Torrance: Escape From Singapore

By Jonathan Lunn

  From the bestselling author of the Martin Kemp series, a British regiment struggles to survive during WW2 after the Japanese invasion of southeast Asia.
 
1942. Trapped on Singapore with the Japanese pouring in from all sides, things look bleak for Charlie Torrance. The Allies are losing, and even if he survives this brutal week, chances are he will end up in a POW camp.
 
But Torrance is up to his old tricks—pulling scams, dodging bullets and making the most of life on the edge. Until his luck runs out, and he is thrown into a hopeless extraction mission, certain to fail, rescuing a British operative in possession of classified information.
 
Back with Rossi, his Australians pals and a Glaswegian hard-case called Smiler, it’s a dog eat dog world. In the end, the trick to this insane war is simple: kill, escape or die trying.
 
Praise for the writing of Jonathan Lunn:
 
“Full-blooded action. Simply superb.” —Northern Echo
 
“A rollicking tale with plenty of punches.” —Lancashire Evening Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788636759

Jonathan Lunn

Born in London a very long time ago, Jonathan Lunn claims to have literary antecedents, being descended from the man who introduced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the Reichenbach Falls. To relax he goes for long strolls in the British countryside, an activity which over the years has resulted in him getting lost (multiple times), breaking a rib, failing to overcome his fear of heights atop dizzying precipices, fleeing herds of stampeding cattle, providing a feast for blood-sucking parasites, being shot at by hooligans with air-rifles, and finding himself trapped by rising floodwaters. He lives in Bristol where he writes full time.

Book preview

Torrance: Escape from Singapore by Jonathan Lunn

For Michael

Singapore, 1942

One

Sunday 2030 – 2330

Howitzer shells plunged deep into the mud of the mangrove swamps, stirring up decaying matter that had been quietly rotting for decades, lacing the acrid reek of high explosive with the stench of putrefaction. In the darkness, the flashes of the explosions cast a flickering light over the mudflats. Private Jim ‘Bluey’ Quinn’s impression was one of a series of disjointed images: trees ripped apart by the blast, branches spinning through the night, eyes wide in terror in the pallid faces of his comrades as they clutched their Lee–Enfields.

Shells that fell short sent up great fountains of water from the straits separating the island from the Malayan mainland. Others passed overhead to land in the jungle behind. Most buried themselves in the dark, glutinous mud. As they exploded, they hurled hot dirt in all directions. Much of it flew over the low sandbag parapet of the weapon pit where Quinn and his comrades crouched. By the end of the bombardment all four of them were spattered with filthy, foul-stinking silt.

And then, at half past eight, the bombardment lifted: now the shells passed over the heads of the Australians preparing to defend the mangrove swamps, concentrating on rearward areas where artillery provided counter-fire.

Quinn heard another noise: the puttering of engines. Dozens of engines. Maybe even hundreds. Faint, but growing louder. He gazed across the straits, but saw nothing in the darkness. On the north side of the island, tanks filled with millions of gallons of oil burned. Some said they had been set on fire by the British authorities to prevent the fuel from falling into Japanese hands, others that the Japanese artillery had set them ablaze. Whatever the truth of it was, the fires formed the base of a vast pillar of black, billowing smoke that had cast a dark pall over the island for several days now, blotting out the sun, making the days dark and the nights pitch-black, without moon or starlight.

‘Hear that?’ asked ‘Mother’ Hubbard.

‘Yeah,’ drawled Quinn. ‘Now we know why the bastards have been bombarding us all day. It’s the bloody invasion!’ In truth he was not all that surprised: ever since the last Allied units had pulled back across the Causeway a week earlier, blowing a section of it up behind them, it had been a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ the Japanese would try to invade Singapore.

‘Don’t be a drongo,’ said Corporal Lynch. ‘The Japs are supposed to be attacking in the Pommy sector.’

‘Why?’ asked Quinn. ‘Because the Pommies say so? Does that sound to you as if they’re attacking in the Pommy sector?’

‘Okay, okay,’ sighed Lynch. ‘Run and tell Mr Newton, Bluey.’

‘Why me?’

‘None of your bloody lip, mate! Just do as I tell you.’

‘Bloody hell!’ A rangy figure, Quinn clambered over the sandbags and sprinted through the darkness to platoon headquarters. He did not much care for the corporal. While Quinn and Hubbard had been dodging pot-shots from the Japanese and hacking their way through the jungles outside Parit Sulong, Lynch had been sitting on his backside at Walgrove Camp outside Sydney, giving new recruits a hard time. Pushing forty, Lynch had been in the army since he was sixteen – Quinn and Hubbard remembered him from their own basic training – and had never fired a shot in anger. Quinn and Hubbard had joined up in 1939, thinking they would get to take a crack at Herr Hitler and his Wehrmacht. Instead they had spent the past year garrisoned in Singapore, occasionally undertaking bush training upcountry, which at least meant they had had some kind of preparation when the Japanese came down the Malayan trunk road on their bicycles. Two months after Pearl Harbor, Quinn and Hubbard had infinitely more experience of front-line action than Lynch had ever known, and taking orders from the corporal was starting to stick in Quinn’s craw.

Splashing through the shallows of the swamp, Quinn got lost in the darkness. At least he did not have to worry about running into any barbed wire entanglements, he thought ruefully. It was not that there was a shortage of wire on the island, just that the brass had decided not to build any entanglements in the mangroves because it was thought it would be bad for the morale of the civilian population if they saw the army preparing for a siege. Bugger the bloody civvies, Quinn thought bitterly. What about my bloody morale?

He tripped over a mangrove root in the darkness. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘Halt! Who goes there?’ a voice immediately challenged him out of the Stygian dark.

‘Private Quinn, Third Platoon.’

‘Oh, it’s you, Bluey. Thought maybe you was a Jap.’

‘Japs don’t say Bloody hell!; they say "chikusho!". Where’s platoon HQ?’

‘Fifty yards to your right.’

‘Thanks, mate.’

Platoon headquarters was in a tented dugout beyond the mangroves. Inside, Lieutenant ‘Fig’ Newton was holding the handset of a telephone to his ear. ‘Hallo, hallo, can anyone hear me?’ Getting no response, he tapped the cradle a couple of times, then slammed the handset down in disgust. ‘That bombardment must’ve cut the lines. What d’you want, Quinn?’

‘Corporal Lynch sent me, sir. He told me to tell you the Japs are coming.’

‘I know, Quinn, I’m not deaf.’ He turned to Sergeant Smith. ‘It’s no good, Smudger. We’ll have to signal the searchlight batteries with a flare. Pass me the Very pistol.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Smith handed the lieutenant a pistol and a flare. Newton tried to insert the flare in the pistol, but it would not fit. ‘Bloody hell, Smudger! They’ve issued us with the wrong bloody flares!’

‘You sure about that, sir? Sometimes they swell up in a humid atmosphere.’

‘Oh, that’s bloody marvellous, that is! Issuing us with flares that spoil in a tropical atmosphere. In Singapore, that’s as much use as tits on a bull! Send a runner to company HQ, Smudger. Quinn, who’s on the Bren in your section?’

‘Boyd, sir.’

‘Right, then. Run back to Lynch and tell him to have Boyd open up with the Bren. When the searchlight batteries hear that, they’ll get the message soon enough.’

‘Reckon they’ll hear a burst of Bren-gun fire over this racket, sir?’

‘If you’ve got any better suggestions, Quinn, I’m sure we’d all be fascinated to hear them.’

Quinn splashed back through the mangroves to the weapon pit where he had left Lynch, Hubbard and Boyd. By now the sound of motors approaching across the strait was even louder, though Quinn could still see nothing. ‘Fig says to loose off a few bursts from the Bren,’ he told the corporal. ‘He reckons that’ll wake up the searchlight batteries.’

‘We’re not pulling out?’ asked Lynch.

‘I guess not,’ said Quinn.

‘He’s crazy! We’re too thinly spread to hold the Japs here. You know it, I know it, he knows it!’

‘What do you want to do, run away?’ Quinn asked scornfully. ‘All right, maybe we are too thinly spread. Even if we can’t hold them, at least we can slow them down till the Poms get their heads out of their arses.’ He clapped Cyril Boyd, who manned the Bren light machine gun, on the shoulder. ‘You wanna fire off a few bursts?’

‘Live rounds?’ Boyd was one of the new recruits who had lately joined the battalion, in the same draft of reinforcements that had imposed Lynch on them.

‘Might as well.’ Hubbard was training Boyd in some of the finer points of operating the Bren, and was every bit as calm on the battlefield as he was on the firing range.

‘What do I aim at?’

‘What can you see?’

‘Only the darkness.’

‘Aim for that, then.’

‘What if I hit someone?’

‘I reckon we’re all hoping you do.’

Boyd squeezed off a few short bursts into the night. The muzzle flash of a Bren gun was a poor light source, but in the absence of any other light, it was better than nothing. Enough for Quinn to imagine he saw something on the water about fifty yards out. If Lieutenant Newton had thought that would be sufficient to wake up the artillery, however, he must have been disappointed.

‘I’d keep firing if I were you.’ Quinn unslung his rifle, bracing the butt to his shoulder, and pushed the safety catch forward.

Boyd fired a few more bursts. ‘I’m out of ammo!’

‘You say change.’

‘Oh! Sorry, Mother. Change.’

Hubbard plucked out the spent magazine and slotted a fresh one in its place, giving it a light slap on the top to make sure it was snug, before clapping Boyd on the shoulder to signify he could resume firing.

Someone managed to fire a parachute flare. The bright magnesium fizzed in the sky, casting long shadows that lengthened and swayed eerily as it descended beneath its parachute. While far from being as bright as the sun, it was bright enough to reveal several dozen boats crossing the black waters of the strait. An armada of plywood-hulled assault boats with outboard motors, each of them carrying a dozen Japanese soldiers, grim-faced beneath their dome-like steel helmets. And in the midst of them a great big steel landing craft, big enough to carry perhaps fifty men.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Lynch gasped hoarsely.

‘Open fire!’ Quinn aimed his rifle at the man sitting at the front of the nearest assault boat, squeezed the trigger, felt the butt kick against his shoulder, then worked the bolt action to put another round up the spout. Boyd fired another couple of bursts from the Bren. The men in the nearest assault boat jerked spasmodically where they sat, the ones in the bow slumping back against the ones amidships. Other machine guns opened up further along the beach: Brens, Vickers, even a Lewis. Lynch pulled back the cocking handle of his Thompson sub-machine gun and fired a long, wild burst, most of which went over the heads of the men he was aiming at, as far as Quinn could tell. ‘Die, you mongrels!’ the corporal was screaming. ‘Die! Die! Die!’ For the first time, Quinn found himself hoping Lynch survived this campaign, if only for the opportunities it would give him to mock the corporal afterwards.

The first of the assault boats beached itself on the mud, the Japanese soldiers within stepping out into the surf and charging towards the jungle to the left of Lynch’s weapon pit. Boyd turned the Bren on them, but he also seemed to be firing high. Then he was out of bullets again and waiting for Hubbard to slap a new magazine in place. ‘Change!’

The flare landed on the water and was extinguished with a fizzle. The shooting continued, however, muzzles flashing in the darkness and tracer rounds arcing through the night. Quinn could hear the Japanese shouting to each other, yelling orders, screaming for help. A mortar round hit one of the assault boats and it burst into flames, dousing the men in the stern with burning petrol. That provided more than enough light for the Australians to see by. The flames silhouetted a man charging right at the weapon pit. Quinn put a bullet through him at only a few yards, saw the man drop and lie still. He worked the bolt of his rifle again, fired the last round from his magazine and reloaded with two chargers from his utility pouches.

Each time a boat disembarked its cargo of soldiers, one man remained on board, turning it in the water and heading back the way it had come. Going to collect the next wave, thought Quinn. One assault boat had almost washed aground, turned sideways to the shore, the man at the tiller slumped and lifeless. Quinn saw a Japanese soldier run across, drag the dead man to the middle of the boat, then take his place at the tiller, steering back into the night. Oh no you don’t! Quinn took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. The Japanese slumped, and Quinn put a round through the tank of the outboard motor for good measure, though to his disappointment it did not explode in a ball of fire.

More and more assault boats loomed out of the darkness. There was still no sign of the searchlight batteries, or the artillery which they had been promised would blow the Japanese boats out of the water before they got halfway across. Lynch, Quinn, Hubbard and Boyd aimed and fired as fast as they could reload, but there were too many Japanese charging across the beach now, and the defenders were too few and far between to make any real impact on them.

Quinn heard footsteps behind him. Whirling, he levelled his rifle, expecting to see a Japanese emerging from the mangroves at the back of the weapon pit. In the hellish glow from a burning assault boat, he recognised the anxious face of Solly Shapiro. The regimental heavyweight boxing champion, Shapiro had been the original ninety-seven-pound weakling until he had seen one of Charles Atlas’s advertisements in the back of an issue of The Kookaburra and sent off for a copy of Everlasting Health and Strength. A few years later he had won several body-building contests, and whether in barracks or in bivouac, he religiously got up before reveille to perform the ‘dynamic tension’ exercises that made him the man he was. Proud of his physique, he wore a khaki shirt with the sleeves cut off entirely, all the better to show off his bulging biceps.

He spread his brawny arms wide, holding his rifle above his head. ‘Don’t shoot, Bluey! It’s me! Solly!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Solly! Get your bloody head down!’ Grabbing Shapiro by a webbing strap, Quinn hauled him over the sandbags into the weapon pit.

‘Why aren’t you with Jumbo’s platoon?’ demanded Lynch.

‘Jumbo’s dead. So are most of the others, I think. The Japs have worked their way around behind us. I got separated from the others crossing the swamp.’

‘They’re behind us now? Christ, I’m getting out of here before they get us completely surrounded!’ Lynch clambered over the sandbags and dashed off into the night.

‘Lynch, you gutless bloody mongrel!’ Quinn shouted after him. ‘Get back here!’ But the corporal had gone.

‘Reckon that leaves you in charge, Bluey,’ said Hubbard.

‘Me! How do you reckon that?’

‘You were in front of me in the queue at the recruiting office.’

‘What do we do?’ asked Boyd.

‘Well, don’t just sit there, you drongo!’ Quinn gestured to where another dozen Japanese waded through the surf. ‘Keep firing!’

---

Tracer bullets whipped out of the darkness up ahead as Sergeant Shimura climbed out of his boat, distracting him, so he did not realise he was stepping on a corpse until it was too late. The surf was awash with the bodies of Japanese soldiers who had already died in the assault. Shimura wondered if he would soon join them.

But he was not dead yet, and this was no time to be squeamish. Wading through the surf – it was impossible not to trip on the corpses – he fired his Arisaka rifle blindly in the direction from which the tracer rounds seemed to be coming. The mud sucked at his boots as he ran.

He glanced over his shoulder to check his men were following him, waving them onwards. ‘Come on!’

Corporal Toriyama was at his side – the two of them had fought together in a hundred skirmishes since they had first marched into Manchuria ten years ago – along with seven more men, but three had been killed by a burst of machine-gun fire riddling the boat’s side before they had even landed.

More bullets came, whip-cracking past Shimura’s head. He threw himself flat in the mud, then crawled forward like a mudskipper until he lay alongside a young superior private from one of the earlier waves. There was no barbed wire that Shimura could see, no evidence of mines, just the hail of lead from a machine-gun nest.

‘Where’s Lieutenant Inoue?’ he asked the superior private.

‘I don’t know, Sergeant-sama.’

‘What an annoying mess!’ Shimura glanced behind him, saw Toriyama lying there with the other men from their assault boat. He caught the corporal’s eye, and Toriyama nodded. Neither of them inclined towards heroics – they had learned early on in China that that was a quick route to the grave – but unless someone took charge, they were all going to get killed, and as the senior man in the boat, Shimura realised with dismay that the responsibility fell to him.

‘Fix bayonets!’ He drew his own bayonet from the scabbard on his belt. The sixteen-inch blade might look fearsome in comparison with the eight-inch spike of the British standard-issue bayonet, but the difference was purely cosmetic: the Arisaka rifle was ten inches shorter than the Lee–Enfield, so in a bayonet duel the advantage was with the British. Nevertheless, it was difficult to look at a Japanese bayonet and not pity the poor devil who found himself skewered on the end of it.

Shimura crawled forward, gesturing for Toriyama to follow. The Vickers was still blazing away, but if they had it mounted on a tripod – and the gaijin usually did – then they would not be able to tilt it down sufficiently to shoot Shimura and Toriyama, provided they stayed low.

The two of them crawled to within twenty yards of the machine-gun nest. Drawing level with Shimura, Toriyama took out two Type 97 grenades and handed one to the sergeant. The grenades had grooves on their metal casing that divided their surfaces into regular segments, like the British Mills bomb, but while a Mills bomb was egg-shaped, the Type 97 was cylindrical. Shimura and Toriyama screwed down the firing pins of their grenades so they protruded from the base of the striker, tugged on the loop of cord threaded through the safety pin to pull it out, and then – for want of any other hard surface – both of them dashed their grenades against their steel helmets, priming them, and lobbed them over the sandbags into the machine-gun nest.

The two grenades detonated in rapid succession, illuminating the figures wearing Brodie helmets behind the sandbags for the blink of an eye. Shimura got no more than an impression of a face distorted in agony, heard a crack and a short scream, and the machine gun fell silent.

Shimura and Toriyama crawled forward until they could touch the sandbags, then lunged over them, the butts of their rifles braced against their shoulders. The only occupants of the weapon pit were dead.

A burst of machine-gun fire crackled, too close for comfort. Shimura saw the muzzle flash, had an impression of a figure behind scrim netting. He started to raise his rifle, but Toriyama was faster, swinging his Arisaka around, loosing off a snapshot from the hip. The man dropped his sub-machine gun and fell forward until his utility pouches caught on the scrim netting, holding him up grotesquely.

The netting concealed the entrance to a tented dugout. Toriyama took out another grenade, primed it as he had the last, and lobbed it through the entrance. The flash of the blast lit up the doorway. Shimura and Toriyama went through one after the other, guns blazing.

They need not have bothered: everyone inside was already dead, had probably been dead even before Toriyama lobbed the grenade in. Shimura snapped on a torch to check. The beam picked out the bright blood splashed on the inside of the tattered canvas. The corpses wore the iconic British Brodie helmets, but their shoulder flashes said ‘AIF’. ‘Australians,’ Shimura said to Toriyama, who nodded.

One of the dead men had a lieutenant’s pips on the epaulettes of his bush shirt, a map case fixed to his belt. Crouching by his corpse, Shimura took the man’s Thompson sub-machine gun and pulled back the cocking handle. The Nagoya Arsenal produced many fine weapons for the Imperial Japanese Army, but its attempts to produce a satisfactory sub-machine gun had until now failed to bear fruit. Shimura had heard they were working on one; until it was in production, he and his men would have to make do with whatever sub-machine guns they could take from the corpses of their enemies.

Shimura tossed the Thompson to Toriyama, who caught it. The corporal grinned, and struck a pose. ‘Like Jemezu Cagney!’

Shimura indicated the dead officer’s knapsack. ‘Take plenty of magazines.’ Taking the map case, he moved away from the corpse, but none of the maps he studied by the light of the torch provided any new information that would be of any use to him or his battalion’s intelligence officer.

He stepped out of the tented dugout, into the darkness of the night. The corpse still dangled from the scrim netting. Shimura took the dead man’s Thompson, slinging it over his own shoulder this time, and stuffed his pack with magazines from the corpse’s utility pouches. Toriyama emerged from the dugout after him. The two of them followed a trail through the undergrowth until they came to a clearing where something else was concealed beneath scrim. Pulling the netting back, Shimura revealed a searchlight. Stepping up onto the platform on which the light was fixed, he turned and saw he had a fine view over the intervening undergrowth to the beach where he had come ashore, and the waters of the strait beyond.

‘If they’d fixed our boats in this beam of this, their artillery would’ve blown us out of the water,’ he remarked to Toriyama.

‘Why didn’t they, then?’

‘No power, I expect.’ To demonstrate, Shimura threw one of the levers on the searchlight, and to his astonishment and horror the whole unit began to hum noisily, the bulb quickly lighting up and sending a dazzling beam across the strait. Shimura quickly cut the power again before the light drew fire from the Japanese artillery, who would assume the searchlight was being operated by British soldiers trying to direct their own artillery on the Japanese assault boats.

‘So why didn’t they use it?’ wondered Toriyama.

‘The same reason nine out of ten things happen in battle, I expect,’ said Shimura. ‘Some idiot made an annoying mess of things.’

They made their way back to the beach. Fifty yards away, tracer fire still came from where a handful of Australians – one of them armed with a Bren gun – still held out in a weapon pit.

Ordering Toriyama and three other men to follow, Shimura led the way through the mangroves, wading through cold, waist-deep water until they were in position behind the weapon pit. Picking their way through the tangled roots in the dark, they got close enough to prime two more grenades and lob them into the weapon pit, before charging the last few yards and firing bursts from their Thompsons at the men within.

But the pit was deserted. ‘Chikusho!’ cursed Shimura. While he and his squad had been working their way around the Bren-gunners’ flank, the Australians had slipped away in the darkness. Had it been luck, or cunning? The Australians could not have gone far, and the thought of some cunning enemy soldiers in the vicinity made Shimura nervous.

Toriyama’s thoughts must have been working along similar lines. ‘Should we go after them?’

Shimura shook his head. ‘Let them go. Our orders are clear: we must make for Tengah Airfield.’

General Yamashita had anticipated there would be much confusion when the Fifth and Eighteenth Infantry Divisions landed in the mangrove swamps at the western end of the island. Men would become separated from their units in the dark. So the general had made sure that whatever else happened, everyone knew what to do. Their orders were simple: head for Tengah Airfield; if you meet with men from another unit, stick with them; you can look for your own unit after the airfield is in our hands. Every officer and NCO was issued with a wrist-compass with a glow-in-the-dark dial so he could find his way: the Fifth Division had to march south-south-east from their landing zone on the north-west side of the island while the Eighteenth Division – of which Shimura’s battalion was a part – were to head east-south-east. If their boats had put them ashore in the right place – and with such a narrow strait to cross, it seemed unlikely they could have gone far wrong – they had only three and a half miles to march, as the crow flew. If all went well, both divisions would rally at Tengah tomorrow evening. With the airfield in Japanese hands, they could start bringing in reinforcements, supplies and ammunition. And from Tengah to Singapore Town was a mere nine miles.

Little more than a dozen miles from where he now stood to Singapore Town! After a march of over four hundred miles from where they had landed at Khota Baru two months earlier, now they were less than a day’s march from their final objective. In three days it would be Kigensetsu: the anniversary of the coronation of the Emperor Jimmu, the founder of the Chrysanthemum Dynasty. What a great tribute it would be to his descendant, the Emperor Hirohito, if they could conquer Singapore on Kigensetsu!

Shimura snorted. He was getting ahead of himself. They might only be twelve and a half miles from Singapore Town, but those miles would be the most bitterly contested of all. The British would not give up their island fortress without a fight, and no doubt there would be many hard battles to fight before the Rising Sun was flying over the city.

So take it one step at a time, Shimura told himself. Get these men to Tengah. Do that, and then you can start thinking about conquering Singapore in time for Kigensetsu.

Two

Monday 0200 – 0402

‘There are guards on the gate!’ growled MacRae.

‘Of course there are guards on the gate,’ said Torrance. ‘What were you expecting?’

‘Ye said there widnae be any!’ MacRae was nicknamed ‘Smiler’ on account of his ‘Glasgow smile’, two deep scars running from the corners of his mouth where his cheeks had once been slashed open almost as far as his ears, a souvenir of his time in the Brigton Billy Boys, one of Glasgow’s notorious razor gangs. According to some legends current in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, MacRae being given a Glasgow smile was only poetic justice, for some said he was the man responsible for three out of four such ‘smiles’ seen walking the streets of the Gorbals.

‘I said the storeroom was unguarded.’ Like MacRae, Torrance wore a khaki-drab Balmoral bonnet with the silver badge of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders pinned above his left ear. Although his father – who had died at the Somme before Torrance was born – had been a Highlander, Torrance himself had been raised in London and spoke with a cockney accent. ‘I never said the base wasn’t guarded.’

‘I thought ye said the place was abandoned?’

‘Abandoned by the navy. Now the army’s moved in to blow up the dockside equipment, so Tojo won’t get his sticky mitts on it. You know what the army’s like: if there are gates, they’ve got to ’ave sentries on ’em.’

The sentries were Gurkhas, Lee–Enfields at the slope, the broad brims of their slouch hats casting shadows across their faces from the glare of the flames of the naval base’s burning oil tanks. Gurkhas were a cheerful, good-humoured, easy-going bunch, but Torrance had served alongside them in India and he knew it was no lie that their kukris, once drawn, could not be returned to the scabbard without drawing blood.

A sergeant emerged from the shadows, standing in the middle of the tarmac, a raised palm commanding the Morris three-tonne lorry to halt. MacRae eased on the brakes. ‘Now what?’ he asked Torrance.

‘Stay calm and let me do the talking.’

He wound down the window on his side, taking a folded slip of paper from the breast pocket of his sweat-stained khaki drill shirt and leaning down to hand it to the sergeant. The Gurkha produced a torch and read the order in the light of its beam before handing it back to Torrance. He barked a command at the sentries in Nepalese and they hurried to open the gates. The sergeant waved the lorry through. Changing gear, MacRae shifted his foot from brake to accelerator, easing the Morris forward.

Torrance folded the order and tucked it back inside his pocket.

‘Where d’ye get that?’ asked MacRae, steering the Morris along the long drive through the naval base.

‘Typed it myself, didn’t I? All you need is five minutes alone in the