This Is Not a Game

by Walter Jon Williams

  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.”

  “Yes,” Dagmar said. “Thank you.”

  She pushed the door open all the way and stepped onto the sidewalk. Afternoon heat shimmered up around her: the atmosphere seemed scarcely more breathable than the close air in the stairwell. The young man bustled up around Putri and took Dagmar’s bag, then waited expectantly for the knapsack. Dagmar shrugged out of the shoulder straps and handed the computer ruck to him. He put both in the trunk and slammed the lid.

  Dagmar stepped into the car. It smelled of tobacco, cloves, and hot plastic. One of the young men, very polite, closed the door for her.

  Putri trotted around the car and joined Dagmar in the backseat. The older man gave a quiet command and the others ran into their cars. The three vehicles made U-turns and sped away.

  Dagmar looked over her shoulder to see the Royal Jakarta receding.

  Putri was still smiling at her.

  “Where are you from?” the girl asked.

  Dagmar laughed and told her.

  FROM: Desi

  My friend Eric tells me that Bayangan means “phantom” or

  “shadow,” and that Prajurit is “warrior.” So the Bayangan Prajurit

  are Phantom Warriors. Pretty cool, huh?

  FROM: Hanseatic

  Phantom Warriors? Are they like Indonesian ninjas or what?

  FROM: Desi

  I don’t think so. I think it’s just one of those elaborate names that

  martial artists use, like Golden Crane White Tiger Long Fist Kung

  Fu. But I could be wrong.

  The Bayangan Prajurit convoy avoided the highways and worked their way east and north in short legs, sometimes back-tracking when they didn’t like the look of an area. The older man, whose name, according to Putri, was Mr. Abu Bakar, was on his cell phone continuously-negotiating, Putri said, with groups that controlled the neighborhoods they were passing through.

  When they had to take an overpass over a highway, or a bridge across one of the city’s many canals, one car was sent forward to scout, to make certain there was no ambush. Some of the bridges had roadblocks on them, cars drawn across the road
way, and then Abu Bakar came forward to negotiate. Sometimes they were turned away and had to find an alternate route. On other occasions, Abu Bakar paid a toll with sacks of rice that were carried in the lead vehicle.

  Jakarta was like Los Angeles in a way, a series of small towns blended together. Some areas featured tall glass office buildings or apartments; some had private homes; some had apartment buildings clustered together. The homes were quiet; businesses were shuttered.

  Everywhere there was greenery. The Jakartans liked living among trees.

  Or perhaps, in the tropics, you couldn’t keep the green from springing up.

  Only in the poor areas, the kampungs, were numbers of people seen-their apartments were too small for anything but sleeping, so life had to be lived in the open whether there was a political and economic crisis or not. The destruction of the currency had hit the rich and the middle classes, but the poor had no savings to lose. What they had lost were jobs: in the streets, Dagmar saw people who would normally have been at work playing football or standing in groups or gambling with whatever passed for currency in an economy where the money had become so much toilet paper.

  On one occasion she saw them engaged in a sport that looked like volleyball played with the feet, kicking sometimes from a hand-stand position. The game was fascinating, but the car raced by too quickly for Dagmar to get a good look.

  She got on her handheld and sent a message to LadyDayFan, Charlie, and Tomer Zan that she was on her way.

  No one tried to stop her from sending the message. If they were kidnappers, she thought hopefully, they would have kept her from communicating.

  After two hours of transit, the convoy drew up before a canal, one equipped with a drawbridge of the same type Dagmar had seen in Amsterdam. The drawbridge was up but came down as soon as the cars appeared. Children playing in the canal stared from the water as the cars crossed.

  Abu Bakar put down his cell phone for the first time. He turned around in his seat and looked at Dagmar.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He gave her an encouraging smile, then faced forward again. Dagmar guessed he had pretty well exhausted his English.

  The convoy passed over the bridge, between two shabby canal-side warehouses with red tile roofs, and into a residential area. The principal streets were laid out in a grid, but the smaller streets, very narrow, crept and zigzagged between apartment blocks. There were bright plastic awnings, lines hung with laundry, flags, umbrellas-anything, Dagmar suspected, to provide shade. Broken plaster showed that the buildings were made of red brick, with roofs of metal or worn red tile. The structures were old and sagged a bit, sinking into the soft ground. Zigzag cracks demonstrated that bricks were a very poor construction material in an earthquake zone. The tile roofs often had green plants, and even small bushes, sprouting from the crumbling red clay.

  The vehicles passed a small neighborhood mosque and drew up in front of a long building. The brick walls had been plastered and painted white, with neat, bright blue and red lettering. Dagmar recognized “Bayangan Prajurit” amid other words she didn’t know.

  Doors opened. Abu Bakar opened Dagmar’s door, and said, “Please.”

  The building turned out to be the group’s training hall. The place was scrupulously clean. Racks for weapons stood along the walls, half of them empty. A large photo of a distinguished-looking man, perhaps the style’s founder, stood on one wall between a pair of Indonesian flags.

  A group of women sat on a raised platform at one end of the room. Cooking smells brightened the air. Dagmar felt her mouth begin to water.

  Dagmar removed her shoes at the entrance along with the others. The boy in the wife-beater shirt brought in her baggage and placed it by the door.

  Dagmar looked at the springy split-bamboo floor, ideal for percussive exercise, and reflected that in Los Angeles, fashionable homeowners would have paid a lot of money for a floor just like this one.

  She turned to Putri. “How long are we staying here?”

  “Till the boat comes. The boat won’t come till night.”

  “How will we know when the boat arrives?”

  “The captain will call on his phone.”

  On his satellite phone. Of course.

  “Please,” said Putri, waving a hand in the direction of the circle of women. “We thought you might want to eat.”

  “Thank you!”

  Dagmar approached the platform eagerly. The women looked up at her-they were young girls in their teens under the direction of an older woman, and they had prepared a large pot of rice and a number of other dishes set in a circle around the rice bowl.

  One of the girls gave Dagmar a bowl, and she was prepared to seat herself with the others when a thought struck her. She turned to Putri.

  “Food must be scarce here,” she said. “I don’t want to take anyone’s food.”

  Putri absorbed this, then nodded.

  “That is kind of you,” she said. “But in our kampung we have food. One of those gudangs we passed-storage places?”

  “Warehouses?”

  “Yes. Warehouses. One of the gudangs was full of rice. So now we have a lot of rice, and the head man of our kampung can trade this rice for other kinds of food.” She smiled. “So we are poor here, but not starving.”

  “Is Abu Bakar the head man?”

  “No. That is Mr. Billy the Kid. You may meet him later.”

  Dagmar was hungry but couldn’t keep the question from her lips.

  “Billy the Kid? Is that a name his English teacher gave him?”

  “No,” Putri said patiently, “it’s his Indonesian name. American names are very popular here, and Mr. Billy the Kid was named after a character played by Paul Newman in the cinema.”

  Dagmar could think of no response but a nod.

  Dagmar moved to seat herself with the other women, who gladly made room for her. She noticed that several of the young girls carried knives in their belts, and she was pleased that women were allowed to study martial arts here, in a Muslim country. No one had imposed burkas on these women, not yet.

  The food was lovely, and carefully prepared. Dagmar praised it extravagantly. Her stomach had shrunk in the day and a half since her last meal, and that helped her eat slowly. The girls were talkative, and those who had English were eager to practice it. Dagmar answered the usual questions and asked questions of her own.

  Time passed. The young men wandered in and out. Abu Bakar talked with the older woman, who Putri said was his wife. Dagmar looked out the rear window and saw an undeveloped area, partly under a shallow lake, that stretched from the rear of the building toward an industrial district in the distance. There was a petrochemical smell-perhaps the lake was used for dumping.

  The kampung, backed up against this desolate area, with its canal and drawbridges, was practically an island. That made it very defensible, assuming of course that anyone ever found it worth attacking.

  The sun drew close to the horizon. The evening call for prayer went up from the neighboring mosque, but those in the training hall ignored it as if it were nothing more than birdsong.

  If you were religious enough to pray, Dagmar supposed, you were probably in the mosque already.

  As the muezzin fell silent, Dagmar approached Putri. She reached for one of the pockets where she had stashed some of her money, opened the pocket button, and offered Putri three hundred dollars.

  “Could you give this to Abu Bakar for me?” she asked. “For the poor people in the kampung?”

  Putri was astonished. For a moment her English deserted her, and she could only nod. She walked to Abu Bakar and gestured for Dagmar to follow. Putri handed Abu Bakar the money, and the two conducted a rapid conversation in Javanese. Then Abu Bakar turned to Dagmar and held out the money.

  “He says,” said Putri, “that you don’t have to pay. We are doing this for the sake of our own-” She paused, then made a valiant attempt at the proper English. “For our s
pirit. For our own development.”

  Dagmar’s mind spun. She had wanted this not to be noblesse oblige, a round-eyed female handing out hundred-dollar bills like tips. She genuinely liked these people; she wanted them to be well.

  She put out a hand and pressed the bills back toward Abu Bakar.

  “For the children,” she said. “For medicine and-whatever.”

  Putri translated. Abu Bakar thought for a moment, then gravely put the money into a pocket.

  “Thank you, Miss Dogma,” he said.

  A cell phone rang. Dagmar recognized a ring tone by Linkin Park. One of the young men answered, then gave the phone to Abu Bakar.

  In a few moments everything was motion. Dagmar found herself back in the white sedan with Putri and Abu Bakar, her luggage in the trunk. The convoy moved out, traveling under running lights on the blacked-out streets. They crossed another drawbridge out of the kampung, then turned north. Abu Bakar was back on his cell phone, talking to his friends and allies.

  Bags of rice were exchanged, and the group passed through a roadblock into another kampung. The cars passed young men carrying spears and wavy-edged blades. Taillights glowed on the red brick buildings.

  The convoy passed through an industrial area, factories looking out with rows of blind glass eyes. Dagmar caught sight of a tank farm off to the left, glowing eerily in the moonlight.

  The convoy came to a canal, and a roadblock on a bridge. The cars paused on the deserted road. Dagmar saw a Coca-Cola sign hanging loose on a shuttered fast-food place. The lead car moved up to the roadblock; there was some shouted Javanese, then there were cries and martial yells. Dagmar’s heart lurched as she saw moonlight on sharp blades. There were the bangs of weapons striking the car, and then taillights flashed and the car came roaring back as fast as it could come, a mob in pursuit. Abu Bakar yelled out orders. His young driver faced to the rear and put the car in reverse, his face all staring eyes and moist lips. He couldn’t move until the rearmost car reversed, and the rear car wasn’t moving.

  Dagmar was aware only of being trapped, that she could die in this car and not know what to do.