State of Siege

Suparto was standing over me, watching expectantly. To get rid of him I explained that I should want heating appliances of some sort, preferably blow lamps, a couple of electric fans, some thin sheet iron and a block and tackle. When he had gone to give the necessary orders, I began, with Osman and Alwi, the dismantling process.

In one of the ceiling joists there was a ring bolt that had obviously been put there to lower the generator into place when it had been originally installed. I managed, eventually, to get a rope sling round the armature; then, by using the block and tackle rigged to the ring bolt above, I was able to sway the armature clear of the housing. But the job took well over an hour. The coupling to the generator had proved all but inaccessible, and we had had much more dismantling to do than I had anticipated. We had, moreover, removed the fan from the ventilator shaft to get the hose through, and the heat down there became overpowering. By the time we were ready to start drying out, we were too exhausted to go on without a rest.

Suparto had food brought to us- nassi goreng and fruit-and we squatted on the stairs while we ate. I got some cigarettes, too. Suparto watched us keenly, like a trainer; with us but not of us.

“What about Miss Linden?” I asked him. “Has she had any food?”

“I will see that she gets some.”

“And drinking-water, and cigarettes?”

“Very well.” He looked at his watch. “It is three hours to sundown, Mr. Fraser. It will be necessary soon for me to report to the General.”

“I can’t tell you a thing. I shan’t know whether it’s going to work until we’re able to try it.”

“He has called a press conference at the Presidential Palace for six. There, he will distribute copies of the proclamation; also the radio address he expects to deliver tonight. If the radio is not working he will be exposed to serious humiliation.”

There were a number of replies I should have liked to have made to that; but Osman and Alwi were listening. They were looking worried, too.

“Well, we’d better get on with it,” I said.

My plan for drying the windings was simple; it had to be. What I did was to bend the sheet metal into two big tubes, wrapping wire round each one to hold it together. Then I kept the sides of the tubes heated by the blow lamps and blew air through them with the fans. They were, in effect, like two large hair-driers. One I set up to blow into the field windings inside the housing. The other I directed at the armature suspended in its sling from the ceiling. Neither of them was very efficient, as a lot of the heat was wasted; but I could think of no better way of doing the job.

There were two blow lamps to each tube, and, once their most effective positions had been determined, all we had to do was to keep them going. The atmosphere rapidly became stifling, but we had time to replace the ventilator fan now, and when that was set going, things improved. After a while, I momentarily switched off the fan blowing on to the armature to feel if the ropes round it were getting too hot, and was rewarded by the sight of a whiff of steam rising from the windings.

At about four o’clock there was another air raid, and Suparto went up to find out what was happening. To us, it sounded as if the planes had returned to the same target as before, and I was terrified lest they should succeed in cutting off the power supply to the fans; but this time the lights did not even flicker. Osman and Alwi said, gleefully, that it was because the enemy were such timid pilots, but I was not so sure. Isolated, easy to identify and, doubtless, undefended, the power station was a much simpler target than the Air House. If they had really been after the power station, I thought, even those pilots would have been able to hit it. When Suparto returned he was blandly uncommunicative; however, I was beginning to know him, and I thought I detected a hint of satisfaction in his manner. For him, at any rate, things might be going according to plan.

At five o’clock we turned off the fans and the blow lamps and began the task of reassembling. The windings felt dry outside, but that meant little. Even if there were nothing else wrong with them, there might still be enough damp inside to break down the insulation. I should have liked to cook them longer, but Suparto would not allow it. I tried to persuade him that it was better to have a generator that did work at seven rather than one that did not work at six; but he merely shrugged.