Sanusi eyed him coldly. “We will consider all the possibilities, Ahmad. Your advice will be asked later. The second possibility is that we attempt to hold the centre of the city.” He paused and this time Roda was silent. “The third possibility is that we negotiate with them.” He looked at the lieutenant-colonel. “Well, Aroff? Your opinions?”
Aroff wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “As to the first possibility, Boeng, I agree with Ahmad.” He spoke huskily and kept clearing his throat. “As to the second, I have no objection to dying. As to the third, I do not understand how we can negotiate anything except surrender, and for us that only means dying in a different way. I say that it is better to die like men than to die shamefully in a prison yard.”
“Major Dahman?”
“I say the same, Boeng.”
“Ahmad?”
Roda stared round at them belligerently. “Are we whipped dogs? What is all this talk of dying?”
Aroff stiffened. “Can you give us guns, Ahmad?” he snapped. “Can you give us tanks? Can you, at this late hour, persuade the men who were to have fought with us to desert General Ishak? If so, we will talk of living.”
“We are not whipped dogs,” Sanusi interposed; “and neither are we children. What is your opinion, Ahmad?”
“We should negotiate, Boeng. Consider. We are in a strong position here. They have tanks, yes, and they have guns, but they cannot stand at a distance and kill us all with high explosive. At Cassino, a few Germans held an army corps. At Stalingrad, it was the Germans who broke, not the Russkis. Ah yes, I know it is different with us. We are cut off from our supplies. Our ammunition will not last for ever. But if they want to kill us they will have to assault us, and that will be an expensive operation for them. They will prefer to negotiate.”
“For our surrender, certainly they will negotiate,” retorted Aroff; “but what terms can we expect?”
“An amnesty within two years. The terms to be witnessed by a neutral observer, the Indonesian Ambassador perhaps.”
“They would be fools to agree.”
“Why? We have a following in the country. They will not make themselves secure by killing us. Besides, think of the good impression it would create abroad.”
Aroff turned protestingly to Sanusi. “ Boeng, this is madness.”
Sanusi started to say something and so did Roda. At the same instant, there was a quick rushing sound. Then, the floor jumped, a blast wave that felt like a sandbag clouted me in the chest and my head jarred to the whiplash violence of exploding T.N.T.
For a second I stood there, stupidly staring at the other men in the room who were staring stupidly at me. Then, I turned and blundered out on to the terrace. The shell had burst against a window embrasure on the floor below, and fumes and smoke were pouring up over the balustrade. As I began to cough, the staff captain pushed past me with an angry exclamation that I was too deafened to hear, and went to look down over the balustrade. Then, the fumes got him, too, and he turned away. I looked back into the room. Roda was holding the back of his hand against his forehead as if he were dazed. Sanusi was shouting something at him. I stumbled along the terrace to the bedroom.
Rosalie was sitting on my bed with her hands over her face, trembling violently. I was not feeling too good myself. If that was a sample of the shooting we could expect from the naval gunners, we were not going to last very long.
I put my arms round her and she looked up at me. The whistle of the second shell rose to a climax and we both ducked involuntarily. The burst that followed made a glass on the table tinkle against the water bottle standing beside it, but that was all. It was about three hundred yards over.
I produced the old platitude: “If you can hear it coming it’s going to miss you.”
It has never yet comforted anyone who was badly frightened, and it did not comfort her. The destroyer was firing its four guns singly, so that the bombardment was reasonably steady, but I soon realised that the first hit had been a fluke. When, after twenty minutes, the first burst of firing ceased, they had not succeeded in dropping another shell within fifty yards of the Air House. Perhaps they were not trying for it. For Rosalie, however, every round was aimed, not merely at the building we were in, but at our room in it. I moved one of the beds around so as to give us some protection from a burst on the terrace, and we lay down on the floor behind it, but I don’t think she felt any more protected.
When the lull came, however, I made her go out on to the terrace with me to see what damage had been done. There were some craters in the square, and a small building on the far side was on fire; but that was about all that was visible. In fact, the closely built-up area behind us had taken the brunt of the shelling; but there was no point in telling her that. The damage to our own building was also out of sight. As she had clearly expected to find the entire square in ruins, all this produced a very satisfactory sense of anti-climax. We kept to the bathouse end of the terrace, and saw nothing of the men in the living room. I guessed that the council of war had been resumed on the other side of the building. Rosalie had heard something of what had been said while I was there, and now I told her the rest. The possibility of negotiation cheered her up considerably. I did not say what I thought of it. When we went back into the bedroom, I was able to persuade her to eat some fruit and begin another game of gin.
It was just after three when the staff captain came for me again.
Since two, the sounds of street-fighting had steadily been getting nearer, and we had had another twenty- minute bombardment from the destroyer. This had been both worse and better than the first; worse, because the gunners had dropped the range slightly and managed to put every shell into or around the square itself; better, because Rosalie, having decided that her earlier fears had been quite groundless, proposed that we should continue our game of gin on the floor. Admittedly, it was my hands that shook now, not hers, and she who was concerned on my account when a near miss made me fumble and scatter my cards; but on the whole it was an improvement on the earlier situation.
The staff captain was more polite this time. It was Colonel Roda who wished to see me, he explained; but why, he did not know. The radio in the next room was silent, and, with a sinking heart, I wondered if the generator had broken down again. The staff captain shrugged when I suggested this; he knew nothing. I told Rosalie that if I were going to be away for any length of time, I would try to get a message to her, and then went off with him.
He led me to an office on the third floor at the back of the building. The shell that had burst on the fifth floor had gutted three offices and brought down part of the wall along the corridor, but there had been no casualties, and no structural damage of any consequence. It had short-circuited the lights, however, and Alwi was along there trying to rectify the trouble. I asked him about the generator, but he said that it was running perfectly. By the time I reached Colonel Roda’s office, I was both puzzled and worried.
The office into which the staff captain ushered me had the look of a board room after a directors’ meeting. The air was full of tobacco smoke, and there was a litter of dirty coffee cups and crumpled scribbling paper. There had been seven men in there, but now there were only two: Roda and Aroff. The latter had cleaned himself up and wore a black cap in place of the steel helmet; but he looked even wearier than before. Roda’s face was the colour of putty. It did not seem to have been a very successful meeting.
They were sitting at one end of the table reading through a document and comparing it with what was evidently the draft from which it had been typed. To my surprise, Roda waved me to a chair. I sat down as far away from them as possible and waited. When they had finished, Roda looked at Aroff inquiringly. Aroff nodded, but with the air of a man agreeing to something against his better judgment. Roda pursed his lips and turned to me.
“Mr. Fraser, we have sent for you because we believe that you may be willing to assist us.”
“Oh yes?”
“The General and I were much impressed by your co-operation in the matter of the generator. Under circumstances of the greatest difficulty, without proper assistance or equipment, you employed your skill and knowledge to such good effect that the enemy’s attempts to silence Radio Sunda were totally defeated.” He smiled.
This was fantastic. For one wild moment I thought that he was about to pin a decoration on me: the Order of Boeng Sanusi (2nd Class) perhaps. I smiled back guardedly. Aroff, I noticed, was absently studying his fingernails, as if none of what was being said were any business of his.
“That being so,” Roda continued amiably, “we do not think it unreasonable to assume that, as a British friend of Sunda, you are sympathetic to the policy and aspirations of the National Freedom Party and its leader.”
I could have thought of several brief replies to that, but by now I was curious to know what he wanted.
