Eric Ambler: State of Siege

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 back 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.