To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  The tanker turned across the length of the road, the cab coming to a stop near the front of Spier’s Land Cruiser, the tank of fuel blocking passage. Fuel started to drip from the tank onto the dirt below.

  Two dump trucks, traveling north along the road, rounded the corner and the shooters pivoted their rifles to the new targets.

  The dump trucks now took the full fire of the gunmen. The ambush was now in its twentieth minute and rather than diminishing in intensity, more targets were being drawn in. So long as the shooters could keep every new arrival on the scene in their sights, the ambush would continue.

  This was not a limited operation, tightly constrained in time or munitions. The gunmen walked calmly, deliberately, the plan open-ended, absorbing as many victims as the circumstances presented. They were indiscriminate in their bloodshed, unconcerned about the nature of the targets. Their rifles arced across mine vehicles and cars, their bullets aimed at men, women, and a child. Both Indonesians and Americans were targets.

  With so many targets being drawn into the massacre, one would eventually get away.

  Another car emerged, this one at the north end of the ambush, driven by a mine manager, Andrew Neale. The gunmen had been walking south, down the road, and were unable to spin around and get a clear shot at Neale’s car a hundred feet behind them. Neale could see the carnage. He spun the wheel and U-turned back up the road, speeding toward the barracks to alert the soldiers.

  The gunmen must have now realized the inevitable. Within minutes the Indonesian military would arrive in force and the shooters would confront the possibility of return fire. They dispersed.

  A few minutes later, at approximately 1:10 P.M., the Indonesian military arrived.

  The ambush had lasted nearly thirty minutes. In total, 234 bullet casings would be found on the scene amid the blood, bone, and tissue fragments. Two Land Cruisers and two dump trucks were punched full of bullets. A tanker trunk, the skin peeled back by bullets, dripped fuel oil.

  By the time the military appeared, there was no one left for them to attack or arrest; the gunmen had apparently fled. The soldiers began to search for survivors.

  As a soldier approached Patsy’s vehicle, she remembered looking up at the gun slung over the shoulder, wanting to reach out to touch it. If it was warm, she thought, she would know that he was one of the shooters, a bad guy now posing as one of the good guys. Touching the barrel would have resolved so much of the confusion and accusations that were to follow, but she never got the chance.

  Four soldiers stepped up, pulled back the perforated rear door, and lifted out Patsy’s nearly lifeless body. She called out weakly, barely audible, for her husband. There was no answer. She knew there would never be a reply from him again.

  It was too rainy and foggy to land a helicopter on the narrow road, so the survivors were driven to the mining camp hospital for triage until they could be evacuated to a fully equiped medical facility for emergency surgery. As the jeep bounced along, Patsy asked, “What’s the date today?”

  The doctor was surprised. “Why, is it someone’s birthday?”

  She replied, one of the last things she remembered before drifting into a morphine haze:

  “It’s the day my husband died.”

  Three people were killed in the ambush, eleven wounded. Several of them were wounded so severely that their survival was in question. Patsy Spier, near death, was flown to a specialty clinic in Australia. An incision was made in her abdomen and all the internal organs were extracted from her body and tweezed on an operating table in an attempt to remove the shards of splintered bullets. Seventy pieces of shrapnel would remain in her left side and kidney; removing them proved to be too dangerous.

  Within hours of the shootings, the army declared that the crime was the work of an armed separatist group, the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM), or Free Papua Movement, which aspired to create an independent state in West Papua. The OPM had been active in the mine, the military asserted, and there was clear evidence that they were looking for a high-profile target.

  Over the next three months, the case became murkier. An alternative explanation began to emerge. A careful examination of the scene suggested that the Indonesian military itself may have been involved in the massacre. The Washington Post ran the story in early November:

  Indonesia Military Allegedly Talked of Targeting Mine

  Sunday, November 3, 2002

  By Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress

  Washington Post Foreign Service

  JAKARTA, Indonesia, Nov. 2—Senior Indonesian military officials discussed an operation against Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. before an ambush near its mine in Papua province that killed two Americans and one Indonesian on Aug. 31, according to intelligence obtained by the United States, a U.S. government official and other sources said.

  The discussions involved the top ranks of Indonesia’s military … and were aimed at discrediting a Papuan separatist group, the Free Papua Movement, said the U.S. government official and another American source.

  The attack took place near a mine operated by New Orleans–based Freeport; the three victims were contract employees. The intelligence was based on information supplied after the ambush by a person who claimed to be knowledgeable about the high-level military conversations. The source was described in the report as “highly reliable.” This information was supported by an intercept of a conversation including that individual, said the U.S. government official and the American source. The intercept was shared with the United States by another country, identified by a Western source as Australia.

  Subordinates could have understood the discussions as a direction “to take some kind of violent action against Freeport,” the government official said.

  The two radically different explanations of the ambush did have one thing in common. An armed group, whether guerrilla or Indonesian military, had been planning to attack someone passing along the mine road in August of 2002. They were looking for victims. Given the nature of the massacre, anyone would have served their purpose.

  Gunmen had stepped out in front of my vehicle, they had stepped out in front of Spier’s vehicle. For whatever reason, they did not pull their triggers in my case. So, despite the claims and counterclaims of who initiated the attack, there was one thing that I knew for sure: I dodged the attack that Patsy Spier later took.

  I remember that moment sitting on the beach in Bali, staring at the paper in disbelief. It was still months before I would learn the details of the attack, see the police reports, and feel compelled to act. For now, I was just processing the shock.

  “What’s up?” Mike asked.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I said, and explained what I had just read in the newspaper.

  Later that day I would explain it all again, to Gina, who had planned to meet me, post-climb, on the sands of Kuta Beach. As we talked about the ambush, a string of unanswerable questions came to mind.

  “What if we hadn’t offered more money on our way back down the mine road?”

  Before Gina could respond, I fired off another question: “What if we had waited a couple more days to do the climb?”

  “Then it could have been you instead of them,” Gina said. “So, are you wondering why it wasn’t you?” she asked.

  I knew what was coming.

  “Sometimes,” she observed, “things just turn out this way.”

  “Oh c’mon, Gina. Don’t tell me this happened for a reason. You know I don’t buy that.”

  In response, she added a question of her own: “Okay, so what are the chances of it happening? Remember how unlikely it was that we met. You figured out the odds.”

  The likelihood that I would be at that particular milepost that very week was small; Gina was right about that.

  “I don’t believe in fate, Gina.” I don’t accept that an event can somehow be hardwired into life, so that no one has control over it. She knew my perspective—a perspective she didn’t share.

>   “There must be something that you think of that can happen for a reason.” She wasn’t insistent, just curious. It seemed obvious to her that this event should be challenging my worldview.

  “When there’s a reason, science can explain it,” I responded. “Anything else is just coincidence.”

  She stopped short of suggesting that destiny played a role in the events that unfolded at the Freeport-McMoRan mine. Instead, she closed with a question. “So what’s your explanation this time? I guess you think you just got lucky.”

  I look back now and still more questions come to mind.

  What if I hadn’t picked up the paper that morning? I might never have noticed the story and the next few years of my life would have taken a completely different direction.

  What if we had climbed that mound, Mount Kosciuszko in Australia, instead of the peak in Oceania?

  What if … What if … What if …

  Events were put in motion that day. My simple surfing and climbing plan was about to get extraordinarily complicated. I was about to get entangled in the life of one of the survivors of the ambush. And, as utterly improbable as it sounds, she would eventually be working a job in an office just a few hundred yards from me in Washington, D.C.

  “You sound like a horse when you eat like that,” Gina says with a laugh from across the table as I’m crunching down a bowl of cereal. We only have about four hours until we need to be at the airport and we’re downing a quick breakfast. At the moment, we don’t have any plans for how we’re going to spend the time.

  “What are you going to do?” Gina asks.

  We were heading back to the U.S. from Indonesia and had laid over in Vietnam on the way. We had this last morning in Hanoi.

  “I’m going to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. Want to come?”

  Gina looked back at me with complete disinterest. I could tell from her expression that she couldn’t imagine anything more boring.

  “You’re going to see a dead guy?”

  I gave the mausoleum the best defense I could think of. “They keep him in a glass case. He’s been there for decades and I’m wondering what he looks like.”

  “He’ll look dead, Slake. It’s not like you can talk to him or kick him in the ass. For all you know it’s just a wax figure. Who cares?”

  There’s a science to the preservation of a body. Egyptians developed a method to preserve bodies, mummies, intact for millennia without any need for attention. Ho Chi Minh’s body, on the other hand, was under careful daily surveillance for any signs of decay. I was curious how the two techniques compared. But I could see that none of that was going to persuade Gina. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll fill you in when I meet you at the airport. We’ll see who has the better time.”

  I arrived at the mausoleum a half hour later and with assembly line efficiency I was directed into an enormous stream of Vietnamese, all of us now moving toward a five-story-tall tiered structure of gray granite blocks. The thick crowd was narrowed to a precise single file as we entered the building and began a slow hour-long march toward a guarded room ahead of us.

  As I entered the room, I felt cool air blow across my back. Something in here was definitely being kept on ice, preserved and chilled. But this didn’t have the frigid feel of a Himalayan peak; that would have been familiar, comfortable. No, this was different, a chill that someone, something, could never thaw from.

  At the room’s center was an elevated glass casket. Long thin velvet tubes connected a series of pedestals that established our path toward and around the casket.

  A guard was calling out a few words over and over and over again in a steady rhythmic tone, like a drumbeat. As I approached the glass, he looked at me and converted the Vietnamese chant into English. “Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving.”

  And then the embalmed body came into view.

  Flat on his back, clothed with only his head and hands visible, lay the former leader of Vietnam. The soft dim light on his face illuminated the skin; his cheeks looked a bit flush. He seemed serene, but not asleep. It appeared like he’d just gotten back from a brisk walk and was now lying down peacefully to catch his breath.

  As I exited the room, with the guard’s steady rhythmic demand now fading behind me, only one thought came to my mind: that was a waste of time. Gina was going to have a better story.

  The airport was crowded, but Gina was easy to spot, the only Italian among the sea of Asians.

  “So, how was it? Seeing the dead guy,” she asked as I walked up.

  “Not very interesting. What did you do?”

  “I got a massage in the home of a blind masseuse. I found her place while I was wandering around downtown.”

  I stared back at Gina. “I can’t beat that,” I admitted. I had consorted with the dead; she was immersed in life.

  That moment exposed the core of our relationship. Sure, we had a surprising amount in common: both of us raised through our teens by a single parent, both the youngest of three siblings, both of us moving across the country for high school, both losing a close family member to cancer. But those similarities weren’t the glue in our relationship. Our relationship stuck because of our independence, our tolerance for each other to go along separate paths.

  When we were at the same place at the same time and had a chance to choose our own course, we went in entirely different directions. Yet, hours later, we ended up at precisely the same spot, standing together, comfortably side by side, about to ride a plane home.

  Gina had been through so much of what I had been through, but unlike me she never iced over. Looking back at me that afternoon in the airport, she knew that I thought her story was more appealing than mine. She also sensed that the events in Indonesia would change me. She didn’t have to wait long.

  Chapter 7

  SHARED PURPOSE

  The hallway is an obstacle course, filing cabinets and boxes lining the walls, probably jammed with the results of previous congressional investigations. I am led through the maze to a conference room and stand waiting in front of it. Hundreds of people have walked down this corridor and pushed open this very door. Some entered hoping for justice, others, perhaps guilty or simply cautious, entered silently and offered no answers, taking refuge behind the Fifth Amendment.

  I walk into the stark windowless room and take a seat on one side of a long wooden table. Sitting opposite me are staff on the Homeland Security Committee of the House of Representatives. They will pepper me with questions, I expect this, and I will answer every one as best I can. I will tell them what I know about the shooters, the Freeport-McMoRan mine, milepost #62. I have also read the police reports about the ambush and I will share my suspicions.

  I don’t have a lawyer with me, since I have nothing to hide. They already know that I trespassed and bribed my way across the mine. Those indiscretions have been public knowledge ever since I admitted to them in a piece I wrote for the Washington Post about my climb and the ambush.

  I never expected that my pursuit of a surfing and climbing record would lead me to this room. At the beginning of my quest, I would never guess that I would care enough about a stranger’s life or about international politics to get involved. Yet here I am, staring into the faces of the congressional staff, willing to answer questions and be part of a solution.

  Gina is waiting for me at home, eager to hear the outcome. And the amulet, that preposterous amulet, is still stuffed into the back of my sock drawer. It wouldn’t be there much longer.

  By the time I returned to the United States from Bali, the ambush had made international headlines. The ramifications for U.S.-Indonesian relations were enormous.

  It had been less than a year since the collapse of the Twin Towers and in the post-9/11 world, President George W. Bush was evaluating which countries could be relied on to join the battle against terrorists. Indonesia was probably circled in red on the map in the Pentagon war room.

  Indonesia is the largest Mu
slim country in the world and there were reports of terrorist groups training in the jungles of some of the remote islands. But with accounts of possible Indonesian soldiers’ involvement in the ambush, a question was emerging. Could the Indonesian military be trusted to combat the terrorists? There was only one way to know for sure.

  The White House dispatched a team of FBI investigators to Papua in late 2002 to investigate the ambush. By February of 2003, Congress received intelligence reports that said there was a “strong possibility” that Indonesian soldiers were the murderers. One theory was that the soldiers arranged the ambush to create chaos, then they planned to squeeze the mine for more money to combat the very chaos they had created.

  That theory didn’t sound far-fetched to me. After all, I knew that some of the soldiers were corrupt. I was counting on it when we bribed them. Also, having interacted with those soldiers, I had no trouble believing they could have gunned people down without blinking.

  The FBI investigation was incomplete; there was nothing conclusive, no hard evidence to indicate that the Indonesian military was involved in the ambush. At the same time, the need to confront potential terrorist training grounds in Indonesia was perceived to be necessary and immediate. That presented a challenging decision.

  The Bush administration made the tough call: fund the Indonesian military.

  I recognize that was a difficult decision, still, I disagreed with it. Perhaps I could overlook the ambush—if the military was in fact involved—for the sake of the battle against terrorists if it were an isolated incident, one act by a rogue element. But the Indonesian military’s human rights abuses stretch back decades. In fact, that very month, eighteen defendants, mostly Indonesian soldiers, were on trial for participating in a wave of killings, lootings, and rapes in the province of East Timor.

  It may seem hypocritical that I would disagree with the administration’s decision to fund the Indonesian military, given that I had funded members of the Indonesian military myself. To pass through the mine, I placed stacks of bills into the open palms of soldiers. I admit that my payout was intended simply to achieve my own personal ambition, nothing so righteous as paying to combat terrorists and protect U.S. citizens. I accept that criticism. But it didn’t change my conclusion.