by Eric Ambler
“As long as it’s clearly understood that the stuff stays where it is until I have sixty-two thousand five hundred dollars in my hand, I don’t care who does the paying.”
“You needn’t worry about that, old boy. They want that stuffand the sooner the better. This is how we handle it. I give you a draft on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, made out but unsigned. It requires two signatures, mine and a member of the Central Committee’s. When you present that cheque to him, he knows that I’ve inspected the stuff and agreed the price. He signs. Then, you and I go down to the Customs House, you sign the transfer, I countersign the cheque and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Will the cheque be certified?”
“We can go to the bank and cash it first if you like.”
“Well, it sounds unnecessarily complicated to me, but if that’s the way they want it, okay. Where do I see this Committee man?”
“In Labuanga.”
“Where’s that?”
“Oh, it’s only half an hour or so by air. Anyway, my good lady will arrange all that side of it.” He spoke rather too airily. Greg was suddenly suspicious.
“Where is it?”
“Just across the other side of the straits opposite Penang.”
“In Sumatra?”
“Well, naturally.”
Greg took a deep breath. “Now wait a minute. Why didn’t you say something about this before? I’m not going gallivanting off into the wilds of Sumatra in order to get a cheque signed.”
“Labuanga isn’t in the wilds, old boy,” the Captain said patiently. “It’s a coast town with its own airport and a hotel. Pretty little place as a matter of fact.‘1’
“I don’t care how pretty it is.”
“But that’s the drill. There’s nothing to it really. It’s always worked out fine. Don’t misunderstand, old boy. I’m not asking you to pay your own expenses.”
“I tell you it’s out of the question. Quite apart from anything else, I don’t have an Indonesian visa.”
“Well, that’s easily fixed.”
“Is it? I understood it took a week.”
The Captain threw up his hands in exasperation. “Old boy, this isn’t my idea. You want cash on delivery, Singapore. All right. Cash it is. I’m not arguing about that. But you’ve got to look at things from their point of view. They’ve been let down before now, and they like to know who they’re dealing with. You only have to go the first time. After that it’s plain sailing.”
“Don’t they trust you?”
“Of course they trust me. I tell them what to buy and what they ought to pay. They just finalise the first deal.”
“Well, I don’t like it. If you can’t produce the money here without this drill, as you call it, the deal’s off.”
The Captain drew himself up. “I’m sorry, old boy, but I can’t accept that. I thought we shook hands on it.”
“We didn’t shake hands on a trip to Sumatra.”
“Old boy,” the Captain said wearily, “there’s a plane every day. You can be there and back in twenty-four hours. It’s perfectly simple. Betty goes along with you, calls up when you get there, arranges the meeting, and takes you to it. You don’t have to bother about a thing. Take Dorothy along with you for the ride, if you like.”
“I don’t get this. Why does your wife have to go? Why don’t you go yourself?”
“I would, but the Indonesians won’t give me a visa any more.”
“Why not?”
“Naturally, they know what I’m up to.”
“But they let your wife in?”
“She’s got her passport in her maiden name. As a matter of fact she looks forward to these little trips. Makes a change for her. Look, old boy,” he went on persuasively, “you admit the deal’s a good one for you. All I’m asking you to do is finalise it.”
“You could have said something about this before.”
“It never occurred to me that you’d object, old boy. Most of you chaps are popping in and out all the time.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“A half-hour plane trip, that’s all. Surely, old boy …”
“All right, all right,” Greg snapped irritably, “I’ll think about it.”
“I’ll have to know tomorrow. They’re waiting to hear about this stuff.” He was looking tortured again.
“I understand.”
The Captain smiled bitterly, shook his head, sighed, finished his stengah, and went.
Dorothy came out of the bedroom.
“You heard?” Greg asked.
“Yes. Do you think he meant that if I went with you he’d pay my expenses too?”
Greg chuckled. “I wonder. The Colonel was certainly right about his needing a counter-signature on cheques. What a way to do business!”
“What will you do?”
“I’m darned if I know. The trouble is that, as Mr. Tan’s appointed agent, I’m virtually the legal owner as far as Singapore Customs are concerned. If I don’t sell it to Lukey what happens? After all, I do have an obligation to Tan. I can’t just do nothing at this stage. As for that crooked brother of his, I’d be crazy if I expected him to find another buyer while I’m around to stop him picking up two commissions. It’s got to be Lukey.”
Dorothy shrugged. “Well, we’ll never get another chance to see Sumatra.”
“Are you serious?”
“Why not? Why shouldn’t we both go? You know, while you two were arguing about money, the Cook’s man called up. He said our Indonesian visas have come through. All we have to do is take our passport round in the morning.”
II
Mrs. Lukey, or, as her British passport somewhat incongruously proclaimed her, Miss Elizabeth O’Toole, met them at Singapore Airport with the tickets. The plane, a Garuda Indonesian Airways Convair with an Australian pilot, was reassuring. The discovery that the flying time to Labuanga was not thirty minutes, as the Captain had claimed, but a full two hours, seemed a matter for amusement rather than annoyance. They were getting off the beaten track; and not merely as tourists, but in order to sell arms to a band of freedom-loving anti-Communists. Moreover, they were travelling at someone else’s expense. The spirit of high adventure tingled in their veins.
Mrs. Lukey had explained the whole thing to them while they had been waiting in the departure lounge. The Captain’s contact man in Labuanga was a Sumatran oil company employee who had legitimate reasons for cabling regularly to Singapore. This man also had access to a clandestine radio, through which he kept in touch with insurgent headquarters in the hills. On these cheque-signing occasions, he notified headquarters and arranged the rendezvous three days in advance. This gave the Committee member time to make the journey to the coast without running the risk of travelling by day.
“What sort of people are they?” Greg had asked her; “the Committee members, I mean.”
“I’ve only seen two of them. One is a lawyer from Medan, the other is an army officer. I think those two are sent because they both speak English. A European comes with them, but only as a guard, I think. All the Committee members are Moslems.”
“What sort of European?”
“He is Polish. Hamid, who is our contact, said that he had been in the Foreign Legion in Indo-China, and was training them to use the arms.”
The plane reached its cruising altitude and headed north along the coast of Sumatra. The Malacca Strait moved slowly beneath them, green among the shoals of the off-shore islands, brown where the river mouths discharged the silt carried down from the hills, slate blue where the colder currents flowed down from the Bay of Bengal. Then, as the Strait widened, they altered course and began to fly over land. Soon, from their seats on the port side, all they could see below was something that looked like a vast sand dune covered with green moss.
“Jungle,” said Mrs. Lukey.
The Indonesian stewardess began to serve bottled lemonade and stale cheese sandwiches. Twenty minutes before they were due at Labuanga, they ran into a local storm an
d had to fasten their seat belts. The plane bucketed about wildly for a time, and they came in to land under a huge black cloud and in a deluge of rain.
A sheet of spray went up as the plane touched down; but by the time it had taxied in to the arrival apron, the rain had stopped and the sun was out again. Their first impression of Labuanga airport was the smell of steaming mud.
It was the most favourable impression they received.
Mrs. Lukey had warned them about the immigration and customs officials. “They are appointed from Djakarta,” she had said; “and they are not friendly to anyone here. Europeans especially they do not like. The last time I was here, they made two Europeans undress to be searched; but the papers in Singapore were very angry about it, and I do not think we shall be troubled in that way if we are careful. It is better not to smile or look impatient.”
Greg and Dorothy did their best to remain impassive, but it was difficult. One immigration official took their passports away for examination, and did not return. A second official then demanded the production of the passports. When Mrs. Lukey had explained to him what had happened, they were told to wait. It took an hour to recover the passports. Next, the currency control official ordered Greg to turn out his pockets, and, for some unexplained reason, decided to confiscate his Diner’s Club credit card. Finally, the customs inspector insisted on taking the lens numbers of his camera and impounding the exposed film in it.
Mrs. Lukey seemed to be as shaken as Greg and Dorothy by the experience. “I am sorry,” she said. “They have never been so bad before.”
“What the hell were they trying to prove?” demanded Greg. “Why take a credit card? I don’t particularly mind. I can replace that. But what’s the idea?”
“Darling, at least they didn’t make us undress.”
Greg, whose cotton and Dacron shirt was clinging wetly to his body, muttered that he wished they had. The loss of the film had particularly annoyed him.
The airport was three miles from the town and the airline bus had already gone. There were no taxis. They found that they had to wait for another bus. There was a painful silence.
Mrs. Lukey made an unfortunate attempt to dispel the gloom. “Well, anyway,” she said, “I don’t suppose the same men will be on duty tomorrow when we leave.”
“You mean we have to go through all that again?” asked Dorothy.
“If we are careful about our exit visas it will be all right.”
Greg swung round. “What exit visas?”
“We have to get those tomorrow morning at the police office. As long as we give the man who makes them out a good tip, there will be no trouble.” She gave them an anxious smile.
There was another silence.
As the mud dried, other, more human smells were beginning to emerge from the vicinity of the airport. The heat was stupefying. Dorothy could feel the sweat trickling down her legs. She made a determined effort to be objective.
“Well,” she said lightly, “it’s their country.”
Mrs. Lukey turned to her eagerly. “Yes, they are really gay, laughing, happy people, but they are not always understood. It is the same in India. Because a European coming to Bombay cannot buy alcoholic drinks without a permit, he thinks that the Indians are not friendly people. That is not rue. One must live in a country to know it. One should not judge a country from the airport. Nor from its customs officials.”
She had spoken quickly and vehemently, and, in doing so, had suddenly become more Asian than European. It was a disconcerting transformation.
Dorothy started to make some sort of reply. Fortunately, a bus drew into the yard at that moment and she did not have to complete it.
Almost as soon as the bus left the airport they passed through a village. The houses were of the small teak-framed atap kind with which they were becoming familiar; but on most of them the atap was faded and torn or patched. Only one house looked new and cared for. There was a signboard across the veranda. On it, painted in Malay and English, were the words: “LA-BUANGA DISTRICT COMMUNIST PARTY.”
Dorothy and Mrs. Lukey were on the other side of the bus. Greg did not draw their attention to it.
III
Labuanga was a port, and the terminal point of a system of pipe lines connecting the oil fields in the area. The town sprawled over a broad alluvial tongue of land jutting out into the sea beside a river delta. It had been built by the Dutch, and the tree-lined streets and public gardens of the civic centre had been laid out like those of a provincial town in Holland. The effect was bizarre. The trees were not lindens or sycamores, but casuarinas. Flower-beds which should have contained orderly rows of tulips, narcissi and hyacinths, were lush with crotons, wild orchids and scarlet lilies. Hibiscus rioted over the iron railings surrounding a plinth which had supported a statue of Queen Wilhelmina. The portico of the Stadhuis looked raffish under the burden of a monstrous bougainvillaea. The centre of Labuanga was like a respectable Dutch matron seduced by the jungle and gone native.
Radiating out from it were the wide roads and bungalow compounds of the former European quarter. There were still a number of Europeans living there, mostly oil company employees ; but many of the buildings had been taken over by the security forces and other agencies of the Central Government. It was now called the ‘Inner Zone’.
The change had a military as well as a social significance. The District of Labuanga covered an area of several hundred square miles and included oil fields, pipe lines, copra plantations, over fifty villages, and substantial tracts of virgin jungle in addition to the city and port. An effective system of defences against the insurgents operating from the hills would have absorbed at least three divisions of reliable and well-equipped troops. Major-General Iskaq, the Military Governor of Labuanga, had at his disposal a garrison consisting of two demoralised infantry battalions, with three small field guns, ten decrepit armoured cars and sixty policemen. So far, the insurgents had confined themselves to night raids on outlying oil storage installations, the dynamiting of bridges, and harassing reconnaissances in force. But the General knew that the day must come when the Party of the Faithful would feel itself strong enough to mount an all-out assault on the city, capture it, defend it against counter-attack and proclaim an autonomous regional government. When that day (or night) did come the Inner Zone would become a fortress within which the garrison could hold out until help came from Medan. The problem had been to guard against surprise. At every road junction on the perimeter of the Zone, concrete defence positions had been built. Now, at the first sign of any insurgent activity at all in the vicinity of the city, an alarm button was pressed, the defence positions were manned, and the rest of the garrison withdrew behind them. Only a small mobile column was left outside the Zone to deal with the raiding party which had been the cause of the trouble.
The Inner Zone plan was one of those dreamlike pieces of military thinking which even their authors know to be unsound, but which are solemnly acted upon nevertheless, because any plan is preferable to none. The General was well aware of the illusory nature of this one. The Zone contained the police headquarters, the Stadhuis and a number of office buildings and houses. From a tactical point of view it was a mere geographical location, no easier to defend than any other part of the city. The power station, the water-pumping station, the port installations and the telephone exchange were all outside it, together with the bulk of the population. But there were similar disadvantages to every other area that had been considered. The truth was that, with only two infantry battalions, ten armoured cars and three field guns, there was no right way of defending a place the size of Labuanga against superior forces.
General Iskaq was a cunning and ambitious man with a deep contempt for Djakarta politicians and a sensitive regard for his own interests. He knew that many of his officers were in sympathy with the insurgents and that he had only to hint at such a sympathy himself to initiate secret negotiations with the Committee. He had a reputation as a patriot, and the price they woul
d pay for his defection would be high. He had never heard the axiom “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em” expressed in just those terms, but it exactly described his own ideas about power. Only one thing secured his allegiance to the Central Government.
His father had been a Javanese coolie. All through his childhood, the General had seen his father kicked, shouted at and bullied by white men, or mandurs working for white men. There had been nothing strange about this. His friends’ fathers had been treated in the same way. That white men should drive Javanese coolies to work, coolies who would otherwise have idled in the shade, had been in the natural order of things; just as it had been natural to stop work when a white man drove by in his car or carriage, and turn towards him, and bow. Then, one day, a white man who had drunk too much gin had accused the General’s father of smiling at him. When the General’s father had denied it, the white man had started to beat him about the head and shoulders with a thick cane. The General’s father had been strong, but the cane had been stronger and, as his face had become covered with blood, he had fallen to his knees, crying like a child.
From that moment, and for many years after, the General had found nothing natural in a relationship with white men but hatred. It was not until the Japanese Army had surrendered and the white men had tried to reclaim Java as a colony, that he had been able to assuage much of his hatred by killing. What was left of it had, in time, been transformed into the irrational but unshake-able belief that white men and Asians could have no interests in common, and that what was good for one must be bad for the other. The Party of the Faithful was financed by white men, its forces were trained by white men, and, if it came to power, it would be friendly with white men. For the General, the idea of coming to terms with such an organisation was totally unacceptable.
His repeated requests to the Area Commander for reinforcements had been refused; and for a good reason. The Area Commander had no reinforcements to send. The General had been in a mood of bitter desperation when his new Intelligence Officer, Captain Gani, had come to him with an interesting proposal.
