The Red Pavilion

by Jean Chapman

  About an hour after this Sturgess halted the line and called them in again. ‘We’ve made good time so we’ll bivouac early, keep a low profile in case they miss their man — we don’t want to trigger anything too soon.’

  There was a heightening of morale, for now their officer was working as a fully committed soldier. Alan too admitted his superiority as an officer in action. Every soldier had heard of officers and sergeants who deliberately made their presence known in the jungle — to make sure they never did encounter any terrorists. He watched Sturgess as he went from man to man with a word for each one; in action he was of a different calibre.

  ‘Have a listen in,’ Sturgess asked as he reached Alan, ‘just make sure there’s nothing we should know about.’

  The signaller had barely swung his radio and pack from his shoulder when from some distance came a single reverberating echo. It was hardly more than the sound of an eardrum popping as an aircraft climbed, but they all froze, listening intently. The single shot was followed by the unmistakeable stutter of an automatic weapon.

  ‘Christ! Someone’s blown it!’ Sturgess spat out the words.

  ‘Not all that walking for nothing!’ Dan stood and shook his head.

  Alan dived for his radio, put on headphones and throat microphone, switched on and listened to the operation frequency. Silence. Then he switched to their headquarters at Ipoh. His hand was just reaching for the knob to retune back to the operation call station when the smooth, upper-class and unmistakeable voice of the commander in chief came on the air.

  ‘Sunray here! Attention! Sunray here! All units Operation Tight squeeze! Go in now! I repeat. Go in now! All units ... ’

  Alan looked up at the major, slipped the headphones off and handed them to him. Sturgess listened, nodded, handed them back. ‘Acknowledge,’ he said turning back to the men. ‘We’re going in now!’ he told them. ‘I estimate we’re about a quarter of a mile from the camp — a bloody long way in jungle, but if these tracks go our way a bit farther and the CTs want a quick way out, we may pick some of ‘em up.’

  He gestured to Alan to let him have the throat microphone as well and, pressing it to his larynx, reported in no more than a whisper.

  ‘Unit One to Sunray. We’re on a natural escape route so won’t go in hell for leather, we may pick up more if we let ‘em funnel in rather than scatter them around the jungle.’ He listened out, then passed the instruments back to Alan.

  ‘The other thing is it’ll be dark in about an hour,’ he told the group. ‘We’ll move off right way, then lie in ambush along these tracks for the night. Signaller, see what else you can pick up as we go.’

  Alan reassembled his kit, loaded up, locked his radio on to the operation frequency and, wearing his headphones and throat microphone over from the set on his back, followed the major and the sergeant. They had barely gone two hundred yards when they were again given urgent signals from Entap to disperse.

  Alan slid the headphones aside a little so he could hear what was happening around him. It was not difficult. Whoever was coming, he thought, was not Dyak or Iban and sounded in a blind panic. The jungle trapped the sounds, sending them rolling along the track like the echoes in a tunnel. Soon, he thought he could actually hear laboured breathing, the regular suck and pump of air, then he realised it was his own heart thumping.

  He swallowed hard, took deep breaths and tried to remember his training, the drills men said came automatically when action began. He had two conflicting thoughts: one was that he had still never actually shot a man, never seriously hurt a fellow human being — and would he be able to? — the other was the drill of bayonet practice, the instant response to the command to charge in and the ‘in, twist, pull’ of the bayonet.

  He wondered if a real body felt anything like those heavy, awkward dummies they had screamed at in training.

  Listening, his state of apprehension bordered on terror as the noise of those who approached sounded to him more like trains than terrorists. They passed within yards of where he lay. What was that bloody major playing at? Alan could have wept with the frustration of seconds hanging like sentences. He was sure he heard a stifled sob, a swift, involuntary gasp from Dan. Alan held his breath as if to compensate, then realised that the bandits were making so much noise they would never have heard.

  He also dimly realised that the major was waiting until he was sure all the communists were in their sights. Alan reached the pitch where he really did not care what he fired at as long as he shot his gun off.

  Then the challenge rang out. ‘Halt or we fire!’

  The communists dived and the soldiers fired. The shots exploded, whined and ricocheted along the line.

  ‘Follow me!’ Sergeant Mackenzie was on his feet, crouching low, running to an ellipse of untrampled undergrowth in the middle of the tracks, an island of cover. As he moved more shots rang out, then answering fire from both sides as in the jungle gloom men saw where bullets were coming from. There was more firing and the swift cry of a man mortally injured.

  Alan felt a shiver go over his spine as he was up and running. His sergeant seemed slightly behind but gestured he should take one side of the patch of central cover while he went the other. They emerged firing. Alan saw a hat with a red star in the undergrowth ahead of him and fired as fast as he could as he ran towards it.

  When he got there it was just a hat caught in a bush. He grabbed at it and looked around for its owner. Mackenzie called to him, ‘I’m coming on your right, Cresswell.’

  ‘We got him then.’ The sergeant nodded at the hat. Alan turned to deny it, when he saw the young Chinese terrorist at Mackenzie’s feet, three shots splayed across his chest like a dotted line. ‘Make up for Veasey!’

  A burst of automatic fire from farther back was followed by high Chinese voices, gabbling, appealing, the major’s command, and ‘All right! Stand still! Stand still!’

  ‘Come on!’ Mackenzie went ahead to where the major and one of the Sutherlands had two prisoners at gunpoint. They indicated their surrender with hands as high as they could reach above their heads.

  ‘Disarm them,’ Sturgess ordered.

  Alan went forward, pulling hand grenades from back pockets, knives from belts. He gasped as he pulled a hefty parang out of the belt and across the chest of the second terrorist, and drew back as if stung. ‘This one’s a woman, sir.’

  ‘Is it!’ The major sounded unimpressed. ‘Lucky you. Right! We want some good long bamboos and Mackenzie will show you how to tie these across their shoulders, hands at each end. They won’t run very far or very fast in the trees then, should they try to escape.’

  Alan had moved towards Entap, who was already cutting at a clump of stout bamboos, when he turned back to the sergeant. ‘Make up for Veasey?’ he questioned.

  Everyone’s eyes was on Mackenzie as he looked directly at his officer and reported, ‘I’m afraid Veasey bought it, sir.’

  ‘That who screamed?’

  The Sergeant nodded.

  ‘But I heard that ... ’ Alan began as if in the fact he had found out their lie, ‘He can’t be!’ Alan turned and went quickly back to where he and Danny had been lying almost side by side. He had run forwards, he thought, with Danny following.

  Alan did not see him come but the sergeant reached the spot midway between the jungle and that central island of cover at the same moment. He knelt by the body as Alan stretched a hand down to Dan.

  ‘Sorry, lad, afraid he’s gone!’

  Such a rage overtook Alan, he wanted just to shoot off his gun at everything — friend, foe, jungle, sky, everything was his enemy now.

  ‘Take a hold of yourself, lad,’ Mackenzie said, gripping his arm.

  ‘Don’t bloody lad me,’ he said between clenched teeth, repeating the words again very slowly, ‘Don’t bloody lad me,’ Then he asked, ‘Are you sure?’ and dropped his knees by his sergeant, though even as he asked he remembered the cry. He remembered knowing the man was dead. He stretched out a hand towar
ds Dan’s shoulder as he lay on his side, facing away from them.

  ‘He’s dead, soldier.’

  ‘Not sure ... ’

  The Sergeant tried to catch his hand before it reached his friend’s shoulder. ‘He’s dead, Cresswell — half his bloody head is shot away.’

  Their two hands lay together on Danny Veasey and the pressure rolled him on to his back. Only his light-red hair was recognisable. Bile exploded from Alan’s mouth. He dropped his rifle and bent double until the retching stopped. Danny had been sick when Entap had produced the head. They needed Danny, he was a kind of weathercock, he knew how they were all feeling, he championed them all!

  As he raised himself up, he saw the two prisoners coming towards where he knelt, their hands roped to long bamboos as if in crucifixion. He groped for his rifle.

  ‘We all feel like that at these times.’ The sergeant was there first and, picking up Alan’s rifle as well as his own, managed to stand between him and the prisoners as he helped him to his feet. ‘All right?’ he asked before passing the gun back to him.

  ‘Came from your part of the world, I understand,’ John Sturgess said as he came to them. ‘You’ll miss him, we’ll all miss him.’

  ‘What do we ... ?’ Alan sounded panic-stricken as he thought the major was walking on, for he remembered what he had said about the head and not wanting anything extra to carry.

  Sturgess came back almost immediately with Danny’s pack and began to unstrap his waterproof poncho cape.

  ‘We take him with us,’ Alan asserted.

  ‘Of course.’ As if seeing in Alan’s concern all the questions of what happened to a body in the heat, he explained ‘There’s a road much nearer the far side of this camp we’re heading for. Don’t worry, we’ll get him out. Do you want to ... ’ he held out the cape questioningly, then added, ‘wrap him tight?’

  The sergeant took the cape and Alan nodded. They laid it on the ground; Alan closed his eyes as the sergeant took his shoulders and poor half head while he lifted the feet and placed him on his cape.

  ‘Wrap him tight,’ his brain was saying, ‘for he sleeps well tonight. Wrap him in swaddling clothes and lay him in the tropics thousands of miles away.’

  When the body was neatly swathed, Mackenzie produced two lengths of cord. ‘Twist and tie the ends,’ he ordered and, when Alan looked up questioning the added indignity, he added, ‘We don’t want anything in there with him.’

  The time of darkness was nearly upon them and there had to be much swift organisation. The major photographed the dead terrorists. The prisoners were gagged and their lashed feet tied to the trunks of trees. Alan watched critically, determined nothing should be left to chance. He saw how, with her hands lashed to her pole, the girl’s black shirt was pulled tight over her breasts.

  Danny had talked a lot about his mother. Alan’s heart gave a sickening thud as he realised he must write to her, tell her how her son had died — well, some of how he died — and how in half an hour or less, all their lives had changed. Dan’s mother wouldn’t know for days; he hoped she would have a nice time until she was told. He wondered what day it was, perhaps the weekend?

  He went back to his radio duties, reporting to headquarters. He was informed that other units had been under similar fire in areas surrounding parts of the camp. Things were quietening down now it was dark, but they were to proceed into the camp at first light, ‘taking the normal precautions’.

  The major had decided that now they had prisoners they should withdraw a few yards into the jungle and Danny’s body would lie in his place in the line.

  They rigged a string between the ten of them so they could signal if need be without giving away their position. The two Sutherlands had extra strings to the arms of the prisoners, with Ben taking first watch. No one, prisoner or soldier, could move more than an arm’s length without waking the others.

  Alan lay keeping vigil by his friend’s body. He stared wide-eyed into the night and his mind went back to the villages he and Dan had known: a litany of Sheepy Magnas and Sheepy Parvas, of Littlethorpes and Greatthorpes; of being on the opposite sides at an inter-village cricket match; of the sleeping mounds in the village churchyard, generations of the same family laid to rest in the same place. But where would this son of England be buried? ‘Some corner of a foreign field … ’

  His mind slipped out of control into total despair. Liz loved this country, this jungle he felt bearing down on him, doom-laden. In the heat and tormented noises of the night where creatures preyed on each other he felt he would never see her again. Then his body fell into exhausted sleep while his mind played the nightmare on. He started awake, overwhelmed by terror, as he found the string on his wrist pulled violently by the sergeant. ‘You’re shouting, Cresswell.’

  Well before dawn he was awoken again by something moving nearby. He lay rigid with listening until he was sure what he heard was the foraging and grunting of wild pigs. Around him he could begin to make out what looked like a ghastly painting of a ghostly cathedral: the pale and dappled greens, blacks and reddish silver bark of the tree trunks rising high and true as pillars to the vaulted canopy of leaves a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet above. Still and straight, the trees seemed at once to witness and to judge man’s presence. The verdict, he felt, was not favourable, and the sentence was carried out by cutting off light for ever to the floor below where man murdered his fellows.

  He wondered if it had been his shots that had killed the communist with the face like a startled schoolboy. He knew the sergeant was wrong: it didn’t make up for Dan. The khaki peaked cap with the red star had belonged to some mother’s son ... Babyface had kept it as a souvenir. Alan hadn’t wanted it — all the deaths in the world could not remake a single life.

  Beside him Sergeant Mackenzie stirred, awakened by the increasing activity of the pigs. He immediately roused the line and breakfast was handed out from the airdrop rations of hard square biscuits and thick chunks of corned beef. The prisoners were given nothing and no one suggested they should be.

  The soldiers were all pale and haggard; any continuous spell in the sweltering, enervating gloom of real jungle made them look like men who had been incarcerated underground.

  The major proposed fixing Danny’s body under a thick bamboo pole, so two of them could carry the burden between them. A litter which four would have had to porter would have forced them to take twice as long to travel in double file, for the elephant tracks now moved away from the human settlement.

  When, after several false starts, Alan realised that to do what the major suggested meant they must tie Danny’s hands and feet together, pass the pole through them and carry his friend as if he were some kind of hunting trophy, he said, ‘I’ll carry him.’ His tone brooked no denial of his intention and, as the major made no immediate objection, Ben Sutherland added, ‘I’ll carry the radio.’

  ‘And I’ll take your pack,’ his brother added.

  The major looked at the determined men. ‘Right, let’s get on,’ he conceded.

  The prisoners were forced to walk like crabs to get through the path cut by their captors. Occasionally the major ordered a stop so they could listen; the distant, spasmodic firing that had begun again at first light seemed to ebb and flow like a tide.

  ‘I’ll take him for a bit now.’

  ‘It’s OK, Sarge, I can manage.’

  ‘The major wants to listen in on the radio for a bit.’

  Alan was dropping under the weight, yet reluctant to give up his friend, though his body had lain on his shoulder more like the weight of sandbags than flesh and blood.

  ‘Gawd!’ The sergeant took the weight as gently as he could. ‘Good job his grin was the biggest thing about him.’

  ‘Right!’ Alan agreed, choked, nearer to tears than at any time since it had happened. He went quickly to open up the radio pack, pull out a small portable aerial and listen in as they walked on. The reception was poor and he could obtain nothing but a crackle, certainly with
voices mixed in, but completely unintelligible.

  The major halted them while Entap went ahead to scout. He came back quickly, reporting that the first huts they would come to were all empty.

  ‘Sergeant, you bring up the rear with Cresswell, find a place to secure Veasey, then join me. Babyface, you take charge of those prisoners and guard them with your life. They may be the most important things to come out of this botch-up.’

  They all went slowly forwards, relieved at least to be able to lay Danny’s body down under the raised floor of the first hut they came to. Emerging cautiously, they could see the extent of the camp. They viewed what amounted to a parade ground complete with flagpole and raised dais, surrounded by substantial-looking huts, the main one with verandah and easy chairs.

  ‘Really roughing it,’ Mackenzie muttered.

  ‘We built a lot of this during the war, even made furniture,’ Sturgess recalled. ‘I was here with Harfield … ’

  ‘A bit too quiet for my liking,’ Sinclair muttered as they still stood in a little group peering round the corner.

  Alan desperately missed Danny. He would have been voicing all his own and everyone else’s impressions and feelings aloud, making those who shushed him feel braver as he confirmed their own worst secret fears.

  ‘We’d better have a look, see what we’ve got,’ Sturgess said, detailing Mackenzie, Alan and the two Sutherlands to take one side of the square and the other four to follow him.

  They did not need cautioning how to proceed; this part at least of their training had been covered. In a series of diving runs, crouching pauses and door-kicking entrances, they searched the huts one after the other.

  ‘Chrrrist!’ the sergeant exclaimed as they found themselves in a wash house with latrines with bamboo seats. ‘They’ve got running water! This is better than our camp!’

  ‘I wonder what else we’ll find,’ Alan muttered grimly. ‘Can’t imagine them giving this lot up easily.’

  The next hut was the one with the verandah, grandiose enough to be nominated a bungalow. The sergeant and Alan took the steps at a bound and kicked in the front door, waiting either side lest a burst of fire should greet their arrival. Then, cautiously, they went in.