In their little enclave in East Java, across the bay from the Royal Dutch Shell petroleum docks, Johannes and Hendrik felt comparatively safe for the time being. Johannes renewed an old friendship with the Kuoks, a local Chinese family who before the war had found a niche as middlemen, buying the produce of the interior and selling it to overseas customers. Feeling threatened by the overall climate, and now effectively stateless, they wanted guns to protect themselves. Johannes knew how to get them, exploiting his privileged status, and traded some to the Kuoks for food, which they still knew how to obtain from their connections in plantations up-country.