Читать книгу Toll for the Brave - Jack Higgins, Justin Richards - Страница 10

On a wet February evening in 1966 during my second year at Sandhurst, I jumped from a railway bridge to a freight train passing through darkness below. I landed on a pile of coke, but the cadet who followed me wasn’t so lucky. He dropped between two trucks and was killed instantly.

We were drunk, of course, which didn’t help matters. It was the final link in a chain of similar stupidities and the end of something as far as I was concerned. Harsh words were said at the inquest, even harsher by the commandant when dismissing me from the Academy.

Words didn’t exactly fail my grandfather either, who being a major-general, took it particularly hard. He had always considered me some kind of moral degenerate after the famous episode with the Finnish au pair at the tender age of fourteen and this final exploit gave him the pleasure of knowing that he had been right all along.

My father had died what is known as a hero’s death at Arnhem during the Second World War. My mother, two years later. So, the old man had had his hands on me for some considerable time. Why he had always disliked me so was past knowing and yet hatred is as strong a bond as loving so that when he forbade me his house, there was a kind of release.

The army had been his idea, not mine. The family tradition, or the family curse depending which way you looked at it, so now I was free after twenty-odd years of some kind of servitude or other and thanks to my mother’s money, wealthy by any standards.

Perhaps because of that – because it was my choice and mine alone – I flew to New York within a week of leaving the Academy and enlisted for a period of three years in the United States Army as a paratrooper.

It could be argued that the jump from that railway bridge was a jump into hell for in a sense it landed me in Tay Son, although eighteen months of a different kind of hell intervened.

I flew into the old French airport at Ton Son Nhut in July, 1966, one of two hundred replacements for the 801st Airborne Division. The pride of the army and every man a volunteer as paratroopers are the world over.

A year later, only forty-eight of that original two hundred were still on active duty. The rest were either dead, wounded or missing, thirty-three in one bad ambush alone in the Central Highlands which I only survived myself along with two others by playing dead.

So, I discovered what war was all about – or at least war in Vietnam. Not set-piece battles, not trumpets on the wind, no distant drum to stir the heart. It was savage street fighting in Saigon during the Tet offensive. It was the swamps of the Mekong Delta, the jungles of the Central Highlands, leg ulcers that ate their way through to the bone like acid and leeches that fastened on to your privates and could only be removed with the lighted end of a cigarette.

In a word, it was survival and I became rather an expert in that particular field, came through it all without a scratch until the day I was taking part in a routine search and destroy patrol out of Din To and was careless enough to step on a punji stake, a lethal little booby trap much favoured by the Viet Cong. Fashioned from bamboo, needle-sharp, stuck upright in the ground amongst the elephant grass and smeared with human excrement, it was guaranteed to produce a nasty, festering wound.

It put me in hospital for a fortnight and a week’s leave to follow, which brought me directly to that fateful day in Pleikic when I shambled around in the rain, trying to arrange some transportation to Din To where I had to rejoin my unit. I managed to thumb a lift in a Medevac helicopter that was flying in medical supplies – the worst day’s work in my life.

We were about fifty miles out of Din To when it happened, flying at a thousand feet over paddy fields and jungle, an area stiff with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regular troops.

A flare went up suddenly about a quarter of a mile to the east of us. There was the burnt-out wreck of a small Huey helicopter in the corner of a paddy field and the man who waved frantically from the dyke beside it was in American uniform.

When we were about thirty feet up, a couple of heavy machine guns opened up from the jungle no more than fifty yards away and at that range they couldn’t miss. The two pilots were wearing chest protectors, but it didn’t do them any good. I think they must have both died instantly. Certainly the crew chief did, for standing in the open doorway in his safety belt, he didn’t have a chance.

The only surviving crew member, the medic, was huddled in the corner, clutching a bloody arm. There was an MI6 in a clip beside him. I grabbed for it, but at the same moment the aircraft lifted violently and I was thrown out through the open door to fall into the mud and water of the paddy field below.

The helicopter bucked twenty or thirty feet up into the air, veered sharply to the left and exploded in a great ball of fire, burning fuel and debris scattering like shrapnel.

I managed to stand, plastered with mud and found myself looking up at the gentleman on the dyke who was pointing an AK47 straight at me. It was no time for heroics, especially as forty or fifty North Vietnamese regular troops swarmed out of the jungle a moment later.

The Viet Cong would have killed me out of hand, but not these boys. Prisoners were a valuable commodity to them, for propaganda as well as intelligence purposes. They marched me into the jungle surrounded by the whole group, everyone trying to get in on the act.

There was a small camp and a young officer who spoke excellent English with a French accent and gave me a cigarette. Then he went through my pockets and examined my documents.

Which was where things took a more sinister turn. In action, it was the practice to leave all personal papers at base, but because I had only been in transit after medical treatment, I was carrying everything, including my British passport.

He said slowly, ‘You are English?’

There didn’t seem to be much point in denying it. ‘That’s right. Where’s the nearest consul?’

Which got me a fist in the mouth for my pains. I thought they might kill me then, but I suppose he knew immediately how valuable a piece of propaganda I would make.

They kept me alive – just – for another fortnight until they found it possible to pass me on to a group moving north for rest and recuperation.

And so, at last, I came to Tay Son. The final landing place of my jump from that railway bridge into darkness, a year and a half before.

My first sight of it was through rain at late evening as we came out of a valley – a great, ochre-painted wall on the crest above us.

I’d seen enough Buddhist monasteries to recognise it for what it was, only this one was different. A watch tower on stilts at either side of the main gate, a guard in each with a heavy machine gun. Beyond, in the compound, there were several prefabricated huts.

Having spent three days stumbling along on the end of a rope at the tail of a column of pack mules, I had only one aim in life which was to find a corner to die in. I tried to sit and someone kicked me back on my feet. They took the mules away, leaving only one guard for me. I stood there, already half-asleep, the rain drifting down through the weird, half-light that you get in the highlands just before dark.

And then an extraordinary thing happened. A man reported dead by the world’s press came round the corner of one of the huts with three armed guards trailing behind him, a black giant in green fatigues and jump boots, Chaka, King of the Zulu nation, alive and shaking the earth again.

Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, the pride of the Airborne, one of the most spectacular figures thrown up by the army since the Second World War. A legend in his own time – Black Max.

His disappearance three months earlier had provoked a scandal that had touched the White House itself for, as a Medal of Honour man, he had been kept strictly out of the line of fire since Korea, had only found himself in Vietnam at all as a member of a fact-finding commission reporting directly to the president himself.

The story was that St Claire was visiting a forward area helicopter outfit when a red alert went up. One of the gun ships was short of a man to operate one of its door-mounted M60’s. St Claire, seizing his chance of a little action, had insisted on going along. The chopper had gone down in flames during the ensuing action.

He changed direction and crossed the compound so briskly that his guards were left trailing. Mine presented his AK and St Claire shoved it to one side with the back of his hand.

I came to attention. He said, ‘At ease, soldier. You know me?’

‘You inspected my outfit at Din To just over three months ago, sir.’

He nodded slowly. ‘I remember and I remember you, too. Colonel Dooley pointed you out to me specially. You’re English. Didn’t I speak to you on parade?’

‘That’s right, General.’

He smiled suddenly, my first sight of that famous St Claire charm and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You look bushed, son. I’ll see what I can do, but it won’t be much. This is no ordinary prison camp. The Chinese run this one personally. Forcing house number one. The commander is a Colonel Chen-Kuen, one of the nicest guys you ever met in your life. Amongst other things, he’s got a Ph.D. in psychology from London University. He’s here for one reason only. To take you apart.’

There was an angry shout and a young officer appeared from the entrance of one of the huts. He pulled out an automatic and pointed it at St Claire’s head.

St Claire ignored him. ‘Hang on to your pride, boy, you’ll find it’s all you have.’

He went off like a strong wind and they had to run to keep up with him, the young officer cursing wildly. Strange the sense of personal loss as I found myself alone again but I was no longer tired – St Claire had taken care of that at least.

They left me there for another hour, long enough for the evening chill to eat right into my bones and then a door opened and an n.c.o. appeared and called to my guard who kicked my leg viciously and sent me on my way.

Inside the hut, I found a long corridor, several doors opening off. We stopped at the end one and after a while it opened and St Claire was marched out. There was no time to speak for a young officer beckoned me inside.

The man behind the desk wore the uniform of a colonel in the Army of the People’s Republic of China, presumably the Chen-Kuen St Claire had mentioned.

The eyes lifted slightly at the corners, shrewd and kindly in a bronzed healthy face and the lips were well-formed and full of humour. He unfolded a newspaper and held it up so that I could see it. The Daily Express printed in London five days earlier according to the date. English war hero dies in Vietnam. The headline sprawled across the front page.

I said ‘They must have been short of news that day.’

His English was excellent. ‘Oh, I don’t think so. They all took the story, even The Times.’ He held up a copy. ‘They managed to get an interview with your grandfather. It says here that the general was overwhelmed by his loss, but proud.’

I laughed out loud at that one and the colonel said gravely, ‘Yes, I found that a trifle ironic myself when one considers his intense dislike of you. Almost pathological. I wonder why?’

A remark so penetrating could not help but chill the blood, but I fought back. ‘And what in hell are you supposed to be – a mind reader?’

He picked up a manilla file. ‘Ellis Jackson from birth to death. It’s all there. We must talk about Eton some time. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of the place. The Sandhurst affair was certainly a great tragedy. You got the dirty end of the stick there.’ He sighed heavily, as if feeling the whole thing personally and keenly. ‘In my early years as a student at London University, I read a novel by Ouida in which the hero, a Guards officer in disgrace, joins the French Foreign Legion. Nothing changes, it appears.’

‘That’s it exactly,’ I said. ‘I’m here to redeem the family honour.’

‘And yet you hated the idea of going into the army,’ he said. ‘Hated anything military. Or is it just your grandfather you hate?’

‘Neat enough in theory,’ I said. ‘On the other hand, I never met anyone yet who had a good word for him.’

I could have kicked myself at the sight of his smile, the satisfaction in his eyes. Already I was telling him things about myself. I think he must have sensed what was in my mind for he pressed a button on the desk and stood up.

‘General St Claire spoke to you earlier, I believe?’

‘That’s right.’

‘A remarkable man – gifted in many directions, but arrogant. You may share his cell for a while.’

‘An enlisted man with the top brass. He might not like that.’

‘My dear Ellis, our social philosophy does not recognise such distinctions between human beings. He must learn this. So must you.’

‘Ellis.’ It gave me a strange, uncomfortable feeling to be called by my Christian name. Too intimate under the circumstances, but there was nothing I could do about it. The door opened and the young officer entered.

Chen-Kuen smiled amicably and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Sleep, Ellis – a good, long sleep and then we speak again.’

What was it St Claire had said of him? One of the nicest guys you’ve ever met? The father I’d never known perhaps and my throat went dry at the thought of it. Deep waters certainly – too damned deep and I turned and got out of there fast.

During the journey to Tay Son, we had made overnight stops twice at mountain villages. I had been put on display, a rope around my neck, as an example of the kind of mad-dog mercenary the Americans were using in Vietnam, a murderer of women and children.

It almost got me just that, the assembled villagers baying for my blood like hounds in full cry and each time, the earnest young officer, a dedicated disciple of Mao and Uncle Ho, intervened on my behalf. I must survive to learn the error of my ways. I was a typical product of the capitalist imperialist tradition. I must be helped. Simple behaviourist psychology, of course. The blow followed by kindness so that you never knew where you were.

Something similar happened on leaving Colonel Chen-Kuen’s office. I was marched across the compound to one of the huts which turned out to be the medical centre.

The young officer left me in charge of a guard. After a while, the doctor appeared, a small, thin woman in an immaculate white coat with steel spectacles, a face like tight leather and the smallest mouth I’ve ever seen in my life. She bore an uncanny resemblance to my grandfather’s housekeeper during my early childhood, a little, vinegary lowland Scot who had never been able to forgive John Knox and therefore hated all things male. I could taste the castor oil for the first time in years and shuddered.

She sat down at her desk and the door opened again and another woman entered. A different proposition entirely. She was one of those women whose sensuality was so much a part of her that even the rather unflattering tunic and skirt of her uniform, the knee-length leather boots, could not hide it.

Her hair was jet black, parted in the centre, worn in two plaits wound into a bun at the back in a very Eastern European style, which wasn’t surprising in view of the fact that her mother, as I discovered later, was Russian.

The face was the face of one of those idols to be seen in temples all over the East. The Earth Mother who destroys all men, great, hooded, calm eyes, wide, sensual mouth. One could strive on her forever, seeking the sum total of all pleasures and finding, in the end, that the pit was bottomless.

She had only the slightest of accents and her voice was indescribably beautiful. ‘I am Madame Ny. I am to be your instructor.’

‘Well, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,’ I said, ‘But it sounds nice.’

The old doctor spoke to her in Chinese. Madame Ny nodded. ‘You will undress now, Mr Jackson. The doctor wishes to examine you.’

I was so tired that undressing was an effort, but I finally made it down to my underpants. The doctor glanced up from a file she was examining, frowned in exasperation.

Madame Ny said, ‘Everything, please, Mr Jackson.’

I tried to keep it light. ‘Even the Marine Corps let you keep this much on.’

‘You are ashamed to be seen so and by a doctor?’ She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘There is nothing obscene in the human form. A most unhealthy attitude.’

‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘Cold showers just never seemed to work.’

She leaned down to speak to the doctor and again they examined a file between them, presumably mine.

I peeled off like a good boy and waited. I must have stood there for twenty minutes or more and during that time various individuals, both men and women, came and went with files and papers. A study in conscious humiliation.

When it had presumably been judged I’d been punished enough, the doctor stood up abruptly and went to work. She gave me a thorough and competent examination, I’ll say that for her, even to the extent of taking blood and urine samples.

Finally, she pulled forward a chair, sat down and proceeded to examine my genitals with scrupulous efficiency. It was the kind of free-from-infection check that soldiers the world over get every few months. That didn’t make it any easier to take, especially with Madame Ny standing at her shoulder and following every move.

I squirmed, mainly at the old girl’s rough handling and Madame Ny said softly, ‘You find this disturbing, is it not so, Mr Jackson? A basic, clinical examination carried out by a woman old enough to be your mother and yet you find it shameful.’

‘Why don’t you jump off?’ I told her.

Her eyes widened as if gaining sudden insight. ‘Ah, but I see now. Not shameful, but frightening. You are afraid in such situations.’

She turned, spoke to the old doctor who nodded and they walked out on me before I could say a word. I wasn’t tired any more but I found it difficult to think straight. I felt as angry and frustrated as any schoolboy, humiliated before the class for no good reason.

I had just struggled back into my clothes when Madame Ny returned with the young officer. She had a paper in her hand which she placed on the desk.

She picked up a pen and offered it to me. ‘You will sign this now, please.’

There were five foolscap pages, closely typed and all in Chinese. ‘You’ll have to read the small print for me,’ I told her. ‘I haven’t got my spectacles with me.’

‘Your confession,’ the young officer cut in. ‘A factual account of your time in Vietnam as an English mercenary lured by the Americans.’

I told him what to do with the paper in an English phrase so vulgar that he obviously didn’t understand. But Madame Ny did.

She smiled faintly. ‘A physical impossibility, I fear, Mr Jackson. You will sign in the end, I assure you, but we have plenty of time. All the time in the world.’

She left again and the young officer told me to follow him. We crossed the compound through the rain and entered the monastery itself, a place of endless passages and worn stone steps although, surprisingly, lit by electricity.

The passage we finally turned into was obviously at the highest level, so long it faded into darkness; and, quite plainly, I heard a guitar.

As we advanced, the sound became even plainer and then someone started to sing a slow blues in a deep, mellow voice that reached out to touch everything around.

‘Now gather round me people, Let me tell you the true facts. That tough luck has struck me And the rats is sleeping in my hat.’

The door had two guards outside and was of heavy black oak. The young officer produced a key about twelve inches long to unlock it and it took both hands to turn.

The room was surprisingly large and lit by a single electric bulb. There was a rush mat on the stone floor and two wooden cots. St Claire sat on one of them a guitar across his knees.

He stopped playing. ‘Welcome to Liberty Hall, Eton. It isn’t much, but it’s the London Hilton compared to most of the accommodation around here.’

I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see anyone in my life.

He produced a pack of American cigarettes. ‘You use these things?’

‘Officer’s stock?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘They’re being nice to me at the moment. They might give me a pack a day for a whole month, or simply cut off the supply from tomorrow morning.’

‘Pavlovian conditioning?’

‘That’s it exactly. They have one set idea and you better get used to it. To drive you to the edge of insanity, to tear you apart, then they’ll put you together again in their image. Even their psychology is Marxian. They believe each of us has his thesis, his positive side and his antithesis, the dark side of his being. If they can find out what that is, they encourage its growth until it becomes the strongest part of your nature. Once that happens, you begin to doubt every moral or decent worthwhile thing you’ve been taught.’

‘They don’t seem to be getting very far with you.’

‘You could say I’m inclined to be set in my ways.’ He smiled. ‘But they’re still trying and my instructor is the best. Chen-Kuen himself. That’s just another name for interrogator, by the way.’

‘I’ve already met mine,’ I said and told him about Madame Ny and what had happened at the medical centre.

He listened intently and shook his head when I was finished. ‘I’ve never come across her myself, but then you won’t have contacts with many people at all. I haven’t met another prisoner face-to-face since I’ve been here. Even the sessions in the Indoctrination Centre, where they feed you Chinese and Marxism by the hour, are all strictly private. You sit in an enclosed booth with headphones and a tape recorder.’

I made the obvious point. ‘If what you’re saying is true, why have they put me in with you?’

‘Search me.’ He shrugged. ‘First I knew was when Chen-Kuen called me in, told me every last damn thing about you there was to know and said you’d be joining me.’

‘But there must be a purpose?’

‘You can bet your sweet life there is. Could be he just wants to observe our reactions. Two rats in a cage. That’s all we are to him.’

I kicked a chair out of the way, walked to one of the tiny windows and stared out into the rain.

St Claire said softly, ‘You’re too up-tight, son. You’ll need to cool it if you’re going to survive round here. The state you’re in now, you’d crack at the first turn of the screw.’

‘But not you,’ I said. ‘Not Black Max.’

He was off the bed and I was nailed to the wall. The face was devoid of all expression, carved from stone, the face of a man who would kill without the slightest qualm, had done so more times than he could probably remember.

He said very slowly in a voice like a cut-throat razor, ‘They have a room down below here they call the Box. I could tell you what it’s like, but you wouldn’t begin to understand. They locked the door on me for three weeks and I walked out. Three weeks of being back in the womb and I walked out.’

He released me and spun around like a kid, arms outstretched, smiling like the sun breaking through after rain.

‘Jesus, boy, but you should have seen their faces.’

‘How?’ I said. ‘How did you do it?’

He tossed me another cigarette. ‘You’ve got to be like the Rock of Gibraltar. So sure of yourself that nothing can touch you.’

‘And how do you get like that?’

He lay back, head pillowed on one arm. ‘I did a little judo at Harvard when I was a student. After the war, when I was posted to Japan with the occupation army, I took it further, mainly for something to do. First I discovered karate, then a lethal little item called aikido. I’m black belt in both.’

It was said casually, a statement of fact, no particular pride in the voice at all.

‘And then a funny thing happened,’ he continued. ‘I was taken to meet an old Zen priest, eighty or ninety years old and all of seven stone. The guy who took me was a judo black belt. In the demonstration that followed, the old man remained seated and he attacked him from the rear.’

‘What happened?’

‘The old man threw him time and time again. He told me afterwards that his power came from the seat of reflex control, what they call the tanden or second brain. Usually developed by long periods of meditation and special breathing exercises. It’s all just a Japanese development of the ancient Chinese art of Shaolin Temple Boxing and even that was imported from India with Zen Buddhism.’

He was beginning to lose me. ‘Just how far did you go with all this stuff yourself?’

‘Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism. I’ve boned up on them all. Studied Chinese Boxing in every minute of my spare time for nearly four years at a Zen monastery about forty miles out of Tokyo in the mountains. I thought I knew it all when I started and found I knew nothing.’

‘And what’s it all come down to?’

‘Ever read the Daw-Der-Jung by Lao Tzu, the Old Master?’ He shrugged. ‘No, I guess you wouldn’t. He says, amongst other things, that when one wishes to expand one must first contract. When one wishes to rise, one must first fall. When one wishes to take, one must first give. Meekness can overcome hardness and weakness can overcome strength.’

‘And what in the hell is all that supposed to add up to?’

‘You’ve got to be able to relax completely, just like a cat. That way you develop ch’i. It’s a kind of intrinsic energy. When it’s accumulated in the tan t’ien, a point just below the navel, it has an elemental force greater than any physical strength can hope to be. There are various breathing exercises which can help you along the way. A kind of self-hypnotism.’

He proceeded to explain one in detail and the whole thing seemed so ridiculous that for the first time it occurred to me that his imprisonment might have affected him for the worst.

I suppose it must have shown on my face for he laughed out loud. ‘You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Well, not yet, boy. Not by a mile and a half. You listen to me and maybe you stand a ten percent chance of getting through this place in one piece. And now I’d get some sleep if I were you while you’ve got the chance.’

He dismissed me by picking up a book, a paperback edition of The Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung. By then, I was past caring about anything. Even the short walk to my bed was an effort.

But the straw mattress seemed softer than anything I had ever known, the sensation of easing aching limbs almost masochistic in the pleasure it gave. I closed my eyes, poised on the brink of sleep and started to slither into darkness, all tension draining out of me. A bell started to jangle somewhere inside my head, a hideous frightening clamour that touched the raw nerve endings like a series of electric shocks.

I was aware of St Claire’s warning cry and the door burst open and the young officer who had delivered me re-appeared, a dozen soldiers at his back and three of them with bayonets fixed to their AKs. They pinned St Claire to the wall, roaring like a caged tiger. The others were armed only with truncheons.

‘Remember what I told you, boy,’ St Claire called and then I was taken out through the door on the run and helped on the way by the young officer’s boot.

I was kicked and beaten all the way along the passage and down four flights of stone stairs, ending up in a corner against a wall, cowering like an animal, arms wrapped around my head as some protection against those flailing truncheons.

I was dragged to my feet, half-unconscious, the clothes stripped from my body. There was a confusion of voices then an iron door clanged shut and I was alone.

It was like those odd occasions when you awaken to utter darkness at half-past three in the morning and turn back fearfully to the warmth of the blankets, filled with a sense of dreadful unease, of some horror beyond the understanding crouched there on the other side of the room.

Only this was for always, or so it seemed. There were no blankets to turn into. Three weeks St Claire had survived in here. Three weeks. Eternity could not seem longer.

I took a hesitant step forward and blundered into a stone wall. I took two paces back, hand outstretched and touched the other side. Three cautious paces brought me to the rear wall. From there to the iron-plated door was four more.

A stone womb. And cold. Unbelievably cold. A trap at the bottom of the door opened, yellow light flooding in. Some sort of metal pan was pushed through and the trap closed again.

It was water, fresh and cold. I drank a little, then crouched there beside the door and waited.

I managed to sleep, probably for some considerable period, which wasn’t surprising in view of what I had been through and awakened slowly to the same utter darkness as before.

I wanted to relieve myself badly, tried hammering on the door with no effect whatsoever and was finally compelled to use one of the corners which was hardly calculated to make things any more pleasant.

How long had it been? Five hours or ten? I sat there listening intently, straining my ears for a sound that would not come and suddenly it was three-thirty in the morning again and it was waiting for me over there in the darkness, some nameless horror that would end all things.

I felt like screaming. Instead, I started to fight back. First of all I tried poetry, reciting it out loud, but that didn’t work too well because my voice seemed to belong to someone else which made me feel more alarmed than ever. Next, I tried working my way through books I’d read. Good, solid items that took plenty of time. I did a fair job on Oliver Twist and could recite The Great Gatsby almost word-for-word anyway, but I lost out on David Copperfield half-way through.

It was about then that I found myself thinking about St Claire for he was already a kind of mythical hero figure as far as the American Airborne forces were concerned. St Claire and his history were as much a part of recruit training as practising P.L.F.s or learning how to take an M16 to pieces and putting it together again blindfold.

Brigadier-General James Maxwell St Claire, himself alone from the word go. Son of a Negro millionaire who’d made his first million out of insurance and had never looked back. No silver spoon, just eighteen carat gold. Harvard – only the best – and then he’d simply walked out and joined the paratroops as a recruit back in nineteen forty-one.

Captured in Italy in forty-three, as a sergeant, he’d escaped to fight with Italian partisans in the Po marshes, ending up in command of a force of four hundred that fought a German infantry division to a standstill in three days. That earned him a field commission and within a year he was captain and dropping into Brittany a week before D-day with units of the British Special Air Service.

He’d earned his Medal of Honour in Korea in nineteen fifty-two. When a unit of Assault Engineers had failed to blow a bridge the enemy were about to cross in strength, St Claire had gone down and blown it up by hand, himself along with it. By then no one in the entire American Army was particularly surprised when he was fished out of the water alive.

And his appetite for life was so extraordinary. Women, liquor and food in that order, but looking back on it all now, I see that above all, it was action that his soul craved for and a big stage to act on.

God, but I was cold and shaking all over, my limbs trembling uncontrollably. I wrapped my arms around myself and hung on tight, not that that was going to do me much good. I think it was then that I remembered what St Claire had said, recalled even a line or two of some Taoist poem he had quoted. In motion, be like water, at rest like the mirror.

I had nothing to lose, that was for certain, so I sat crosslegged and concentrated on recalling every step of the breathing exercises he had described to me. His method of developing this mysterious ch’i he had talked about.

I tried to relax as much as possible, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. I closed my eyes, not that it made much difference, and covered my right ear with my left hand. I varied this after five minutes by covering my left ear with my right hand. After a further five minutes, I covered both ears, arms crossed.

It was foolishness of the worst kind, even if it was a technique a couple of thousand years old according to St Claire, but at least my limbs had stopped shaking and the sound of the breathing was strangely peaceful. I was no longer conscious of the stone floor or of the cold, simply floated there in the cool darkness, listening to my breathing.

It was like the sea upon the shore, a whisper through leaves in a forest at evening, a dying fall. Nothing.

They had me in there for eight days during which time I grew progressively weaker. Using St Claire’s technique, I slid into a self-induced trance almost at will, coming out of it, as far as I could judge afterwards, at fifteen or twenty hour intervals.

During the whole period no one appeared, no one spoke. I never again saw the small trap in the door open although I did discover several more containers of water, presumably pushed through while I was in a trance. There was never any food.

Towards the end, conditions were appalling. The place stank like a sewer for obvious reasons and I was very weak indeed – very light-headed. And I was never conscious of dreaming, of thinking of anything at all, except at the very end of things when I experienced one of the most vivid and disturbing dreams of my life.

I was lying naked on a small bed and it was not dark. I was no longer in the Box for I could see again, a pale, diffused golden glow to things that was extraordinarily pleasant. It was warm. I was cocooned in warmth which was hardly surprising for the room was full of steam.

A voice called, slightly distorted, like an echo from far away. ‘Ellis? Are you there, Ellis?’

I raised my head and saw Madame Ny standing no more than a yard away from me. She was wearing her uniform skirt and the leather boots, but had taken off her tunic. Underneath, she was wearing a simple white cotton blouse.

The blouse was soaking up the steam like blotting paper and as I watched, a nipple blossomed on the tip of each breast and then the breasts themselves materialised as if by magic as the thin material became saturated.

It was one of the most erotic things I have ever seen in my life, electrifying in its effect and my body could not help but respond. She came over beside the bed, leaned down and put a hand on me.

I tried to push her away and she smiled gently and said, still in that distorted, remote voice, ‘But there’s nothing to be ashamed of, Ellis. Nothing to fear.’

She unfastened the zip at the side of her uniform skirt and slipped out of it. Underneath she was wearing a pair of cotton pants as damp with steam as the blouse. She took them off with a complete lack of concern, then sat on the edge of the bed and unbuttoned the blouse.

Her breasts were round and full, wet with moisture from the steam, incredibly beautiful. I was shaking like a leaf in a storm as she reached out and pulled my face against them.

‘Poor Ellis.’ The voice echoed into the mist. ‘Poor little Ellis Jackson. Nobody loves him. Nobody.’ And then she pushed me away so that she could look into my face and said, ‘But I do. I love you, Ellis.’

And then she rolled on to her back, the thighs spreading to receive me and her mouth was all the sweetness in life, the fire of my climax such a burning ecstasy that it had me screaming out loud.

I came awake to that scream in the darkness of the Box again, the stench of the place in my nostrils and for some reason found myself standing up straight and screaming out loud again, a blank defiance at the forces ranged against me.

There was a rattle of bolts and a moment later, the door opened and a great shaft of yellow light flooded in.

They were all there, the young officer and his men and Colonel Chen-Kuen, Madame Ny at his shoulder, very correct in full uniform including a regulation peaked cap with a red star in the front. She looked white and shocked. No, more than that – distressed, but not Chen-Kuen. He was simply interested in how well I’d stood up to things, the complete scientist.

I stood swaying from side-to-side while they busied themselves with a door next to mine. When it swung open, there was only darkness inside and then St Claire stepped out.

He had a body on him like the Colossus of Rhodes, hewn out of ebony, pride in his face as he stood there, his nakedness not concerning him in the slightest. He caught sight of me and his eyes widened. He was across the passage in two quick strides, an arm about me as I reeled.

‘Not now, Ellis – not now you’ve got this far,’ he said. ‘We walk to the medical centre on our own two feet and shag this lot.’

Which gave me the boost I needed, that and the strength of his good right arm. We made it under our own steam, out through the main entrance, crossed the compound to the medical hut through a thin, cold rain falling through the light of late evening.

Once there, they parted us and I found myself alone in a small cubicle wrapped in a large towel after a warm shower. The old doctor appeared, gave me a quick check, then an injection in my right arm and left.

I lay there staring up at the ceiling and the door clicked open. It was a day for surprises. Madame Ny appeared at the side of the bed. There were tears in her eyes and she dropped to her knees beside the bed and reached for my hand.

‘I didn’t know they would do that, Ellis. I did not know.’

For some obscure reason I believed her, or perhaps it didn’t really matter to me any more, but in any event, I have never felt comfortable in the presence of a woman’s tears.

I said, ‘That’s all right. I made it in one piece, didn’t I?’

She began to cry helplessly, burying her face against my chest. Very gently, I started to stroke her hair.

The weeks that followed had a strange, fantasy air to them and things dropped into a routine. I still shared the room with St Claire and each morning at six o’clock we were taken together to the Indoctrination Centre. Once there, we were separated to sit in small, enclosed booths in headphones, listening to interminable tapes.

The indoctrination stuff was mainly routine. Marx and Lenin to start with, then Mao Tse-tung until the old boy was pouring out of our ears. None of it ever really got through to me although I have noticed in later years that I have a pronounced tendency to argue in most situations using Marxian terminology. St Claire was a great help to me in this respect. It was he who pointed out the real and tangible flaws in Mao’s works. For example, that everything he had written on warfare was lifted without acknowledgement from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War written in 500 B.C. As the Jesuits have it, one corruption is all corruption and I could never again accept any of the great man’s writings at face value.

Five hours a day were devoted to learning Chinese. In one of many interviews with me, Chen-Kuen told me that this was to help promote a closer understanding between us, an explanation which never made much sense to me. On the other hand, languages were something I’d always been good at and it gave me something to do.

Each afternoon I had a long session of ‘instruction’ with Madame Ny which St Claire made me report in detail to him each night, although that was only one of our activities. He taught me karate and aikido, subjected me to lengthy and complicated breathing exercises, all designed to make me fit enough to face up to the day when we were going to crash out of there, his favourite phrase.

But he was the original polymath. Philosophy, psychology, military strategy from Sun Tzu and Wu Ch’i to Clausewitz and Liddell Hart, literature, and poetry in particular, for which he had a great love. He insisted that we talked in Chinese and even gave me lessons on his guitar.

Every minute had to be filled to use up as much as possible of that burning energy. He was like a caged tiger waiting his chance to spring.

I once tried to sum him up and could only come up with words like witty, attractive, brave, totally unscrupulous, amoral. All I know, and still believed at the end of things, was that he was the most complete man I have ever known. If anyone ever lived with total spontaneity, bringing it right up from the core of his being, it was he.

My relationship with Madame Ny was perhaps the strangest part of the whole affair.

I was taken to her office in a room on the second floor of the monastery each afternoon. There were always two guards in the corridor, but inside, we were quite alone.

It was a comfortable room, surprisingly so, although I suspect now that was mainly by design. Chinese carpets on the floor, a modern desk and swivel chairs, a filing cabinet, water colours on the wall and a very utilitarian looking psychiatrist’s couch in black leather.

It became very plain from the beginning that these were psycho-analytical sessions. That she was out to strip me to the bone.

Not that I objected, for it quickly became a game of question and answer – my kind of answer – that I rather enjoyed playing and the truth is that I wanted to be with her. Looked forward to being in her company.

From the beginning, she was calm and a little remote, insisted on calling me Ellis, yet never by any remark or action, referred to that emotional breakdown at my bedside on the evening they had released me from the Box.

What I could not erase from my mind was the memory of that strange dream, an erotic fantasy so real that to see her simply get up and stretch or stand at the window, a hand on her hip, was enough to send my pulse up by a rate of knots.

A great deal of her questioning, I didn’t mind. Childhood and my relationship with my grandfather, schooling, particularly the years at Eton which seemed to fascinate her. She seemed surprised that the experience hadn’t turned me into a raving homosexual and asked searching and vaguely absurd questions about masturbation which only succeeded in bringing out the comic in me.

We spent a month in this way and it became obvious to me that she was becoming more and more impatient. One day she stood up abruptly after one particularly feeble joke, took off her tunic and walked to the window where she stood in the pale sunshine, angrier than I had ever seen her.

From that angle, half-turned away from me, it became obvious that her breasts managed very well without the benefit of such a western appurtenance as a brassière and I could see the line of them sloping to the nipples as the sunlight filtered through the thin cotton.

‘All men are at least three people, Ellis,’ she said. ‘What they appear to be to others, what they think they are and what they really are. Your great fault is to accept people at face value.’

‘Is that a fact?’ I said mockingly.

She turned on me in anger, made a visible effort to control it, went to the door. ‘Come with me.’

We didn’t go very far. Through a door at the end of the corridor which led to a gallery above what was obviously the central half of the old temple. There was a statue of Buddha at the far end, flickering candles, the murmur of voices at prayer from a group of Zen monks in yellow robes.

Madame Ny said, ‘If I asked you who was the commander of Tay Son you would say Colonel Chen-Kuen of the Army of the People’s Republic.’

‘So what?’

‘The commander is down there at this moment.’

The monks had risen to their feet, their Abbot magnificent in saffron robes at their head. He glanced up at that moment and looked straight at me before moving on. Colonel Chen-Kuen.

We returned to her office in silence. I sat down and she said, ‘So, nothing is as it seems, not even Ellis Jackson.’

I made no reply and an orderly came in with the usual afternoon pot of China tea and tiny porcelain cups. It was unfailingly and deliciously refreshing. She passed me a cup without comment and I took the first long sip with a sigh of pleasure and knew, almost instantly, that I was in trouble.