by Philip Atlee
The high metal fence across the rear driveway opened before us, and I could see Marine Guards standing with leveled rifles and crouching behind a heavy machine gun. When I jumped out, Katja entered the armored car and I crowded her over toward the driver as I got back in and slammed the heavy metal door.
She was wearing a black jump suit, lace-up paratrooper boots, and her bright hair was covered by a dark scarf. The driver, after one swift glance at her shapely butt, never missed a beat. He swung the car around deftly in the wide drive and we went screeching back out of the Embassy compound. Behind us the Marine Guard detachment swung the steel gates shut.
"Where to?" I asked.
Katja spoke, not to me or to Colonel Hatta, but to the driver. "Lubang Buaja," she said. "From the swamp side."
As the armored car rolled through the suburbs of Djakarta, the sounds of violence and the stain of mounting fires fell behind us. Katja handed me a leather-cased object and I held it under the dashboard illumination. A pair of high-powered night-vision binoculars, U.S. Naval issue.
In another hour we were on a deserted road to the south of the capital and Katja asked the driver to go more slowly. He complied and finally we came to a marshy stretch protected by a high, barbed wire fence. Katja halted the driver twice and got out to reconnoiter. Then she ordered the driver to put the armored car off the narrow road and broadside against the high fence.
He did that, too. He would have driven the thing through a brick wall if this authoritative njonja had told him to. Katja and I got out and climbed onto the top of the vehicle, leaving Colonel Hatta and the driver inside. Leaning over, holding onto me with one hand, she tested the tensile strength of the top strand of barbed wire with her other hand.
"The footing on the other side is soft," she said. "Heave me over."
I looked at the fence; it was at least seven feet high, and the ground on the other side was in shadow. Then I remembered the gymnastic ability she had demonstrated in my bedroom, with the impromptu backflip. When she lifted one of her paratrooper boots, I saddled my hands, and threw her over the fence.
"No problem," she called up to me. "Muddy down here."
Probing at the top strand of wire with one hand, I hurdled over it and felt my wisdom teeth shake when I jarred into the ground. But I stayed upright, and she began walking ahead of me.
The overcast had broken to scattered clouds, and bright moonlight made our way easy to see. There were hummocks of firm ground, stretches of mud where our feet squelched through the ooze, and finally we went over a slight rise to confront several sizable lagoons fringed by banyan trees and clumps of mangroves.
Katja seemed to be following some kind of radar, and after we had circled the first two lagoons, of dank and foul-smelling water, she pointed ahead. I saw a reflection of fire on the last scuds of low-hanging, miasmic clouds. We moved toward a clump of bent palms with ferns growing halfway up their trunks, and she went scaling up one of the slanting limbs nimbly. I followed her up the nearest trunk, which was only a foot away, and brushed the ferns aside.
We were gazing down onto a broad meadow whose grasses were trampled flat, and a tremendous bonfire was blazing in its center. The fire must have been fueled by petroleum, judging by the roar and by the thick pall arising from it. And all around the black plume were people, dancing. Few of them wore uniforms, but most of them were armed, both men and women. They all seemed to be young and were howling and chanting in a flame-lit saturnalia.
"These are the murder squads," said Katja, her head lifted from the slanting palm trunk beside me. "This is where they brought the generals."
I unslung the leather case from around my neck, took out the night-vision binoculars, and focused them on the wild celebration. Three figures were stretched out on the near perimeter of the huge bonfire. Three other trussed figures were just beyond them, sitting up and being abused by the dancing rebels of both sexes.
I swept the flame-lit scene several times to be sure I was seeing what was there. Men with bayoneted rifles were jabbing impartially at both the three cadavers and the three sitting survivors. One was in uniform, another wore a torn dressing gown, and the other had on only a sarong.
All the torturers cavorting in the meadow below us were chanting as they hacked away at their prisoners. I did not recognize the song, but it was one of the monotonous minor-key melodies with a martial air. Stabbing and hacking away with wild, inchoate yells.
As I watched the killing ground flickering in ruddy flames I saw a concerted rush of women at the generals left alive. Or nearly so. And breathed a sigh of relief when the onrushing women seemed to be stroking the fettered figures. Then I realized that the strokes of the women's hands were slicing flesh off the bound bodies.
I handed the binoculars across to Katja. Pawing the ferns away from the palm tree trunk, she aimed the glasses and swept them back and forth across the demented dance.
"Using razor blades," she commented, and I put my head down against the rough texture of the tree.
"Now," she announced several minutes later, "they are throwing all the bodies into the well."
I didn't lift my head. I hadn't even known there was a goddamned well.
Finally Katja said, "They've put all six bodies into the well and are filling it in. I think we'd better get back to the car."
I nodded, lifting my head, and we inched down off the palm trunks and retraced our mud-slogging way back to the high, barbed wire fence. When we called out, the driver pitched a canvas tarpaulin across the top strand, and I took Katja's pretty little booted foot, covered with mud, in both hands and tossed her nearly over the armored car. Then I went up the fence strands and vaulted down beside her.
It was nearly dawn and we stood facing each other in paling moonlight.
"You don't take care," she said. "You made me hurt myself."
"Sorry," I said. "I was upset because you do seem to know more about this revolution than I do."
EIGHTEEN
KATJA DID NOT ANSWER MY CHARGE. WE returned to Djakarta over the same narrow back roads. As we approached the city, the dawn was beginning to show. When we passed canals, my nose wrinkled because they were nothing but open sewers. Even in the dim light we could see that the city's sidewalks were crumbling and its housing dilapidated.
The Indonesian capital had been deteriorating steadily ever since the Dutch left. At its best, Djakarta had never been a model of colonial architecture; Holland had simply erected a tropic version of its own uninspired cities, but at least the environment had worked. Its services, streets, and structures were efficient and clean, softened by the lush vegetation.
When freedom came, the Indonesians had grafted their own village kampong slums onto the city, and it looked shabby and smelled bad. More fires were blazing, and we passed families trying to put their few possessions on betjaks and hand trunks. Several times we were fired at from roadblocks, and the driver had to make hurried U-turns to get us out of range. It was nearly all small-caliber fire, however, and glanced off the car's plating.
When the vehicle wheeled back through the hastily opened rear gates of the U.S. Embassy, again under the muzzles of Marine Guard machine guns, Katja jumped lightly down on the paved driveway and turned to face me. She was unsmiling.
"You go back and tell General Suharto that you saw the other generals butchered," she said tersely. "Tell him you saw his associates mutilated and tossed down the Crocodile Hole. With General Nasution's aide. And you can also inform him that President Sukarno is at Halim Air Force Base and that he is not a prisoner."
Turning, she stalked into the colonnaded back entrance to the Embassy. I got back into the armored car, and the alert Marines saw it out the gate and locked up again. Hatta instructed the driver and we picked up speed through the streets of the burning city. When we stopped again, it was before another guarded gate and we drove into a huge walled compound that turned out to be a military motor pool.
Ducking gratefully out of the heat of the armor
ed car, we walked into a parts warehouse and were crossing it when all the horn-clusters spaced along its aisles came alive. They rashed with static, and a humming carrier wave came on. Hatta held up one hand and we stopped to listen.
The radio transmitter, held by the rebels, was warming up. The strains of the national anthem, "Indonesia Raja Merdeka," began pouring from the speakers. When the anthem was concluded, a clipped but authoritative voice came on the air; Hatta whispered in my ear that this was Untung speaking, and kept up a running translation as the voice droned on.
Colonel Untung said he was speaking in the name of the September 30th Movement, whose members had acted to forestall a coup by the "Council of Generals" sponsored by the American Central Intelligence Agency. He added harshly that this "Council" had planned to seize power on Armed Forces Day by bringing troops from East, Central, and Western Java.
Without mentioning the murder squads or the six slaughtered army generals, Untung said that "action" had already been taken against the right-wing commanders. And that further drastic action would be taken throughout Indonesia against the agents and sympathizers of the "Council of Generals."
Warming to his harangue, Untung shouted that "such power-mad generals and officers who have neglected the lot of their men, who lived in luxury, led a gay life, insulted our women, and wasted government funds must be kicked out of the army. The army is not for generals," he insisted with his voice breaking, "but is the possession of all soldiers who are loyal to the ideas of the revolution."
After a short pause Untung seemed to have recovered. He announced calmly that he would soon broadcast the first decree of the Indonesian Revolutionary Council. All citizens were to stay in their houses. The national anthem was repeated, and the horn-clusters clicked silent.
I asked Hatta if he still had the jar of puromycin from Japan, and he nodded. It was locked inside the armored car. Then I briefed him swiftly on what Katja and I had seen, the incredible murder orgy at Crocodile Hole. The maiming of the generals' bodies. Hatta's composure was shattered as I described the wild dancing and the stuffing of the corpses down the well; his facial planes were flattened.
"We can get the communications building back by dawn," I said, "if we use that stuff. Or did you have other plans for it?"
"Nothing more important," he admitted glumly. "Only a sample, for testing, anyway."
"That's it, then." I asked him to call General Suharto and describe the slaughter of the generals, just as I had described it to him.
To tell Suharto that if we could have the help of ten men who knew the physical layout of the communications building, I thought we had a good chance to take it before the early broadcast. That we also needed transceivers, at least four. Finally, that if we were successful, his troops must be ready to invest the building immediately.
Hatta nodded but seemed unsure about our chances. "If you are wrong, and Suharto follows us with troops, only a few defenders could sabotage the radio and telegraph installations so badly it might take days, or even weeks, to get them operational again."
"Abdul," I said slowly, "I have no intention of letting that happen. Tell the general that he will be able to follow his men in and broadcast over a live microphone."
"All right." Hatta was turning toward the office of the parts depot when I called after him.
"Tell him also that in driving to Lubang Buaja and back, we noticed that most of the damage is being done by roving bands. Looters, youth groups, kill-crazy civilians who are being hauled from one place to another. In similar situations I have found that if you immobilize their vehicles, these roving squads soon show little belly for walking to their war. Especially in daylight."
"So?"
"Advise him to have the tires or wheels shot off the rebel vehicles, especially at main intersections. It would also help to clog up the corners with his own transport; I notice a lot of it standing idle outside here."
Colonel Hatta rattled it off, repeating, and when I nodded, he turned again and went striding toward the office.
NINETEEN
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT THE SQUAD Colonel Hatta had assembled slipped out the back entrance to KOSTRAD headquarters, behind me. We had spent two hours in a briefing, and all but four of the small group were wearing dark clothes and caps. The other four wore the uniforms and insignia of the 530th Battalion, from East Java. This was the unit that held the communications building on the other side of Merdeka Square.
The main strength of the 530th was bivouacked in tents, on the lawn of the square, across from the communications building. Sentry squads were posted at all the building's entrances, and machine-gun posts set up some distance from each squad to provide enfilading firepower.
There was only one entrance to the back of the building, but it was a wide, arched doorway. Besides the two sentries pacing there, the covering machine-gun crew was across the alley. Screened, they thought, by a cluster of tiny orange trees. It was the Singapore mentality all over again. They could protect the building until doomsday, but they had no traverse on us as we crawled forward behind them through the shadowed shrubs.
It was four-on-four, and they all died without knowing what had happened. It had to be the knife because we couldn't afford any noise, but after the initial onslaught, grunts, and chopping noises, they were dead. Indonesians are good at this type of infiltration; they learned it against the Japanese.
When we had dragged the corpses back out of sight, we lay in the shadows behind the machine gun and watched our four men in 530th uniforms come sauntering down the alley. They were reeling, raucous, and obviously stupefied with palm wine. When the sentries braced them, shouting angrily, the drunken quartet stood swaying in dismay until the flashlight beams had flicked across their insignia.
When asked for the password, they muttered, "Ampera!" in a slurred chorus, and the disgusted sentries lowered their carbines and motioned the malcontents inside. They stumbled in, wheeled, and took the relaxed sentries two-on-two, again with the knife. I waved my right hand forward, and four of the dark-clad soldiers beside me crossed the alley swiftly and hauled the dying sentries into the shrubbery to join their comrades.
One of them, being dragged by the heels, started shouting and another knife chop nearly took his head off. Colonel Hatta and I went scrambling toward the back door of the communications building, because we did not know if they had sentries on the roof. They must not have had, at least on our side of it; by the time we were in the rear corridor, two of our men were pacing as sentries.
Two more of them, in 530th noncom uniforms, had entered the kitchens and ordered the four cooks working over the ranges and tureens to step to the back entrance. The grumbling cooks, wearing flour-whitened aprons over their fatigue uniforms, came out into the hall and were also dispatched. They were then dragged across the alley to join their dead comrades.
Two of the men with us really were cooks, and they ranged the huge kitchen, telling Hatta and I what was being prepared. We followed and I distributed the puromycin powder in what seemed an equitable fashion. I saved enough of it to doctor the coffee and tea that would be served in the mess an hour before dawn.
By two o'clock in the morning it was done. Our sentries were patrolling the alley behind the communications building, our cooks were ladling the spicy sauces and preparing the rice in battalion strength, and for two hours Colonel Hatta and I sat in the darkened hallway and waited. Both of us had walkie-talkies that could reach KOSTRAD headquarters easily, but we had not used them.
At a quarter to four, orderlies came to eat in sleepy relays and got up to go across the wide boulevard to alert the troops. They seemed to enjoy their breakfasts and not to notice the new waiters. At four, elements of the battalion came clomping in, their boots banging at the marble floor, and everybody who wanted it got seconds.
At twenty minutes until sign-on time for Radio Indonesia I had two of the waiters tour the quarters again. Trying to find out if anyone was still holed up. They came back and reported t
hat they had covered everything upstairs, the quarters and studios, and we seemed to have no other candidates for a meal.
I glanced at Hatta and he nodded. Compressing the transmit button on my transceiver, I said, "Please come in! Hurry now, please come in!"
When I snapped the button to receive, a brisk voice answered. "On the way." Putting the transceiver down, I motioned to Hatta and we went walking through the empty mess hall and across the street to the park. Dawn was graying the sky above the sleepy troops.
Down the square we could barely make out the arched facade of KOSTRAD headquarters, but no troops had come out of it. The 530th Battalion, the rebel group to which we had administered the puromycin, was directly across from us, being ordered into formation. Rifles clinked and booted feet stamped as the East Java unit formed up. They moved alertly and seemed normal, and my gut tightened with apprehension.
Why weren't Suharto's men on the move? I realized grimly that if the vaunted mind-changing goofus dust didn't work as advertised, I was about to precipitate a pitched battle at bayonet range. Hatta was rubbing at his face nervously and avoiding my glance.
For what seemed endless minutes the only sounds disturbing the great square were the crisply shouted orders of the 530th's officers. Then, more distant, came like sounds from the other rebel battalion, the 454th from Central Java. It was also forming up but on the far corner, and a line of trees and shrubs would shield the advance of the government troops from its view. Unless, of course, its brother unit began firing.
