The arms bazaar is a bit like a huge shopping mall. It is also a bit like getting inside a disco - with guns and bouncers in dayglo vests.
This is the place the Indonesian government decided it would be best not to be seen. It is called Longcross and is in Surrey. There are oak groves and gated houses with names such as Childown and Herondip. Longcross is also a Ministry of Defence installation.
Opening day of the arms fair is for buyers only and the leafy lanes and dual carriageways are choked with shiny 4X4s and land cruisers.
At the main gate, security hovers. Vanloads of police are just down the road and out of sight. There are some 25,000 square metres of war technology. The catalogue has 400 pages and weighs 2 1/2 lb. There are literally thousands of companies from 26 countries.
There are announcements for weapons fairs around the world between now and New Year's Eve. There is, for example, the Thailand ("lock your sights on Thailand and the Asia Pacific Region") defence equipment exhibition. Closer to home, there is IDEF Turkiye '99 in Ankara.
Some of the stands have three-level bars and conference rooms tucked away in quiet places. Many companies have avant garde video displays of anti-missile missiles shooting down enemy objects in real time, then again in slow, slow motion.
Simulators abound, creating a multi-media, three-dimensional feast of "enemy situations" with their snap, crackle and crash. Some simulators are so real you'd think they are real. They would make the sanest head of state order by the box car.
Most global weapons-mall buyers are rather shy about their name tags and conceal them artfully. The mood is one of restrained buoyancy.
And why not? Enemies and friends rubbing shoulders in the belly of the beast . . . probably one of the safest places in the world, come to think of it. A loose association of men with chequebooks and men with deadly devices. Wandering through the crowd are the buyers - a uniformed man and a grey-suited man followed by three or four men with brief cases. In their wake, at a discreet but unavoidably obvious distance, are other suited men anxious to see what stand the buyers will favour with their cheques.
While being screened for credentials, I stood next to a man with very white teeth and a very shiny grey silk suit. He is an arms buyer for Pakistan.
"Do you think the trouble between your country and India will end soon?" I asked. "Not very soon at all," he said.
"That is very unfortunate," I observed. "Not at all," he responded with a smile. "Not at all. It's good for business," he chuckled. "I've been in this business for 20 years and I wouldn't know what to do if I wasn't in this business."
"Mr Hussain," called the credentials verification clerk, "your identification badge."
"Excuse me please," he said. "I must go to work."
Howard Noyes is an Irish-based inventor and attended the arms fair at the invitation of a Swedish company.