Nancy lifted her cellphone once more. Even though the screen still glowed with the “No Service” prompt, she pushed the redial button for the US Consul in Denpasar. Like the last fifty times she had tried, there was no response – and now the low battery warning blinked as well.
She felt the moisture gathering in her burning eyes, the fresh tears joining the drying streaks on her face. She wished someone, anyone, would answer. She wished that she and her children were anywhere other than Bali. She wished that time could be made to run backwards so that the last forty-eight hours could be made to disappear, or even the past six months.
The offer of a posting in Bali for Suncrest Fashions had been a dream assignment. Combining good money with a beautiful and exotic locale, it had been a perfect escape from her exploded marriage. Nancy found a lovely apartment on the fashionably upscale Benoa Peninsula near her office, a good private school for foreign students for her sons – and even a Balinese housemaid to deal with the cooking and cleaning.
There had been talk about the troubles in Indonesia, but she had been assured that didn’t apply to Bali. “The Balinese are the kindest, gentlest people in the world!” And so they had seemed.
It was paradise, or as close to it as a sophisticated, independent businesswoman could obtain. Perhaps that was why she had resisted being driven from it.
The first warning from the American Embassy in Jakarta advised that instability within the Indonesian archipelago was growing and that all American Nationals should make preparations to evacuate at short notice.
But that couldn’t possibly mean from Bali.
When the second warning arrived, advising that all American nationals should depart Indonesia immediately, the American Benoa community elected to take action. They gathered at the home of a University of California political science professor on sabbatical and discussed the situation over coffee.
The professor explained in detail how the evacuation notice was merely a political ploy by the current reactionary administration, seeking to drum up support for a needlessly interventionist foreign policy. He went on to insist that there was no real risk to anyone willing to deal with the Balinese in a fair, nonjudgmental manner.
Comforted, Nancy stayed on. Others – the Johnsons, the Vales, the Smiths – had not been so comforted. They had left.
Then came the third and final notice, the one that stated in the strongest of terms that the United States Embassy could no longer be responsible for the lives and safety of any American national who remained in the archipelago.
At last, Nancy Aimsley had grown concerned. Perhaps it would be wise to return to the States for a time. She could visit her parents, and Walter had been complaining about his parental visitation rights. She wouldn’t really be running away.
Nancy called her travel agency, only to find its Denpasar office closed. Then she called the airport directly. After a long wait, and several disconnects, she was told that there would be no seats available off island for at least a week.
The following day, the rumors of the rioting and the atrocities began.
The television and radio stations in Denpasar reported that the local authorities were “reacting decisively to the situation.” Then the radio and television stations went off the air.
The following morning, the maid did not come to work and the electricity was off. Nancy took her sons with her to the Suncrest offices, not to work but to look for friendly faces. The stores and shops were closed and the streets were eerily empty.
The other American members of the Suncrest staff had also rallied at the office, but the only constructive course of action anyone could suggest was to contact company headquarters. The problem was, the phones, both cellular and landline, were dead.
Now the true fear started to grow. Nancy and her compatriots had been born into a world of the Internet and instantaneous telecommunications. There was always someone to call. Someone to listen to their concerns. Someone paid to give a damn.
Mr. Juita, the Javanese district manager, arrived shortly thereafter. But he provided neither information, comfort, nor leadership. He spoke only to say that, should anyone ask, he was not in, nor had he been there. His words were curt but his eyes were fearful. Then he went into his inner office and locked the door.
The heat and humidity crept into the silent office suite, untempered by air conditioning. Her colleagues Terrie and Frankie’s nervous string of jokes had given out and the futile rehashing of the situation was abandoned. A rare car swept past in the street beyond the building. Once, a police siren honked tentatively in the distance. The sensation grew of a storm building to break.
They came shortly after the noon hour. Some of the men were strangers. Some were Balinese who had worked in the same building with the Suncrest people. Some were local Suncrest employees.
Smiling politely, they begged the pardon of the office staff and asked for Mr. Juita. Hesitantly, Nancy and the other Americans replied as they had been instructed, denying the presence of the Javanese Muslim. The Balinese continued to smile. Then they knocked on Mr. Juita’s door and requested that he come out.
When Mr. Juita refused, the Balinese apologized once more and broke down the door. They carried the manager screaming out of his office and down into the courtyard, and there they cut his throat from ear to ear.
Fear blossomed into panic then, the frenzied consensus being to try and reach the US Consul at Denpasar. The staff started out in an automobile convoy for the island capital, but the closer to the city, the greater the savagery.
Houses and cars burned on the roadsides. Blood smeared the pavement and bodies sprawled. The mosques, small and few in number on Bali, were either in flames or were being wrenched apart barehanded by the mobs.
The line of refugee vehicles had snaked down one side-street after another, seeking for a route not closed by rioting or roadblocks. They were slowed by intermittent stops to argue about maps and directions. Cars started to separate off as frightened, angry people sought their own way to safety or perdition. For the first time Nancy could remember, Tommy and Aaron, her boys, were quiet in the car, their eyes wide and terrified.
The remnants of the convoy were finally stalled by a solid mass of people packed into the street. The Balinese flowed in around the Americans’ cars, peering intently through the windows, studying faces, deciding if anyone within needed to die.
Nancy Aimsley would have lost her sanity there and then, were it not for the presence of her children. Only the need to be strong for them kept her from hysteria on the floorboards of her car.
And then a police armored car had suddenly appeared around a corner, machine gun fire spewing from its gun ports. People screamed and ran and the windows of the Settermans’ Volvo just ahead of Nancy’s car had dissolved in a spray of glass, blood and brain matter.
Nancy convulsively floored the accelerator of her Nissan and wrenched the wheel toward an alley. There was a thud and a gagging squeal as someone went down under her tires – and suddenly Nancy and her children found themselves away and alone.
Abandoning the futile quest for the consul, she turned west, fleeing into the quieter green refuge of the countryside where the death was not so overt. She had tried to reach Ngurah Rai airport, but as she neared the facility, she could see there were no planes climbing into the sky, just a dense plume of black smoke boiling up from the burning terminal buildings.
After that, the drive became aimless. She was stopped twice in the smaller villages but each time, when it was seen that she and her children were not Muslim, she had been allowed to pass. Corpses stacked in the ditches had told of what would have happened if she had been a follower of Muhammad.
That was how she had come to this beachside motel in the Kuta district on the western coast. Kuta was not the refuge Nancy would have chosen for herself and her children. It was the haven of cheap tourism, the wilder, younger, surfing crowd from Australia and the States. But this was where she had run out of gasoline and options.
Once more, by rote, she pressed the redial button on the cell phone. No connection, and this time the battery failed completely.
Tommy and Aaron were being so good, so brave for a six and an eight-year-old,
somehow sensing that this was a time to be obedient and quiet. But the
questions had started. “Mommy, when are we going home? Mommy, why are you crying? Mommy, what’s the matter with that man?”
And finally, “Mommy, are we going to die?”
The questions would begin again when they awoke and she would have no answers for them.
Nancy looked toward the window. The sun would be rising soon. She would have to find some way to deal with another day.
The airless room was suffocating her. Carefully, she worked her way free of her sleeping boys and crossed to the glass doors. Then she undid the latch and slid the door open. Running her fingers through her short, sweat-wet hair, she inhaled deeply of the sea scented air. Out in the dying night, the shadows still lay heavy on the ocean, the pale break of the waves on the beach marking its edge.
The rumble was so low and deep-toned that its moment of inception didn’t register. When it did, Nancy first thought it was a roll of thunder, but it lasted for too long. Then the building began to vibrate. An earthquake?
