A Leopard Sings In Sarawak by Paul Leslie Smith

A tale of angst and anguish comes to life as Sarawak languishes between Admiral Lord Mountbatten’s faculty as the British battle through Burma’s hideousness, and General MacArthur’s disinterest whilst the Americans island hop toward Japan. In a fateful twist of irony however, Sarawak held huge reserves of Japan’s motivation for attacking Pearl Harbour: oil. Beyond the reach and interest of regular forces, the denial of this vital supply of life-blood to Japan fell to an unorthodox British Special Operations Executive officer. Thwarted by larger campaigns, he recruits an unsuspecting engineer who worked for Sarawak Oilfields Limited – a company the world now knows as Shell – to attack the Japanese working the very oilfields the man had built. As this engineer-cum-soldier sets out to sever Japan’s fuel jugular, he could have had no premonition of the wrath and venom an unfeeling enemy would vent on a people he had come to know and love. Aghast, the man is forced into ever more desperate circumstances as what started out as a mission to throttle Japan’s fuel umbilical inexorably mutates into a race for mere survival. Set in Miri, Sarawak, much of this story is true as one of World War Two’s last secrets comes to light.