by Philip Atlee
We were too late there. After traveling at the highest speed the armored car could reach, through back streets, we rolled into Kebajoren, the quiet residential section, to find that General Nasution had barely escaped with his life. Fleeing out of his house and across his garden just in advance of the killer squad. The defense minister's residence had a sentry post before it, and guards surrounding it, but the sentry on duty at that late hour had recognized the trucks as bearing members of the elite palace guard.
He had not challenged them and was overwhelmed and knifed before he could protest. Two of Nasution's aides, a young lieutenant and Assistant Police Commissioner Mansjur were asleep in a garden pavilion and awakened to find bayonets at their throats. Nasution himself heard the noise outside, left his ground-floor bedroom through a side door, and slipped away into the darkness. His sister was also trying to reach safety, fleeing across the garden, carrying the general's five-year-old daughter, Irma, when the killer squad opened fire on them.
When we arrived, the sister was lying dead on her back in the garden, still holding the child. Nasution's daughter had been shot three times in the spine, and we gathered her up and rushed her through the silent streets to the Central Military Hospital. Hatta was sitting beside me, staring straight ahead, and from the blood on the child's night-clothing, I thought she would not make it. When Hatta had taken her into the hospital and come running back out, we started for General Yani's home.
Here again we found the yard of the palatial house thronged with people, but the owner of the place was not at home. And never would be, again. His wife approached us, crying, brandishing a blood-soaked shirt, and said that the "Tjakra," elements of the elite palace guard, had broken into her home by smashing the door down.
General Yani, awakened, came to meet them calmly, and was told that the President wanted him to report to the palace immediately. Yani said very well, but that he must change into his uniform, and the invaders said there was no time for that. He could change in a toilet at the palace. Yani said that was foolish, tried to strike a guard who attempted to detain him, and wheeled back through a glass doorway leading to his bedroom.
His body was riddled in the back from gunfire, by heavy weapons fired through the glass. When the intruders dragged him out by the feet, he was still alive and tried to embrace his eleven-year-old son. That was not allowed; he was yanked across the garden roughly, bleeding, and thrown into a truck.
As we left, Mrs. Yani was still waving the bloody shirt at us. I was numb by this time. As we got back into the armored car, a jeep came humming down the street and told us General Parman had been seized and manhandled but not killed. The message of the invaders had been the same. The President wants to see you! He had also been taken away in a truck.
Mrs. Parman had asked the killer team to show her some evidence that Sukarno really wished to see her husband at such a late hour. The invaders had laughed, cut the phone line, and smashed up the furniture in her living room.
***
As we sat in the armored car, I asked Hatta who would be next. Logically, in the chain of command. He thought a moment, with his right hand on his forehead, and said "Harjono." I told the driver to go to that house.
We had our only victory there, if you can call it a victory. Minutes before we arrived, General Harjono's wife had answered the rude, late thunder of gun butts on the front door. She had opened the door to see shadowy figures surrounding the house, and told them that the general was sleeping. The message was the same: Sukarno wished him to report to the presidential palace immediately.
Mrs. Harjono told them to wait and locked the door in their faces. She went back to wake up her husband. He had no illusions and switched off the light she had turned on, telling her to get the children and herself into another part of the house. She hurried to obey him, and was herding the whimpering children ahead of her when the Tjakrabirawa got impatient and fired a burst through his bedroom door.
General Harjono dived to the floor unhit and. when the first soldier came charging through the shattered door, started firing at him with a pistol. That one went down coughing his guts out, and the next one charged into the bedroom carrying a lighted scroll of newspaper. Harjono emptied his pistol and rushed the next intruder. who was firing a Bren-gun.
Our armored car had stopped behind the Harjono house, and two of our paracommandos began stitching the back windows with random fire from carbines. But they were as likely to hit the general's family as the invaders, and I told Hatta to stop them. Other commandos began circling to the front of the house.
Hatta and I, entering the garden from the back entrance, saw the general run out into the garden in his sarong. From the house a Sten-gun burst buckled him in the middle, but when four soldiers rushed out to grab him by the feet, we scythed them down with great pleasure. We killed them and kept the rest of the jackals from dragging him off.
Unfortunately for our relief effort, General Harjono was dead when we reached him. We put his body in the back of the armored car, as a purely political victory for our side.
***
At General Pandjaitan's house we got into another fire fight, at the tail end. He was the only one who had a two-story house and he had stood the killer squad off for nearly an hour from his upstairs bedroom window. Of all the generals singled out for murder, Pandjaitan was the only one who had prepared for such an eventuality.
He had an arsenal in his upstairs bedroom, and he used it all up. The rebel units of the palace guard tried to shoot their way into his house through a side garden, and he made them pay. We found twenty-three bodies compressing his ferns and exotic blooms, and I don't think they would ever have smoked him out if they hadn't gotten into the house from the other side.
And threatened, shouting up the stairs, to massacre his family if he didn't let up.
He killed two more and came down the stairs unarmed. In full uniform, with all his decorations on. We drove up in the back of his garden as they were marching him away, and as we were piling out of the armored car (a fact he did not know) he became angered by something and turned and struck one of the captor officers to the ground. From behind, someone aimed a burst through the back of his head as we opened fire through the ferns and shrubs.
We killed six, but the rest of the murder squad dragged Pandjaitan's body out and tossed it into the back of a truck. From the front wall of the garden we were pinned down by a rear-guard fire while the truck rolled away. They withdrew in lighter vehicles, mostly jeeps with ragged canvas tops, while we rushed forward and fired after them ineffectually.
By then I was tired of playing catch-up, and requested Colonel Hatta to get us to KOSTRAD Headquarters, where General Suharto could tell us what was happening. Because it was obvious that we weren't helping. We had been spinning our wheels for three hours and all we had to show for it was the corpse of General Harjono.
Trying to quit the fighting was not as easy as appeared. We had to swerve through enfilading fire to reach Merkeda Square, and just before we rolled under the carved arch into General Suharto's headquarters the paracommando sitting next to me was drilled above the right eye and toppled across my knees. We had rolled down the window on his side to get some air.
When we got inside the headquarters, I saw the same aimless and antic inefficiency I had observed at the Senajang sports headquarters.
It was a conference of lamenting brown lemurs. Everybody was upset; nobody was doing anything. Colonel Hatta went in to see General Suharto and came out with the dismal news that two more generals on the list, Suprato and Sutojo, had been taken alive. Like the others, they had been hauled off in trucks, and their present whereabouts was not known.
I collapsed on a wooden bench, curled up, and went to sleep. In what seemed only seconds Colonel Hatta was shaking me awake.
SIXTEEN
COLONEL HATTA TOOK ME PAST THE sentries and into the inner office of General Suharto. He was a stocky man wearing a rumpled khaki uniform with no insignia; his squar
e face was drawn with fatigue and his eyes were heavily bloodshot. He shook hands with me perfunctorily and motioned us into the adjoining office, which was completely dark. Suharto closed the door as he entered behind us and we stood looking out the open window at Merdeka Square.
In the city beyond the square, light weapons were chattering in bursts, and many buildings in the center of the Indonesian capital had been torched and were sending up dark plumes of smoke. The moon overhead was nearly full, but a slight overcast was filtering its radiance; dimly seen figures could be seen running from one shadowed cover to another. We could not see or hear any planes, but at intervals the antiaircraft batteries around the port shook the night air. The whole scene was becoming a walpurgisnacht.
General Suharto's calm, strained voice told us where the enemy tanks were parked, at the four corners of the huge square. Slowly I made them out, and the clusters of machine-gun nests. They too belonged to the insurgents, he said bitterly, and were commanded by men who had served under him.
What made it hard to see was the blazing, ornate bulk of the floodlighted presidential palace directly across from us. The other buildings we could see were darkened, but even at this late hour the tremendous crystal chandeliers inside the palace were blazing with light. Beyond the immaculate stretches of tended lawns, lily ponds, and glistening statuary, Sukarno's state residence glittered like something in a dream. No one moved at its windows or huge arched doorways. No one knew where its occupant was.
General Suharto quickly briefed us on the disposition of the opposing forces. Two rebel battalions, the 454th from Central Java and the 530th from East Java, were holding three sides of the square. His own KOSTRAD forces, the Strategic Reserve, held the fourth. The presidential palace stood by itself, lighted and lifeless, with only a remnant of the elite guard still in place, but the rebel positions could interdict any attempt to enter or leave the palace.
The palace guard, the Tjakrabirawa Regiment, was depleted in strength because much of it had defected with its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, who was spearheading the revolution and had turned the killer squads loose in the city. In addition, thousands of Communist civilians who had been trained at the Crocodile Hole, Lubang Buaja, had been armed and were roaming the dark city. Their members had been recruited from the Pemuda Rakjat, the Communist youth organization, and its women's auxiliary, Gerwani.
Suharto said he had loyal troops in the port area and at the Senajang sports complex, but they had already been driven back by the rebel roadblocks when attempting to reach his KOSTRAD headquarters. The rebel high command was entrenched at Halim Air Force Base and could commit several more battalions to the action at any time.
"The point of all this, Mr. Gall," said the tired general, standing slightly behind me, "is that their people also control the state radio and communications building over there on the southeast corner. We have learned that they will make a broadcast soon. I cannot prevent that with the forces at my disposal, but if I do not invest that building soon and rescind whatever they have announced, I will have lost the initiative. In that event, it is possible, even probable, that we will be defeated. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir," I said.
"Good. I do not know you, but Colonel Hatta assures me that you are well-trained in guerrilla and demolition work. If you can think of a way to take over the communications building and its radio studios without a destructive assault, we would be most grateful. It is the nerve center, you see; the only way we can reach all the islands and military garrisons of our country."
I was about to answer when someone rapped on the door behind us. An officer opened it a trifle and said. "Sir?"
"Coming," answered General Suharto, and Hatta and I followed him back into the lighted office. Another officer was holding out a red telephone, and as he reached for it Suharto told me that he would be available at any time. Then he spoke into the phone and listened, his face somber in fatigued repose.
"How many men were with him?" he asked finally. Nodded, told them to keep searching, and handed the red phone back to the waiting officer, who cradled it.
"That was Central Hospital," announced Suharto, going to sit behind his desk. "Colonel Untung just raided it, with fifty men. He was looking for Defense Minister Nasution, thinking he might have come to see about his daughter. They did not find him, and left."
"And the little girl, sir?" asked Colonel Hatta.
"She died an hour ago," said Suharto. The red phone rang again and he answered and talked briefly. Then again he said, "Keep searching, please," and hung up. Put both weathered hands on the desk top and looked around at us. Including his staff officers, Hatta, and myself, there must have been thirty men in the big office. A huge portrait of President Sukarno, handsome and charismatic in his black pitji cap, smiled down from the wall behind him.
"Here's the tally, gentlemen," Suharto said without emotion. "General Nasution, the Commander in Chief, seems to have got away, but we do not know where he is. Generals Parman, Suprato, and Sutojo have been kidnapped, bound, and hauled away in trucks. We do not know where they are, either, or if they are still alive. Generals Yani, Harjono, and Pandjaitan were killed while resisting."
I stood across the office, behind the silent Indonesian officers, and thought how it would be if the top seven generals in the United States were removed in one lightning coup, in a few hours. Still, there was something wrong. I pushed away from the wall and spoke.
"I thought there were eight names on the list," I said. Even to me my voice sounded intolerably loud.
Suharto's seamed face lifted, and he stared across the desk at me. Slowly he nodded.
"True, Mr. Gall. There were eight names." His mouth quirked in irony. "But fortunately General Sukendro is in Peking at the moment. With our delegation there, to help celebrate that People's Republic on their National Day.
"If you can help us solve our immediate problem, Colonel Hatta can get anything required for the venture. If you encounter difficulty, he can contact my staff members or myself. I think it best, however, that you not be seen again at this headquarters. There are a number of foreign reporters in the press room, and they are frantic for something to hang a story on. Do you understand?"
"Yes, General," I said.
"Thank you." His slaty eyes were fixed on me for a final second, and he looked down at the grid maps spread across his desk. As Colonel Hatta and I left the office Suharto's hoarse, patient voice was instructing his officers.
I was about to cave in for lack of food, and Hatta took me down the hall to the KOSTRAD mess, where we were given heaping plates of steaming rice curry. The food was good, but spiced so hotly that I knew I would be blowing smoke rings from both ends before noon.
As we were finishing the curry a soldier came into the mess, saluted Colonel Hatta, and said I was wanted on the phone. That, I thought as I got up and followed the soldier down the hall, was interesting. Who in Djakarta would know where I was?
It was Katja Arnkloo, sounding faint and far away. She said she was calling from the American Embassy. The static was bad; it may have been a bad connection or it may have been scattered gunfire at her end. I made out that she and Straight-Arrow Harvard Frank had received my note, written in haste before leaving Djokja, and had fled the kraton as advised. Instead of trying to make it overland to the capital, Frank had borrowed a Cherokee lightplane belonging to the resident head of Standard Vacuum Oil Company, and flown them to Djakarta.
They had landed at Kemayoren, the commercial airport, and been arrested. Frank had discussed the matter with the arresting officer, while peeling off bank notes, U.S., with several numerals on them, and had been driven to the U.S. Embassy in a huge black sedan flanked by motorcycle outriders.
I told her I could understand that. Harvard Frank was a going Jessie of purest ray serene, and what else was new?
"Quite a bit," she said, and her voice faded. She seemed to be turned away from the phone, talking to someone else. "There's a mob sur
rounding the Embassy here," she informed me. "They're stoning the building and trying to break down the front gates. And Jordan Tanner, the head of the U.S. Information Service, has radioed from downtown that another mob has just set fire to his building and is burning the books in the downstairs library."
"Princess," I said wearily, "I'm always glad to get these flash bulletins, but…"
"Shut up your goddamned face!" she answered. "Find some transport and come pick me up at the back gate to the Embassy. The Marine Guard on duty there says they can cover you in and out."
"Why, for God's sake?" I asked. "Don't you know there's a full-fledged revolt going on?"
"Yes. I may know more about it than you do. You're in Suharto's headquarters, and he might want to know where all his missing flag-rank superiors are."
The line hummed silent, except for the distant shouts and sounds of gunfire and rock-thuds at her end.
"Wait a minute," I said. Colonel Hatta was standing down the hallway, waiting, and I asked him if I could use the armored car. With a full tank of gas, the same driver, and the machine-gunners. He nodded. I told Katja about it, and she said "fine"; she would be waiting at the back gate of the Embassy. I was to honk three times before I approached it.
"Right." I was hanging up when I remembered the rebel recognition signals. I shouted down the line, saying that we would flick the headlight beams five times instead, and Katja said "okay" scornfully. That I could wear my jockey strap like a snood if' it pleased me, but for God's sake to get off the dime.
SEVENTEEN
I GOT OFF THE DIME, WITH SOME CHANGE. The armored car, with me, the colonel, and the driver in it, went careening out of the back gateway to KOSTRAD headquarters and circled several blocks into the city before approaching the rear of the U.S. Embassy. At several corners we were fired on, but the bullets chinked off the sides of our vehicle. There was more gunfire rattling across the dark city, and many houses were being gutted by flames. As we approached the Embassy from the back I ordered the driver to keep tapping his horn and flicking his headlight beams, hoping that we would not be fired on by both sides.
