Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo by Shaun Clarke

Author:Shaun Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1993-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

8

Further along the border, on the lower slopes of Gunong Rawan, near Tebedu in the 3rd Division, Sergeant Alan Hunt and Corporal Ralph Sanderson, at the head of their patrol, were moving down from a ridge on a jungle track towards an old Indonesian border-terrorist camp that had been discovered the day before and appeared not to have been used for many months. Nevertheless, as both men knew by now, appearances could be deceptive, so they both advanced on the camp with great care, with Sanderson at the front as lead scout and Hunt second in line.

Hunt was an amiable giant of a man from rural Oxfordshire, with thinning red hair, a constantly flushed, blue-veined face (his heavy drinking only showed there; certainly not in a drinker’s paunch) and a body which, for all of its weight, was pure muscle and bone. Thirty-four years old, he had been wounded when engaged with the Gloucestershire Regiment in their epic battle on the River Injon in Korea, damaging his right arm so badly that it became paralysed and required four years to repair. Once recovered, however, he had applied to the SAS, got in with flying colours, and sustained his already admirable reputation with his work during the Malayan Emergency. Now, here he was, big and wind-blown, yet oddly graceful, moving down the densely forested slope with all the stealth of a tribesman, holding his Armalite at the ready and expert in using it. He was a man worth admiring.

Sanderson admired him. Up at the front on point for the sergeant he knew so well, aware that Indonesian troops could be hiding anywhere, ready to spring an ambush, Sanderson was glad to have Hunt backing him up. Ever since the disaster at Long Jawi, when everyone but Sanderson had lost his life, Sanderson had been more aware than ever of how easy it was to die in this war. A product of the Fifeshire coalmines and the Queen’s Own Highlanders, he took pride in being a good soldier and respected only those who felt the same way. Being a good soldier was being a worthy man and Sanderson wanted to be just that.

Reaching a curtain of bamboo, he knelt on the ground and listened intently for any unfamiliar sounds. As no breeze could penetrate the dense canopy of the jungle, let alone reach the ground, and since the animals were always careful to conceal their presence from alien presences, such as humans, Sanderson heard nothing other than the occasional cry of a long-armed gibbon or the squawk of a distant hornbill. Apart from that there was nothing but a total, oddly disturbing silence.

Staring carefully between gaps in the bamboo curtain, he saw the Indonesian camp stretched out just below. Built in a clearing between the jungle and a stream that flowed down to the River Sekayan, it consisted of many bamboo-and-thatched lean-tos without roofs, obviously used as bashas; open-air latrines now covered with swarms of flies; and a series of sunken rectangles that had clearly been gun emplacements and defensive slit trenches.

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