by Eric Ambler
We had come to a short flight of steel stairs leading down to the sub-basement. There were lights on below and at the foot of the stairs there was a gleam of black, oily water. There were sounds of splashing. The bottom two stairs were under the water. Suparto went down as far as he could without getting his feet wet and called sharply.
There was more splashing and then two bedraggled young men waded to the foot of the stairs.
“What progress?” Suparto asked curtly.
One of them shrugged. “The water is no longer coming in, but we cannot make the drain work.”
“The tuan here is an engineer from Tangga. He understands these matters. You will take orders from him now. Mr. Fraser, these men are Engineer Osman and Engineer Alwi.”
I nodded to them and made my way down to the water level. From there I could see the whole area of the room. It was about thirty feet by twenty. The generating set and two five-hundred-gallon fuel tanks occupied most of the space. The diesel part of the set stood clear of the water but the generator itself was half-submerged. To one side was a slate switchboard.
I looked at Osman. “You say that there is a drain that won’t work.”
“Yes, tuan. We have put rods down it, but it will not work.”
I looked at Suparto. “How close did the bomb fall?”
“In the roadway at the side. You wish to see the crater?”
“No. But what happened?”
“The crater filled up with water from the broken pipe before a man who knew how to turn the water off could be found. Then it was found that the water was coming in here.”
“Where did it come in? A crack in the floor? Down the walls? Where?”
“Up through the drain, tuan.” This was Engineer Alwi, wide-eyed with wonder. “It bubbled up through the drain. I saw it.”
“Then what the Hell’s the good of poking about trying to get it to run back down the drain?” I demanded. “Don’t you see what happened? The bomb collapsed the drain conduit as well and the water from the crater took that way out. We must be below the crater here. Naturally the water won’t run back uphill. We’ll have to pump it out.”
“What do you need, Mr. Fraser?” This was Suparto.
“A powerful rotary pump. A fire-truck would do the job, or maybe there’s a sewage-disposal unit. Any pump that will lift water twenty feet at a reasonable speed. There’s nothing to be done until we get it.”
But Suparto was already hurrying up the stairs. Osman and Alwi stood there in the water looking at me sheepishly.
“Where does the exhaust from the diesel go?” I asked.
“There is a pipe, tuan,” said Osman. “It comes out at the back of the building.”
“There must be a ventilator shaft. Where is it?”
“There in the corner, tuan.”
“Where does that come out?”
“I don’t know, tuan.” He wrung his hands. “How should I know?”
“All right, Osman. Don’t worry. Just go upstairs and see if you can follow it. It looks as if it may come out where we can reach it from the outside. You understand? Then, when the fire-truck comes, we can run the hose down through the ventilating shaft and reach the water that way. It will be quicker.”
“Yes, tuan.” He was smiling eagerly as he clambered out of the water and squelched away up the stairs.
I was left with Alwi. He was waiting attentively for his orders. It occurred to me suddenly that all I had to do was to invent some task for him that would take him out of sight for a few minutes, to be free to walk out of the building. It was unlikely that anyone would try to stop me. If anyone did, I could say that I had gone to inspect the ventilator. If all went well, I could be at the British Consulate in ten minutes. True, my passport was at the police department awaiting an exit permit; but providing that I was not stopped by a patrol, that would not matter. I would be safe.
When the day-dream was over, I sat down on the stairs and wondered idly if Suparto were counting on my reluctance to abandon Rosalie to keep me from escaping, or whether he had preferred to rely upon more direct methods.
“Alwi,” I said, “a guard should have been posted at the top of the stairs to prevent unauthorised persons interfering with our work. Go and see if he is there.”
He looked a bit mystified, but he went readily enough. I lit my last cigarette. He was back before I had taken two puffs.
“The guard is there in position, tuan.”
Suparto was, after all, a realist.
“Very well,” I said. “Now tell me. Was the generator set running when the water came in?”
“Yes, tuan. There was a loss of power. My colleague, Osman, came down and found the water. The motor stopped running as he came in.”
“Did any fuses blow?”
“We have not looked, tuan.”
I lowered myself into the water and waded over to the switchboard. The generator set itself had been made by the Krupp engine works at Kiel, but the board was Japanese. There was a “no-volts” circuit-breaker on it and that had tripped. After a bit, I discovered that the motor control box was linked to the circuit-breaker. It seemed likely that the motor was undamaged and that it had cut out automatically as a result of the electrical failure. No fuses had blown. It was possible, I decided, that the generator windings had not burnt out and that the loss of power had been due simply to the damp insulation; but it would be a long time before I knew for certain one way or the other. There was one other hope, a faint one.
“Can’t you adapt the equipment to use the mains power?”
Alwi looked at me reproachfully. “But that is direct current, tuan. One hundred and thirty volts.”
So that was that.
It was eleven thirty then. Soon, Osman came to report that he had found the ventilator shaft opening and that it was near enough to the ground to serve as a duct for the hose pipe. There was an extractor fan fitted to the basement end of the shaft. So that there should be no delay when the pump arrived, I told them to get some tools and remove the fan. When that was done, we sat on the stairs and waited.
Just before noon there was another air raid. This time the target seemed to be on the outskirts of the city. Presumably, the fact that the radio station was no longer on the air had satisfied them. Down in the subbasement we could feel the concussion of the bombs. The lights flickered once, and Alwi said that it must be the power station that was being attacked; but, to my relief, the lights stayed on. About ten minutes later, Suparto arrived, accompanied by a terrified fireman wearing a steel helmet, and reported that a motor pump was outside.
I sent Osman up to show them the ventilator shaft. At twelve thirty they started to pump. There was a delay when Suparto noticed that the water was being allowed to run back into the bomb crater; but after another hose had been fitted to carry the water from the pump to a drain farther along the road, the work was uninterrupted. By one fifteen, the water in the basement had sunk to the level of the intake hose nozzle, and further pumping was impossible. There was still an inch or so of water on the floor, but it was well clear of the generator housing and could be dealt with later.
Suparto was looking pleased. “You must admit, Mr. Fraser,” he said sportively, “that the General’s methods sometimes produce results.”
“What results?”
“You have made progress.”
“We haven’t even started yet.”
I called for a hand lamp and made a careful inspection of the generator. This told me nothing that I did not know already. The thing was designed to deliver alternating current at five hundred volts, and the windings were soaking wet. I also knew there was only one course open to me; that was to dismantle the thing, dry the windings out as best I could, reassemble it and hope to God it worked.
Suparto was standing over me, watching expectantly. To get rid of him I explained that I should want heating appliances of some sort, preferably blow lamps, a couple of electric fans, some thin sheet iron and a block and tackle. When he had
gone to give the necessary orders, I began, with Osman and Alwi, the dismantling process.
In one of the ceiling joists there was a ring bolt that had obviously been put there to lower the generator into place when it had been originally installed. I managed, eventually, to get a rope sling round the armature; then, by using the block and tackle rigged to the ring bolt above, I was able to sway the armature clear of the housing. But the job took well over an hour. The coupling to the generator had proved all but inaccessible, and we had had much more dismantling to do than I had anticipated. We had, moreover, removed the fan from the ventilator shaft to get the hose through, and the heat down there became overpowering. By the time we were ready to start drying out, we were too exhausted to go on without a rest.
Suparto had food brought to us- nassi goreng and fruit-and we squatted on the stairs while we ate. I got some cigarettes, too. Suparto watched us keenly, like a trainer; with us but not of us.
“What about Miss Linden?” I asked him. “Has she had any food?”
“I will see that she gets some.”
“And drinking-water, and cigarettes?”
“Very well.” He looked at his watch. “It is three hours to sundown, Mr. Fraser. It will be necessary soon for me to report to the General.”
“I can’t tell you a thing. I shan’t know whether it’s going to work until we’re able to try it.”
“He has called a press conference at the Presidential Palace for six. There, he will distribute copies of the proclamation; also the radio address he expects to deliver tonight. If the radio is not working he will be exposed to serious humiliation.”
There were a number of replies I should have liked to have made to that; but Osman and Alwi were listening. They were looking worried, too.
“Well, we’d better get on with it,” I said.
My plan for drying the windings was simple; it had to be. What I did was to bend the sheet metal into two big tubes, wrapping wire round each one to hold it together. Then I kept the sides of the tubes heated by the blow lamps and blew air through them with the fans. They were, in effect, like two large hair-driers. One I set up to blow into the field windings inside the housing. The other I directed at the armature suspended in its sling from the ceiling. Neither of them was very efficient, as a lot of the heat was wasted; but I could think of no better way of doing the job.
There were two blow lamps to each tube, and, once their most effective positions had been determined, all we had to do was to keep them going. The atmosphere rapidly became stifling, but we had time to replace the ventilator fan now, and when that was set going, things improved. After a while, I momentarily switched off the fan blowing on to the armature to feel if the ropes round it were getting too hot, and was rewarded by the sight of a whiff of steam rising from the windings.
At about four o’clock there was another air raid, and Suparto went up to find out what was happening. To us, it sounded as if the planes had returned to the same target as before, and I was terrified lest they should succeed in cutting off the power supply to the fans; but this time the lights did not even flicker. Osman and Alwi said, gleefully, that it was because the enemy were such timid pilots, but I was not so sure. Isolated, easy to identify and, doubtless, undefended, the power station was a much simpler target than the Air House. If they had really been after the power station, I thought, even those pilots would have been able to hit it. When Suparto returned he was blandly uncommunicative; however, I was beginning to know him, and I thought I detected a hint of satisfaction in his manner. For him, at any rate, things might be going according to plan.
At five o’clock we turned off the fans and the blow lamps and began the task of reassembling. The windings felt dry outside, but that meant little. Even if there were nothing else wrong with them, there might still be enough damp inside to break down the insulation. I should have liked to cook them longer, but Suparto would not allow it. I tried to persuade him that it was better to have a generator that did work at seven rather than one that did not work at six; but he merely shrugged.
I could see why, too. From his point of view, it did not matter whether the generator worked or not; all that mattered was that the verbose, ridiculous but dangerous Sanusi should continue to trust him until it was too late to withdraw from the trap that had been so carefully set. Sanusi had ordered me to repair the generator by sundown. For my sake, Suparto hoped that I would succeed in doing so; but if I failed, he had no intention of sharing the blame with me. As a loyal servant of the Nasjah Government, a patriotic agent provocateur, his responsibility was to the other General, the one he had been with in the garden of the New Harmony Club, the General who was now on his way to close the jaws of the trap, and liquidate Sanusi and his National Freedom Party once and for all.
The reassembly went far too well for my liking. I wanted difficulties and delays; I wanted to postpone the moment when the whole thing would be started up and I should know for certain that I had failed. But Osman and Alwi worked with feverish efficiency. Every part fitted neatly into place first time; every nut went on to every bolt as if it had been machined by an instrument-maker; Osman even began to sing as he worked. When I told him to stop it, he giggled happily.
At a little after five thirty, we were ready to test. I held the no-volts circuit-breaker trip plate into position, closed the circuit and told Osman to start up.
The diesel fired within about ten seconds. When it was up to speed, I let the trip plate go. It dropped instantly, the breaker flew out with a bang and the diesel chuffed to a standstill.
There was a horrified silence. I thought that Osman was going to burst into tears. Suparto raised his eyebrows.
“Well, Mr. Fraser?”
I took no notice of him. I was not so worried now; I knew that there was power there, because I had seen the meters kick. There just had not been enough to hold the circuit-breaker in.
I nodded to Osman. “Start up again.”
When it started this time I kept my finger on the trip plate and watched the meters. The voltage was all over the place and I guessed that there was still a lot of damp in the windings; but the probability now was that the heat of the diesel and the heat generated in the windings themselves would gradually complete the drying-out process; either that, or the insulation would break down disastrously. I kept the trip plate up. After about twenty minutes’ running the voltage had steadied appreciably. I gave it another five minutes and then tried releasing the plate. It held.
Osman grinned.
“Is it all right?” Suparto asked.
“I think it may be. It’s not delivering anything like full power yet, but it’ll improve, I think.”
“The General will be pleased. I congratulate you, Mr. Fraser.”
“The rest of this water ought to be mopped up. The drier the air in here, the better.”
“That shall be attended to.” He glanced at Osman and Alwi. “One of you had better stay here to supervise the work. I will send men down.”
“I will stay,” said Osman. “Alwi should test the transmitter.”
I was covered in grease and filth from head to foot, my shoes were full of water, my muscles ached and my legs were trembling. Suddenly, I felt so tired that I had to go over to the stairs and sit down.
Suparto followed me. “Are you sick, Mr. Fraser?”
“No, just tired. I didn’t have much sleep last night, you may remember.”
“But not too tired to report to the General, I hope?”
“Can’t you report to him?”
“It will be better for you and for the woman if you speak to him yourself.”
“All right.”
Alwi had already gone ahead. Suparto and I mounted the stairs slowly. When we reached the guard on the stairs, Suparto told him to report back to his N.C.O. The man followed us up to the ground floor, where Suparto made arrangements for the sub-basement to be cleaned up. The lift was working again now. It was the kind you operated yourself. When we were insi
de and the gates were closed, I asked Suparto about the air raids we had heard below.
“Were they trying for the power station?”
“No. The road and rail bridges over the river east of the city.”
“Did they destroy them?”
“They damaged them badly enough.”
“Badly enough for what?”
“Enough to prevent a retreat to the hills before the city is completely surrounded.”
“Doesn’t he realise that?”
Suparto pressed the button for the fifth floor and the lift started up.
“The General and Colonel Roda place a more optimistic interpretation on the attacks. They see them as a move to delay the Government troops who have mutinied, and who are on their way to join us here in the city.”
“That interpretation having been suggested by you, I take it?” When he said nothing, I asked: “Have any Government troops, in fact, mutinied?”
“The loyalty of one infantry unit was considered doubtful. It was disarmed yesterday.”
The lift stopped and we got out.
The General was preparing to leave for the foreign press conference at the Presidential Palace, and I had to wait in the outer office. While I was there, a station monitor speaker in the corner began to emit a frying sound and then the xylophone signal came on. Alwi had got the transmitter working again.
When the General appeared at the door of his office, I saw why I had been kept waiting. He had changed into a clean uniform and was wearing a tie. Roda and Suparto followed him out.
I stood up and the General came over to me. He nodded graciously; his thoughts were already in the Presidential Palace.
“Major Suparto has told me of your hard work,” he said. He glanced at the monitor speaker. “We can hear for ourselves that it has been successful, eh, Colonel?”
“As we expected, the tuan was too modest about his qualifications.” Roda grinned.
I ignored him. “I am glad to have been of service, General.”
“Sunda has need of good engineers,” he replied; “especially those of proved loyalty. It is my intention to set up intensive technical training schemes for the youth of our country. For a man like you, Mr. Fraser, there might be exceptional opportunities for advancement here.”
