“’Tis mine to seek for life in death,
Health in disease seek I,
I seek in prison freedom’s breath,
In traitors loyalty.
So Fate that ever scorns to grant
Or grace or boon to me,
Since what can never be I want,
Denies me what might be.”
—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Still stinging from their defeat and hasty withdrawal from northern Australia, the Indonesian high command issued orders for a series of punishing raids. Not expecting to do any substantive damage, these raids were designed to boost morale and to demonstrate that Indonesia was still in the fight. If nothing else, they distracted the media’s attention away from the unending parade of photos and interviews with bedraggled Republic of Indonesia (RI) soldiers and sailors who had made it out of Australia in the “miracle evacuation.” The Indonesian press was playing it up as a latter-day Dunkirk.
At the same time, Indonesia and Malaysia were dragging their feet on making their war reparations, which under the terms of the cease-fire agreement were primarily to be paid in the form of natural rubber. Once all of their soldiers, sailors, and aviators had been released and allowed to return home, their conciliatory tone changed to something more brash, Islam-centric, and nationalistic.
—
Captain Soekirnan Assegaf watched most of the invasion of Australia on television. Other than ferrying some communications security equipment to an invasion ship that had already left port, Assegaf and his patrol boat did not play a major part in the invasion effort. They were, however, involved in the aftermath. In mid-May, the Sadarin was tasked with ferrying a fourteen-man PKK commando team to infiltrate northern Australia for a sabotage mission. The orders were hand-carried by the commando team leader and included the seals of both the TNI-AL and BIN headquarters. To assure deniability, they included the proviso that the orders themselves were to be burned once Sadarin was within 125 miles of Australian waters.
To fit so many soldiers and all of their gear on board, Assegaf opted to crew his boat with just himself and three sailors. All three of them were in Assegaf’s cell. Like Assegaf, they were Muslim in name only and therefore deemed expendable by their superiors. Suspecting they might be used as scapegoats, the sailors confided to him that they wanted to defect to Australia.
In the first leg of their mission the seas were rough, and some of the commandos were seasick. Assegaf watched the commandos do their daily prayers with quiet amusement. There was much debate each time about the direction of Mecca so they would be sure to bow down in the correct direction.
Instead of dropping them off on the coast north of Tiwi as he had been ordered, Assegaf deposited them on uninhabited North Vernon Island. In the dark of night, the commandos didn’t know the difference. Watching his depth finder carefully, he crept up to the shore. Then he heard the familiar grind of beach sand at the ship’s bow. The men jumped off in just two feet of water in very light surf. The beach ahead could just barely be seen in the moonlight. As soon as the last man had slipped over the bow, Assegaf gave a wave and reversed his engines.
A few minutes later, after sprinting off the beach and into some rolling dunes, the commandos unpacked one of their GPS receivers from one of their Chinese-made waterproof bags. It was then that they learned they had been deceived.
Wishing to look inoffensive when they surrendered, Assegaf and his crew dismounted the Browning .50s from the ship. Working in pairs, they carried them below to stow in their canvas cases. They hoisted a white flag that was fashioned from a bedsheet.
As they pulled Sadarin up to the newly installed floating dock at Fannie Bay, they were greeted by the muzzles of more than twenty guns held by Australian civilians. Captain Assegaf shouted to the gathered crowd, “We are here to surrender this ship and to seek asylum. I also need to tell you about fourteen Special Forces soldiers I stranded last night on North Vernon Island. They are heavily armed and I’m sure that by now they’re as mad as Tasmanian Devils.”