Rogue Raider (14 page)

Book Two

THE SEPOY MUTINY

Chapter Six

Lauterbach, Lauterbach, the best mate a bloke ever had.”

Lauterbach was glad to be back in Singapore again, a steaming, teeming town where all the races and religions on earth poured their essence into a single malodorous pool. He breathed in the pungent city air where the smells of Klings and Chinese and Malays and Buginese jostled and warred on each other, as they spoke their different tongues, sang their different songs to their different gods and made a good living hating each other under the British flag. In the harbour, across from the little Malay houses built out over the water on poles, lay the
Pontoporos
, her status currently undergoing ill-natured legal investigation in several other languages. Lauterbach hoped to be called as a witness and would lie gloriously in whatever fashion would cause most trouble for everyone. He felt truly himself again, a foreigner, an alien, all his senses heightened. Not far from there, the
Exford
rested on the rocks, the bottom torn out of her by the embarrassed young lieutenant. Lauterbach had forgotten to mention the matter of the faulty compass to him. It was a shame really. He had been nice enough, even asked schoolboyishly for an
Emden
cap badge as a souvenir for his girl. Still, a sensible sailor would have checked. Now he would never make captain. The wreck was a vast monument to Lauterbach's own sheer bloody-mindedness.

They had been driven through town in a rattling open truck, guarded by two stick-legged Tommies, with terrible teeth, in baggy shorts. As the biggest British military base East of Suez, Singapore normally wore a pall of khaki and grey and so had changed relatively little from the place he had known before the war. Indeed most of the troops had been called away to the West so there were, if anything, fewer of them about and almost all Indians. Here were the scenes he remembered from a dozen peacetime shore leaves – the Esplanade, the cricket club, St. Andrew's Cathedral. All inculcated in the natives a caricature of village-green Englishness under tropical skies. He caught a tantalising glimpse of the white facade of the Raffles Hotel and its fanned traveller's palms and was assailed by a terrible thirst for the haven of the bar with its ancient ‘boys' and yarning expats. But it was snatched away from him in a swirl of honking traffic. Orchard Road bustled with all its accustomed flocks of memsahibs in hats and gloves followed by troops of parcel-carrying servants. It was the dance of life from which he was, it seemed, to be banished for an indefinite future.

“Lauterbach, Lauterbach, the best mate a bloke ever had.” A beardstubbled madman in a torn Tsingtao captain's army uniform rushed up, hugged Lauterbach, looked round smirkingly at the onlookers through crazed grey eyes, basking in reflected glory. Lauterbach did not recognise him and paused nonplussed as Sikh guards seized Schulz and slashed him to the ground with practised elegant strokes of their bamboo batons. “Best bloke a mate …” he muttered and succumbed.

In the absence of von Mueller – imprisoned in Malta – and von Muecke – God knew where on the high seas – Lauterbach alone inherited the chivalrous mantle of
Emden
's glory in arms. Soon he was installed in the old Tanglin Barracks in a spare but spacious bungalow that echoed to dripping taps and his further reward was to be allowed unrestricted visitors and electricity after the normal ten o'clock lights-out. Abruptly, he was a man of substance. For the first time in his life Lauterbach was famous, feted by rude soldiery and camp followers alike, indeed for the first few days a permanent guard was necessary to protect him from their excessive enthusiasm. The German ratings from the
Pontoporos
were in the same compound and cheered him as their leader. Their reputation, too, rode so high that a considerable black-market currency had now developed in
Emden
cap badges within the city. Lauterbach swiftly arranged to have more made by a clever Chinese tailor and found them useful for the purchase of food, drink and sexual favours but, as a man of the world, knew it was only a matter of time before the tailor, like any self-respecting Chinese, went into business on his own account and spoiled the market.

The camp was a series of bleak wooden barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and with sentry posts every hundred yards, manned exorbitantly by twenty British officers, six hundred Indians and apparently numberless Malays. That, in turn, was encompassed by an electrified fence and beyond that a deep ditch as though for the trapping of tigers. Lauterbach felt finally
safe.
No one, it seemed, could get at him here. It had been explained that if he gave his word as an officer and a gentleman not to try to escape he might install himself more commodiously in a hotel in town. He could have his own batman there if he cared to. And who would pay for all that? They had shrugged. As a gentleman he naturally must pay for it himself from his private means. Not bloody likely. He would rather sit in the camp than fritter away his hard-earned cash on trivia such as daily food and board. Since joining the merchant marine, he had never paid for either and did not intend to start now. King George had put him in jail and King George would pay the bill.

“Our chief concern,” said Herr Feldschwein, mopping his domed brow with a large snowy handkerchief that exuded the scent of frangipani, “is to continue the war by other means and, of course, we look to you not simply to inspire us but to direct us in our struggle to support the fatherland.” Lauterbach had felt safe. He had been wrong. The enemy was already lying in wait for him inside the camp. There were half a dozen of them – Lauterbach knew the type – elderly patriots of the dentured classes, cosily civilian but eager to spill the blood of younger men, German nationals interned by the British for the duration of the war. They were business men, Hamburg merchants, shippers, condemned to live here in hot, stuffy barracks while their cool, white mansions just down the road were requisitioned by tippling British officers who put their dirty boots up on the tables. They still insisted on the propriety of the white linen suits and ties of commerce even in the professional void of this prison camp. Many were part of that shadowy force, the German
Etappe
, a network set up to secretly buy supplies and illegally communicate with German naval vessels through neutral ports and so overcome the dreadful handicap of not having a world empire in a world war. It operated, inconspicuously as they thought, out of a fake Rhenish castle up the road called the Teutonia Club. The only thing that could have made it more obvious was singing mermaids posted on rocks outside. They loved the whole glamorous business of Berlin intrigues, rustling nocturnal rendezvous in the Esplanade shrubbery and secret despatches written in invisible ink and stamped with imperial eagles, since it transformed their mundane acts of sterile trade into a national crusade. Also they had made a great deal of money out of it. Now they were obliged to limit their activities to directing a stream of strategic supplies into Lauterbach's own kitchen. Out there he had crates of beer and hams stacked up to the ceiling. The table was littered with the debris of tinkling teacups and rich chocolate cake. Lauterbach's stomach growled and gurgled like a contented baby.

“As senior officer here, Oberleutnant, we look to you to put a bit of backbone into the men and we look forward to hearing your detailed plans for resistance as soon as possible. There's been a frightful slackness around the camp with a deal too much fraternising. There has even been an outbreak of cricket.” They nodded solemnly, speaking with the arrogance common to all financial backers. Feldschwein of Meyer and Co. had put a slight edge in his voice, just a tiny hint perhaps, that Lauterbach was part of that slackness.

But Lauterbach was all smiles. These men were a pain in the arse but necessary for his creature comforts, a little like the women in his life and as needful of shameless flattery. He looked down on his Iron Cross, newly forwarded by the British and fingered it casually. He had gone out and bought the formal sword that British deference permitted him and clanked it now as token of his superior status and military expertise. Since fame had come upon him, he had found it easy to assume a pose of approachable greatness but it was just as pleasurable, from time to time, to slam the green baize door on the fingers of mere tradesmen.

“You may be assured, gentlemen, that, as a military man, I have already conceived several ideas as to how we may best proceed … Drawing on my experience in the
Emden
where we destroyed for all time the myth of British supremacy at sea … Security forbids a fuller account at this stage … You will be aware yourselves, as men of responsibility and discretion of the absolute necessity for silence on all details at this point … I beg you therefore to follow your usual patterns of behaviour … Above all let us not be seen together too often lest it arouse the suspicion of the enemy whose spies are everywhere … I must give out the air of a man who regards himself as retired from combat … We must do nothing precipitate until we are certain of the current situation.” His mouth flapped glibly, the empty words flowing with generous ease. The less he told them, the more exciting they would find it. They nodded earnestly. He yawned, his mind elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would start the men doing some pointless physical drills to impress and confuse them. He could get the gymnastics team training themselves up to form human pyramids sufficiently high to get over the perimeter fence. His mistress was coming at three. It would be nice to get a cat to share his quarters, a big complacent tabby perhaps. He missed the cats of the
Emden
and wondered briefly whether they had all died in the conflict. Maybe the English, a sentimental race, would have been less free with their lobbing of shells if they had known there were innocent pets on board. He shook his head. He was nodding off. His visitors rose to go, searched fussily for hats and sticks and he waved them wearily away. They crept through the door in one's and two's, making off hurriedly in opposite directions with the brims of their hats ostentatiously pulled down. That would be
Etappe
training.

“We must do nothing precipitate,” said Colonel Martin, “until we are certain of the current situation. It could unsteady the men.”

Captain Hall looked out through the open door where chubby Jemedar Khan of the Fifth Light Infantry stared in total absorption at a buff form, picked up a pencil and began to write industriously. Hall opened his eyes wide and nodded back over his shoulder, warning Martin that they were not alone.

“What? Oh don't be silly, Hall, Khan's all right.” He sat down in his creaking chair, creaked his Sam Browne belt and cracked his knuckles. “This isn't the first time there have been rumours of disaffection in the ranks.” He pouted petulantly. “Not enough goat's meat and milk? Men don't mutiny over that. I don't believe a word of it. It's traditional to belly-ache about rations. It's like boys complaining about school dinners. You should know that.”

“There is also,” Captain Hall dropped his voice, “the more serious matter of the Muslim connection.”

“What? Speak up man. Don't mumble. The Muslim ‘connection', as you term it has been grossly exaggerated. So Christi Khan holds a few meetings telling the men not fight fellow Muslims in Turkey. They're not going to Turkey. We've been slated for Hong Kong, as you very well know. He'll be a laughing stock when we're in Kowloon.” He was getting irritable again. It was all becoming Hall's fault. From the outer office, Jemedar Khan made a foul gurgling noise with the thick snot far up his nose and scraped his chair on the floor as he lent back, aimed, swirled and spat. Hall paused, waiting for the
Ping
as it hit the cuspidor. Prudence dictated he should call it a day. Never mind. He had come this far. He would see it through.

“I think I mentioned, sir, that my friend in Intelligence warned us to expect some sort of demonstration on the 19th, co-ordinated by those Indian Nationalists funded out of Berlin. They picked up a couple more of their agents in Johore Bahru last week and down at the mosque in Kampong Java the
imam
's been stirring them up again. With the Chinese New Year coming up and crowds in the streets, we can expect trouble.”

Something in Martin snapped. Hall could almost hear the sound of it, like the wishbone of a chicken. Beneath the tight collar his neck coursed with a sudden gush of throbbing blood. His nostrils dilated. Spittle flecked the corner of his mouth.

“You're just like all the rest aren't you, Hall. You want me out of here so you can petition the War Office for service in the West again and get yourself some quick medals. Fancy yourself as CO here don't you? You've never forgiven me for telling them the men just aren't ready, that we need a tour of duty back in India. Don't think I don't know what you all say about me in the Mess, how you try to poison their minds against me. The men tell me all about it. They know whose side I'm on. You'll never understand the Muslim mind, Hall. You're too pig-headed.” He stopped, sniggered at his own joke, then snarled, “Oh get out.”

Hall stiffened, choked back the rage and bit down hard on it. He saluted icily and strode through the door, pulling it hard so that it slammed behind him. As the reverberations died away by Khan's desk, he stopped and stared down at the top of his glossy, bobbing head.

“You may fool him, Khan, but you don't fool me.”

The Indian did not look up but pencilled quietly away with gentle hands. “Sahib?”

“I've got my eye on you Khan, don't you forget that.”

Khan turned towards him a face of ineffable sweetness and innocence. The lips parted over white, smiling teeth almost in the gesture of a kiss. “Yes sahib. Thank you sahib. Oh, and happy Chinese New Year, sahib.”

Chapter Seven

Lauterbach groaned and belched. He turned on his stomach so that a hand dangled heavily over the edge of the bed, encountered empty bottles and sent them rolling and crashing like skittles. Light penetrated the grubby curtains and seared his pupils. His eyes, when he rubbed them, ground in crystals like powdered glass. A small furry animal had crawled into his mouth, vomited, voided its bowels and then died. He cursed, reached under the bed with shaking deliberation and found a gin bottle full of tepid water whose contents he sucked down gratefully, then fought stomach convulsions and a terrible sense of suffocation that ended in a coughing fit. On that table there, somewhere, was a fag. He groped, found, struck a lucifer and swallowed smoke blindly. “Himmel, Arsch und Wolkenbruch.” This could not go on much longer. The mix of outrage and boredom in this camp and limitless beer were a combination that would be the death of him. Too much free time led to brooding over the meaning of life and for Lauterbach the meaning of life had always been to be too busy to have time to think about it.