by Eric Ambler
“Shirts?” I stared at him stupidly.
“Two will be enough. You have clean ones?”
“Yes, I have.” I also had a terrible desire to laugh.
“Then perhaps you will get them.”
“Now?”
“At once, please.”
I turned and went back into the bedroom. In there, I tried switching on the light, but the power was off. Rosalie watched me incredulously, while I struck a match and began fumbling in the drawers. I knew that I had only one clean shirt left. This round would have to be on Jebb. I found the right drawer eventually, picked out two of the oldest shirts there, and took them out on to the terrace. Roda nodded approval.
“I’m afraid they will be a bit large for you, Colonel.”
“That is unimportant.” He folded them carefully and put them in his document case. “They are light-coloured but not…”
“Colonel!” It was Sanusi’s voice.
Roda turned inquiringly.
Sanusi had moved away from the balustrade and was standing in the centre of the terrace. I thought I saw a pistol in his hand, but it was too dark to see properly. At the same moment, there were footsteps in the living room, and Aroff and Major Dahman came out on to the terrace.
“Boeng,” Aroff began, “you sent for us?”
“Yes,” said Sanusi; and then he fired.
The first bullet hit Roda in the stomach. For a second, he stood quite still; then he dropped the document case and took a step forward. The second bullet hit him in the right shoulder and he twisted forward on to his knees. He began to say something, but Sanusi paid no attention to him.
To Aroff and Dahman, he said: “I sent for you to witness an execution.” Then, he went up to Roda and shot him again in the back of the head.
Roda slid forward on to his face.
Aroff and Dahman did not move as Sanusi turned towards them. Across the square, one of the tanks began firing its turret gun.
“What was the offence, Boeng? ” Aroff said.
“He was attempting to desert. You will find the evidence in there.” He shone a flashlight on to the document case. “Open it.”
Aroff walked over to the document case and opened it up. The shirts fell out. He looked up at me.
“Yes, they were from the Englishman,” said Sanusi. “I leave that matter to you. All officers of the defence force must be informed of the execution and the reason. The body should be put where they can see it. For the public I shall issue a simple statement informing them that, in view of the pressure of Colonel Roda’s military duties, I have taken over the Secretaryship of the Party for the time being. There must be no suggestion at this moment of a division in our ranks. I also have to consider world opinion. Firmness in such matters is not always understood.”
He made these announcements with the cool authority of a leader secure in the possession of great power and the habit of using it with wisdom and restraint. He seemed totally unaware of their absurd incongruity. I saw Aroff look at him sharply.
“We have yet to hear from Djakarta,” Sanusi added; “I think the time has come for me to speak to President Soekarno personally.” With a nod to Aroff, he turned and walked away through the living room.
Aroff looked at Dahman, who shrugged slightly, and then at me. “What happened, Mr. Fraser?”
I told him. He made no comment. When I had finished he looked at Dahman.
“Well, Major, what do you think?” He nodded towards Roda’s body. “Perhaps he was right. Of two men, one might be lucky.”
Dahman smiled grimly. “And the other? I have seen Ishak’s way of putting a renegade to death. I would prefer to shoot myself now rather than risk that.”
“Are you a coward, Dahman?”
“About some things, Colonel.”
“So am I.” Aroff handed the shirts to me. “You see, Mr. Fraser? We have no use for them either.” A gun flash lit up his face for an instant as he looked out across the square. “They will have their artillery up soon,” he remarked; “then, there will be no more doubts to trouble us.”
He turned to leave but at the living-room window he paused and looked back. “Mr. Fraser, if Roda had anything else belonging to you, something that you may need, you should take it at once.”
I stood there staring after him uncertainly as he went through into the corridor. Then, Rosalie was at my elbow.
“Steven! He means the pistol.”
“Are you sure?” I was still trying not to be sick.
“Yes. He means you to take the pistol.”
“All right.”
The holster was near enough to the side for me to get the pistol out of it without getting blood on my hands, but the spare magazines were on the other side of the belt, and I knew that I would have to turn the body over to get at them. There was a sound of footsteps in the corridor. We hurried back to the bedroom and I slipped the pistol into a drawer with the shirts on top of it.
The guards had a simple way of moving the body. They rolled it on to a mat that they had taken out of the living room and dragged it away. As they went, they made jokes about Roda’s plumpness. They seemed in excellent spirits. In one respect, at least, Sanusi’s officers had been successful; they had managed to conceal the truth about their predicament from the unfortunate rank and file.
When they had gone, I got a flashlight out of my suitcase and examined the pistol. It had a full magazine in it and there was a round in the breech. Rosalie watched intently, and when I had unloaded it to make sure that I knew how it worked, she asked if she might handle it.
The possession of the pistol obviously pleased her a great deal more than it pleased me. I remembered how, when I had wakened her the first night, thinking that there were thieves getting into the apartment, her first thought had been to ask if I had a revolver.
When I had shown her how to load and fire it and had explained the safety catch, I thought that I had better try to modify her enthusiasm for the thing.
“Pistols are not really very much use except for frightening people,” I said.
“Colonel Roda would not agree with you.”
“The General was six feet away and Roda wasn’t expecting it. I’ve seen people miss a target in broad daylight with a pistol at that range.”
“But if anyone attacks us, we can kill him.”
“The fact that you have a pistol can be more dangerous than being unarmed. A soldier might not kill an unarmed civilian, but if he sees someone facing him with a gun in his hand, he may shoot rather than take a chance.”
“I think it is better to have it.”
“As long as we don’t have to use it, it’s fine.”
“You had a revolver.”
“There was a time up in Tangga when there were a lot of snakes about, and sometimes they got into our rooms. So I had a revolver. But the only time I tried to use it I missed, and after that I kept a shot-gun. I left that behind.”
“Then the pistol is no good?” She sounded bitterly disappointed.
“It’s an excellent pistol, and, as you say, it’s better to have it than not. But what we need at this moment is somewhere to go when the fighting starts.”
“When it starts? What is all that going on over there?”
There was, indeed, a fierce machine-gun and mortar battle going on around the College of Agriculture on the far side of the square. Some of Sanusi’s troops had dug themselves in in the College grounds, and now the Government infantry were having to ferret them out.
“When it starts here, I mean. It’s not going to be easy for them to take this building. They’ll have to do it floor by floor. I don’t want to be here when they start throwing grenades about.”
“But where is there to go?”
“The roof would be safer. It’s not so enclosed. I want to try and find the way up there. Will you come with me or would you sooner stay here?”
“I will come with you.”
I hung the pistol by its trigger guard on a nail at the bac
k of the cupboard, and we went out on to the terrace.
A car outside the big building at the end of the Telegraf Road was on fire, and the immobilised tank was using armour-piercing shot to break up a sandbagged defence position in one of the corner shops. The smoke and the glare and the noise made it all seem like a sequence from a somewhat improbable war film. The glare, however, was useful.
We went along the terrace past the bathhouse to the barrier wall which had been dislocated by the shell burst. There was a gap between the wall and the balustrade, and it was not too difficult to squeeze through. Beyond it we had to walk carefully. This terrace did not broaden out as Jebb’s did, and the rubble was piled up against the balustrade. Farther along, where the balustrade had broken away and fallen down into the roadway, it was impassable; but by going through what should have been the bed and living rooms, it was possible to get round on to the terrace again beyond the obstruction. No more barrier walls had yet been erected, and from there on it was easy. I knew that somewhere on that floor there must be a stairway up to the roof. What I had wanted to find was a way of getting to it without being seen or having to pass the sentry stationed outside the apartment. By going along the terraces of the unfinished apartments for most of the way, it was possible to reach the stairway without using any of the passage visible to the sentry.
The roof was quite flat with an eighteen-inch parapet running round it. At intervals along the parapet concrete blocks had been let in to hold the guy wires for the radio masts. There were the usual water tanks and ventilating shafts.
The sounds of the battle for the College of Agriculture had died down, and we had just started to walk over to the parapet, when there was a bright flash from somewhere way across the square, a stab of pain in my ears and the whole building jumped as if it had been dynamited. For one absurd instant, I even thought that it had. Then there was another flash, and the same thing happened again. General Ishak had brought his guns into action.
We hurried down the stairs and back to the apartment. There was no point in hurrying: I suppose that it was just a panic desire to be in familiar surroundings. As we went along one of the terraces, I could see that there were two more tanks in the square now, and that they were moving round the perimeter into positions from which they could give covering fire to the assault troops. The eighty-eights were firing at twenty-second intervals and with shattering effect. At that range they could not miss. When the first rounds had landed there had been shouts and screams from below. Now, those had stopped. After about five minutes the guns changed their targets. One of them began to take pot shots at the first-floor windows. The others started to pound the Ministry of Public Health.
There was nobody in the apartment when we returned, but I guessed that it would not be long before a general movement away from the lower floors began. I told Rosalie to put anything of special value that she had there into her handbag. My money and air ticket, and the few personal papers that I had, I stuffed into my pockets. Then, I took the pistol and a bottle of water and hid them along the terrace where they could be picked up easily when we moved out.
The din was appalling now and the whole place shook continually. Rosalie seemed more bewildered by the noise than frightened. When she had collected what she wanted to take with her and I gave her a glass of whisky, it was my hand that was shaking. I had made up my mind that the moment to move would be when the assault began. From then on, there would be little chance of anyone caring where we were; it would be everyone for himself. The trouble with me was that I could no longer see what was going on. Once or twice, a machine gun in the square had sprayed the windows of the floor below with bullets, and I knew that if I tried looking over the balustrade now I should almost certainly be seen and draw fire. So I had to sit there drinking whisky, listening and trying to imagine what was happening.
At about seven thirty there was a sudden lull, and from down in the square there came a series of small plopping bangs that sounded as if someone were letting off fireworks. A moment or two later, there was a lot of confused shouting from the floor below. I put my glass down and went out on to the terrace. As I did so, there were some more bangs. The Ministry next door was burning and the smoke from it was drifting over to mingle with the stink of shell fumes rising from below. My eyes were smarting anyway. Then, I became aware of another smell and a sudden pain between the eyes. I turned quickly and went back into the room.
“We’re going now,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Tear gas. If we get too much of it we shan’t be able to see to get up to the roof.”
As we scrambled through the gap on to the next terrace, our eyes began to stream, but I managed to find the bottle of water and the pistol, and once we were past the rubble we did not have to be so careful about looking where we were going.
I did not have to see now to know what was happening below. The bigger guns were silent, but there was incessant automatic fire and the frame of the building was transmitting an intermittent thudding that was certainly from bursting grenades. There were other sounds, too; the hoarse, inhuman screams and yells that come from men’s throats when they are killing at close quarters.
The moment the tear gas had gone in and the defenders were blinded by it, a party of assault troops in respirators had rushed the Air Terminal. Now, with grenades, machine pistols and parangs, they were clearing the ground floor and basements. Other parties would be storming the rear of the building. The business of clearing the upper floors would soon follow. First, more tear gas; then, up the stairs. “Quick as lightning. Every room. First a grenade, and then yourself. Doesn’t matter what’s there. Doesn’t matter who’s there. Then, comb it out with your machine pistol.”
I had already decided where we would go on the roof. There was no cover worth speaking of, and if the defence did last long enough to make a stand there, all we could do would be to lie flat on our faces and hope for the best. The important thing for us was to stay close to the apartment. If Suparto had remembered his promise to warn the assault troops of our presence, we wanted to be there when they arrived. The place I had chosen, therefore, was the section of parapet immediately above the apartment terrace.
We soon found it. The anti-aircraft machine gun which had showered the terrace with cartridge cases had been mounted there, and that part of the roof was strewn with empties. There was a good deal of tear gas about, but most of it seemed to be coming up from below through the ventilators, and when we got to windward of them the air was better. By leaning forward, I could see the terrace below. There was nobody there, and, as far as I could tell, the apartment was still empty. We sat down beside the parapet to dab our eyes and blow our noses and try not to listen to the massacre going on beneath us.
We had been there about twenty minutes when there was a sound of men blundering through the living room immediately below. A moment later Sanusi and Major Dahman came out on to the terrace, coughing and gasping for breath. I could hear others moaning and retching and stumbling about behind them.
It was Dahman who managed to find his voice first.
“Not here, Boeng,” he said hoarsely.
“Where is Aroff?”
“Aroff is dead, Boeng. You saw him.”
“Yes. I shall stay here.”
“They will take you alive.”
“No, they will not do that.”
There was a commotion from the passage beyond. A man was shouting something about surrender.
“You are in command, Dahman.”
“I will return for you if I can, Boeng. But we cannot die like women begging for mercy. We must counter-attack.”
He started to cough again as he went back through the living room, but a moment later I heard him gasping out an order about assembling on the stairs. I leaned forward cautiously and looked down on to the terrace.
Sanusi was walking slowly towards the balustrade. He had a machine pistol in his hand. At the end of the terrace he stopped and looked round, dra
wing deep breaths and wiping his face with the back of his hand. Then, he knelt down and, putting the gun beside him on the ground, began to say his prayers.
He went through the Rakats; then, he began to intone a passage from the Koran.
“But what shall teach thee what the night-comer is? It is the star of piercing radiance. Truly every soul has a guardian over it. Let man then reflect out of what he was created. He was created of the poured-forth germs which issue from between the loins and breastbones. Well able truly is Allah, the all-seeing, the all-knowing, the all-merciful, to restore him to life, on the day when all secrets shall be searched out, and he shall have no other might or helper.”
I looked down at Rosalie. She took my hand and pressed it against her face.
He was still kneeling there when there was a series of violent explosions that felt as if they were coming from right underneath us, and somewhere not far away a man began screaming. Then, the screaming was drowned by a blast of automatic fire as the assaulting troops reached the head of the staircase.
I saw Sanusi grab the machine pistol, get to his feet and start towards the window. At the same moment a grenade burst in the living room.
The blast flung him across the terrace like an empty sack, but he was on his feet in an instant, and as he rose he pressed the trigger of the machine pistol. Someone inside was firing back, and for a few seconds the air was torn to pieces. I saw the grenade land on the terrace outside the bedroom windows just in time to drop behind the parapet. Then, there was an ear-splitting concussion, another burst of automatic fire and silence. When I dared to look down again, three men in steel helmets were walking out slowly on to the terrace.
Two of them looked round warily and then began to move along towards the bathhouse, their arms at the ready. The third man went over to Sanusi’s body and shone a flashlight on it. Then, he turned and looked at the bedroom window.
“Mr. Fraser,” he called.
“We’re up here, Major,” I said.
The moon had risen. Down in the square, the dead were still being piled into trucks and driven away, so that, in the morning, when the Minister of Public Enlightenment issued a statement minimising the importance of the whole affair, no sceptical foreign newspapermen would be able to refute his casualty figures. The few surviving wounded were already in sick quarters at the garrison barracks, and therefore inaccessible. The disabled tank had been hauled on to a transporter and removed. The other tanks had retired together with the self-propelled eighty-eights. The square was being patrolled by two small armoured cars. Now and again there would be a faint rattle of fire from the outskirts of the city as stragglers or would-be escapers were rounded up and killed. The building next door had nearly burned itself out.
