The Flame Tree (11 page)

W
HEN ISAAC CAME TO
, he found himself on the mattress in his sister’s room, staring blankly at a yellow sky beyond a window.

His mother bent over him. “How’s my hero boy?”

Isaac looked down at himself. He was wearing his own clothes. He’d been in a hospital gown, hadn’t he, getting a checkup? “How did I get here?”

“By a stretcher,” Mary said. “And a knockout shot. You were quite agitated.”

He sat up. “There was a bomb in the beggar’s corpse.”

“My
foolish
hero boy,” Mary said. Her smile faltered. “Dear God, Isaac, I tremble to think how close—” She gave him a long, fierce hug. “You should have called one of the guards. But if you’d done that, maybe there wouldn’t have been time to—”

“There were a couple bottles on the beggar’s stomach.”

Mary nodded, her lips pressed grimly together. She glanced up at the bedroom doorway. Joe stood there. He came in and squatted beside Isaac. “Those bottles were the real danger,” he said. “The bomb was a small one as bombs go. But the bottles didn’t break, thanks to you. And you are not to tell anyone of them. No one. We don’t want mass panic.”

Isaac said, “Mas Gatot’s nephew—”

“The police already nabbed him,” Mary said.

“Mr. Suherman?” Isaac asked.

“Nobody knows.” Joe was not wearing his jacket. His shoulder holster was empty. He noticed Isaac looking at it. He said wryly, “Your mother made me put it away in the safe.”

Mary Williams was once a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association. That changed the day when, as an intern in an ER rotation, she had dealt with the aftermath of an accidental shooting involving three young children. She’d burned her card and for a while wrote incendiary letters to the NRA.

Isaac grabbed his mom’s arm. “Ruth. She’s become a Muslim again.”

Mary nodded, a pained sadness on her face. “I know, I’ve heard. Literally. She’s been on the mosque speaker telling us infidels about it.”

Isaac drifted off again. Some time later—long or short, he had no idea—the school bell rang in the distance, rousing him. He was aware of tense voices downstairs.

“Continuing intelligence confirms a strengthening blockade around Wonobo by militant Islamic groups,” Joe said. “Vehicles are being stopped and searched for Americans.”

“When do those helicopters get in range?” Graham asked.

“Sometime tomorrow around noon,” Sheldon said. “I’m expecting an update in an hour.”

Miss Augusta said, “I don’t see why we can’t get the children out before then. A bus convoy with an army escort.”

A brief silence, and then Sheldon said, “There is some question of factions within the East Java Brawijaya Command and the loyalty of some of the troops to their own officers.”

Isaac recalled the way the Red Berets had respectfully ushered the Tuan Guru off the square when the rioting broke out.

“Why doesn’t the embassy raise a big stink, then?” Mary asked. “Why isn’t the morgue bomb on the news? Why are we keeping that hush-hush? That would put pressure on the Indonesian government to assure our safety.”

Another silence. “Operational reasons,” Joe said.

“What on earth do you mean?” Mary said. Then, in a suspicious voice, “Are you implying you
want
us to be a target? Maybe to flush out the bin Laden terrorists?”

Sheldon said, “Everyone will be out of harm’s way this time tomorrow. Now, let me go over the ground rules for the evacuation.”

He droned on and was sharply interrupted by Graham. “Wait a sec,” Graham said. “I thought we were only evacuating the children and school staff.”

“Everybody, including doctors. I thought that was clear.”

“You didn’t make that clear at all,” Graham said.

“Did I make myself clear to you, Reverend?”

Reverend Biggs cleared his throat. “Yes, very clear.”

“The evacuation is for all U.S. citizens without exception,” Sheldon said. “That’s the instruction from the secretary of state himself. Mandatory and nonnegotiable.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mary said. “You can’t order us to leave. We’re a private mission foundation. You have no authority here.”

“Order you? An appeal to your common sense should be more than sufficient. Your lives are truly at risk here.”

“Evacuate the children, yes. But we doctors have been called here, we have chosen to be here, and we’re going to stay here. We know the risks and accept them.”

“I’m the hospital director,” Graham said. “Not a dictator. I can’t make my colleagues leave. Not against their will.”

“We can’t—we won’t—abandon our patients and our people,” Mary said.

“You are not abandoning anyone,” Sheldon said. “It is a temporary evacuation until the situation stabilizes.”

“If we get on those helicopters, our people will think we are running away. Which is exactly what we would be doing. And besides, does our leaving also remove this threat of terrorist bombs?” Mary changed her voice and manner as though speaking to someone else: “‘I’m sorry, Dr. Priyono, we’re leaving here in this awful hurry because there’s a chance the hospital might get blown up by a terrorist bomb, but you hang in there, be strong, be brave, our prayers will be with you, God is with you.’ Ha! I’m not leaving.”

“You don’t want to be with your son when he gets on that helicopter?” Sheldon asked, with surprise. “It’s going to be a stressful time for him. What comes first? Your child or your career?”

“That’s a low blow, Sheldon,” Mary said grimly. “You be careful. My work here in Wonobo is not a career. It’s a calling. I. Am. Not. Leaving.”

A shiver started on the nape of Isaac’s neck and coursed down his ribs. He knew that tone of voice. As his father often said, the
only thing on earth more stubborn than a two-headed mule is a Connecticut Yankee with her heels dug in. His mom was staying, and if she stayed, his dad would stay, and then Isaac would be alone and far away.

Reverend Biggs cleared his throat again. “You are not a solo effort, Mary. None of us are. We are a team with a hierarchy of authority. I spent nearly an hour on the phone earlier discussing the situation here in Wonobo with President Saxton and the other members of the board, and it is our unanimous decision to evacuate all—
all
—of our expatriate mission staff for the time being. It is the prudent thing to do. We do not want unnecessary heroics, and we do not want martyrs just for martyrdom’s sake.”

“I want to see these orders, Sheldon,” Mary said. “I want to see something in writing from the secretary of state himself ordering this—what did you say?—mandatory and nonnegotiable evacuation. I stay until I see that in writing.”

“There is no way I am going to agree to such a ridiculous demand.”

“Sheldon, I have the funny feeling that you are engaging here in the art of diplomacy called letting others have it your way. I think your main purpose is to look good and come out smelling like a rose and gather what credit you can at others’ expense.”

Sheldon sighed, a contemptuous sound. He said, his voice thrown in a different direction, “I don’t need this on top of everything else, Graham. She’s your wife, you deal with her, will you? Remind her of that biblical instruction of wives submitting to their husbands.”

Isaac’s stomach soared in a weightless loop.
Oh, boy
. He scrabbled to the front of the stairs to witness the forthcoming explosion. His mother’s temper compressed to critical mass, her cheeks paling to alabaster, her blue eyes turning violet. The quiet that fell had a numinous quality, the silence of the moment before God breaks His bowl of wrath. Sheldon must have sensed something terribly awry, the moist pinkness of his gums showing as he opened his mouth, his pupils widening in the nanosecond of realization that a catastrophe of meteoric proportions was about to engulf him.

It was in that nanosecond that a muted warble came from somewhere around Sheldon’s midsection. He grabbed at the cell phone at his waist with the desperate relief of a man offered rescue by blind luck from being quarkified and scattered throughout the universe. He answered “Summerton,” and at once stiffened. “Mr. Ambassador, sir.” He listened for a half minute. After he clicked off, he said, “The Nahdlatul Umat Islam, in solidarity with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, has declared jihad against all Americans in Java.”

“Jihad means many things,” Graham said. “Not necessarily war. The Javanese are a gracious people. Not hostile.”

“Is that so? The ambassador just told me that in Mojokerto the decapitated head of an American businessman was tossed into a hotel lobby. It was wrapped up in a Nahdlatul Umat Islam banner.”

Incredibly, that evening the adults decided to have an Evacuation Eve party out on the large front lawn of the compound. Three
library tables had been placed on the grass, under the glare of fluorescent lights rigged on bamboo poles. All the households and the dorm had donated the entire contents of their fridges and larders to the buffet spread upon the tables. It was the potluck of potlucks.

Isaac sat in a chair by the toolshed, watching everybody. The scream of the dorm children playing Red Rover made his headache worse. Slobert sat on the steps of his house, giving Isaac the stink-eye. Isaac ignored him.

Graham Williams yelled that Reverend Biggs was going to be saying grace. When everyone was quiet, the reverend prayed, “Lord God Almighty, Yahweh and Jehovah, the God of Moses and of the Israelites, the God who led His chosen people out of Egypt and to the Promised Land, who comforted and succored them, who provided them with sweet water when tongues were swollen with thirst, who provided sweet manna when bellies were shrunken with hunger, who lit up their way when all was dark, Lord God Almighty, we your children here in Wonobo are also gathered on the eve of an exodus. Yet unlike the Israelites’ departure from a land they loathed, we leave a place we love, we leave friends and neighbors, we leave a life’s work, not knowing where you shall lead us in the days and weeks to come. Yet do we trust in your grace and in your love and know that you will provide in the days to come for all our wants and all our worries. You will dry our tears and you will comfort our hearts and you will soothe the strains of separation, for you are the Lord God Almighty who makes straight the crooked paths and who will lead us back once
more, when we shall know the place we left and know it joyously, as home. Amen.”

The skin on the back of Isaac’s neck tingled. He didn’t like Reverend Biggs, but this prayer had the power of a prophecy. No, it
was
a prophecy: “We shall know the place we left and know it joyously, as home.” Isaac took back all the unkind things he’d thought about the reverend.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the food is served,” Beth Patter called out. “Children, you line up on this side.”

Isaac picked at his food and then threw his paper plate in the trash bin. He slipped through the night shadows to the flame tree. He felt weak, but he had to keep an eye on things. He worked his way up the familiar, smooth-barked passage. With that alien red color hidden by the night, the tree under his hands and feet was a living creature, possessing a warm-blooded interior. Isaac was a symbiont, a tree ant. If this tree were to die, he would also perish, for there was no other flame tree in the whole world to which he could flee for refuge.

Wonobo was calm, its evening lights murky blobs in the haze. Ismail was somewhere out there beyond the curve of luminescence. As the Lord of the Crows might fly, Ismail was close by. But not to Isaac, whose world had shrunk these last few days, from the cane fields and streets of Wonobo to within these compound walls, and it was shrinking even still and tomorrow would be a space of lawn and then not even that as the helicopter lifted. The chasm between him and his former friend, already unbridgeable, was rapidly becoming immeasurable.

E
ARLY
F
RIDAY MORNING, AFTER
a tense and silent breakfast, Isaac went into his bedroom to pack. Reverend Biggs had already vacated his room. Isaac pulled out shorts and shirts and underwear from his closet. He surveyed the familiar clutter: the books, the games, the empty bottles of his chemistry set and a broken plastic microscope, the posters, the knee-high scribblings and scratchings on the walls that repainting could not completely hide.

He should be sad, desperate, but he felt no emotion of leave-taking. He felt nothing except a general malaise in his bones and the hollows of his heart. Was malaria starting to stir? In all the confusion it seemed that nobody had gotten around to his blood test. He had a brief shower, hoping that would make him feel better. It didn’t. As he put on his underwear, a sudden dizziness sat him down on the bed.

He thought he could hear, like a susurration of blood, the murmured prayers of tens of thousands of Wonobo Muslims preparing to go to mosque for Friday congregational prayers. 0 Allah, make light in my heart, and make light in my tongue.
0 Allah make light in my ear, and make light in my eye. Make light behind me, and light before me, and make light above me and make light beneath me. 0 Allah, bestow upon me light.

Was Ismail praying? Would he proudly wear his new Reeboks to mosque, to take off before entering?

Isaac put on a pair of light cotton shorts and a blue chambray shirt and slipped sockless into a pair of old Hush Puppies split along the sides. He closed his suitcase and hauled it down the stairs and out to the lawn. Reverend Biggs, ticking names off a clipboard, said, “There you are. I was wondering where you’d got to. You’re in group three with your parents.”

“Who else?”

“That’s it.”

“You mean we get a helicopter all to ourselves?”

The reverend winked at him. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles. Lucky you, huh?”

The boarding students were being sequestered in the dorm until it was time to march them out to the arriving choppers, but most of the other evacuees were gathered on the Higginbothams’ and Patters’ residence porches.

The consulate Ford was parked on the lawn, near the toolshed, bundled up with canvas straps with a big loop on top for a hook. Not only the American people of Wonobo were being evacuated, but also American cars. Sheldon Summerton was going to fly away on the fourth and last chopper, with his Ford slung underneath it. Maybe he was going to ride in the limo through the Java sky and be dropped off on a Surabaya highway near the consulate, where, with a wave of his hand and a tootle of his horn, he’d be off to do new derring-do.

Sheldon made an appearance on the Higginbothams’ porch.
“Announcement, everybody. Helicopters arriving thirteen hundred hours. Reverend Biggs says we’re still missing Dr. Azakian. He’s not in the hospital.”

There was a collective shrug. “Can’t expect psychiatrists to keep track of time,” Beth Patter said, “not when their official hour is forty-five minutes long.”

“I think he went back to his town apartment,” Dr. Higgenbotham said. “Some sort of closure thing.”

Sheldon looked at his watch. “I’ll give him another psychiatric hour before we send out the troops.”

The evacuees waited. All was quiet—to Isaac, almost eerily so. Even the Al-Furqon Mosque speakers had fallen silent as the muezzin meditated for the last final moments before the noon call to prayer.

The first cry of his
azan
cleaved the air like a sword strike, a rending that continued out to the horizons as other mosques broadcast their summons to prayer.

Joe slipped out of the compound to be with the hospital security guards by the hospital gates. The assigned policemen were nowhere to be seen. The hospital garage and workshop staff had worked overtime to provide each guard with a stout shield made of plywood. They had no proper riot helmets, so as a substitute they donned motorcycle helmets with pull-down face-shields.

The characteristic whine of a Volkswagen engine at full rpm’s grew loud. It was Dr. Azakian, hurtling up Hayam Wuruk Avenue in the VW Bug that he normally drove as sedately as a horse cart. The guards rushed to open the barrier for him. The
VW squealed to a halt in the alley. He trotted through the gate into the compound, the fastest Isaac had ever seen him move, a Gladstone bag in one hand and a Nikon camera in the other. Around his neck was a piece of cord on which dangled a card with his name.

“Where have you been?” Sheldon barked at him.

Dr. Azakian said breathlessly, his unflappable manner finally flapped for once, “I went to get my bag. I meant to be back earlier. I apologize for the delay, but it was quite unavoidable. There’s a mob downtown ransacking the Citra Mall. Had a tricky time outmaneuvering them. Cars turned over and burning on the streets. One shop already going up in flames. I couldn’t get through and tried a detour. A thick-necked goon saw me and led some rioters after me with gasoline bombs. I was blocked in and thought I’d had it. I got out this camera and an old conference badge and convinced them I was a journalist. Spoke with a French accent. I got them to pose for pictures they think are going be in foreign papers tomorrow, and then they cleared the way for me.” He grinned. An eager light danced around in his brown eyes. “A Frenchman indeed! May the Lord forgive me for my little lie. Freud and Jung! I’ve never been in such a close call.”

The other adults listened with growing consternation. They kept looking at the northern horizon. Sure enough, Miss Augusta, with her all-seeing glass eye, said, “There’s black smoke, see it?”

Miss Jane said, “Dear God, please hurry up with the helicopters.”

Sheldon Summerton also had the same request, but not of
God. He got on his cell phone. “What’s the status on the choppers? Can we hurry this up in any way?”

The service at the Al-Furqon Mosque seemed shorter than usual. The mosque emptied quickly, the congregation moving out onto the street. Some began unfurling and parading banners; the tops of some of them were visible over the compound wall. A few voices, none of which Isaac recognized, began chanting for American dogs to leave Java.

Sheldon yelled, “Everybody, get in your assigned groups. And for Christ—heaven’s sake, would somebody—you, Dave, okay—run over to the dorm and tell the supervisors to get the kids out here.”

Isaac followed Dave as if to help but veered off and climbed the flame tree. He didn’t have the strength to make it to his usual lookout post. His breath came painfully short and his heart pounded. He stopped high enough to see over the wall.

The mob on Hospital Street was already several hundred people strong, and more were filtering in from the back alleys. Most were young males in battle uniforms of jeans and T-shirts and green headbands, many carrying staves and knives. A fair number of older adults, dressed in their conservative mosque cloths of sarong and blouse, seemed to be bemused by this turn of events. Pak Harianto, the barber, looked around him with alarm at his more agitated brethren. Sprinkled here and there were a dozen women still wearing their full white dresses and veils. The crowd gathered at the corner of Hospital Street and Hayam Wuruk Avenue. The front ranks of young males shouted their anti-American slogans.

But with their primary target bristling with hostile self-defenses, they soon turned to a secondary one. A few of the excitable lads began tossing stones at the second-floor window of the Friendship Store. “Open up!” they shouted. “We’re thirsty and we want some drinks. We’ll pay for them. Hey, listen, you Chinese dog, you’re supposed to open for business hours. Why, are we not good enough for you? We said we will pay. Open up!”

Pak Harianto cried out, “Let him be.”

The lads gave him the Javanese jeer, the long, high-pitched “Hiieeeee.”

“He is our neighbor, and the Holy Qur’an says—”

A muscular man in a Nahdlatul Umat Islam T-shirt shouted, “What do you know of the Holy Qur’an? You still worship the spirits of your kris blades and seek magic charms from the
dukun santets
.”

Pak Harianto stiffened. “I am as true a Muslim as you arrogant Nahdlatul Umat Islam windbags.”

The Nahdlatul Umat Islam man raised an angry fist as though to strike the tiny barber. The mob was on the verge of splintering and disintegrating, for there were others who agreed with the barber and would have come to his defense.

A woman darted forward to pound on the shop’s thick wooden shutters with a small fist. She shouted, “Open up, you bloodsucking thief. It’s time for us to take back the milk you’ve stolen from our babies’ mouths.”

Isaac’s jaw dropped.
Hey, that’s Ruth
.

The other women followed her example, banging on the shutters and screeching.

The barber’s protestations were overwhelmed, and he was shoved to the side. The young males and quite a few of their elders picked up pieces of crumbled sidewalk pavement and heaved them at the two-story building. The rocks did little harm. The shop had little exposed glass to break, except for the neon bulb over the shop sign, which shattered with a tinkling noise. A couple of the boys climbed on others’ shoulders to claw at the sign with their hands.

Across the street the hospital guards stood in a tense phalanx, uncertain whether to intervene. Joe huddled together with Theophilus, who stepped forward and bellowed for the crowd to disperse, that this was a hospital area and the patients were not to be disturbed for the sake of their health.

This warning only served to rile the youths, who pranced and jeered. The more impetuous ones advanced a few steps across the tarmac and began throwing chunks of sidewalk at the guards.

At that Mr. Theophilus gestured for his guards to uncoil a hospital fire hose attached to a portable gasoline pump that suctioned a fifty-five-gallon drum. They fired up the pump and turned a crank. The hose spurt a powerful stream of liquid that Isaac at first assumed was water. It wasn’t. Joe had cooked up a large tankload of something foul and sticky from the store of hospital chemicals and, by the smell that reached even Isaac, from the septic tanks as well. The liquid drenched many of the young men and sent them reeling back, retching and coughing. Many vomited. Some of the liquid splattered on the women, and they ran away yipping in disgust.

The gang of snarling youths regrouped. They began tearing up the sidewalk and chucked whole bricks at the security guards. Joe ordered a second volley of different ammunition. Three of the security guards pulled back slingshots made out of surgical hose and shot large test tubes. The test tubes broke on the pavement and hissed in white incandescent flares. Reddish orange smoke billowed. The young men began coughing, rubbing their eyes, scratching their skin. They scurried back in retreat.

“Wow,” Isaac murmured, reminding himself to get the recipe.

The guards’ actions bought a reprieve for the Friendship Store. Isaac did not descend the tree. He kept looking for helicopters. There’d be time to get down for the third one.

In the distance billows of smoke and gouts of flame erupted into the air, moving closer and closer to the hospital.

The remnants of the Hospital Street mob cocked their heads and ears. Two of the excitable lads ventured back to the corner of Hayam Wuruk Avenue to peer down the lifeless road.

A minute later the first vanguard of the town mob streamed into view on Hayam Wuruk Avenue, two dozen swaggering youths with ragged bandannas around their heads. They carried iron rods, sharpened bamboo stakes, antennas torn off cars. Some brandished fresh gleaming machetes taken from looted hardware shops. Many wore sunglasses with price tags still attached. One boy had a cassette stereo, partially wrapped in plastic, on his shoulders. With a bizarre sort of appropriateness, its speakers blared a Carpenters song about being on top of the world.

They marched forward in eager quickstep. From the back
rushed two lads with lit Molotov cocktails. The security guard sharpshooters took aim with their slingshots and got both boys with ball bearings as they were cocking their arms. The lit bottles fell to the ground, one bursting and spreading into a pool of fire. The two lads raced away to escape the flames.

The fire hose brigade also let loose with their foul liquid.

This first wave of attackers retreated and milled about in confusion.

Thirty seconds later the main force of the mob arrived. Hundreds of men of all ages swirled up the avenue. Some carried posters and banners, but this was no longer an orchestration of the Nahdlatul Umat Islam. The mob was beyond the control of any human agency.

One kid in a pair of new Reeboks too large for him hoisted a cardboard poster that showed a childishly sketched scene of a big-nosed, yellow-haired head on a spike, severed neck dripping blood, a crude scimitar in the background. Underneath this the slogan read:
DEATH BY THE SWORD FOR UNREPENTANT INFIDELS
.

Isaac blinked and blinked again, but this little vignette was not erasable. The kid was Ismail, wearing Isaac’s oversized Reeboks, and the torsoless head was a gruesome rendition of Isaac’s own.

The helicopters arrived just as the security guards were down to their last line of defense, firing off surgical gloves filled with supersticky rat glue. A number of the rioters were already stuck to the pavement, Ismail included. He finally had to pry himself out
of the stolen Reeboks, leaving the shoes glued to the asphalt.

Sheldon yelled, “Get in place, everybody, we’re on a countdown now.”

Isaac got into his assigned place on the lawn. From the sky came a whirring. The first helicopter was on its landing glide, the whomping of its blades growing more visceral as it angled toward the big white “H” painted on the lawn. The helicopter became very big very quickly. A long boom jetted out of its nose. Stubby pods extended from underneath large square windows. A funny-looking tail rotor tilted off the vertical.

It blasted a hurricane at the ground.

When the helicopter was still six feet in the air, seven marines in combat gear jumped from its rear door, rolling on the grass to break their fall. Three raced to the alley gate, while another three darted to the northern wall, in time to face two of the rioters who had been hoisted over by the hands and shoulders of their comrades outside. Upon seeing marines in full battle dress charging down on them, they lifted their hands in panicky surrender. They were swiftly and professionally trussed by two of the marines while the other jumped up with athletic vigor and used his rifle butt to smash two pairs of hands appearing at the top of the wall. Howls of pain rose from the other side.