Passage of Arms Read online

  PASSAGE

  ERIC AMBLER

  OCR AFMG 2003

  THE REPRINT SOCIETY LIMITED : LONDON

  FIRST PUBLISHED 1959

  THIS EDITION PUBLISHED BY THE REPRINT SOCIETY LTD

  BY ARRANGEMENT WITH WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD 1960

  Copyright © Eric Ambler, 1959

  All rights reserved

  PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY HAZEIL WATSON AND VINEY LTD

  AYLESBURY AND SLOUGH

  passage …

  9. A mutual act or transaction; something that goes on between two persons mutually; a negotiation; an interchange or exchange of vows, endearments, or the like; an interchange or exchange of blows; encounter; altercation; a fencing, as in argument; as, a passage at or of arms.

  —Webster’s New International Dictionary

  CHAPTER ONE

  ALL THAT Mr. Wright, the rubber estate manager, ever knew of the business was that an army patrol had ambushed a band of terrorists within a mile of his bungalow, that five months later his Indian clerk, Girija Krishnan, had reported the theft of three tarpaulins from the curing sheds, and that three years after that someone had removed the wheels from an old scooter belonging to one of his children. As it never occurred to him to look for a possible connection between the three incidents, he remained unaware even ofthat knowledge. In Malaya, at that time, there were more important facts to ponder and attempt to correlate. Stolen tarpaulins and missing scooter wheels were trivial mysteries; and, although the ambush itself was not forgotten, it was remembered more for its proximity than its novelty.

  Mr. and Mrs. Wright had been at breakfast when they heard the sound of firing. It began with a flurry of submachine-gun bursts and continued intermittently for about two minutes.

  The truck which took the tappers off to the work areas had not yet left the compound; and, although there was a lot of shouting and excitement, there was no panic and little confusion. Almost before the firing had ceased, the barbed-wire barricades were in position and the inner defence posts manned. During the long silence that followed, Mrs. Wright, a woman of character, calmed the servants and ordered fresh toast and tea so that she and her husband could finish breakfast.

  At eight-thirty the patrol appeared: fifteen Malay infantrymen under a British subaltern, and two R.A.F. radio operators. They had been in the jungle for several weeks and their success that morning would probably earn them a rest period. They were smiling and talking as they toiled up the steep track to the compound.

  Shortly after they arrived, Girija was summoned to the bungalow. As he went up the veranda steps he could see the officer, a downy, blue-eyed Englishman with paratroop wings on his jungle-green bush shirt. Mrs. Wright was pouring him a cup of tea.

  “All Chinese, and on their way to mine the main road by the look of things,” he was saying. “We got the lot.”

  “Nice work,” said Mr. Wright.

  “Could have been better, sir.” The young officer grinned. “They were all killed outright. You can’t ask them questions about their chums when they’re dead.”

  Mr. Wright chuckled and then, seeing his clerk waiting outside, beckoned him in.

  “Girija, this is Lieutenant Haynes. He’s just wiped out a gang of terrorists. I said we’d let him have some men to help bury them. Will you see to it?”

  “Certainly, sir.” Girija turned with a slight bow to the officer.

  Lieutenant Haynes nodded genially. “I left two men there on guard,” he said. “They’ll give your chaps a hand if you send extra spades. The ground’s quite soft, I think. Shouldn’t take long. If you’ll speak to my sergeant he’ll detail a guide for you.”

  “Thank you, sir. I will make all necessary arrangements.”

  The officer’s grin faded slightly. “Seen many dead terrorists around these parts?” he asked.

  “No, sir.Have not had that pleasure.”

  “Well, mind you spread the good news.”

  “I understand, sir. Two men from each kampong?”

  “That’s the idea. And tell them they’ll be seeing plenty more before we’re done.”

  Girija smiled politely and withdrew to organise the burial party.

  He was well aware of the reason for it. The Malay villages in the area had long been suspected by the authorities of aiding the Communist guerrillas with food and shelter. It was not that the villagers approved of the invaders, but simply that the savage reprisals that could follow any refusal of aid were more intimidating than the possibility of having fines or other collective punishments imposed by the British. They were not warlike people; their villages were often isolated; the British forces were scattered. In the past, glib official assurances that the police and army were at last gaining the upper hand and able to protect the outlying areas from the terrorists had been given too often, and too often proved baseless. Now, the villagers believed only what they saw themselves, or what had been seen by their own people. Dead terrorists had to be shown to be dead. The burial party was in the nature of a morale-building or public relations device.

  Girija found the head tapper and explained what was wanted: two men from each of the four neighbouring villages, and picks and shovels. Then he went to the Malay sergeant and secured a guide. Within twenty minutes the party was ready to move. The head tapper was obviously hoping to go with it, but Girija sent him off with the truck and the remaining men to the work areas. He had decided to take charge of the burial party himself.

  The action had taken place in a deep gully carved out of the red latérite hillside by the monsoon rains, and flanked on both sides by bamboo thickets, fern trees and dense tangles of croton undergrowth. It was a natural route for men to use on that otherwise trackless hillside, and a perfect site for an ambush.

  There were ten bodies there; four within a few feet of one another, and the rest scattered along the gully for a distance of some twenty-five yards. It was easy to see what had happened. Concealed in the undergrowth along both lips of the gully, the patrol had been able to open fire at point-blank range without fear of hitting each other or the smallest chance of missing the enemy below them. One or two dead men were lying in attitudes which suggested desperate split second attempts to claw their way to cover behind the roots of a fallen tree. One had been hit in the back as he turned to run. One, the farthest away, had tried to return the patrol’s fire; there were empty shells scattered on the ground by him ; but he was as dead as the rest. Nobody in the patrol had been hit.

  The two Malay soldiers left on guard were squatting on their heels by a Sterno fuel stove, heating cans of tea and smoking. They took no notice of the burial party. Beside them, on a groundsheet, were stacked the arms and equipment collected from the dead: machine pistols, boxes of ammunition and road mines, and canvas belts with pouches containing hand-grenades.

  The soldier who had guided the party from the compound joined his friends at the stove. Girija knew that they would not help with the digging unless he told them what Lieutenant Haynes had said; but he made no attempt to do so. During his brief inspection of the gully he had made two small discoveries. They had aroused his curiosity and made him wish to know more about the dead terrorists. He put the burial party to work and sat down on the ground near-by.

  The first thing he had noted was the fact that, although the bodies had been searched and stripped of all arms and equipment, there had been no cooking utensils of any kind found on them. This meant almost certainly that they were within a day’s marching distance of their camp; which meant, in turn, that they were probably living off one or more of the four villages near the estate. They would be known, if only by sight, to at least two members of the burial party.

  His second discovery had to do with the arms and equipment. He was sure that the machine
pistols were new; not new in type necessarily, but newly acquired. His father had been a subahdar in the British Army and Girija had spent his childhood in barracks and cantonments. He knew the look of a new gun and how soon it acquired the patina of use from normal cleaning and handling. At least three of the machine pistols on the groundsheet had been so recently unpacked, and so little used and cleaned, that traces of brown preservative grease were still visible on them. The ammunition boxes, the mines and the grenades were also new. The grenades were of an old type with cast-iron fragmentation cases; but the grey paint on them was fresh and the pins were clean and bright.

  The gully was only partly shaded by the overhanging trees, and by eleven o’clock the sun was shining directly into it. The tappers were craftsmen, used to the careful work of milking rubber trees without damaging them. Digging graves on a hillside, and in ground which, despite Lieutenant Haynes’s assurances, had proved to be rock hard, was not a job which they could be expected to tackle with enthusiasm. The excitement of the occasion and the sight of ten bloody corpses were novelties that had soon palled. By the time the third grave had been dug, most of the men had lost their customary good humour. Criticism began to be voiced of the soldiers squatting in the shade and drinking tea while others cleaned up the mess they had made. There was even an exchange of remarks, meant to be overheard, to the effect that the tuan’s clerk might, without serious loss of face, enhance his already considerable popularity by taking a shovel and doing a bit of digging himself.

  Girija was able to ignore this unworthy suggestion with equanimity. The tappers’ complaints interested him for reasons other than their substance. He was almost certain now that he knew the area in which the band had made their headquarters. Only two of the burial party had remained cheerful. Malays were not good at concealing their emotions, and although these two were trying hard to conform to the mood of the others, their satisfaction with the turn of events and the task in which they were engaged kept showing through their scowls. Girija watched them dump one of the bodies into its grave with unmistakable gusto, and then glance round guiltily when they caught themselves grinning at one another.

  The two men came from a village named Awang on a river three miles away to the west. Once there had been tin-mining in the district, but falling yields and rising operating costs had made the mines uneconomic. The small labour force of Awang had been gradually absorbed by the rubber estates.

  Girija had been to the village once or twice to pay sick benefits to the families of men in hospital ; but he did not know it well. It was at the end of a secondary road which had degenerated in recent years to no more than a cycle track. Beyond the old tin workings the jungle-covered hills stretched all the way to the borders of Thailand. In that lush wilderness, small groups of disciplined men with minds and bodies adapted to the environment could remain healthy and mobile almost indefinitely. At that period, it was impossible either to police the area effectively or to halt the stream of Chinese militants filtering down the peninsula from the north. Villages like Awang became staging points for the terrorist bands cautiously working their way southward towards the politically more sensitive areas of Selangor, Negri Sembilan, Malacca and Johore. The men now being buried had probably made their camp within a mile or so of it; going in at night to receive food, gather information, brow-beat the headman and talk earnestly to potential recruits.

  Girija walked over to the two tappers and stood watching them as they filled in the grave. They had fallen silent as he approached. After a moment or two he moved in closer.

  “A good day’s work/’ he remarked.

  They looked at him warily.

  He smiled.“The past buries itself.”

  That raised a sheepish grin.

  “And honest men are free again,” he added.

  They went on working. The body was covered now.

  “The tuan was pleased,” Girija said thoughtfully; “pleased that these pigs were all foreigners. To him that proved the loyalty and courage of our men here.”

  They looked at him again. One of them mumbled: “The tuan is a father to us.”

  “It is unfortunate,” Girija went on, “that the Lieutenant tuan does not agree with him.”

  They stared at him in dismay.

  Girija shrugged. “He said that this gang was new to the district. He said that a week was no test of loyalty.”

  He had them now. Dismay gave way to indignation.

  The man who had spoken before spoke again. “The tuan was right,” he said firmly. “The Lieutenant tuan does not speak the truth.”

  Girija shrugged again. “It is not important.”

  “The Lieutenant tuan is wrong,” the man insisted. “It was many weeks.”

  Girija made sympathetic sounds.

  “Many weeks,” repeated the other man emphatically.

  Girija spread out his hands. “It is not my business. Perhaps you should tell this to the Lieutenant tuan.” He saw the sudden panic in their eyes and went on smoothly. “Myself I do not think it necessary, or wise. The pigs are dead. They are best forgotten.”

  “Yes, yes. It is best. We will forget.”

  Girija smiled benignly and moved away. He knew that they were watching him and wondering fearfully if he would betray them to the Lieutenant. He had no intention of doing so; but there was no point in telling them that. They would not quite believe him ; and in any case they had served their purpose. He had found out what he wanted to know.

  II

  Girija was born of Bengali parents at Cawnpore in the United Provinces of India. He had five sisters but no brothers. When he was six his father, the subahdar, went to London with a detachment of his regiment to march in the coronation procession of King George the Sixth. During his stay, the subahdar was taken on a. conducted tour of the city which included visits to the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the British Museum, the Law Courts, Battersea power station, and, for some obscure reason, a factory in Acton where bus bodies were made. He returned to India laden with souvenirs and fired with ambition for his only son. The Law Courts had particularly impressed him. Girija would become a lawyer, or, failing that, a policeman.

  Girija became neither. The subahdar was killed at the battle of Alamein, and Girija spent the next three years in a military orphanage at Benares. When the war ended, however, his mother wrote to a brother, who had a cotton goods business in Singapore, explaining that she had only her widow’s pension and asking if she might join him with the children. The prospect of securing this windfall of cheap labour appealed to the brother, and he replied sending passage money. In December nineteen-forty-six the family sailed as deck passengers from Calcutta. With them went the subahdar’s medals and the precious souvenirs of his visit to London; the coronation mug, the picture postcards, the newspaper cuttings, the photographs, the ash-tray from the Warrant Officers’ mess at Chelsea Barracks, and the bus body manufacturer’s catalogue.

  In his last year at the orphanage Girija had been taught book-keeping, office organisation and the jargon of commercial letter writing. The uncle in Singapore found him useful; so useful, indeed, that after three months he got rid of the book-keeper to whom he had been paying forty dollars (Straits) a week and replaced him with Girija to whom he paid twenty. Girija was sixteen then. He stayed two years in Singapore. During them, he learned Malay and a smattering of Cantonese, and made friends with a Parsee who worked in the offices of a Chinese financial syndicate.

  At that time, shortage of capital, ill health brought about by internment, or sheer hopelessness engendered by the early successes of the terrorists were persuading many British rubber planters in Malaya to sell out. The Chinese syndicate was buying. It was through his Parsee friend that Girija heard that the new manager of a recently acquired estate in the north was asking the Singapore office for a clerk.

  His uncle was angered by Girija’s decision to leave him, and talked darkly of getting a court order requiring Girija to repay the cost
of his passage from Calcutta. To his astonishment the bluff failed. Girija, whom he had come to regard as a pliant and somewhat timid young man, not only laughed loudly and made a disrespectful noise with his lips, but also threatened to take his mother and sisters north with him unless their wages were immediately doubled. There was a shrill Bengali family quarrel during which Girija uttered a further and more compelling threat. He had made a secret analysis of his uncle’s accounts which he was prepared to send to the Inspector of Taxes. The uncle wept and spoke of ingratitude, but capitulated. Girija’s mother embraced her son proudly and said that he was his father’s true heir.

  When the time came for Girija to leave, however, he asked her for only one thing that had belonged to his father; the bus body manufacturer’s catalogue. His sisters were relieved. They had been afraid that, as a man, he would feel himself entitled to the subahdar’s medals.

  The catalogue was a quarto size book with a brown cover on which the name of the manufacturer was embossed in green. Inside there were forty-eight pages of thick, shiny paper displaying the specifications of twenty different types of buses together with colour illustrations of the exteriors and interiors of each. There were double-deckers and single-deckers, buses designed to enable the driver to collect fares, and buses designed to carry conductors. There were twelve seaters, twenty-four seaters and sixty seaters. There were buses for long distances and buses for local services in cities, for cold climates and for hot. The cover was dog-eared from much handling and some of the pages were loose. There was an ink stain on the title page. It was Girija’s most treasured possession.

  As a small boy he had sat for hours turning the pages, studying the illustrations and re-reading the text. He had, in the end, come to know it by heart. At the orphanage, when he had been separated both from his mother and the catalogue, he had found comfort in reciting it to himself, beginning with the Foreword by the Chairman (“In presenting to our customers all over the world this, the Eighteenth Edition, of our Catalogue and Price List, we are proudly conscious that …”) and finishing with the specifications of a forty seat medium range staging coach (available on A.E.C. or Commer chassis) “as supplied to the Argentine Government. Price £8,586, f.o.b. London.”