The wrench slipped from his wet hand for the third time and, as he dodged to avoid it landing on his face, he cracked his head on the differential – an unforgiving great lump of metal beneath the truck. Spitting out a string of oaths, he impatiently yanked on the thick leather gloves he’d previously discarded because they made him even hotter and, taking a deep breath to keep his temper at bay, started work on the stubborn bolt again.

His task would have been simple enough in ordinary circumstances, but he was in a hurry, and what with the rain and the draining heat, he was beginning to wish he hadn’t taken over from the young sapper. However, he’d missed working on the tools, and after the past four months of almost constant fighting with the Japanese, he’d hoped the familiarity of the task would help him banish the memories of what he’d witnessed during the liberation of Rangoon.

Jim blinked away the stinging sweat and brushed the muck off his face which sifted down from the underside of the truck as he attacked the bolt with added vigour, but the images of what they’d encountered in Rangoon still haunted him.

After the battle for Pegu was won in March, Jim and his men had arrived in Rangoon to mop up any resistance, only to discover that the city had been abandoned by the Japanese who’d fled by land and sea, resulting in nine of their eleven convoy ships being sunk by the British Destroyers anchored offshore.

Before the Japanese had left the port, they’d looted and destroyed it, going as far as bombing the convent which had served them as a hospital, killing four hundred of their own men, before locking the Burmese prisoners in their wooden huts and burning them to the ground.

The thousand Allied POWs Jim and his men had found had escaped this terrible fate, for the Japanese had planned to take them with them as slaves, but soon realised that in their desperately weakened state they’d slow them down. As ammunition was in such short supply they didn’t want to waste bullets by shooting them, so they’d abandoned them to the lawlessness of the dacoits and a city which was already starving and rife with disease.

The POWs had been held in the city jail for several months and were so emaciated and weakened by starvation, slave labour and disease they were barely living skeletons in their filthy rags. As they waited to be loaded onto a requisitioned sampan to be taken upriver to the safety of an Allied air lift to hospital, Jim had remembered how desperate young Sarah Fuller was for news of her father and fiancé, who’d been captured after the fall of Singapore, so he’d asked if any of them had come across a Jock Fuller or Philip Tarrant.