4
Penang, Malaya, July 1949
It was raining. A heavy, tropical downpour, so intense that Howard could see only a few yards in front of him. He listened to the water hammering against the armour plating that enveloped his jeep, grateful that it was cooling the furnace that was the interior. Since the so-called Emergency had begun the previous year with the shooting of three British rubber planters by rebel communist fighters, it was a foolhardy planter who ventured beyond his estate without the protection of steel plating. Better to endure the suffocating heat than risk a bullet through the head as you drove into an ambush.
Over the past few months, there had been little sign of the insurgency at Batu Lembah, the rubber estate where Howard was Assistant Manager. The communist terrorists,
