State of Siege Read Online Free PDF Page A

suitcase aboard and slung the outgoing mail in after it. My successor and one or two particular friends had come out to the airstrip to see me off, so there was more nonsense to be talked and handshaking to be done before I could get aboard myself.
    Roy Jebb was the pilot. The first officer was a Sundanese named Abdul. They never carried a full crew on those trips, so, as I was the only passenger, I sat in the radio operator’s seat just behind them. The plane had been standing in the sun for an hour and was suffocatingly hot inside; but I was so glad to be going that I did not even think to take my jacket off. I could see the men who had been seeing me off walking back to where the jeeps were standing, and wondered vaguely if I would ever see any of them again. Then the sweat began to trickle into my eyes and Jebb called to me to fasten my seat belt.
    Two minutes later we were airborne.

2
    T he dark green mass of the jungle moved away beneath us and we began to follow the coast line with its ragged fringe of islands and turquoise-coloured shoal water.
    Jebb glanced over his shoulder at me. He was lean, rangy and very Australian.
    “Done anything about getting yourself a room, Steve?” he asked.
    “I thought of trying the Orient.”
    “You might get a bed there. You won’t get a room to yourself. Isn’t that right, Abdul?”
    “Oh yes. You can’t sleep alone in Selampang. That is what they say.” The first officer giggled deprecatingly. “It is a joke.”
    “And not a very funny one. They’ve got six beds now in some of those fly-blown rooms at the Orient. It’s a fair cow.”
    “I’ll buy my way in,” I said; “I have before. Anyway, it’s only for three days. I’m hoping to get a plane to Djakarta on Friday.”
    “You can try if you like, but you’ll still have to share with a stranger. Why don’t you come over to the Air House with me?”
    “I didn’t know they let rooms.”
    “They don’t. I’ve got a little apartment up top there over the radio station. You can doss in the sitting room if you like.”
    “It’s kind of you, but …”
    “No ‘buts’ about it. You’d be doing me a favour. I’ve got to go to Makassar tomorrow and won’t be back till Friday. It’s asking for trouble these days to leave an apartment unoccupied.”
    “Thieves?”
    “Either that or you come back and find some bloody policeman’s wangled a requisition order and moved in with his family. I lost my bungalow that way when I went on leave last year. Now, I always try and get a pal to stay, even if it’s only a couple of days.”
    “Then, I’ll be glad to.”
    “It’s a deal. What do you want to do on your first night of freedom?”
    “Where’s the best food now?”
    “The restaurants are all pretty bloody. Did you know we’ve got a new club? The New Harmony it’s called.”
    “It’s a year since I’ve been down here.”
    “Then that’s settled. Your evening’s made. Now then, Abdul, what about some tea? Where’s that thermos?”
    Selampang lies at the head of a deep bay looking westward across the Java Sea. It used to be called Nieu Willemstad, and along the canals near the port there are still a few of the old houses, with brown-tiled roofs and diamond-paned windows, built by the early Dutch colonists. It stands on what was once swamp land, and the network of canals which covers the whole city area is really a system of drainage ditches; ditches in which the majority of the inhabitants, serenely ignoring the new sanitary regulations, continue to deposit their excreta, wash their bodies, and launder their clothes. When the Dutch left it, Selampang had a population of of about half a million. Now it has over a million and a half. Yet, when you drive along the wide, tree-lined streets of the modern sections, past the big solid bungalows standing in their spacious compounds, there are no signs of overcrowding. It is only the pervasive smell of the canals and the occasional glimpses you get of