours spent in the banker’s apartment, and Sandingham was feeling the hollowness that absence causes.
‘Right, Lance-corporal. Wait here, will you?’
He went into the headquarters where the Brigadier was studying a map spread across his knees and the lap of his intelligence officer. The sentry raised his rifle as Sandingham passed by. The Brigadier looked up expectantly.
‘Captain Sandingham, grand! Now, this point here’ – with a pencil, he pointed to a road on the map which wove its way down the wooded hillside towards the sea – ‘by this driveway. Get down that far, with the car, if you can. No farther. Don’t risk it. If you don’t come under fire, go ahead to this bend here’ – again he indicated the place on the map – ‘and see what you can beyond it. Try not to engage the enemy. Then get back here and report.’
‘What if I do draw fire, sir?’ Sandingham asked.
‘Don’t bother to shoot back. Get out as fast as you can and head for home. We’ll be on the lookout for you.’ He turned to a company sergeant-major, adding, ‘If you see the Humber coming towards you with its lights on, hold your fire. Pass that on.’
The CSM acknowledged the order with a salute and left.
‘That all right, Captain? If you have any bother, let us know with the lights.’
The intelligence officer winked encouragement to Sandingham.
‘
Bon chance,
Captain.’
As he left, he noticed the fog had become even denser while he was receiving his instructions.
‘Lance-corporal Glass, we’re off down to the seaside. Not all the way, so don’t pack your trunks.’
‘Bucket and spade in order, sir?’ replied the driver as he handed his superior a few field dressings.
Sandingham forced them into his breast pockets and smiled. It was the kind of wisecrack Bob would have made.
They sat side by side in the Humber and Lance-corporal David Glass drove forwards in the direction of Repulse Bay. They had a mile or so to go to reach the Brigadier’s selected point.
‘Slow down and get the car into that entrance,’ Sandingham ordered as they neared their destination. ‘The driveway on the left. Tuck her well in behind that big tree.’
Thus far they had seen neither hide nor hair of the enemy. Possibly the Japanese had yet to advance so much to the west.
The lance-corporal swung the wheel and pressed hard on the brake pedal. The rear of the Humber Snipe slewed on the gravel that had been washed down the driveway and collected at the bottom. The front mudguard clanged on a stone culvert but did not arrest the progress of the car. Sandingham thanked his luck that he had a driver who knew his job.
‘Get the car turned around, driver. Face up the hill. I’m going down to that corner to recce the road as far as the junction.’
‘Right, sir. Want me to follow you down, sir?’
Sandingham considered this. Two pairs of eyes would be better than one, and if the Japs were breaking through over the ridge that ran south from Violet Hill then both they and the car were done for anyway.
‘Anywhere you can hide the car? At least from view from above?’
Glass looked around. He scanned the building just up the driveway: it was a rich man’s house, with a green pantiled roof and neatly arranged gardens along the walls, on which stood pots of flowers.
‘Could get it under the shadow of the terrace wall, sir. The bushes should give it cover. Don’t want to get it too near the house, though. If the Japs are coming down that slope then we don’t want to afford them the house as a hidey-hole.’
‘Do it. Then come after me. Can you hoot like an owl, Glass?’
His question sounded utterly banal, to the point of stupidity.
‘Beg pardon, sir?’
‘An owl, an owl. Hoot! Can you hoot?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘Then if you approach me and I don’t know it’s you, do so. Like this.’
He made a cave of his hands and blew through the crack between his thumbs. A strangled squirting noise came out.
‘Not much like an owl, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.’
Sandingham laughed very quietly. The lance-corporal grinned. Both of them stopped as they heard the stutter of small arms fire open up from the direction of Repulse Bay.
‘I’d rather whistle “Tipperary”, if it’s all the same to you, sir.’
‘Right,’ he agreed, then said, ‘but spare me all but a few bars.’
Sandingham got out of the car, putting his hand in his pocket as he did so. The bullets were there, warm from the proximity of his own flesh.
‘Key in the usual place?’
Glass nodded, and reassured him by saying, ‘Will be, sir.’
He gunned the six-cylinder motor and reversed the car into its hiding place. Glass stopped the engine and put the ignition key under the rear edge of the front off-side wheel, where he knew Sandingham would expect to find it in an emergency. That way, whichever of them got to the car would be able to drive it off. A dead man with the key in his pocket was no use.
In the meantime, Sandingham ran in a crouch down the left-hand side of the road, keeping himself in close to the cover. He reached a bend in the road and ducked into the bushes. Ahead of him, out of sight, he could hear someone muttering. It was a sound that the mist blunted, rendered indistinct yet did not silence.
Lance-corporal Glass appeared noiselessly at his side. Sandingham was glad that he had had the presence of mind not to whistle. He was carrying his Lee Enfield .303 rifle.
‘What do you make of it?’ Sandingham whispered.
Glass shrugged, then grimaced. Sandingham ordered him to slip into the trees above the road and work his way down to the top of a small bank from where the sound seemed to be emanating. If he saw anything he wasn’t to shoot but to signal to Sandingham who would come along the road using the wide storm drain. They’d tackle the enemy together, as silently as possible.
Edging along the drain, Sandingham felt as if he were making enough racket to awaken a corpse. Dry twigs, deposited in the bottom of the watercourse, cracked and tweaked under his soles; he could ill afford to look down and check where he was stepping. As it was, he was bent double, with his head up, like a miner working his way through a gallery to the seam. In his hand was his revolver. The safety catch was off and he pointed it ahead.
The noise grew softer as he approached, but it didn’t cease. He took the opportunity of the cover of a big lantana bush to stand up and check the lance-corporal’s progress. The cover was not as thick as he had supposed when looking at it from the road, and he could make out his driver a little ahead of him and thirty yards higher up the hill.
The road began to turn left. As he cleared the lantana bush he heard a distinct, smooth click. It was the sound of a bolt going home into a breach. It was followed by another click as the bolt handle was pushed down. Someone was waiting for him.
His nerves were alive with the currents of fear. Every step counted now. He wondered abstractly if one felt much as a bullet entered the forehead and left by the cranium …
His finger tightened on the trigger of his revolver. He looked down. His knuckles were tense and white. The skin across the back of his hand was stringy: it reminded him of his grandfather’s hand when the old man held a fan of cards. His bidding was so good. If he opened six no trumps, out of the blue, you shut up and he’d maybe make seven with a bit of luck or a slip on the part of his opponents.
His mind strayed to thoughts of summer-time peace, tea parties and bridge evenings in the old man’s garden at Saxmundham. Meanwhile his body acted out the slow mime of war.
‘It’s all right, sir. I can see him. One of our lot. He’s hurt.’ His driver’s voice was quiet but clear.
David Glass came quickly through the trees, ducking and weaving past the lower branches and making no pretence of silence. He kept his rifle at the ready, though, and Sandingham noticed that his bayonet had been fitted to the muzzle.
The wounded man was lying on the opposite side of the road, half his body out of sight down the slope. Only his head and shoulders were in view. He was muttering to himself. In front of him, on the kerbstones, lay his rifle.
‘Stay down, driver,’ Sandingham commanded quietly and then, to the wounded man, he called softly, ‘Can you hear me?’
The muttering stopped and the man raised his head a few inches.
‘Who’s there?’ he said hoarsely, his left hand scrabbling for his rifle. Twice his fingers touched its butt, but they seemed unable to grip it. All the effort he could muster had gone into sliding the bolt home. His second hand lay motionless.
‘Signals officer,’ said Sandingham. He stood, so that the wounded man could see him from the waist up, recognise his uniform and the cap from which Sandingham had unclipped his badge.
‘I’m hurt bad,’ said the man unnecessarily. His voice weakened with each word. ‘Can’t feel me legs. Can’t move me fuckin’ arm.’
He groaned and muttered something again. It could have been a prayer, Sandingham thought.
‘Cover me, Glass.’
The lance-corporal rested his rifle in the notch of a sapling and faced downhill, the direction from which they expected any opposition to come. He adjusted his back sight to one hundred and fifty yards.
‘Ready!’
Sandingham scuttled across the road and slid down beside the wounded man. He fumbled in his pocket for a field dressing.
Nothing happened; no hidden sniper opened fire. The lance-corporal rapidly crossed the road and knelt beside Sandingham, all the time looking up and down the road. Nothing moved except a bird which alighted in the middle of the road, sang a few shrill notes into the mist then took wing, to glide on to a branch overhead where it perched in silence.
The wounded man was a private in the Middlesex. He was wearing a battle-dress uniform with a webbing belt. His steel helmet was twenty feet down the slope. His right arm was without motion and felt clammy and cold. Around his shoulders was a dark patch that was not sweat, although it was warm. Where his left foot should have been was a ragged stump of flesh and bone with surprisingly little blood oozing from it. Stuck to the raw meat of the man’s ankle were small twigs and dried leaves.
Sandingham ignored the soldier’s legs. He undid the man’s tunic and tore at the vest underneath. The shoulder wound did not look too bad. A piece of shrapnel was embedded in the tissue just beneath the collar-bone. He gripped it firmly and gave a sharp tug. The man grunted, muttered incoherently and fell silent. The shrapnel was out and the wound started to bleed again. Sandingham stuck the field dressing over it and lodged it in place with the vest. As he did so, he felt the dressing sink in the middle. The hole was larger than he had realised. He felt a hard lump beneath the dressing wad and tried to guess if it was collar-bone or another fragment of iron.
‘If we’re quick, sir, I can get the car down to this poor bugger. I can back along.’
‘Do it!’
Glass disappeared. Within a minute, Sandingham heard the Humber revving up and then it careered around the bend, reversing dangerously at twenty miles an hour. The brakes locked and the car skidded to a stop. The lance-corporal had the back passenger door open. He left the driver’s seat and helped Sandingham lift the private into the rear of the vehicle. The man collapsed on the seat, falling over sideways, blood from his back smearing the leather upholstery. Sandingham got in the front passenger seat and slammed the door. The lance-corporal moved quickly around the boot of the car to get in the driver’s side. As he pulled the door handle down, three single shots rang out in quick succession. Glass spun about, his arms outstretched like a ballerina’s. He hit the bonnet, his head denting the metal, and fell off. His forearm caught round the headlamp and the opening on his jacket snagged the sidelight on the top of the mudguard.
Sandingham knew he was dead. He had seen men pirouette like that before. He pushed himself into the driving seat and rammed the car into gear. It screeched and jolted foward. He pressed his foot hard on to the accelerator pedal. The Humber surged powerfully ahead.
A light machine weapon opened up. The pane in the rear window shattered and Sandingham felt small splinters of it hit the collar of his jacket.
The lance-corporal’s body was hanging from the headlamp and sidelight. His boots trailed along the road, the metal toecaps sparking off the surface. For a quarter of a mile his body stayed in tow. Sandingham ignored it. Then the clothing tore and the body slumped, fell off and was gone. In the driving mirror Sandingham saw it rolling across the road. Around it, small calibre bullets were kicking up puffs of grit.
The machine-gun nests and pill-boxes at Wong Nai Chung Gap were half-expecting him. As he raced through the fog he kept his hand pressed hard upon the horn and it blared out in the sorrow of the mist. He had forgotten to switch on the lights. Those dug in held their fire as he approached.
He did not stop at the medical aid shelter by the brigade headquarters but kept on going, easing up on the accelerator. Outside the headquarters was a pile of smouldering rubbish: it consisted of all non-essential documents.
As he passed some water treatment filter beds, to his horror, someone opened up on the Humber with a machine-gun. Their fire was inaccurate, but a few stray riccochets hit the nearside passenger door.
‘You stupid bastards!’ he screamed. ‘You dumb, fucking useless, shitting, half-arsed bastards!’
His words gave vital release to the terror that was surging through him, a terror that had wanted to seek escape but which he had not dared let go free.
At the junction with Stubbs Road he passed a number of lorries speeding back the way he had just come. He hoped the gormless sods with the machine-gun would not fire on them as well.
Down at the racecourse in Happy Valley, the RAMC and the staff of a local hospital had established an emergency centre in the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club building. He headed there and stopped the Humber outside the main entrance. A Chinese orderly ran out carrying a stretcher. A nurse in her mid-twenties followed him. They lifted the private out of the back seat and on to the stretcher. Sandingham helped carry him in.