When they were first married, Audrey had said he was at his best when in a position of power, in control — alone. He had taken it as a compliment.

Once begun on this trail, his mind slid easily back to 1942, to the agonies he had undergone when his young wife had been torn from his side. The six intervening years seemed sometimes no more than days, so vividly did he recall the noise, heat and panic all around them.

He had queued with her on the quayside, pushing her ever nearer the gangplank of the ship with other wives, women and girls who had lingered on working in essential jobs or caring for children, their menfolk all desperate to get them away from Singapore.

There had not at the end been a real moment of parting for she had been swept from him by the tide of anxious embarkees as yet again Japanese warplanes bombed and strafed the harbour. For a second he had seen the top of her brown hair, a raised arm, finally just a hand, as if she was drowning in the sea of people pushing relentlessly towards the ship.

The moment had only recently been refocused and magnified under the clear lens of hindsight. Since his journey to the Blue Mountains of Australia, the memory was more harrowing with each recall. Before there had been so much hope, now it was a repeated bereavement.

The truth had taken so long to learn. Immediately after the fall of Singapore he and many remaining men who had trained for just such an eventuality had retreated into the jungles of the peninsula. All through the war they had struck at the Japanese in any way they could. He had eventually learned that the ship she had embarked on had been sunk, and had agonised over the lifted arm as if it had been some omen of a drowning.

That was the first time he had thought he had lost her for good.

Then he’d heard survivors had boarded another vessel bound for England. But though there had been coded messages sent from the secret jungle radios asking for news, there had been no reports of anyone landing in England by the name of Audrey Rosalind Sturgess.

He had had to wait until the war was over and he could travel back to England to learn that some of the people on that first stricken ship had been transferred to one going to Australia.

Walking back to his own tent, he let down the sides, opened his locker and looked at the book inside. Then he closed it and locked it away again. It was time he had his chance, time for a counterattack on life.

He saw again the bungalow on the banks of a river, the mountains blue with the aura of gumtrees in the distance. He was irretrievably bitter. He had spent the war years pining and mourning for her, then two years looking for her, as well as hundreds of pounds — and the worst thing of all had been finding her.

*

‘Hope you all behaving yourself in ‘ere.’

Alan lifted his head to see Babyface’s cratered face grinning in at the tent flap.

‘Clear off and go to bed!’ Alan told him.

‘That’s what the major just told me to do,’ he said with a jerk of his head in the direction of the night as he went to sit on Dan’s bed.

‘What’s he snooping about at?’ Ben Sutherland asked, but Babyface was watching Alan as he drew himself up to a sitting position.

‘Watching you.’ He nodded in Alan’s direction. ‘Watching you like a bloody hawk.’

Alan scowled but did not speak.

‘So what’s so special about you?’ Babyface obviously thought there was a possible source of entertainment here. ‘You did know we’d got enough signallers without you being fetched back from that plantation? What you done to him? Why does he want you in the ulu with ‘im?’

The other five men in the tent all looked for his answer. Explaining was something Alan had been pressed to do ever since he found himself reunited with the men who had been at Rinsey. For it seemed what Babyface said was true; a signaller from Headquarters Company had found himself sent on unexpected furlough to Penang Island. There was no way, though, Alan was going to try to explain his real suspicions about his cavalier removal from Rinsey.

‘Perhaps he couldn’t get on with the other chap.’ Dan tried valiantly to be on Alan’s side. ‘After all, an officer has to work pretty closely with his signaller in the jungle.’

Alan still did not respond and Dan went on, ‘I’m bloody scared of going back into the ulu, I don’t mind telling you.’

‘Everybody is,’ Alan answered, thinking that the heat made Dan’s freckles look almost black against his cameolike complexion.

‘It’s not the ulu that’s worrying our Al, it’s leaving the girlie behind at that plantation. Ideas above his station, that’s what he’s got!’

‘That’s not true!’ Dan sprang to his aid with the devastating remark, ‘If anyone fancies that Miss Hammond it’s the major. I saw him looking at her when he thought nobody knew.’

‘Sounds as if you’d better watch your back, Cresswell!’

‘Aye! Strange things can happen on jungle patrols.’

‘Aye.’ Dan again sought to be on Alan’s side. ‘And it wouldn’t be the first officer who’d been shot by his own men.’

‘Thanks, Dan,’ Alan said mildly. ‘that’s a great help.’

‘Well, you know what I mean.’ Dan protested his good intentions. ‘You know as well as I do that officers can’t afford to throw their weight about so much when they’re having to muck in with you and we’ve all got live ammunition and that ... ’

Alan raised his eyebrows, remembering his admiration for Sturgess in action at the village, but there were murmurs of agreement from several throats.

‘I’ve known a time-serving drill sergeant I wouldn’t have minded walking behind with a loaded rifle,’ Sinclair, the elder of the Sutherland brothers, muttered.

‘Hey!’ Dan asked in an excited whisper, ‘and have any of you lot seen the amount of top brass we’ve had in this camp the last three days?’

‘The Smiths reckon it’s something big this time,’ Babyface said with a resigned sigh, quoting the other two members of their group, no relation, but always together.

‘I’m sure it’s different,’ Alan agreed. This was one thing he was quite prepared to talk about. ‘For one thing there’s a lot more men going in.’

‘Yeah! And there’s a lot more dropping zone tape and maps around. We’re going after something specific.’

‘Or someone?’ Alan wondered. ‘Heng Hou perhaps.’

‘Christ!’ Babyface blasphemed vehemently. ‘Don’t want anything to do with that bastard. You heard what he did to that Seaforth sergeant!’

They had but it didn’t stop him refreshing their memories.

‘Threw him down a pit lined with sharpened bamboos all pointing downwards from the sides.’ Babyface stood up so he could better display the arrangement of the trap. ‘He was impaled in the bottom and if he tried to get out he spiked himself worse. Every time he moved he — ’

‘Very heartening!’ Sergeant Mackenize had come and stood unobserved in the doorway. ‘If that’s the last bedtime story, I’d say get your bleeding heads down before it’s time to get up again. Otherwise I’ll tell you a story that’ll really make your toes curl. Now stop your yapping and get to your own tent, Babyface.’

‘Well, we won’t be able to talk much once we get into the jungle, will we, Sarge?’ Dan, everybody’s champion, commented. ‘It’ll be all hush and hand signals.’

‘Very true, Veasey.’ The sergeant made a few meaningful jerks of his thumb towards Dan’s bed.

As he made the gestures, ‘Lights Out’ was sounded by the trumpeter and all over the camp the Tilley lights were extinguished. As Dan slid into the bed nearest the door, the sergeant pulled down the mosquito netting for him.

Alan thought it a kind act to close his eyes upon, and soon the camp was threaded by the assorted snores of men who were too exhausted to be worried, while others lay staring into the darkness and into their own particular thoughts and fears.

Alan lay thinking of Liz and Rinsey, then of tomorrow’s mission. It all suddenly felt so different for him. If he believed what was said, he had really not been needed. He need not be going. The thought needled, made him nervous and resentful. He hoped the camp cook would be prompt in posting his letters — to Liz and to his mother. There seemed so much that was not quite right, so much plotting, lots of rumours being spread.