Ah Pak was pleased with his success in making neutrals of the post specials. It was in line with the New Policy. The New Policy had started over a year ago, but it took time for all the units to be told, and more for them to obey. Sen saw that they did obey. ‘We must win the Malays to our cause. They will become more and more useful … the enemy is trying to starve us out. They are cutting us off from our people. We must get food from the Malays too.’

Ah Pak, with a Malay comrade from the Malay regiment of Mustapha Kling, a Malay communist leader, had been able to talk and to win over the seven naive and slow-witted men. It was a precarious success, for however dull in some ways, they were treacherous, with a mindless treachery, a soft and casual will to murder, especially if money, or religion, or women was the issue. But at the moment, with money, cigarettes, promises to spare their life, and the name of Mustapha Kling, the specials’ post gave the jungle fighters no trouble.

Had Chan Ah Pak suffered from a sense of humour and a detached mind, he might have laughed wryly, thinking suddenly of the similarity in the tactics evolved on both sides. The British Police were out to woo the people from communism, with soft words, and courtesy lessons for their own constables, with medical aid and money rewards for information. And the People Inside, too, were forbidden now to destroy trees and frighten people, and only allowed to kill planters, policemen, and informers.

But comparison, however acridly stimulating to those cursed with a perverted sense of humour, would have been unpopular in the circles in which Chan Ah Pak lived and worked, as it would have been in the circles in which Luke Davis lived and worked. The difference in their punishment, however, would have been important: Davis would have been ostracized, failed to ‘make his number’, mucked up his career and possibly ruined his prospects; Chan Ah Pak, quite simply, would have died.

Winning the hearts of the Malays, then, the 10th Regiment of the jungle was now engaged in dealings with Mustapha Kling, the Malay communist leader, whose name all the kampong Malays seemed to know. They wagged their heads when they heard it, and smiled acknowledging, not because he was a comrade and a communist, one of the few Malays up in arms against the British, but because he was invulnerable.