Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

“I see it!” she said into her phone. “It’s right over my head!”

“How far above you?”

“Maybe twenty feet. It’s hard to say. I can’t tell how large it is.”

“We’ll take it down three meters.”

The tone of the turbines shifted, and the machine wafted gently toward Dagmar. The hydrocarbon smell grew stronger.

“Right,” Mordechai said. “We’ve got you. It was hard picking you out from the background. Stand by.”

The drone was, Dagmar guessed, about eight feet long. Despite the gusting of the monsoon, the machine hovered with perfect stillness in the air, its fly-by-wire computer adjusting to every shift of the wind.

“Hold out your hand,” Mordechai said. There was amusement in his voice.

Dagmar put out her right hand, her left hand still holding the phone to her ear. The package dropped and bounced off Dagmar’s forearm, then fell to the rooftop with a little slap.

“Have you got it?” Mordechai asked.

Dagmar knelt, swept her hand over the roof, and found the package. Her fingers closed around it.

“I have it,” she said.

She straightened and looked up in time to see the drone take off, its low roar increasing as it turned northeast and flew away with surprising rapidity. She watched it until it disappeared into the night.

“You want to be careful with that money,” Mordechai said. “What you had before was maybe not worth killing over, but what you’ve got now can get you killed very fast.”

Dagmar felt an invisible hand clamp over her throat. She managed to speak in a kind of whisper.

“How much is it?” she said.

“Two thousand dollars. That should pay for a boat to take you away. Now listen.”

He told her that she should split the package up once she got it to her room, carry it in different places so she wouldn’t be peeling bills off a huge roll and offering someone far too much temptation.

“Right,” she said. “No temptation. Got it.”

FROM: Joe Clever

Widjihartani’s got money for fuel. I don’t know how. Apparently

Charlie arranged it.

Widji’s on the way to Jakarta, and he’s got a satellite phone so

that he can be told where he needs to anchor. Or dock, as the case

may be.

Sea rescue is go!

FROM: Desi

Bayangan Prajurit is go!

FROM: LadyDayFan

Evacuation is go!

FROM: Corporal Carrot

Thunderbirds are go!

FROM: Corporal Carrot

Sorry about that last, by the way. My enthusiasm got the better

of me.

FROM: Hanseatic

That’s all right. I knew someone was going to say it.

Dagmar helped the Tippels move eight floors up from their looted hotel room. It took the elderly couple a long time to slog their way up the stairs-the elevators, when they were working, were now reserved for looters.

None of them had eaten in more than twenty-four hours, and Dagmar gave her guests the stale rolls she’d smuggled out of the breakfast room five days ago. She couldn’t do anything about the temperature: the power had been out for fifteen or sixteen hours, and the room was at least a hundred degrees-and since it was a modern hotel, all glass and steel, there was no way to open a window.

She had considered offering to take them with her when she made her exit, but the European Union was in the process of arranging an evacuation, and the Tippels had decided to wait. Dagmar asked how they planned to get past the looters.

“The looters have no reason to stop anyone from leaving,” Anna Tippel said.

What, Dagmar wondered, did reason have to do with anything?

Be in the northwest stairwell at 1600 hours. It was the stair farthest from the front doors, and one that the looters weren’t using: the Bayangan Prajurit didn’t want to risk a collision with whatever group was gutting the hotel.

Dagmar was ready a quarter of an hour early, sitting in the hot, stale air of the staircase and waiting for the sound of her rescuers. She had her satellite phone on her belt and her laptop in a rucksack-in view of the amount of cash she had on her person, she was no longer worried about someone killing her just for her computer. Her bag held toiletries and a change of clothing. She wore her panama hat on her gray hair and Reeboks on her feet and couldn’t tell if her current mood of buoyant optimism was a good thing or not.

Perhaps she was light-headed with lack of food.

Minutes crept by. Sweat dripped off Dagmar’s nose and splashed on the concrete stair landing. At 1600 hours she cracked open the steel door to see if the Bayangan Prajurit had used stealthy martial arts skills to creep up without her hearing them, but the street was empty except for a few nervous-looking civilians scuttling in the shadows. Hot air blasted through the open door, and she closed it quickly. Frustration clattered in her nerves.

In another ten minutes she was convinced that the whole rescue had been an absurd fantasy, some kind of wild delusion that had possessed LadyDayFan and all the others. A bunch of game hobbyists, planning a real-life rescue half a world away? Insane.

She paced back and forth along the landing, muscles trembling with anger. She checked her phone repeatedly to make sure no one had left her a message, either voice mail or email.

Through the steel door she heard the sound of a vehicle. Doors slammed. More doors slammed than would have been present on a single vehicle, so there was more than one.

Dagmar’s heart raced. She tipped back her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead with an already-soaked handkerchief.

Through the door, she heard Javanese voices.

They could be Bayangan Prajurit. Or looters. Or killers.

She looked at her phone again, saw that no message waited, then returned it to its holster.

The stairwell was more airless than ever. For some reason she thought of the skating rink in the shopping center down the street, trendy young people turning slow circles to pop tunes recorded before Dagmar was born.

Oh hell, she thought. Now or never.

She clutched the door’s locking bar with white-knuckled hands, then pushed the door open a foot or so. The hinges groaned, and Dagmar’s nerves shrieked in response.

As she stared out, she saw a group of Javans looking back at her. There were about ten of them altogether, and three small cars. The men didn’t wear uniforms like the Bersih Jantung Association-they were in ordinary street wear-but the oldest of them, a compact, fit-looking man of fifty or so, wore a loose white top and trousers, with a brilliantly colored wraparound knee-length kilt. All had weapons thrust into their belts or sashes, and each of the men wore a kopiah head wrap, blue with a white pattern, with two subdued little peaks on the top of the head, as if to cover a pair of small horns.

In the States, the kopiah would have made a particularly stylish do-rag.

One young woman was with them. She was still in her teens and was taller than the leader, wearing a wide-sleeved blouse in tropical colors and dark pantaloons. Metal-rimmed glasses were set on her squarish face. Her hair was pulled back in a little bun, and she had a long, sheathed knife thrust through her belt.

When she saw Dagmar, her mouth opened, revealing prominent teeth in a brilliant smile.

The older man looked at Dagmar.

“Dogma?” he said.

“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I’m Dagmar.”

“Please,” said the man, with a stiff little bow. He made a gesture toward a white sedan.

A young man in a wife-beater shirt jumped to open the rear door. Another opened the trunk and walked toward Dagmar with hands outstretched to take her bag.

The young woman approached first, stepping in front of the young man. She was still smiling.

“I’m Putri,” she said. “Please come with us.”