Expatriates

by James Wesley, Rawles

  As Joseph was preparing their evening meal, Rhiannon was alarmed to hear a boat motor in the distance. At first they couldn’t determine the direction. Rhiannon broke out the binoculars and began scanning the horizon. Tatang pulled his M1 Garand rifle from its case and slipped a spare 8-round clip onto its sling, the bullet tips clinging like interwoven fingers. This gave him a quick reload close at hand.

  The boat was approaching quickly from the west. The glare of the sunset masked their approach until they were less than five hundred yards away. Joseph started Tiburon’s engine. He instinctively brought the throttle forward and turned away from the approaching boat, presenting their stern to the intruders. Once it was obvious that the boat was headed directly toward them, Joseph pushed the throttle wide open.

  The unknown boat was a black Woosung-Zebec 13-foot rigid inflatable, with a large outboard engine. Judging by the rapid speed at which they approached, it was obvious that they could outrun Tiburon. It was styled much like the classic Zodiac brand, but produced in South Korea. There were three ILF or Indo soldiers aboard and two of them were armed with Pindad SS2-V1 folding stock rifles.

  Still holding the binoculars, Rhiannon declared, “They’re wearing camos and they have long guns. They look like .223s.” After a pause, she added, “I can spot for you, Tatang.” She had grown up hunting deer and elk in British Columbia, so Peter didn’t protest. He knew Rhiannon was better qualified for the job.

  One of the men in the bow of the inflatable began firing even though they were out of effective range.

  Tatang muttered, “No question now.” He clicked the Garand’s safety forward and took a wrap of the sling around his forearm. He shouted to Joseph, “Keep on a straight course!”

  Joseph hunched down over the wheel. His Ruger 10/22 rifle lay across his lap with a 25-round magazine inserted. It would be better than nothing if they needed backup.

  Tatang judged their distance at 450 yards away and closing. Both of the men in the bow of the inflatable were now firing in a rapid cadence, semiauto. Tiburon was still outside the range of their Pindad .223 rifles but well inside the effective range of a M1 Garand.

  On board Tiburon, they began to hear bullets zipping over their heads. Kneeling at the stern rail, Tatang took careful aim and began to fire. With each shot, Rhiannon, kneeling beside him, observed with the sun-shaded binoculars and shouted a brief report: “Can’t tell . . . Low . . . Can’t tell . . . Two feet low . . . You got one—he’s down!”

  The Indonesian beside the man who had just been shot rolled to his side to change magazines. Tatang fired three more times. His second and third shots hit the exposed soldier. One of those bullets passed through his body and grazed the knee of the soldier at the rear, who was steering the boat. As Tatang fired his eighth shot, he heard the distinctive ping of the Garand ejecting its empty clip. He immediately reloaded the rifle with the spare clip hanging from the sling, nearly catching his thumb in the rifle’s action in his haste. As he did so, the inflatable, now just three hundred yards astern, veered sharply to the left.

  Joseph chopped the throttle, dipping Tiburon’s bow. Peter shouted, “They’re running!”

  The inflatable was now presented broadside to their stern. Both of the men in the bow were down, gushing blood. The pilot in the back of the boat was crouched down, doing his best to escape. Navarro resumed firing at a slightly faster tempo. Rhiannon, still spotting, reported, “Just behind him—lead a little.”

  Tatang fired again, and Rhiannon called the shot: “Just ahead of him.”

  The third and fourth shots both hit the soldier. “Hit in the chest. Hit in the head. He’s down,” said Rhiannon.

  With the soldier’s hand now off the outboard’s spring-loaded throttle, it automatically “dead-manned” to a low idle, and the inflatable ceased throwing any wake.

  “Come about, Joey, and bring us alongside, reeeaal slow,” Tatang shouted to Joseph. The boy did as he was told.

  As they got within one hundred yards, Tatang shouted to Joseph, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to finish this up with your .22—the big rifle’s ammo is too precious for this.” Tatang handed his Garand to Peter and then reached over his shoulder to take the Ruger 10/22 that Joseph held forward.

  When they were sixty yards from the inflatable, the elder Navarro resumed firing, with the much quieter .22 rimfire. The old man shot each of the Indonesian soldiers twice more, in the head. He said resignedly, “We gotta be sure they’re really dead.” His last shot was fired when they were less than fifty feet away from the Woosung inflatable. After his final shot, he clicked the rifle’s crossbolt safety and handed it back to Joseph.

  Peter approached Rhiannon and laid a hand on her shoulder. “It had to be done.” She nodded in reply, with tears welling up in her eyes.

  They could see that there was just one rifle left in the Woosung. Any others had obviously been dropped overboard. The three Indo soldiers were in grotesque death postures. One of the men’s jaws had flapped open unnaturally wide on one side, broken by a rifle bullet. The inflatable boat was a blood-drenched mess.

  Rhiannon turned to face her husband. Wiping away a tear, she said, “That’s the first time I’ve ever spotted for someone with bullets coming back from the other direction. A bit too exciting.” She gave a faint smile.

  Peter said, “Yeah, the proverbial two-way shooting range.”

  Joseph throttled Tiburon’s engine back to a minimum and they crept up to the inflatable. Rhiannon said, “I’m going to go keep Sarah occupied down below.”

  Peter nodded. “Good idea.”

  Rhiannon handed the binoculars to Peter, who began scanning, mostly toward the island.

  Tatang used a gaff hook to snag one of the lines that ran down the top of each of the inflation cells. Peter draped himself across the stern rail and held on to the gaff, which allowed Tatang to jump into the inflatable. The old man did so with a catlike grace that surprised Jeffords.

  Joseph said, “I’ve never seen so much blood, coming from people. Looks like the floor of the carneceria on a slaughter day.”

  Working quickly, Tatang picked up the only remaining SS2 rifle and rotated its safety lever leftward to what he presumed to be the safe position. He pointed the muzzle skyward and gave the trigger a pull. It didn’t move. “She’s safe.”

  Tatang handed the rifle up to Joseph, butt first. He quickly stripped off the web gear harnesses from the three bodies. The harnesses each had four magazine pouches.

  There was no question of taking the boat with them. Not only was it now obviously leaking from multiple .30-06 bullet hits, but there was blood everywhere.

  Tatang grabbed a rubberized haversack and one empty rifle magazine from the floor of the boat. That left just the bodies and the outboard engine, which was still gurgling. Tatang took another look around the inflatable and then disconnected its four-gallon gas tank. He handed it up to Joseph, saying, “Gas can’t work in our engine, but it still could come in handy, maybe to trade.” Last, he flicked open his balisong folding knife and slashed down the length of both inflation cells—from stem to stern. He spun the knife with a flourish, returning it to a closed position, and tucked it back into his front pocket.

  As he stepped back up into Tiburon, holding on to the gaff, his feet were already under five inches of water. Starved for fuel, the outboard engine sputtered to a stop. Less than a minute later, the boat slipped beneath the water. The bodies went down with it, although they seemed to linger near the surface while the boat disappeared rapidly out of sight. The weight of the big outboard engine had dragged the deflated boat down, stern first. A few large bubbles escaped from the cells as it sank.

  Tatang and Peter paused for a moment to watch the boat’s descent in horrified fascination as a few more bubbles rose to the surface of the red-stained water.

  Joseph restarted Tiburon’s engine. The sun was below the horizon,
and the sky was already starting to darken. Navarro gave his nephew directions. “Steer southeast, with the full throttle.”

  Washing the blood, intestinal contents, and brain matter off of the rifle, web gear, gas tank, and Tatang’s shoes required bucket after bucket of seawater. After the fifth bucket, Peter brought a stiff bristle brush up from below deck. It took them another twenty minutes and many more buckets of seawater to get everything cleaned up.

  That evening, Tatang took the wheel. Working below, Peter patiently cleaned and oiled the SS2 rifle. He recognized its design. It used the same gas system as the famous FN FAL, but it was scaled down for the smaller 5.56 mm NATO cartridge—the same cartridge used in M16 rifles. Unlike a FAL, the rifle’s charging handle was on the right-hand side. Peter would have preferred it to be on the left, like a FAL, since manipulating the bolt on this rifle required either reaching over the top of the receiver with his left hand or removing his firing hand from the pistol grip.

  Joseph’s cleaning rod for his .22 caliber Ruger rifle worked passably well in cleaning the bore of the new rifle. Rhiannon, Joseph, and Sarah watched with rapt interest as Peter worked. They asked occasional questions about the rifle and its shooting characteristics. The mechanics of the SS2 were easy to figure out, except for its folding stock, which required some practice to push down to rotate shut. Opening the stock was quick and easy, but Peter found folding the stock to be more cumbersome. Rhiannon thought the rifle’s spring-loaded action dust cover was especially clever. The rifle’s safety selector was of particular interest. It had three positions—the third one was for full-automatic fire. This was the first time Peter had ever handled a fully automatic weapon and the “cool” factor took a long time to wear off. Overall, he was pleased with the rifle.

  Because they’d been drenched by seawater, cleaning all of the magazines took longer than cleaning the rifle itself. With the help of Rhiannon and Joseph, each magazine was emptied of its cartridges and then each cartridge individually dried with rags. Each round was carefully rubbed down with coconut oil and then redried with a fresh rag. This time-consuming process took an hour and used up nearly all of Tatang’s bundle of rags.

  Almost as an afterthought, Peter realized that the magazines could also be disassembled and cleaned. It took him a while to figure out how to slide off the floorplates from the magazines. He used a rag wrapped around a foot-long nipa shaft to dry and then oil the inside of each magazine body, rubbing down their springs, again with coconut oil.

  Peter and Joseph reloaded three of the magazines with thirty cartridges each and bagged up the rest of the ammo and the spare magazines. They would need to reinspect them for the next several days, given the highly corrosive nature of salt water. Jeffords also decided to let the magazine pouches dry for several days before reinserting any magazines. In all, there were fourteen magazines for the rifle, and 362 live cartridges.

  As Peter finished his work, Joseph looked admiringly at the rifle. “Mr. Jeffords, God has been good to us. He has delivered us twice from the Indos. And now we have another good rifle with plenty of ammo.”

  Peter nodded. “And that’s the way the Lord provides for his Covenant People. We are undeserving, unworthy, and little better than unrepentant sinners. Yet he cares for us, and protects us. We are truly blessed, and we can only credit all this to Christ Jesus. He died for us.”

  Joseph grinned broadly. “Amen and amen.”

  26

  SHIPSHAPE

  “When all is said and done, Civilizations do not fall because of the barbarians at the gates. Nor does a great city fall from the death wish of bored and morally bankrupt stewards presumably sworn to its defense. Civilizations fall only because each citizen of the city comes to accept that nothing can be done to rally and rebuild broken walls; that ground lost may never be recovered.”

  —Bill Whittle, “The Undefended City”

  On Board Tiburon, Celebes Sea—November, the Second Year

  On four more occasions, they spotted the lights of small boats in the distance. After determining their courses, they would steer away and bring the engine to full throttle. This brought Tiburon up to twelve knots, which was a respectable speed. It wouldn’t outrun many boats, but it could outrun some.

  They assumed that Palau was already in the hands of the Indonesians, so they avoided making landfall there. Far on the westward horizon, they could see smoke rising from fires in East Timor. Apparently the Indonesians were mopping up the last of the resistance there.

  Rhiannon was suffering less often from seasickness, but the frequent bouts of diarrhea had taken their toll. She started their voyage weighing 135 pounds, but she was down to around 120 pounds—they had no way to be sure. Peter had never seen her look so slim, even when they had first met.

  Not wanting to attract a lot of attention from customs and immigration officials—since neither Joseph nor his grandfather had passports—they set their course toward Wyndham, a small town 275 kilometers southwest of Darwin.

  As Peter was piloting, Tatang Navarro sat next to the wheel. “I don’t want us to get deported. You know, we can wait and come in at night to drop you off, and then I can take Tiburon back out into deep water and scuttle her if we have to,” Tatang suggested.

  Jeffords shook his head, and said reassuringly, “I really doubt that will be necessary. Just pray that we’ll be well received by the immigration authorities.”

  Their fuel was running low. The good news was that, after burning most of Tiburon’s fuel and after having consumed nearly all their drinking water, the boat was now five thousand pounds lighter than when they left Samar and sitting much higher in the water. They were now making ten knots at three-quarter throttle instead of the seven to eight knots that they had averaged for the first half of the voyage. It had been thirty-two days since they left Quinapondan.

  Tatang left Peter at the wheel while he went to repack his gear. He first snatched his laundry off the clothesline and then went below. There, he disassembled his M1 Garand rifle and wrapped the three components in his spare blue jeans, tucking them in his large duffel bag along with the flare gun and all of the remaining .30-06 ammunition and the flares. He had Joseph stow his Ruger .22, ammo, and magazines in a similar way.

  As Tatang took the wheel again, he said to Peter, “Joey and I just hid the guns in our luggage. I sure hope we don’t have to go through any customs tae ng bull.”

  Jeffords shook his head. “Probably not. That’s one reason we picked such a small port.”

  Rhiannon cleared the rest of the clothes from the line and started to spruce up the boat. The realization that they would soon be under public gaze spurred her to do some long-neglected cleaning—even scrubbing the spot on the foredeck where Joseph usually cleaned the fish.

  As they entered the bay, Rhiannon poured the very last of the palm oil and the last quart of corn oil into the main fuel tank. It looked less than a quarter full. She said resignedly, “After this, that’s all she wrote.” They also had less than one gallon of water and enough food to last perhaps two more days—just a few dried fish and a couple of cups of dried rice that was starting to go green. The propane for their cookstove had run out two days before.

  Commenting on their scant fuel and food, Peter said, “Is that cutting it close, or what? Thank you, Lord!” Looking at the chart and comparing it to the GPS readings, Joseph said, “We should be at the port of Wyndham in less than two hours, Lord willing.”

  Tatang throttled back to five knots and they picked their way into the inland waters. The waterway was broad and sheltered, but unfamiliar. They consulted the chart, GPS, and depth finder frequently as they worked their way toward the Cambridge Gulf, and then south along to Wyndham. Much of the shoreline was flanked with mud flats and salt ponds. The portions of the shore with vegetation were dotted with oddly shaped boab trees.

  “How’s the fuel, exactly?” Tatang asked.

 
Rhiannon uncapped the tank and lowered the bamboo dipstick with practiced precision. Pulling it up, it showed less than an inch of coconut oil clinging to the end. She said, “Not a lot—maybe three or four gallons—but we don’t have far to go now. If for some reason we have to divert to Darwin, there is no way we could make it there without refueling. It’s all or nothing now.”

  Peter Jeffords attributed the timing of the food, fuel, and water supplies to Divine Providence. During the last few hours of their journey, he and Rhiannon hummed and sang the church chorus Jehovah Jireh several times. Tatang and Joseph weren’t familiar with it, so they taught them the words:

  “Jehovah Jireh, my provider,

  His grace is sufficient for me

  For me, for me.

  Jehovah Jireh, my provider,

  His grace is sufficient for me.

  “The Lord shall provide all my needs

  According to His riches in Glory,

  The Lord shall provide Himself a lamb for sacrifice,

  Jehovah Jireh takes care of me

  Of me, of me.”

  Peter generally liked older Baptist hymns, preferring them to most modern praise choruses. He found the latter largely vain and repetitious. As he often put it, “Most praise choruses have a shortage of good doctrine and a surplus of personal pronouns.” But “Jehovah Jireh” was one chorus that he did like, and he couldn’t get it out of his mind in the last few hours of their voyage.

  Finally, the sleepy port of Wyndham came into view. The town had less than seven hundred residents and most of them lived inland in the new development of Wyndham East—also known as Wyndham Three Mile—rather than in Old Wyndham. As they pulled up to the town’s looping commercial pier, it was just after three P.M. local time. The elevated pier had a paved roadway with several cranes dotted along it and a fuel terminal tower at the south end. There was an empty barge tied up at the center of the pier. Just two yachts were tied up, both at the north end. Nine others—small coastal yachts—were anchored offshore, strung out to the south. Jeffords assumed that their owners were using free anchorage. A row of pallets with shining zinc ingots stood near the center of the pier, being readied for shipment.