“Your company has been a pleasure, Mr. Fraser.”
The staff captain left me at the door of the apartment and hurried back downstairs, presumably to make his own panic-stricken contribution to the discussion of Ishak’s surrender terms.
The door from the hall into the living room was shut. If there were any officers inside I did not want to walk in on them unexpectedly. I knocked. There was no reply; but as I opened the door I had a shock.
When I had left, the sun roof over the terrace had been propped up fairly securely, and the screens were in place. Now there was no sun roof and the screens were flattened. One of the long chairs was lying across the balustrade. I ran through on to the terrace.
The shell had landed on the terrace of one of the unfinished apartments about thirty feet beyond the barrier wall with the spikes on it, and had dislodged a whole section of the balustrade there. The barrier wall was sagging like an unhinged door, and the blast had lifted the roof off the bathhouse.
As I saw this and started towards the bedroom shouting for Rosalie, I stumbled over one of the screens. Then, I saw her running towards me along the terrace and went to meet her.
For a minute or so she clung to me, sobbing. It was only relief, she explained after a while; relief that I was back. She had really not been very frightened when the shell burst; it had been so sudden. It was right what I had told her about shells and the noise they made. She had not heard this one coming.
All this time she had been holding the water scoop from the bathhouse in her hand. Now, she explained that the cistern had collapsed into the bathhouse when the roof had lifted, and that she had been trying to transfer what was left of the water into the ewer before it all leaked away.
I went along there with her and had a look at the damage. If the cistern had been full it would have crashed through to the floor. As it was, the pipes had held it up, though one of them had fractured and was gradually draining it. I got a jug from the kitchen and between us we managed to get most of the water into the ewer. While we were doing this, I told her about the surrender offer and what Colonel Aroff had said.
She took the news calmly.
“General Ishak is a swine,” was her comment.
“You know him?”
“Everyone knows about him. Mina has a very funny scandal. He sleeps with young men, you know. They say that even so he can do nothing. When you spoke to Major Suparto, did he say anything about us?”
“I only had a word or two with him.”
“Do you think he will try to help us?”
“If he can, he will.”
She fell silent. The cistern just above our heads was vibrating to the concussion of an eighty-eight which was slamming away somewhere along the Telegraf Road. I knew that she was listening to the noise carefully and beginning to wonder about the violence it represented. She had a standard of comparison now.
“I think it’s time we had a drink,” I said.
9
The first tank reached the Van Riebeeck Square just before sundown.
No great flights of military imagination had been needed to devise General Ishak’s plan of attack. The modern dock area south of the river had been quietly occupied by Government troops after the bombing of the road and rail bridges the previous afternoon. It was only the semi-circle of city north of the river, and centred on the Van Riebeeck Square, that he had to take by force. The rebel outer defence ring had been held together by three strong points: the canal network of the old port, the garrison barracks and a rubber factory in the suburbs. He had decided to make his break-through a little to the south of the barracks under a covering bombardment from the destroyer, then fan out right and left, rolling up the outer defences as he went. Finally, he would turn east again and send three armoured columns to converge on rebel headquarters. In view of the superior forces at his disposal, there was no likelihood of the plan failing. All that remained to be learned was how soon it would succeed.
The reduction of the outer defences had been all but completed by mid-day, though it had not been quite as easy as Ishak had expected. At several points, the defenders had been agile enough to slip through his cumbersome enveloping movements and re-establish themselves in new positions; but in the end, they were squeezed back, and all they succeeded in gaining for themselves by their efforts was a little time that they could not use. By three o’clock the turn to the east had been made, and the armoured columns were carving their way through towards the centre, the speed of their advance controlled only by that of the infantry mopping up behind them.
Not long after five, there was a tremendous burst of firing along the Telegraf Road; machine guns, mortars, a two-pounder; the noise was deafening. The sun was low now, and I could see smoke drifting up over the roofs less than a quarter of a mile away. Where the Telegraf Road entered the square there was a sudden flurry of activity. There were men running back out of the road and other men running forward into it. Then, one of the two-pounders out in the square began to fire. I heard Rosalie give a startled gasp and turned round. She was crouching behind the balustrade with her fingers in her ears. When I looked back across the square, there were no running men. One of them was lying face downwards in the centre of the road. The rest had taken cover against the walls of the building that jutted out on the corner. The two-pounder was firing rapidly, bouncing about in its shallow pit, sending up a cloud of yellow dust and adding to the racket of the machine guns; then, for an instant, there was a gap in the sound, and through it I heard the shrill squeaking of a tank’s tracks.
It nosed out of the end of the road, and seemed to hesitate there for a moment like a dull-witted bull blinking in the sunlight of the arena. There was a black stain down the side of it that looked as if it had been made by an oil bomb. The two-pounder fired twice and I saw a streak of silver appear on the turret. Every automatic weapon in the square seemed to be firing at that moment, and the sound of the tank’s own machine gun was lost in the din. But it was the tank’s gun that was effective. Dust spurted up all around the two-pounder, and suddenly it was no longer firing. I saw one of the gunners start to crawl out of the pit, and then a second burst finished him. Two more bursts wiped out the crews of two of the machine guns.
The tank lurched forward and then made a left turn. It controlled the square now, and was ready to demonstrate the fact to anyone foolish enough to dispute it. Apparently, nobody was. The crew of the other two- pounder out in the square were scrambling for cover among the trees, and the remaining machine-gunners who, a moment ago, had been blazing away so fiercely at the tank’s armour plating, were now crouching discreetly in their fox-holes. The tank began to move along the north side of the square searching for targets. From away across the square some optimist began dropping mortar bombs near it. And then, suddenly the situation changed. There was a noise like an enormous paper bag being exploded. Immediately on top of it there was a spine-jarring crack. At the same moment the tank swung round broadside on and stopped in a cloud of dust.
The commander of it knew his job. Within a few seconds, he was putting down smoke; though not before another bazooka bomb had sent fragments of the broken track screaming up through the trees overhead. As the smoke drifted back across the tank, I could see the turret traversing rapidly and knew that the commander had spotted the bazookas’ position. If the men handling them did not move quickly, they would become sitting targets as soon as the smoke thinned; but, like innocents, they were settling down expectantly to wait for another chance to knock the tank out.
Rosalie touched my arm. I looked round and saw that Roda had come into the living room. We went back quickly into the bedroom.
After a moment, Sanusi walked out on to the terrace and looked down on to the square. Roda was talking to someone in the next room, but it was impossible to hear the conversation. When the other person went, Roda joined Sanusi at the balustrade.
There was some sort of disagreement between the two men. Roda was trying to persuade Sanusi of something and Sanusi would appear to be listening; then he would turn away abruptly and Roda would have to go after him and begin all over again. Once Sanusi turned sharply and asked a question. Roda had his document case with him, and in reply he held it up and patted it.
Down in the square, the tank’s turret gun began firing suddenly and the building shook as something crashed into it. Rosalie looked at me inquiringly. I said I thought that the tank was firing at the place where the bazooka crews were dug in, and that the shot had probably ricocheted into the building down below. She nodded
