The older man shook his head. ‘You’re going up there, lad! Flying out at eight in the morning, so take your knives with you.’
At the crack of dawn, Tom Howden was in his laboratory, where Cropper filled a haversack with the antique dissection kit, several pairs of rubber gloves, a clipboard and paper, a couple of big sack needles and a ball of twine. Tom had his little Voigtlander 35mm camera in his pocket and his heart in his mouth as half an hour later, a Land Rover dropped him at the grass airstrip behind the garrison compound and he saw the plane that was to take him into the unknown. The little Auster looked to him like a camouflaged Austin Seven with wings and, with some trepidation, he lugged his haversack across to the aircraft, where the Army Air Corps pilot was leaning against the fabric fuselage, complete with leather flying helmet like some latter-day Biggles.
After a laconic greeting, the pilot opened a door, dumped Tom’s bag into the fuselage, then squeezed the pathologist into the single backward-facing seat behind the driver’s position. He strapped him in, gave him a pair of large headphones and then climbed in himself. A moment later, there was a judder as the engine started and the plane began bumping across the rough grass of the old tin tailings. Through the perspex canopy over the back of the cockpit, Tom stared out in horrified fascination at the fragile tailplane as the rudder wagged as they turned upwind. The whole contraption appeared to be made of cloth, reminding him of the balsa and tissue-paper models he made as a boy. The tail rose, the bumping suddenly stopped and Tom realized that they were already off the ground. As they climbed and banked, he looked down at the garrison, the hospital and the little town of Tanah Timah, amazed that this machine was actually flying.
Soon he began to enjoy himself, in spite of the fact that the back of his head was touching the muzzle of an automatic rifle strapped behind the pilot’s seat — reminding him that this was part of a war, not a joyride.
Looking down again, he saw the road going past The Dog and within the regular pattern of rubber plantations he could make out the bungalows of the Gunong Besar estate, where James Robertson had lived. With a return of his feelings of unreality, he realized that within weeks of leaving Gateshead, he had performed an autopsy on a shot murder victim and was now on his way to repeat the performance on three communist terrorists. When he had arrived in Malaya, he was inclined to think that ‘terrorists’ was a pejorative imperialist title for freedom fighters, until he heard descriptions of the sadistic atrocities that Chin Peng’s men had inflicted on uncooperative countrymen and women in the villages.
Alf Morris had explained the previous evening that the War Office wanted information on the killing power of the Belgian-designed FN rifle that had been adopted by NATO and detailed reports on all fatal injuries inflicted by it were to be collected wherever possible, hence his present mission.
They flew over endless rubber and oil palm estates, rice paddies and dense jungle as they went north, Tom taking some photos to amaze his folks back home in Gateshead. All too soon, the fifty-minute flight came to an end, as the Auster glided in to land on another strip of grass alongside a narrow road. On one side was yet more rubber, on the other virgin jungle. A few tents were set up as a temporary camp at one end of the airstrip, where a collection of military vehicles was standing.
An infantry captain in jungle gear came up as Tom was hauling himself out of the cramped seat and helped him with the heavy haversack.
‘Just in time, doc,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They’re about to bring the bastards out of the ulu down there.’ As he waved a hand down the straight road, a corporal crouched over a radio pack called out to him.
‘They say they can see the edge of the trees, sir. Be with us in a few minutes.’
The West Berkshires officer gave a shrill blast on a whistle and beckoned to a group of squaddies waiting around a Ferret armoured scout car, a TCV and a pair of Land Rovers. As the men jogged towards them, the captain began striding down the road. ‘Come on, doc, duty calls!’
Tom slung his bag over his shoulder and sweating like a bull in the cloying heat, followed the men for a few hundred yards, until a soldier suddenly appeared through the lalang grass, holding up his rifle and pointing back into the trees.
A few moments later, a strange procession appeared out of the forest, which confirmed Tom’s impression that he was in a time-warp created by Somerset Maugham or some Edwardian writing about the last days of the British Raj. Some British and Gurkha soldiers appeared, followed by two Malay Regiment men carrying a long bamboo pole on their shoulders. From this hung a corpse, suspended by ropes tied around ankles and wrists. Tom had seen old photos of tigers being retrieved like this, after being slaughtered by some pith-helmeted colonial general, but he never expected to see the method used for humans.
As the two bearers thankfully dropped their burden on the wide verge at the edge of the road, two similar convoys came out of the jungle, this time carried by a pair of West Berkshires and another two locally enlisted Malay privates.
‘Right, doctor, they’re all yours,’ announced the cheerful young captain, as the troops set about untying the corpses from the poles. ‘Let’s know when you’re through, so I can send a few lads down with shovels.’
The men from the patrol went wearily up to the tents for food and rest, while the fresher men from the vehicles stood around to watch Tom do his stuff. The three bodies, dressed in ragged bloodstained clothing, were laid out a few feet apart and he began by taking photographs of them, which seemed a sensible thing to do, as he had no orders as how to proceed. Two of the corpses were men, the other a young woman, though it was hard to tell, as her head seemed to have been exploded from the inside.
‘Were they all shot with FNs?’ he asked the captain.
‘Two of them, doc. The other was traversed with a Bren.’
Tom set out his meagre equipment, the old box of instruments giving rise to a chatter of interest amongst the watchers. Pulling on a pair of gloves, he asked the officer if someone could jot down a few notes and the captain gave the clipboard to his sergeant. Squatting uncomfortably on his heels, Tom began his examination by pulling aside the soaked, tattered shirt of the first man, a young Chinese with blood dribbling from his mouth. There were two bullet entrance wounds on his chest and a large exit wound on his back.
After opening the thorax with one of Cropper’s ferocious knives, Tom dictated a short account of the chaos within the chest cavity and the destruction of the spine, rather similar to the injury to James Robertson. However, unlike the planter, there were no bullets inside the body, the high velocity of the FN having whistled them right through to lie somewhere out there in the deep jungle.
He had a cursory look at the other main organs, mainly out of interest, in case the privations of living for years on poor rations and with rampant infectious diseases and parasites, might have left some mark. He found nothing significant and went on to look at the second man.
This was a different situation altogether, as there was a line of eight bullet entrance rounds running diagonally across his chest and abdomen, as his life was blasted away by a moving hail of bullets from a Bren gun. One of the bullets was still in the body, one lodged under the skin of the back where it had run out of momentum after passing through a vertebra.
‘That will be a three-oh-three, doc,’ commented the helpful young captain. ‘We’ve still got some of the old Brens, before they changed the barrels to fire the NATO seven-point-sixes.’
Again, Tom was chillingly reminded of James Robertson, whose spine had arrested a similar.303 projectile.
The woman, though facially utterly unrecognizable, appeared from her shape and smooth skin to be young, perhaps even a teenager. After trying to roughly replace the exploded tissues of the head, he found that the single entrance wound appeared to be in the left ear, the projectile from the FN having gone down the canal until it struck the mass of dense bone in the base of the skull. The sudden transfer of kinetic energy had been more like a bomb than a bullet, but at least she could not have known anything about it, thought Tom, in an effort to find some consolation in the midst of this carnage. Even the soldiers standing around seemed muted, with none of the usual ribald humour that was commonly used to compensate for these grim situations.