Or so it seemed to me until Leo’s pencillings made things clearer.
On NC2, Rufus and Meggitt sheltered in rocks over which palm trees cast a shade. They were fouled with blood, but Meggitt administered his last shot of morphine to himself and Rufus, which helped their wounds to stop bleeding. The next day, landing Japanese found them sitting dead but still warm on a jungle rock ledge. Though the Allies would hide the fact from Dotty, though Lydon would not say it until the second edition of his book, glass was in their mouths – they had taken their suicide pills for fear of what they might say under torture.
Still on CE7A, Doucette took a new position and planned his fields of fire for the return of the Japanese. He put a tall young man named Private Appin, a prominent Victorian cricketer with a powerful throwing arm, in a pit to the right, with a large supply of hand grenades. He and Sublieutenant Lower, the submersible instructor, chose perches in ru trees with clear views down the avenues of palms. He planned to lay down enfilading fire with the silenced Stens. Doucette rested then, and waited until the afternoon, when they heard the noise of landing and patrol craft.
The garrison troops on board were commanded by a particular Major Ninasu. He was, Hidaka told Lydon, a tough nut, a veteran of China and all its horrors, some of which he had himself been guilty of.
Major Ninasu’s men penetrated the island in good order, sending scouts ahead, using the available cover to creep forward. There was no suicidal charge. But when the Japanese moved within range, Private Appin began throwing his grenades. In the midst of all the sudden flame and chaos, Doucette and the young naval officer and their silent Stens did lethal work, though in short bursts so that the flashes did not give away their location. Ahmed Dulib, who had been brought back on the barge and stood under guard in his clearing, saw the Japanese wounded coming back, being laid on the beach and attended to by medical orderlies. He would tell the war crimes investigators there were an astounding number early on – sixty of them.
As darkness came on, Ninasu sent forward some experienced scouts to draw fire from Doucette, and thus to discover where the Stens were in the darkness. There was by now too much blood around these groves of coconuts for any soldiers to proceed too calmly, but one of them got to within grenade range and blew Doucette out of his tree, after which the assassin was quickly shot to pieces by Sublieutenant Lower who himself, at the end of firing a long burst, was shot dead. Private Appin was still there somewhere, alive, but there was no triumphant charge to obliterate him, since there was a belief amongst the attackers that they had silenced only a portion of the fire which had done them so much damage.
Some twenty-five kilometres to the east, Leo and his men, who were and would remain ignorant of what befell Doucette and Rufus, had already come ashore at NE1 and met up with Mel Duckworth, the caretaker of that island, dropped earlier by the submarine. Shaped like a wine glass painted by Salvador Dali, the island had a hill, Hammock Hill, not very high at all, from where they kept watch and searched the sea for omens, expecting to see Doucette and the others at any time. It would have seemed astonishing to Leo, and it sometimes seems so to me, that a little bit of chemical could bring the living intentions of Rufus Mortmain to a halt so easily and promptly, or that Doucette’s huge intentions could be reduced to fragments of flesh by any weapon.
I know from Tom Lydon how unlucky Leo and his men on Serapem, NE1, now were. Lydon, in his study of the Japanese war files, discovered that a Japanese pilot flying a light aircraft from North Borneo to Singapore experienced a sudden alarm sound in the cockpit caused by lack of oil pressure. The pilot was carrying a naval officer and the Japanese manager of a bauxite mine in North Borneo, and the pilot told them he would need to make an emergency landing at the airfield on Bintang Island. He brought the plane in safely, and began to inspect it. There seemed to be a hole in the engine casing, which might have been caused by gunfire. The army in Singapore took no risks. They sent out troops to look for enemy agents and infiltrators on the islands to the east of the emergency landing, a task which would bring them ultimately to NE1. They sent a captain and a full company of men.
When the Japanese arrived, they landed on the west of Serapem or NE1, where Malay fishermen had a few huts. As his men unloaded weapons and ammunition from the barges, the captain, Captain Matsukata, another China veteran, issued a severe beating to one of the fishermen, and when that rendered him no extra information, moved inland from the beach.
We were making lunch at the normal place under the hill – mixing up the usual big stew of compo rations. Our life was very ordered – we spent time on watch, and we had dug a lot of supplies into the caches on the lower ground below Hammock Hill. Poor old Mel Duckworth, darling Grace’s cousin, who had been here alone since we went off on the junk, had been so pleased to see us.
I took Mel aside. I asked him what shape his Bolton radio was in. It’s good, he said. I’ve been cleaning the valves.
Let’s signal IRD to get that sub here.
Mel looked wistful. The problem is the Boss has the code page with him. You see, the code’s based on a page from Robbery Under Arms – IRD’s got their page, and the Boss has ours.
I wondered whether the Boss had remembered to fetch it from the Nanjang before it blew to pieces.
We couldn’t transmit in plain. The Japanese would come straight to us.
Well, I decided in my own head, this isn’t a tragedy, Leo. The sub will come. But there was all the more reason to miss the Boss, and daily we expected him. And there are a lot of empty hours when you’re hiding on a tropic island. That lunchtime, I was with the cooking group. Hearing the engines of the landing barges, we killed the fire, left the stew, and all grubbed our way up the little knoll at Hammock Hill. About four of the blokes were still missing – they had been excavating a new supply of rations Mel had hidden in the swamp. I sent Chesty off to fetch them. They came back in ones and twos, whispering, holding their weapons.
I made a line of my fellows below the ridge, and put three men down to the right to enfilade with a silenced Bren, and similarly three down to the left with their Stens. We looked out from amongst the volcanic rocks and foliage on the slope, and we could see the Japanese landing on the wide-open rocky, shingly beach, on the side where the coconut plantation grew wild, and they were exposed to anyone with weapons. A few seemed to have started a casual approach, but without any urgency, and I said to everyone, These jokers aren’t a danger. They’re ambling along. If we just hold fire and lie low.
Because we had pandanus and cactus palm and wild sago, as well as papayas and beetle nut and broad-leaf banana trees to hide behind, we could reposition ourselves better than they could. We watched the troops come walking in an orderly way over the volcanic rocks of the beach and into the coconut groves. They were still highly visible. They looked strange and innocent, spread out that way, as if you shouldn’t take advantage of them. They didn’t expect anything to happen. That was it. They looked like they might slope back to their barges at any stage.
Could we be struck twice by the same curse? It seems we could. The sort of thing that happens amongst recruits, but I suppose fear and excitement made all of us recruits. Someone slipped his safety catch while his finger was on the trigger of his Sten – everyone knows you shouldn’t do that. But the Sten fired silently, with a little hiss. It wouldn’t have mattered had no target been struck. The Japanese might have heard a sound like a few hard pellets of rain, that’s all. Except the bullets killed the captain that was leading, and his batman at his side. The Japanese looked at the two of them, pole-axed, not knowing where this damage came from. The rest of us began to fire and made a pitiful shambles of the advancing men. Then some of them became soldiers and hugged the ground, and others dragged their dead captain and their wounded into shelter. Even we could see that some were shattered, nearly cut in two, and their blood seemed to stain everyone near them. It was shocking what silenced Stens could do.